Again? It Makes Sense, I Think

I ran into that woman from last night again about an hour later. While my laptop was chugging away, downloading stuff, we talked for about an hour. One of the dogs' names was Kohaku, and I forgot again the other one's name.
Anyway, if it's any indication of how Japanese people are different, she at one point starting talking about how she's really strong, but has no breasts.
By the way, she's older than me by a generation, so this isn't something really new.
This park is very popular, as it's like the yard of probably a couple of thousand people. It's the only thing like it in the area that I know of.

More Dogs

I was heading over to the AP in the park and saw a woman walking these two medium-sized dogs, so I hopped off my bike and talked to her for fifteen or so minutes while I was loving on the dogs, whose names I forget, but they are both different words for rock. One was magnetic rock and the other was jewelry rock.
I really think it's conversations like these that will help my Japanese more than anything. I'm getting more sincere comments now, too. Normally, you just get 「日本語上手!」 ("Your Japanese is good!"), but I got one long enough that I can't remember it now. It was less canned, and so it felt much more sincere. I know that's just me being American, but it was nice.

Br.

Apparently, it starts to get a little chilly once it's around midnight. Or at least, too chilly for sandals and a T-shirt.

New AP

I found another access point that's open. It's much closer to my apartment than the other two, and actually has a bench nearby. Bonus for the fact that it's in a park. Oh, and my laptop is in the shade, so it's not competing with the sun in a brightness contest (it usually loses). I think my apartment is less than a minute away, even on foot. It won't be much faster on bike, it's so close.
As far as Internet access at my apartment itself, I think we're still waiting on NTT. Eventually, they'll pull their heads out of their... towels, I hope.
I'd love to think that I might eventually be able to use my own Internet connection.
Maybe.

Temple Trip

And here's the temple post, though we almost ended up at Kiyomizudera a number of times.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jinkside/TemplesTrip

That's it. I kind of accidentally commented the pictures with everything I had meant to say here, so... Go check out the gallery.

In case you're wondering, said gallery contains roughly every 5.2258064516129th picture I took today.
Why would you want to know that?

Keen-kah-koo-jee

We'll be going to 金閣寺 (gold cabinet temple, go figure) today, so there should be some good pictures tomorrow unless something happens.

Picture Wandering

So, this isn't the first picture that I took while I was down by the river, but it's one of my favorites. I'll only be posting a few pictures in the post itself, but you're welcome to check out the gallery page for more of the pictures I took while I was wandering around yesterday.
Anyway.
So this dog is, if I remember right, a "kitaben" type. Apparently it's native to Japan, or at least according to the woman walking said dog. The dog's name is "Maru", which means circle.
Japanese people with dogs are usually those that have quite the pile of money to toss around (I suspect!), as dogs require large open spaces to be happy, and large open space comes at a bit of a premium here in Kyoto. Because fewer people own dogs and those that do are usually upper-class (from what I've seen), they are much more likely to have their pet professionally groomed fairly often compared to what you might expect as an American. I dunno if that's actually the case, but the important point here is that all the dogs are so soft.
As much as the might think the Japanese are, in general, less litterbugful (?) than Americans, this park should tell you that they're not, or at least not by much.
This is just a random can that was floating in the river and I liked the way it was bobbing around, but there was quite the plethora of random litter. Strangely enough, it seems as though many people pick up after themselves, bag the whole thing up, then just leave it there. I'd say about half of the random litter I found was in such a state.

If you take a look at the panorama shot that'll be at the end of this post, you'll understand this sign better, as it's posted by those rocks that make the rapids.
It reads:

Danger
Playing in the water here
is danger!!

and I didn't bother to lookup the kanji on the bottom, but at a glance I would guess that it reads something along the lines of Published by the Katsura River Foundation for Putting Signs Up Everywhere, except that it's on the ground, so it probably took them a year to file an internal Request to Put a Sign Down Somewhere request or something.

Here's a guy I saw on the way back to my bike. As you can see, he's simply too hardcore to use one fishing pole at a time.
This makes me think we need a new match time for Halo 2: fishduels. It would totally be a no-shields match, and would involve large fish and slapping. IRC-style.
It'd be hardcore.

This guy, who called himself Nishimura, apparently trains in kenpo. As far as I can tell, that's the Japanese word for kung fu, because the Japanese don't want to admit that they got most of their martial arts from the Chinese, who have a long history of kicking ass.
His dog, Mame, is the same breed as the dog from earlier, but he said it was different, and that this breed "used to protect Japan from nothing". Presumably, something was lost in translation here.
Anyway, we sat around and talked for about fifteen minutes while Mame wandered around was apathetic. I took this next picture while I was talking to him.
If Bethany is to be trusted, mame (まめ) means bean, but I was wondering if there was a slightly less silly meaning for it, so I tossed it at a dictionary. I suspect the first entry I found is the meaning Nishimura intended, as he said at one point "The bond between Nishimura and Mame... It's there. Between Mame and other people there is nothing." I think he said this to cheer me up as I was trying to get Mame's attention so I could scratch his/her head, but s/he was busy sniffing dirt.
I didn't know the meaning of it at the time, and didn't think to ask, so Bethany is as likely to be right as not.


And here's my obligatory sunset picture.


Isn't it pretty?



Good. Moving on, then...

Here's the last one.

I spent an hour this morning trying to get this to stitch properly, but in the end, I failed. It's decent enough, but I've got another 90 degrees of view I could tack on the right side if the connecting shot had exposed properly. The sunset kind of freemed the exposure on my camera, as you can see, but I was able to mostly recover things. The sky above the stuff in the SW looked too nice to crop out, so you get weird grey matting where I didn't have any picture to put.

As a last note, in case you're wondering (I was), the gallery has about every 6th picture I took. I mean, on average. According to my Excel math, it's actually 6.6296, but about every 6th is good enough, unless you're talking to KMD, who would bitch that you couldn't shoot it at a satellite without compromising its pie. Or something.
In case any of you didn't know, Dan's not allowed in the kitchen when people are cooking. God forbid he actually touch something.

Wait for it...

I did some wandering with my camera yesterday, and I've got a couple decent pictures. I'm about to start uploading and annotating them, so... check back in about half an hour?

Odd Omelet

I completely forgot to take a picture of it, but I totally made a chupaqueso-let this morning. I made a chupaqueso shell, then dumped egg on it and wrapped it up. It was decent.

Laziness Strikes

I'm not doing anything this weekend, so I was thinking about wandering around and taking pictures some more, but I don't really know anywhere to go.

Well, I'm not doing anything that I haven't already done. Today.
Judo, for example, is done for today, and that leaves me with ten hours to kill, and then tomorrow as well. I'm trying to meet some people who don't work on the weekends, but I think almost everyone does.

Oh! I managed to get a thing that's like a job. Sort of. Except it doesn't require a working visa, I think, as it's through the school. The job is to be a native English speaker. And... that's about it.
It's only once a week for three hours, but they pay $9.50 an hour, so it's pretty decent, especially given the workload.

The class is a Chinese and English class, where the students work on translating from English to Chinese with no middle Japanese step. There's a Chinese girl who's working as my opposite, but I suspect her Japanese is much better than mine.

It's time for food, but I don't know what I'm going to eat. It might be time to see if I can convince Chise to show me how to cook something new.

Well, it is Pickled...

I put some ベニショウガ on my rice this morning, and as I was doing that, I thought to myself I better use this stuff up. I'm surprised it hasn't gone bad by now.
...
And then I realized that I was talking about pickled ginger. That had been kept by itself in an airtight container in a fridge. And was opened about a week ago.
Needless to say, I'm not worried about it going bad anytime soon.

At The School

So I'm at the school and I just uploaded the picture of the not-okonomiyaki that I made a few days back. The school's connection... the picture upload was like poof and it was done. I've gotten used to people's random connections, where uploading 200k takes a few seconds.

Noob Omelets and Rice

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with my post, but I thought the name was nifty.

Having been given the illustrious title of “guest writer,” I would like to announce that I’ll be a guest writer on the lovely blog of Japan since, according to a certain someone, one can only “Japan so hard” by themselves.

Which, to me, sounds like something more than vaguely sexual, but that is not the point.

The point is, is that since apparently I’m the first person thought of when the question “who do I know that likes writing” is asked, I’ll be joining up to share my own little spastic escapades in the Kansai area in a typically psychotic fashion, not unlike that of the great Yahtzee.

Although, when I write things like this I kind of tend to go everywhere- much like the American military- however since most of my wanderings tend to lead me to school, the grocery store, and Kawaramachi-dori, you’re probably not too likely to see me too often, or too long, since I’m coming back to America at the end of July.

Which, now that I think about it is probably a good thing.

But the point of that was to warn whoever reads this (because I honestly have no clue who most of you are) that I’m likely to write about anything- from punk fashion, to annoying cultural and social graces, to the staggeringly obscene number of cell phone accessories available for gaijin purchase, most of which are Hello Kitty related.

Also, if you couldn’t tell from my particularly geeky reference to an online god game reviewer, I am something of a geek, with a particular penchant for console gaming and anime, not unlike every other college-aged white kid in this country.

I may also include a running tally of how many injuries I received on a given excursion, considering I’ve been here four weeks and have injured myself four different times. Although, one of them I can’t recall ever doing, so it doesn’t really count. Whatever I did left a nice burn mark, though…

RIGHT. So then, on to something Japan-related.

It seems that when one has no internet connection- and thus no connection to the outside world- that they spend a lot of time wandering in the vain hope that some form of communication will fall from the sky much like the rocks onto the heads of the players of a frustrated dungeon master. However, these wanderings usually lead to the findings of large, pretty, humorous, or plain perverted things.

Especially in a country where English is a second, third, or fourth language, and populated by a generation of teenagers who think English is cool.

I imagine it’s much the same feeling that a native Japanese would get coming to America and walking down the halls of a public high school, all of which now seem to be populated by drooling, fanboy, otaku Narutards who couldn’t get laid if a hooker propositioned them wearing nothing but a blue headband with a piece of metal with a meaningless drawing on it.

…there was, at some point, a meaning to this. Allow me to meander my way back to it.

I discovered recently that one should probably never wander around dressed as close as they could get to punk fashion without the black jeans (because they were still drying) and the punk boots (because I left them in America), because strange people still manage to harass you for no reason.

And I’m not counting the strange looks from people who seem to have never seen someone dressed like that or the nervous security detail following you around everywhere like they’re afraid that you’ll pull a knife from hammerspace and maim some nearby innocent children- those I actually take a certain amount of pride in, since it means I accomplished something.

What exactly it is that I accomplished is still something I’m working on figuring out. Possibly reinforcing the “fact” that all Americans are gun-toting, insensitive baby-eaters.

THE POINT BEING. I was harassed on a crosswalk- a crosswalk- by an old guy asking to take my picture. The conversation went something along the lines of what follows. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll be “Me” and the creepy guy will be “Hentai:”

Hentai: Do you mind if I take your picture?

Me: Oh, no go ahead! (If you can’t tell, I don’t get that offer very often.)

Hentai: So why are you so good looking?

Me: Uhm…. Why are you thinking that? I think as obnoxiously loud as I can.

Hentai: So are you a sightseer?

Me: I’m actually a foreign exchange student.

Hentai: Are you teaching anything?

Me: I’m actually studying Japanese. I’m a foreign exchange student, dumbass, I want to scream desperately, but lack the nerve to do so.

Hentai: So are you married?

Me: No. …the hell? Where did that come from? I think he was trying to hit on me. I’m not too certain. He was kinda… loopy…

Hentai: So you live here in Kyoto by yourself?

Me: Yeah… You reeeeeeally weird me out, you know that? I think to myself, wondering if there is some way to reflect the creepy feeling I’m getting from him back and see how he likes it.

Hentai: What’s your name, if I may ask?

Me: Beth. Aren’t you married? I thought I had seen him with a woman, but maybe it was just another 19-year-old girl he was hitting up for pictures and sex conversation.

Hentai: *as the signal changes to let people across the road* Well, I’d like to see you again, even though I probably won’t.

Me: Yeah, that’s because I didn’t give you my contact info, pedo, I scream mentally at him, planning to introduce him to the lovely keisatsu next time I see him? No, it’s not a cop car; they take you to a fun happy place with all the 19-year-old girls you could ever want!

Hentai: Bye!!

And that was the last I saw of him, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Things like this make me wonder if I really am interested in the whole “punk fashion” scene, but then, on reflection, they’re pretty good for a giggle.

And if nothing else, I’ve got an interesting story to take home.

Although, it might be noted that stuff like this doesn’t happen to me in America, I suppose it is my own fault for daring to wear something that wasn’t what everyone else was wearing.

And for having the bright pink

And the chains.

And the hat.

…I think by now you get it.

THE POINT BEING. I’m probably going to ride in the “women only” train car for a while. At least until I’m not so sore I’m not on the lookout for perverts anymore.

INJURY COUNT FOR THIS TRIP:

Burned my tongue on some hot tempura-udon, but that doesn’t count since it was back in Saiin where I belong.

Some minor damage to my pride when I wasn’t aware that the restaurant I had chosen did their orders in a funny way that’s different from EVERY OTHER RESTAURANT I’VE BEEN IN SINCE I GOT HERE. MAKE UP YOUR MIND HOW TO ORDER, SILLY JAPANESE PEOPLE.*

Stupidity pain for wearing heels to go walking around in.

*English speakers please not the comma. I’m not ordering silly Japanese people. The comment “make up your mind how to order” is directed at the silly Japanese people.

"The Usual"

Sorry about the lack of updates! It’s not the usual laziness that leads to this kind of thing, at least. Really, it’s not!

I tried to get online Tuesday morning and post stuff up here, but my laptop said “… ? FU.” And wouldn’t connect to any wireless networks. I tried again yesterday, but got distracted sorting through three days worth of spam. I don’t quite have the heart to mark email from Facebook apps as spam, though I think I will when I get online to post this.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on.

I have a test that I ought to be studying for right now, so that’s it for now.

Not an Okonomiyaki, but...

This morning, I was about to put some rice on before I got in the shower so I’d have something for breakfast and thought Eh… I’ve eaten rice for breakfast for the past week and a half straight. I’ve got some eggs, I’ll do something with those. and hopped in the shower.

15 minutes later, I’m standing in front of my one-burner range, checking my frying pan (フライパン “frai pan” in Japanese. Creative, aren’t they?) and getting out utensils and stuff.

‘Kay, I gots me a knife, a frying pan, and some turners. Fridge. Let’s see… eggs… Oh, cabbage! Hey, some ベニショーガ (red pickled ginger) and… cheese… eh, whatever.

Having acquired base ingredients, my eyes wander over to the four spices I have available: pepper, peppered seasoning salt, roast garlic chicken seasoning, and pepper.

For those of you that didn’t know, I’m somewhat fond of pepper.

So, mix the base ingredients after chopping them up so they’re decently sized, add about a tablespoon of fine-ground pepper, dump the whole thing into a frying pan with a little oil on that’s been sitting oh-so-patiently.

Wait. Wait some more. I have a lid for this frying pan! Put the lid on, so I feel more cook-riffic.

Wait. Wait. Flip. Wait. Flip. Flip. Hee, this is fun! Oh, right. Cooking. Wait. Wait. Flip. Hee.

I had intended to take a picture of the finished product, but I ate most of it. I took a picture of the remaining eighth, though, and you can see it looks like I deep-fried a pan full of vomit.

Yum.

Semi-first day

Today was our first day of actual, we-signed-up-for-these classes. My first class, Basic Japanese, was cancelled due to the teacher having some kind of infection… Under her ear I guess? I don’t really know, but another teacher came in and proctored the test she had planned to give, and that was it for that class. So at 10:30, by which time most people had finished the test and we were starting to clog up the hallway outside, we dispersed.

So, cool, a day off already, right? My next class wasn’t until 3PM, so I had plenty of time to wander around and do stuff, but I ended up staying in the area around the school. Upside is that I found an okonomiyaki shop that’s right by the school and, bizarrely enough, serves 糯お好み焼き(… imagine a non-sweet pancake with onions, ginger, and little balls of compressed rice good and you’ve got the right idea) which was pretty… mediocre. I guess the location makes up for it, as well as the size. Admittedly, I also ate a クリームパン(cream bread) and a チョコパン (bread with swirls of chocolate pudding), but that’s because they’re delicious, not because I was hungry.

I think one of the weird things about being here is that you get used to using coins to pay for stuff. The smallest bill is essentially a $10 one, and they have coins that are about $1 and about $5, so you can buy most daily stuff with just random change from your pocket. It’s hard to equate that with spending actual money, though, instead of the American/English concept of pocket change. I have a little change purse that I got that is big enough to hold a small handful of change, and I think it’s got about $10 in it right now.

Every few days, I go through and pull out all the ￥1 coins, and leave four-ish of the larger coins in, as it otherwise slowly ends up filled with, essentially, pennies and dimes.

I did that just now and it turns out that I had ￥757.

By the way, tax is included in the price of things here, which is really nice. So if it says on the menu that something costs $7.50, it really costs $7.50, not $8.133141592 and a 15% tip ($1.13) totaling an entirely different number ($9.26π) than you were originally thinking. Oh, you don’t tip, either*. It’s really convenient.

That said, a basic bowl of ramen costs $5 for the smallest size (fills me up, though!) at someplace cheap. Okonomiyaki starts at about $6 and the size varies a lot more than with ramen.

*There are a couple exceptions to the not-tipping rule here, but they mostly involve going to places where the reservation alone will cost more than it would to take all your friends out to eat at a decent place.

50 posts! And other stuff

We ran Jynxed Productions for about two years and I think we never hit 50 posts. This is the 50th post in this blog, so three cheers and whatnot, you know?

[Insert smooth transition here]

So I laid out what I think is my schedule this morning in an Excel (coughKMDcough) spreadsheet, but I'm not entirely certain. I'm going to run by the International Office a little later and see if they have a copy of my official schedule that I can check this one against.

[Insert another smooth transition here]

As it turns out, it would seem that I should've been studying for a cumulative test this morning, instead. I think I did okay, but I've learned not to be optimistic with Japanese tests. A 75% here is a B, though, which is kind of cool. Bonus cool if they report it as a 3.0 like it should be.

[Insert crunchy, peanut-butter-like transition here]

I invited Bethany to add to this if she has anything interesting happen, so there should be something from her forthcoming, though as to when, I know not.

Money

I paid rent yesterday. It was ￥252,000 (~$2,470) which is more money than I’ve ever held at once, as far as I know. It’s enough to buy everything I own, and I just got a $1,400 camera system. Really, you’d be coming pretty close, but it’s still kind of astounding.

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, as it didn’t seem like a good idea to advertise both my location and that I had an unguarded pile of cash. Now, normally, you wouldn’t pull out $2,500 ahead of time and sit on it, but I can only pull out $300 each day with my ATM card, and I didn’t want to be caught off guard by something else and not be able to pay rent.

I now have a debit card, so it won’t be an issue anymore, but I felt somewhat obligated to take a picture of the money pile.

"Translating Rice"

Today’s project, Translating Rice, (originally titled I Woke up at Six and it’s Saturday)is done after about a half hour over a hot translator… That really doesn’t work with translation like it does with cooking.
Edit: In fact, it sounds like I met a hot bilingual chick… Too bad, though, as I didn’t.

Anyway, here’s a shot of the troubleshooting guide on the rice bag with my translation notes.

There were a couple things I wasn’t able to translate (and I just asked a Japanese guy and he had no clue), as I’ve only got my electronic dictionaries (mine are from 2000-2002), my laptop (running the full EDICT2, but without all the input options of JDIC), and my DS (for kanji).

That really is quite an arsenal, but they mostly cover the same things, just with different levels of portability. My e-dictionaries are very pocketable, as is my DS, but they have small dictionary sizes as they’re pretty old. In the DS’s case, the dictionary size is limited by the amount of data they can stuff on a cartridge. I usually can find a translation eventually, but with short words in hiragana, it’s sometimes difficult. It’s kind of like having a two-letter acronym.

	Sticky	[シンのあるご飯]	Stiff or dry	No shine	Irregular
Wash rice	Using too much power when washing rice (You crush the rice)		Not enough washing (Still has husk and flour powder)	Not enough washing (Water is not clear)
Adjust water	Too much water		Too little water	Too little water	Do not level before boiling (Rough and sinks)
Soak in water	?	Pre-boil heat too high (Should be less than 45C/113F)
Adjust heat				Heat is strong (Lower boiling heat)	Heat is strong (Lower boiling heat)
Let stand	Sitting temperature too low	Did not sit long enough (Let sit for 10-15 minutes)
Stir	Not enough stirring (Let steam escape)	Call a priest		Not enough stirring (Expose to air)	Not enough stirring (Mix the whole thing)
Retain heat	Container's temperature is too low		Stored too long (Up to 12 hours) Need at least 4 cups	Stored too long (Up to 12 hours)

As the one cell that’s religious, well, that’s what you get if you put in ぼくし(priest) instead of ほぐし(stir). My rice has turned out like this on a couple of occasions. One time, someone snuck some kind of mushrooms into it. Bleh.

In other news, I found this word while trying to find a definition for シンのあるご飯 that I expect some people will appreciate.

同語反復 【どうごはんぷく】 (n) tautology

You know who you are.

Bookstore?

There’s a bookstore down the street from me. Or at least, I thought there was. Except that when I was going in, I noticed that there was a sign saying something about “18 years old” (「18歳」) and I started to be a little suspicious. To go in, you have to go through this little two-turn maze that is kind of like the little half-wall in many public bathrooms.

Once you go past that, there are three vending machines, one with magazines, one with magazines and DVD, and one with DVDs and, I think, panties. I’ve heard stories of the panty vending machines, and I’d been hoping to see one while I was here, just for the… actually, I don’t know why. But it was on my list of things I hoped to accomplish, so there you are.

I didn’t take a picture because it was surrounded by softcore porn titles and I’m trying to keep this at least mostly not-NSFW.

As it turns out, there is no actual bookstore. It’s just the vending machines and a locked door. And some sex toy advertisements. The prices were pretty bad, as you might imagine, ranging from $10 to $50 for a DVD.

Anyway, the better part of this story is that I found an okonomiyaki place about a three-minute walk away from my apartment. It’s sort of like a pub, so it’s only open later in the day, but they have reasonably-sized okonomiyaki. It’s not nearly as big as Mr. Young Mens, but it’s also not a train ride away.

Two pictures, both from my phone, and you can really see the limitations of the camera as it jacks up the sensitivity to counter its pathetically small aperture. The increased in sensitivity is where the noise and random discoloration comes from. Also splotchiness.

Phone Pictures

For a while, I was trying to convince myself that I should buy a smaller, pocketable camera. I love my D80, and you guys collectively see a very small portion of the pictures I take, in large part due to my lack of a ‘Net connection, and the remaining part due to the fact that most of them are 20 different angles on the same thing.

Anyway, I finally got a cell phone two days ago. My provider is Softbank, the second or third largest carrier in Japan. Between NTT Docomo, au by KDDI, and Softbank, there are something like 110 million cell phones in use. And there are a bunch of smaller carriers as well.

Kind of an odd transition, right? Look, here’s another!

Well, with the exception of the two pictures of the phone, I took the rest of the pictures in this post with the camera integrated into my cell phone, a 707SCII. It’s a prepaid model, so it doesn’t have super-leet features like One-seg or a touch screen, but it has a nice display that is pleasantly large and bright, a pretty decent camera, as you can see from these shots, and you can even do video calls with it. I fully intend to give that a try, but it’s not something I would use commonly, as it costs ￥16 for 6 seconds, which comes out to about $1.50 per minute. Voice calls are about half as expensive, at $0.90 per minute.

First, you don’t pay for incoming calls, so when NTT calls me and I spend an hour trying to understand their one English-speaking guy, or they spend an hour trying to understand me, I’m not charged. Second: for $3.00, I get unlimited text messages for a month.

And now you see why the Japanese use text messaging so much.

Here you can see a couple of random pictures from my phone, most of which came out at least decently. Nothing really impressive, but I'm coming from the i275, which has a VGA camera.

First up is the shot of the car and the safety cones. The road that car is driving on is a two-lane road. You will notice that it is all the way on the far side, and the distance from the white line to the car is about the same as the height of a safety cone. If it were a less busy road, I would've put the cone in the road to demonstrate. Point is, the roads here are tiny.

Next up is this metal plate in the ground that reads "Kyoto City". Nobody knows what they're for, as far as I can tell, but they're everywhere, and not always the same distance apart. People seem to agree that it's so you know what town you're in, but I have a hard time imagining someone being that drunk, even here.
Then there's the arrow. Nobody that I've asked has even the slightest idea what the arrow is supposed to point at. They vary based on nothing that I can identify. They don't always point north, or even usually. The only thing I've come up with is that they might mark property lines. But I don't know.

And here's a close-up.

Fairly Clean, Actually

Any of you that have been in my room know that I am not a clean freak, or anything close to it. I don’t even compulsively clean my room every, say, month. Jes has changed that in large part, bringing it to about once a month from about once a year.

Now, that said, those same people know that my room rarely-to-never becomes unbearably messy. There are always easily-found paths, and they’re wide enough that you don’t have too worry about stepping on something vital. And that’s if it’s become messy enough that there are paths through the piles of crap, instead of the other way around.

I would like to point these aforementioned people in the direction of the post with the panoramas of my room from earlier this week. Hopefully, I’ll remember to make that a link when I put this on the ‘Net.

Those pictures show the messiest my room has been up until this morning. Bethany came over last night and we made yakisoba (“fried soba”, in case you’ve ever wondered), and class registration was today, so there are papers everywhere because I was digging around to make sure I had everything I need.

Cream Bread

So I think I've mentioned that I like melon bread. Probably.
The first one I tried wasn't actually plain メロンパン, but was a custard-filled variety with the same basic shape. As you should know by now, I have a weakness for pastries, doubly so for those filled with tasty, custardy goodness. The last few posts (feet excluded) have been pretty bare of pictures, so here are some pictures of my クリームパン("cream bread"). The outer wrapper's big words transliterate to "Kobe Custard Melon", written in roman letters below it.
Big surprise, yes?
Now then. From the thumbnail, you can't really tell that the whole thing is covered with a coating of large-grain sugar, but it is. And it's delicious, as things covered with a thin coat of sugar often are. And last we have the filling. It's rather more concentrated in this クリームパンthan usual, and you should have no problems seeing it even in this thumbnail at right as a lump of gooey goodness.
Needless to say, they are delicious. Oh, and they cost ￥105, which comes out to just about a dollar.

Judo tips, part I

When you're doing 寝技(matwork), be sure to keep your weight on the bottom of your feet, where it's supposed to be. It's not that you should be crouching, but be sure to keep your toes under you when you kneel. By doing this, you provide yourself with better power, and help to prevent the following from happening:

That's from... yesterday, if I'm getting my days right. I didn't realize how deep of a matburn I had on my feet, and I didn't disinfect it. You can see the results on my left (top) foot with the yellow coloration on the scab tissue.
So. The lesson here is:

Don't use your feet upside-down.
And if you do, fix 'em.

Quick Post

I have a test in about twenty minutes, so this is going to be quick.

The OMGREEN suit works great. The only parts of me that got wet were my face (I was on my bike and the water coming down at an angle due to my forward movement... yeah.) and hands (I bloused my gloves backwards. Oops.), which was pretty cool.

I got my interview results back, and the school apparently feels I'm a "low intermediate" Japanese-doing person. On the 1-5 class scale, I'm in the level 3 class. On the 1-10 general Japanese-ness scale, that puts me at a 4. It feels about right, given my abilities.

Judo again tonight, and I have some reading after that, so I'll try and get some posts up tomorrow evening. I have to register for classes tomorrow, too. After that is the weekend, and I just need to write a 400-word essay in Japanese. Um.

The test in a bit is on 20 漢字 (chinese character) compounds. They test us on reading 20 new ones every day, then at some later point, they'll test our writing. I need to go study for this 「小テスト」 (little test). It's basically a quiz.

My Trick

In case anybody hasn't picked up on it, I'm writing the posts at home in Word, then coming to somewhere with a 'Net connection and posting them with the time I wrote them. Posting only takes a couple of minutes, while a good-sized blog post takes from a half hour to three hours to actually compose. For this post, I'm in a ramen shop, having ピリカラぎょうざ(~"spicy meat dumplings") and some plain white rice.

In a way, I'm paying for a 'Net connection. And food. That helps to take some of the ouch out of the $5 lunch I just ate.

Rain Suit

Here’s a picture of the rain suit until I can get someone to take a picture of me wearing it. Without a tripod, I can’t really do self-portraits, so I may invest in one at some point. Anybody got a decent one they want to donate? Carbon-fiber, maybe?

Yes, I’m kidding. Jeez, tough crowd. ね？

1. Yes, those are, in fact, suspenders. Coolest thing: they’re optional. You can take them off by unzipping them. Well, I think that’s cool.

2. They whole thing is rated to withstand… “5,000mm” of rain. I guess 5m is quite a bit of rain? I wanted it mostly so that I don’t have to old an umbrella to ride my bike, and so I can wander around without worshipping the god of umbrellas.
I don’t know why I don’t like them.

3. It’s pretty tough material. I mean, for something whose purpose is to be water-resistant. Figure… Maybe a medium-weight plastic tarp.

4. Yes, it has pockets.

a. Yes, it has enough for me.

i. Yes, that’s weird.

5. Pretty much all the openings have elastic control points that allow you to tighten them as you want.

6. The main closure on the jacket is a zipper, which is covered by a flap that has hook-and-loop towards the waist and buttons up top for better control.

7. There’s a D-ring on the bag for god-only-knows. I bought it from a fishing supply store. You never know with those guys.

If there are any other questions, go ahead and leave them in the comments and I’ll try and check tomorrow or soon. I’m too tired to think time. おやすみ。(Good night [informal])

Edit: It looks like I forgot to actually put the pictures in. The first is the massive bag that I got it in, which is about 50% bigger in every dimension than the basket on my bike. That was fun.
Also, I swear it's green. It's a nice OD green, but here it shows up grey. Go figure.

Judo Club, Day 2

This is going to be a little disjointed, as I’m a little rattled from overexerting myself and being tossed around and whatnot. By the way, eating a pound of ramen a half hour before physical exercise is bad plan. Just so you know.

Tonight was my second practice with this judo club. I had to sit out for a while ‘cause I was starting to get a little faint (目が回る = “eyes are spinning”). These guys are pretty hardcore. As in, the girls that weigh half as much as I do are about as strong as I am in the upper body. I may not be musclebound, but I consider myself fairly average for someone my size.

Tonight, I found out why I haven’t gotten a single throw to execute on any one of them without them very obviously giving it to me. I should start at the beginning, though.

Now, my luggage was overweight to begin with, so there’s no way I could’ve packed the amazingly heavy gi into my luggage, even if I had one. So I came here, and they’ve got a box full of various sizes of gi for visitors (and new members who haven’t yet bought their own) to use. All the belts are old black belts, so I’ve been wearing a black belt during practices, which is sort of embarrassing, but you have to have a belt. I figured this was normal, and pretty much everybody was just wearing a black belt ‘cause it’s what was lying around.

Ha. Ha. F-hah.

Turns out that the people there have, on average, been practicing judo for ten years. One of the girls has only been doing it for two years, but she’s apparently good enough that she’s a probationary black belt and I think she’s the youngest, judo-wise, by at least five years.

I’m not sure that got the point across.

TEN YEARS.

Let me remind you (or inform those that don’t know) that I practiced judo almost ten years ago for a little under two years. Against my will. (Don’t worry, it’s fun now)

Needless to say, the only thing I’ve been able to successfully do is stuff that I am probably only getting away with because I’m a gaijin. I gi-choked someone into tapping out once, got an armbar on someone else, and managed to pin one guy once, but that’s all matwork, which is sort of my specialty, and with that said, I was still only succeeding at stuff they’re not used to defending against. Don’t worry, everything I did was legal, even within the pansy American rules.

Now, all of that said, I’ve been pinned twice myself, and I would’ve lost to time one other time, but I’d say that’s pretty damned good, given the opponents. Oh, and a I sat on one guy. Totally BS’d a technique out of nowhere, picked ‘em straight up off the ground, and sat down.

Did I mention I weigh about 50% more than the heavier guys in there?

Anyway, it was fun. They said I can take pictures next time, so you can look forward to them my Thursday, which is America’s Wednesday.

I wanted to get that off my chest, so thanks for listening, assuming you got this far.

Zzzzz….

Chikaku Ramenya?

Judo club is in about an hour, so it's once again time for ramen.
Yum.

School

I guess I forgot to mention that school started last Thursday. It's now Monday here, and I'm on my lunch break. Not much to say as yet since I haven't signed up for electives, and have only been to two classes that weren't the Basic Japanese class.
Well, there's that, though. Hm.
We, uh, study Japanese! We're doing review to make sure everybody's at the same level before they starting killing us off, from what I understand. Seriously remedial review. I mean, we went over various meanings and uses for ~te iru.
Time for class.

More Room Pictures

Pictures at end of post (EOP?) .

I had more pictures to go with the bike post, but it was cold and the blog software was having issues ‘cause the connection was spotty. I’ve got some better pictures of my room for you today, though.

Now, my computer can’t stitch these together quite right, as you can see (so don’t worry, my laptop is still in one piece and mostly flat, despite what it looks like), but I think the continuous photo gives a much better idea of how the room is laid out on that side.

“But why only the one side?” you ask. Due, I think to barrel distortion (correctable, but slow) and parallax effects (boned) at close range, it is very, very difficult to get close-up shots to stitch together properly. I took these from the far corner of my room, and, honestly, after an hour of trying to get the bastards to cooperate, I decided to give up for now.

The first attempt was trying to get 20 pictures of various orientations (Ahem.) to try and fit together, which was kind of a lost cause. So I instead just crossed my fingers and hoped it could correct the barrel distortion. Low and behold, it worked. Well, it worked enough.

Oh, by the way, the high-res version of this thumbnail weighs in at .999MB (1,300 bytes short), down from the ~10MB PNG I was going to upload.

It might take a minute, is all.

Picture upload is failing!

Grabbed my bike to head home, and thought you guys could use some pictures of the bike parking area. Let me remind you that it was Saturday when I took these pictures.

That ramp leads up to a second floor of the same thing. By the way, this is not the largest bike parking area I’ve seen. The mall has three or four separate ones about this size spread around it, for example.

In case you haven’t heard, bikes are a little more common in Japan than the States.

Bridge: Vital Importance

Since I couldn’t do judo today, and that’s all I had planned, I wandered around and took pictures for a while.

On the way back to the school is a bridge, and I took some pictures off of it. Nothing really exciting, as I was trying to be artistic with them, and that just never works out well. But this canal is pretty cool anyway, so pictures.

Oh, and the bird. I love the coloring on its feathers. It’s like a grayscale rainbow, but with wings and a beak.

As I was about to leave, I noticed there was a little rust on the bridge, and took these two shots. As you can see, the bridge is a little rusty.

Though it would require being on the bridge to try, I was tempted to set up harmonic motion in the bridge. But I don’t want to be the one standing there stomping my feet in the middle when the bridge explodes, collapses, wobbles its way into the street, or falls through time.

Kind of random, but the guy who runs the judo club was talking about a “timeslip” when he was describing a technique to me. I lost the rest of the explanation because I was too busy trying to fathom how that works. Apparently, the Japanese have advanced judo considerably faster than us silly Americans, ‘cause I totally don’t remember ever breaking physics when I did judo before…

So, the bridge. You know how Sonic the Hedgehog games always had spikes in the most random places, and you’d think “What the hell? Why are there spikes there?” Well, apparently this is one of those cases where the creators were just going what was natural, I guess. Anyway, there were those, and then some rusty spikes. You can see the rusty ones are bent at odd angles and look kind of evil.

It must vitally important that nobody goes on that ten-foot stretch of walkway?

It's a Sweatdrop

It was during the prep work for today’s blog post that I realized my laptop is not a multimedia workhorse. It’s great for browsing the ‘Net, checking email, writing reports, and other fairly business-y things, but Lightroom and Photoshop both bring it completely to its knees. The panorama of the bike racks took it almost five minutes to perform. Granted, it was a 300MB file when all was said and done, but still.

Exporting today’s photo set from Lightroom (which consists of resizing and recompressing a set of photos I’ve already picked out) took it about three minutes. This doesn’t sound like much, but then you realize that that’s for 16 pictures. Oh, 17 with the addition of this picture at the right. [Edit: And now I’m at 18 because of the lunchbox picture.]

Now, I’m not complaining. In fact, given that thing’s got a 1.3Ghz Celeron M, I’m surprised it boots, and these figures are not that much slower than my 3500+ desktop machine doing similar work, which means the bottleneck could be at the memory or scratch file…

What’s this blog about?

Oh, right.

Bento-ish

So I went out wandering today. I had meant to go to judo club, but I got the starting and ending times mixed up, and got there as they were finishing, which was disappointing, as you might imagine.

There’s another practice on Monday, so it’s not a big deal, but I still feel stupid for mixing them up.

Oh, and I bought a lunchbox, a thermos, and a pair of collapsible chopsticks. The pile cost me $30, but will allow me to pack food from home, which should save me money in the long run.

Raincoat vs. Rain "suit"

So it rains a lot here. Like, a lot a lot. Lot here should be spelled OMGRAIN, but I've left it as-is for clarity.

Anyway.

Because of the OMGRAIN that it rains here, I've been thinking about buying a raincoat. I waterproofed both my jackets and all three of my hats before I left, but that hasn't been enough, as the rain does eventually get through and neglected to waterproof my pants.

Again, no jokes please.

I understand that my options are as follows:

• $1 raincoat from the 百円 shop (dollar store)
• $40 two-piece rain suit consisting of full-length pants and a jacket.
• $70 version of the above, with better seamwork, more pockets, a better-constructed hood, and OMGREEN*. Oh, and it looks much better on me. And, for some reason, zips into a lifejacket, if you want it to.
  
• Hell, they're only $30, and you never know when your apartment might flood due to OMGRAIN rain.
  

Comments would be appreciated here, as I'm in a bit of a quandary at this point.
OMGREEN is a special color. It is defined as "Green enough that I like it, and on something cool".

I'm currently leaning towards the green one, if you can't tell.
Again, comments please!

Instead... Bi-eek.

I've spent today's blog time going through the comments for some of the other posts and replying to them. Sorry to take so long!
That said, I still have a little feeling in my butt...

I mentioned I wanted to get a bike and had been looking at a green one ($168). I didn't end up buying that one and ended up getting el cheapo discount used bike ($60) instead. Since almost all of you are American, you'll know the same thing I do: it's secretly a girl's bike. They don't make men's bikes here, though. Still, the bike I got is pretty... bleh. It's kind of a dark grey (+), has one gear (-), a light (+) that is aimed sideways (-) and is dim (-), a springy seat (+) but no shocks (-), a basket (+), a back-mounted rack-thing (+), water-guard things (+) that refuse to call fenders (++), and a pretty cool lock (+). There's a lot of rounding error on those, so don't bother counting 'em out. Also, the brakes blow. They are both loud and fail at braking. Never get a bike with a drum brake. Most useless POS ever.

Oh, I went back to the shrine with Bethany and Sara. It was nice to be able to take pictures with both hands this time. No jokes, please.

First Time for Something

Some old man just walked over and said "Using your computer?", and I explained the situation. Surprisingly, in two weeks of me sitting outside the mall, nobody's accosted me about it before just now.

Rain, Rain

It is raining here. I'm not kidding or exaggerating at all. Those of you that know me know that my definition of rain does not include drizzling, sprinkling, and other imitations. This is rain. I'm sitting six feet away from where it's fall and I'm still getting wet.

And it's coming straight down.

Despite that, I can see my little sprinklets of water on my laptop's screen.
It was raining decently last night, as well, and I'm sitting right next to where I was then. But last night, I made a rather moist error. See, apparently, where I had sat down was right next to the mouth of a gutter. When I sat down the ground was dry. When I put my hand on the ground to get up, there was a splash and I realized I was sitting in a puddle about half an inch deep. I don't have my camera, but suffice to say that there's a constant quarter-inch of water over all of th ground.

Blogging in the Rain

My laptop doesn't like being rained on and I'm losing the dexterity in my fingers, so that last blog post was a bit hurried. If I remember, I'll go back and pretty it up a bit.

Well, it was. I made some changes and went over by a little...

I went to Osaka with Bethany and Sara today. It was pretty lame. It was like Kyoto, but more spread out, with less space to walk, more people, and the shops were more expensive. Watch me stick around Kyoto for shopping. Bethany and Sara have both been picking on me quite a bit, and it’s getting on my nerves a little, so I have to admit that watching Bethany fail at the train made me feel good. You’ll recall that I did the same thing yesterday. (Edit: By the way, I talked to Bethany about it, and I think she must've mentioned it to Sara. Yesterday was much more fun.

That said, it wasn’t a complete waste of time. We stopped at a マックド(McDonald’s) and I had my first taste of Japanese McDonald’s food, which was, unsurprisingly, just like American McDonald’s food. I mean, imagine that! … Yeah.

Roxanne has some bizarre obsession with ice, and the ice is different here. It’s smaller, a little jagged on the edges to improve surface area and thus cooling speed, and very soft. Perfect for chewing. The picture is McDonald’s’ ice, but that seems to be standard, ‘cause it’s the same stuff I got at the Mr. Young Men’s later.

We found a random escalator outside. I’m not certain how they keep it from dying in the rain, as it seems like it would be a pain to waterproof that kind of thing. Oh, and right next to the escalators was this nice fountain… thing. Is that a fountain? I don’t really know. It’s in the picture, on the right.

So once we decided that Osaka sucks, we headed back to Kyoto and got off at Kawaramachi, the shopping district. You’d think that shopping with two girls for a whole day that they would’ve bought something. As far as I know, the only things that were purchased by them were train tickets and one bottle of water because Bethany was getting pretty thirsty. Anyway, I lost them/they lost me somewhere in one of the shopping arcades, so I started wandering around on my own.

There are a number of interesting shops in the area, such as the two army surplus stores (one of which I checked out, and it has decent prices), a couple kimono shops (between $50 and $3,000 here), about three dozen (not kidding!) Japanese confectionaries, and a couple of convenience stores. It’s so weird to find a 7-11 indoors. Well, there aren’t any actual doors, per se. You know.

But right by the not-a-door entrance is an お好み焼き(okonmiyaki literally translates to “what you like, fried”) where I got a very delicious ラブラブお好み(“love love okonomi”, a heart-shaped お好み焼き with fish flakes and beef on top). I thought I was watching her make it, but she kept making other people’s orders. Right when I was about to ask about how long was left on mine, she pulls it nearly completed from a nearby countertop oven. At my request, she added ベニショウガ(pickled ginger chopped into cubes or Julian-style – it’s the red stuff with a strong smell), which is one of my favorite condiments/ingredients.

You can be certain that I’ll be going back to that shop in the future. It’s that Mr. Young Men’s I mentioned earlier. Sounds weird, but the prices are decent for that kind of eating. And they have an English menu that’s actually translated decently. First one I’ve seen in two weeks of being here.

Now that I had eaten my fill of delicious egg-pancake-pizza stuff, I headed towards the area that Sara had described as “Kyoto’s own little Denden town”. Denden Town is Osaka’s very own little Akihabara. We had meant to go to Denden town today, but we got off the train about three miles away and the girls are… girls.

This area was quite a lot of electronics on its own, so I can hardly imagine what Akihabara must be like. In any case, I found a place called Camera Naniwa that had all kinds of, you guessed it, camera stuff. It was a very decent store, and had two of four floors with interesting stuff. The other two were scrapbooking and an art gallery.

In any case, I ended up wandering around that place for about, oh, a good hour. Except, I had gone rather far south and had to walk about ¾ of a mile north to get to the station entrance. Then I got lost in the department store that leads to the train station. Seriously, a square turtle-load of overpriced crap. Oh, and a couple パン屋(basically a bakery), which I ignored due to it being very overcrowded.

Obligatory car-a-vator. See left.

So. I finally get on the train and get back to my part of Kyoto. I then proceed to get lost (vaguely in the right direction, though) due to it now being night and chat up a random family that’s walking home from… somewhere. Forgot to ask. I get to the mall about ten minutes later, wander around for a few minutes, accost some random woman and tell her about the supermarket’s really low prices on something she’s holding, and head home. As I step inside, I realize I’ve forgotten something.

So I toss all the bags (three of them) on the ground and go get my bike from Sara’s place, where we met this morning to walk to the train station.

And that concludes today’s freaktastically long entry. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; I have 929 here, and, what, six pictures?

Damn, I’m getting long-winded.

Transportation Price Breakdown
From		To		Cost		Running Total
City	Area	City	Area	JPY	USD
Kyoto	Saiin	Osaka	Umeda	¥390	$ 3.94	$ 3.94
Osaka	Umeda	Osaka	Namba	¥230	$ 2.32	$ 6.26
Osaka	Namba	Osaka	Umeda	¥230	$ 2.32	$ 8.59
Osaka	Umeda	Kyoto	Kawaramachi	¥390	$ 3.94	$ 12.53
Kyoto	Kawaramachi	Kyoto	Saiin	¥150	$ 1.52	$ 14.04	Total

Actually, my pride mandates that I also put one last picture up. You see that? It says the fare is ￥150 from Kawaramachi (the red one) to Saiin. Sara said it was ￥230. We got into quite a debate over it, so I’m glad to at least be somewhat right. She may be thinking of from a different station or something. I’m not certain.

Well, that’s one thousand words.

Pictures

It's now time for another edition of Random Pictures! I'm your host, Will.

Look! It's me! It looks like I'm wearing makeup and need more sleep. Normal for me, I guess.

This is the かんりんりん(apartment caretaker). He let me up on the roof to take pictures, but there's sensitive machinery, so I couldn't go up on my own. He's pretty cool.

Bethany and Sara playing DDR.



WARNING:

Maybe NSFW

I got these in the mail, bizarrely enough. I censored them pretty heavily. Everything remotely pornographic is pixellated very heavily, and there's a 3-pixel Gaussian blur applied to the entire image. I was so surprised that I tossed mine right off, and got Bethany's for this picture. These don't come by normal post, though. Somebody came by and dropped them off himself, as far as I can tell.

Most pathetic is that:

Between the two, they've got about 12 different images of women.
Between the two, they've got four images that are actually different. The others are modified versions of the same picture.

Yes, I meant to center that left.

Anyway.

Adventure to the East

Obligatory picture of some 桜 (cherry blossoms) because I'm in Japan and they're blooming.

So I ventured out all by myself (to prove I’m a big boy now, I guess?) and found the sushi place I was looking for. Admittedly, I had to ask someone for directions, and I was a block away at the time, but the nice lady showed me the way there as it was on the way to where she was headed. That’s the second time someone’s done that for me here.

Once I was there, I stood outside until they opened, checking out their menu. I didn’t see anything that looked amazingly delicious, or even edible, so I just ordered something that didn’t look too bad. It was a good choice, apparently, as the only part of the meal I wasn’t fond of was the wasabi they had hidden in the sashimi. Oh yeah, I tried something with sashimi. It was a lot more edible than I expected it to be.

In addition to finding and eating at the aforementioned sushi shop, I managed to find the train station, which was a whole two blocks away. That didn’t stop me from crossing eight different intersections on the way, though.

The train fare was a pretty reasonable $1.50 to get there and the same price back, so I dug out a ￥100 and a ￥50 coin, and got a ticket from the ticket vending machine.

See, the way the fare works is pretty ingenious, I think. You pay fare X. It spits out a ticket that I think has data encoded on it magnetically. Then, when you go into the train station itself, you pass the ticket through this very aggressive feed mechanism, which then encodes where you started from on to the ticket. When you get off the train, you pass it through the same thing backwards and it eats your ticket.

My guess is that if you went farther than your fare allows, the nice man with the asp has choice words for you, along with a fee. I haven’t seen that as yet, though. I would’ve been completely lost if it weren’t for this guy about my age who helped me buy the ticket and showed me what to do with it. I had been relying on the fact that if I stood around for a while, I’d find someone approachable-looking to ask for help. As you can see, I did.

You might recall from my last post that I purchased a compass and thought it was kind of lame. If you don’t, that’s basically what I said, so don’t bother reading the other post. Eh.

Here's a picture of some hats. The cheapest was $98. Want to guess which one? I don't remember.

I found the place that the かんりんりん said would sell compasses, and it does indeed sell compasses. They had compasses for your pocket, your keychain, your backpack, your zipper. They had compasses integrated with barometers and loupes and all sorts of things, along with ones specifically for use with paper maps. It was pretty cool. The thing is, this was a very, very small part of their store. Maybe a ten square feet of hookboard. The rest of the shop was just as awesome. They had bags, ponchos, shoes, boots, boots for shoes, hats, waterproof hats, umbrellas, “bear bells”, loops, random little pouches, backpacks, slippers, keychains… It’s not a huge store, mind you. But it was very nicely laid out. It was underground, so it was a lot bigger than most stores in Japan. Probably a couple thousand square feet, so fairly average by US standards. Point is, the store is awesome. I think I have pictures.

I only had my 50mm with me – which is not a great indoor lens due to its rather telephoto nature – so I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but I did manage to find a compass, and grabbed a couple other things I’d been meaning to buy. Ended up spending almost $60, but I think it was worth it.

On the way there and on the way back, I managed to – completely by accident – run across the 花まつい(flower festival), a festival not listed in my book on Kyoto. I wonder if it was created in the last three years – I doubt it given Japan’s nature – or if they just missed it. In any case, there were a bunch of little munchkins

being cute, as munchkins are wont to do, some old guys and some cheerleaders that could’ve been anywhere from middle school to high school. I completely fail at guessing Japanese people’s ages. One of them glared at me, as you can see in the picture that I hope I will remember to attach when I post this.