Panda obsessed...

So a while ago, the Namacha brand of tea started a promotion where you could win some prizes by playing a game. Normally I don't like to drink bottled teas in Japan since you know, they taste like bottled tea, however the namacha brand happens to have as their mascot one of the cutest things ever to be borne of the human mind - the Namacha panda.

Anyway, the way the promotion works is that you have to collect these seals that are affixed to the bottles of tea. Each bottle has one seal, and for every two seals you collect, you can go to this website and input them for a chance to play a silly flash game (which I'll detail in a later post). If you beat the game (which turns out to be mind bogglingly impossible), you can win several super cool namacha panda prizes, which in my world, is basically the same thing as cold hard cash.

Speaking of cold hard cash, the cheapest bottle of tea which carries the seal usually retails for about 140 yen (or about $1.20 USD) in stores, which means that pursuing this quest, while not impossible, is not likely to be cheap either. Keep in mind that you need two seals for one chance to win. Oh, and I don't care for the taste of namacha either (even amongst bottled teas).

That having been said, when there's cute pandas at stake, sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. So after asking/guilting/forcing my friends and/or co-workers to assist me in my great undertaking, I started making the rounds at the stores and in the end, when all was said and done, I ended up buying some 40+ bottles of namacha.

Yeah. 40 bottles.

All to win a silly panda.

They say the first step in battling addiction is admitting you have a problem.

*sigh*

(Then again, at least I'm not as bad as these guys!)