Why?

Well, I've annotated all the photos that I intended to upload, but the administrators here apparently feel that Picasa is a scourge upon the world (or something) and have felt the need to block access to it. Since my laptop's battery is already drained, I'll upload the gallery either tonight or tomorrow. I should have a few more pictures from later today by then, too.

Here are some pictures to hold you over.

I'm Not Dead Yet

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not quite dead. I am in fact, merely very tired. I just got back from a field trip and didn't have 'Net access. I can post from my cell phone, but I haven't actually set that up yet.

Anyway, I have 520 or so pictures to sort through and a presentation and a quiz tomorrow, so I can't write anything significant tonight.

Bike Tire

I was sad to discover on Friday evening that my bike's rear tire had apparently been punctured by something. I talked to the 管理人 to see where I should go to get a new tube or to have it fixed and he said that any cycle shop would do it for around $15, but that he'd be happy to do it for $5 for any of the tenants.
So, my tire's all fixed and good to go, and I didn't have to muck around with trying to get the tire on and off. Sweet deal, I think.

Backpost

I got a post for Sunday up just now. I wanted the pictures to go with it, so I was waiting for picture upload to stop failing. I wish I could figure out what messes it up.

Sempai-Kouhai. Also, Curry.

[Edit: "Sempai-Kouhai" refers to the relationship between people of different rank. People who have been in a club/company longer or who are in a higher grade in school/program are your sempai and you are their kouhai. It is your duty to take care of minutae for them, and their duty to take care of things you can't handle. Also, they will generally pay for meals if they are the ones to suggest eating.]
The title's a bit off, but I had my first experience with the whole older-people-paying thing today. After leaving work, I went to a curry place a teacher mentioned. This was my first time going there, and I accidentally ordered curry that was exactly as spicy as I was hoping for: challenging, but not inedible.
As I was leaving this place, I happened to have the fortuitous timing to run into another one of my teachers. As it turns out, he had just gotten paid, so was carrying a decent wad of cash. He demonstrated this a couple of different times and I saw at least a couple man notes (~$100).
Man rhymes with "gone", for those that care.
Anyway, we went to this Italian place and said he was paying and I should pick out some ice cream, some food, and, please, only one or two drinks. I ended up getting a milkshake and some kind of yogurt-based drink, but I recommended he try a panini, which he did. Once he finished his triple-scoop ice cream with whipped cream on top. And then had some kind of alcohol whose name I couldn't pronounce.
I discovered that he used to be a video game otaku, but couldn't find anybody else who was, and isn't now, but plays go at a high level, apparently. He's going to Tokyo tomorrow for a tournament of some kind, if I understand properly.
Anyway, that was my first experience with that, though I don't remember all of the formal stuff for it, so I can only hope I didn't offend him.
Oh, and the curry was... I want to say it was delicious, but it was curry. It's kind of like a hamburger: it's pretty hard to make bad curry, but it's difficult to make it amazing, too.

Shopping

I picked up some really cool gloves. They're designed for taking pictures, and they're thin enough that I can type fairly accurately with them. I mean, you know the dimples on the the F and J keys? I can feel those through the index fingers on these gloves. On the right hand, it doesn't matter, though, as the index fingertip folds back and Velcros to the back of the glove so you can have you index finger exposed because it does so much. Same for the right thumb.

Arashiyama

Grah, I meant to post some stuff today, but I was too busy catching up on webcomics and now I need to go to judo club. Well, rest assured that I at least had an interesting weekend. On Friday, I took about 50 pictures, and this is the only one I can post here.
Yes, she's putting her clothes back on.
Everybody afterward agreed that they were not nearly drunk enough to do something like what they had just done, but nobody drank anything afterward. To answer your questions: no, I didn't drink and no, I didn't lose my underwear, which more than I can say for one guy, who had to search for about half an hour to find it.

Oh, and I just remembered this green tea Kit-Kat that I found. Too weird to not take a picture of, right?

Maybe just disturbing.

Keys

[Edit: I had this post all done and written the day it happened, but picture upload was once again being wenchy, so it's almost a week late.]

Meli got locked out of her room due to a fire alarm test that she (apparently?) forgot about. I guess she spent the night at her boyfriend's house, but when she came back to Paradole 2 in the morning, she found she was locked out of her apartment. Want to guess who is the only person silly enough to be awake in Paradole 2 at 8AM?

But I was taking a shower when she rang the doorbell, so I thought Uh, do I rush for the door and answer it wearing a towel, or ask them to wait? Maybe he/she already left... In the end, I opted for option towel, and answered the door wearing just my green towel tied around my waist.

Josh, hush.

Anyway, we ended up hanging out until around 9PM that day, and I got a couple of pictures you guys should like.

I went over to Tsutaya to drop off some movies I rented that had to be back in before the store opened at 10AM, and saw this... vehicle on the way.

I went over to Tsutaya to drop off some movies I rented that had to be back in before the store opened at 10AM, and saw this... vehicle on the way.

How do you describe this thing? It's not a truck, but it's not really a van or a car. It's like... a trunkmobile? It sort of reminds me of an elephant, in a way.

Meli, however, does not, and here's a Mario statue we found that was as tall as her when she took off her shoes.

And with a nose that phallic, could she really resist the second pose?
I didn't think so either. My camera was at 100 ISO for these shots, so it was trying to expose indoor lighting and decided to give me crappy shutter speed. They're a touch blurry, but if you wanted to professional photos, you'd be reading a different blog.
She looks pretty decent for having been up all night and not having showered in two days, I think.
I'm a bit tired, but here's a mochi shop we found. I hear there's a very good okonomiyaki shop right above this place, but I didn't know at the time, so we ate a barely mediocre burger place. They were confused by the idea of not putting mayonnaise on a burger.

Camera Lenses

By email, I received a question on which lens I use the most. In the states, I use all three about equally, but everything here is very compact, so my 55-200 telephoto sees little use, and my prime sees little use, as it's in the same range.

Ironically, the lens that I use the most - again, this is only here in Japan, where everything is about half as far apart from everything else - is the standard, cheap-ass, comes-with-the-camera 18-55mm. It is a rare case where you need any more zoom than that, so for anybody with an SLR who's planning to come to Japan, you should know that you probably don't need to bring your 600mm, gyro-stabilized, heat-seeking, laser-guided, artillery lens. Just have your 18-55 on your camera all the time, 'cause it's almost the only one you will ever use while you're here.

Maiko'd

[Edit: I've gone back and added some comments. Originally, all that was here was this next bit in green.]
I don't have time to write anything coherent here, but have some picture spammery.

The girls are Anna and Meli, and they invited me along to take ze pictures. Because I am a camera whore. I'll try to remember to make this a little less spastic later.

I have no idea how I'm going to format a post with this many pictures in it.

Okay, so there's this pile of pictures. The main story behind what happened is that Meli found a place called Maika that will dress you up as a geisha, maiko, or samurai. Now, to the average Western person, this sounds kind of silly: "Why would I want someone to dress me up like a prostitute?" you might ask. In reality, geisha aren't and never were specifically prostitutes. They were not paid for sex, and it wasn't and isn't part of the job. If there is sex on the side, that's purely by choice of the geisha and the client.
In other words, geisha are entertainers, not prostitutes. They are skilled in many things, from musical instruments to singing to playing go, which is kind of othello for people with too much time on their hands.

Anyway! Meli (the shorter girl) and Anna (in the green kimono) went and got themselves all maiko'd up. I have to admit that I'm not particularly fond of maiko even when they're pros, so I'm likely fairly biased in that I don't think it turned out too well. I mean, they looked decent, but they're both fairly cute anyway, and I have to say I wouldn't recommend the place to others. The cheapest plan is $65 and the cheapest plan that doesn't suck is around $100. Tack another $32 onto that if you want your hair actually done up instead of just a wig.

For that kind of money, I'd buy a portable hard drive or something - on that note, I really need more storage. I'm running out of space to put all the pictures I'm taking.

Anyway, we headed up there around noon, found the place around one, and had some food while we waited for the appointment at 2. It took about an hour for them to do up the girls, and Hamid and Kazunori and myself wandered around the area, sampled some food a temple gave us (some sort of delicious thing with peanuts, dunno the name) and generally killed time.

I got this picture of Hamid while we were doing this and I think it's one of the best of him I've seen. He looks sort of odd, and I almost missed the shot 'cause he wasn't trying to pose, but I think that's what really makes it.

There was also some random fauna in one of the temples, as evidenced by the random pigeon (that's a pigeon, right?) at left and the turtle-ish thing at right. The pigeon was difficult 'cause he kept walking - damned pigeon - which entails a lot of head-bobbing. At that range, it's difficult to get the focus right, so I have about 90% of the shots where the focal point is off by about an inch in the Z-axis.

Anyway, after that, we got back, waited a few minutes, and the girls came out to the room where you're supposed to take pictures of them. This room was terrible for taking pictures. It has dim orange lights (at least they were soft lights) which completely kill skin color and make them look undead if I correct for it, and... I don't know, really. In any case, I wasn't getting very good shots. You can tell these ones apart from the others because of the weird painted grass/flower background. In case you're wondering, the girls needed help to sit down and to stand up. You can see Hamid fixing Anna's kimono after a sitting at right.
Everybody agreed that picture was the best of the indoor ones, if I recall.

I didn't really crop any of these, so the composition is what I got straight from the camera. I tweaked the colors on a couple of them because of weird things that happened due to various things, but these are about half exposed in manual, and half on full-auto. I took about 210 pictures that day, of which about 20 were a complete loss, and about 30 came out decently. The rest are mediocre or very similar shots I took in case one or another ended up blurry or something happened.

They had the girls pose by a shrine that was nearby, but they weren't allowed to go in. I can guess at the reason, but I don't have a solid answer on why that is.

And some walking back...



On the way back, we saw this big pigeon-shaped thing. I think it was a bird, but it might've been a rock. When I got up, it flew away, though, so I'm fairly certain it wasn't just any rock.

My First Karaoke Experience

Yesterday was originally going to be a barbecue, as I mentioned, but it was changed to an indoor party-shaped thing.
Ended up going to karaoke instead of bowling, because bowling is apparently $15 an hour. Plus shoe rental. Karaoke is $8 a person for however long we wanted to be there, I think. Seems pretty pricey, but they gave us a room about bigger than one of the living rooms at the Chamith house, so that's not too amazing.
Well, and there were 17 of us.

So, my thoughts on karaoke: it blew.

Room that size, three or four people started chain smoking, with another three or four lighting up at various times. I stayed for an hour, but gave up after I sampled some nice, breathable outside air.

The karaoke itself actually looked pretty fun, but people kept standing up in front of screen and seemed to not know they were doing it, so the people singing would just stand there and wait for them to move out of the way. I can see such a get-together being fun with friends, but with almost 20 people I don't know... not so much.

I won't base my evaluation of karaoke in general on this experience, because I recognize that it is very likely extraordinarily bad.

[Edit: Apparently it's not clear that I didn't sing. I don't sing, as many of you know, and I didn't yesterday, either.]

DDR!

I had some people over for DDR last night, which was pretty fun. I think Hamid (the shorter guy - he's an Afghani, I think) is the only one has played before, but he mostly tries to button mash. He brought over some Vodka and Anna (the American girl in front) brought some sort of rum and they had a few drinks.
Anyway, that was fun, but they wanted to do karaoke, so we were going to go hit a karaoke bar, but the prices were lame given our timing, so I mentioned that I knew a nearby okonomiyaki place.
We all went there, had some okonomiyaki, talked for an hour or so.

I think a bunch (~40?) of the study abroad students are going to go bowling later today. I don't really know how to get involved with that, but I'm going to try.

Oh, I picked these up. They're pizza-flavored Munchies. But with popcorn instead of... pretzels? I guess.

I'm going to be a little late for judo, but I wanted to get this up (...she said).

Guess That Thing, part II

Here's another episode of WTF is that?, brought to you by... Uh, Dean's webserver and my D80, I guess.
Here you go! Leave your guesses as comments, if you don't mind. I'm curious to see what people will come up with.

Frivolity?

I'm not certain the title is a word, but spellcheck isn't whining so this is what you get. Strangely enough, it doesn't like the word "spellcheck". Not too surprising, I guess.

In any case, today was another shopping day. I got four liters of various kinds of juices, two trash cans (we have to separate our garbage into "plastic" and "everything else") duct tape, another foam thing for DDR, zip strips, bungee cords, lunch (which was tasty, if disturbing. Don't ask.), and ibuprofen, because it's handy and I didn't have any. I broke two $10 and a $50, but I have most of the $50 still in my wallet and $20 in change in my change-thingy-that-is-not-a-purse.
Very little of it was frivolous, though I suppose none of it was completely necessary. I made a list before I went and the only thing I bought that wasn't on the list was the zip strips.
But seriously: can you not buy zip strips? I apparently can't.

I was surprised by the quantity in the ibuprofen box. It's less than you'd think for $5 if you were in America, but it seems decent here.

In other news, I got another matburn at judo, as you can see.
Apparently the Japanese don't use the same percent system we do, or maybe they just make hydrogen peroxide more hardcore. Somehow. I dunno what the hell it is, but this stuff is not the 3% I'm used to.
This picture was taken after I had rinsed all the peroxide away, by the way. My foot's actually bleached right there now. From about 30 seconds of contact, that's pretty impressive. Anyway, I put some antibiotic ointment on it and a bandage, so it should heal decently, unlike the others that I just kind of left.

Now I'm going to go beat up some hay. With fists. And my head. I suspect that Pepper will help.

Golden Week (end)

Well, it's back to classes for me.

Cards in Japan

I don't know if it's just my bank being stupid, or if there's something wonky with the ATMs or what, but I am once again left with only the money in my pocket. It totals about $5 right now, in random change.

I wish the Japanese would join the rest of the world in having a banking system that doesn't blow so hard.

[Edit: I was thinking it might have something to do with me not having enough money in my account, as I had gone below $300, which is the max you can take out from an ATM here. I had a sneaking suspicion that my bank simply said whether or not I had enough to be performing overseas transactions and if you don't have enough to take out the maximum, you aren't allowed to take out anything at all.
This would seem to not be the case, as I transferred money from my savings and was still unable to pull money out. Both accounts are at at least $400 now, and it worked fine yesterday. Japanese banking system. Seriously? Fail. ]

Belated Adventuring Pictures (non-monkey-park)

And here are my pictures from wandering around the city after the monkey park.

First up is a random 人力車 (rickshaw) and its... driver? Puller? Runner? Whatever you call the guy who pulls a rickshaw.
I think the composition of this shot came out well. I'm always surprised when a shot comes out decently, because my artistic sense (the important thing when dealing with composition) is almost non-existent. This shot feels like it has a decent amount of balance, but still has some tension. I caught that pose entirely by accident, but I like it. He looks like the main character out of Ninja Scroll.

I kind of accidentally uploaded this one, but I was playing around with my camera. Can you guess what the picture is of?
I'll check the comments later and see if anybody gets it.


I mentioned that it's Golden Week, and this means that there are random things going on everywhere. I don't really understand it, but there was some robo-sumo going on in the mall. It seemed too Japanese for me to not take the picture, so I didn't. At left.

Another Golden Week thing, I guess. This picture is called "Uberchu.jpg" on my computer, for good reason. I would like to remind you that Pikachu has an official height of something like two feet. I remember it being something like 1' 4", though.
Anyway, this Pikachu is there probably because of the movie/game ad he's standing in front of and because of the massive pile of everyone that's wandering around around this time.

Last up are these maico. Or geisha. I seriously can't tell the difference, so if you can, tell me, please. Nice kimono, in any case. The guy with his hand up is the old guy I mentioned yesterday. You can't see the grey in his hair due to him not being in the depth of field.

Belated Adventuring Pictures

I mentioned yesterday that I had gone to Arashiyama to do some hiking, but never actually found the place. This was due to a couple of reasons, not the least of which were map failure and a late start - 3PM. On the bright side, I totally headed over to the monkey park, where I got some nice pictures of monkeys, a couple people-monkeys, and a few great panoramas I'll stitch together at some point. Anyway, here's some monkey picture spam.

These first two pictures are of the first monkey I saw. I had to switch to my telephoto lens, 'cause he was about thirty feet away and my 18-55mm just wouldn't cut it at the range without serious cropping, to say nothing about bokeh. The DOF came out nicely with the telephoto lens, I think.

The female hanging through the fencing is sitting at the feeding area. They had decent-sized bags of food that you could buy for a dollar and feed to the monkeys by hand. I eventually ended up buying one and I really think it was worth it. I mean, for that sort of thing, I'd expect they'd charge you a bunch of money, just because it's touristy and it's what usually happens with stuff like that. Anyway, I fed most of the bag two or three of them and discovered they have quite sharp claws. I mean, I guess I would too if I didn't clip my fingernails, but it hadn't occurred to me before. One of the weirdest things to me was their size, which ranged from the size of a small cat to a medium-sized dog.

This guy with the munchies at the right was fed an acorn outside so this guy could get a picture of it, and I took the opportunity as well. This was still up by the feeding area, which doubles as an observation area, and you can see the entire city of Kyoto. Well, a lot of city, in any case.

At left is the panorama, though it's not that impressive as it would appear that I didn't line up my shots right, so I had to crop a lot out. I'll dig around later and see if I can get something close to a 360. I took two sets of shots for that, so I should be able to.


Alright, then. This is right after the resting area, where there's a drinking pond that I saw a couple using. This pose was too good not to pass up, and even with how nicely it came out, I got it on accident trying to get a different pose that makes this one look lame. I was too slow on the camera draw, though.

Oh, and monkey snuggles. I saw a couple monkeys sleeping together and the phrase "monkey snuggles" just stuck in my mind. I know a kitten for whom the monkey snuggles pictures are for, but she's not greedy, so everybody gets some monkey snuggles.

Seriously, who can resist the monkey snuggles?


Here's a monkey in a tree. It seemed odd that monkeys are basically thought of as hanging out in trees all the time, but this area had plenty and they all kind of walked around. This guy with the cute expression just watched one of his buddies fall ten feet through a bunch of branches 'cause the branches in another tree snapped. Nothing like hearing a snap followed by a serious of fwooshes as a monkey discovers gravity does indeed apply when you're in a tree.

Right before I took this shot, I had pissed off a monkey apparently. I think I was taking pictures of it cleaning its mate, or maybe just one of its friends. Who knows. In any case, he/she got all pissy and ran at me and growled. Next time I go, I'll be wearing my nice, big desert boots, in the event that a monkey finds my feet to need some gnawing or something.

Segue.

A monkey licking the handrail of a slide. Go figure.
There was a sign posted saying "Don't run down the slide. Please only slide down the slide." I have to wonder who first ran down the slide and broke something.
In any case, the slide was pretty cool. It had about 15 feet of drop and about 20 feet of horizontal displacement. And a monkey licking it.


Here's the last picture from the monkey park, and I felt it suitably ironic that, inside the monkey park was a small human park, where the monkeys could sit and watch the humans play. Is that really irony?

Cell Phone Picture Catsup

Cats in Japan are so soft. Maybe it's just people who bathe their cats regularly. I don't know. More importantly, the second cat (black-with-white cat) had the coolest color of green in his/her eyes that I've seen. It was like dark lime green. Or something.
Anyway, I was biking along and saw a cat sitting on a fence, so I stopped and talked to the guy petting it. We started discussing the weather and he tried to talk to me about latitudes and longitudes and I was completely lost. I was very sure he was trying to talk about the temperature, which also uses the counter for "degrees". Same kanji, I think, too. Anyway, with the help of my electronic dictionary, we managed to get it figured out.


I don't know if you've ever accidentally frozen an egg, but I ended up partially freezing one in that manner, and decided, since I only had one egg left for some bizarre reason, that I now was as good a time as any to put an egg in the freezer. For a week.
As it turns out, this is what happens. Well, after a liberal application of knifings, this is what happens. I tried to crack it open at first, but it just went clunk on the countertop. The metal countertop didn't care, of course, and the egg barely had any crack in it at all.

And a lightbulb. I was taking some macro shots with my telephoto lens and was using my desk lamp for illumination (imagine, using a lamp to light things!) and decided to take a picture of the bulb. The lamp is on in the picture at right, in case you're wondering.

I was hoping to post a few more, but it looks like my laptop is about out of battery power, so this is it, I guess.
4%...

Picture Catchup, part I

So, while Blogger is working the way it's supposed to, I'm going to catch up on some of the pictures I've taken in the past... while.

I visited a "recycle shop" and bought some stuff. Apparently, someone bought something off this mannequin, as it is now rather topless. Oh, to be that pert, no?


I also happened to see this Hello Kitty toilet paper. I was thinking You know, I don't think I have any toilet paper in the apartment except the roll that's on there. Maybe I should buy it... but I ended up not buying it. I was very tempted by the value pack, though. Somehow, I managed to blur this second picture, but only what I was actually trying to take a picture of. Everything else is decently sharp. Go figure.

So I did end up going into the store, however, and wandered around for a while. Besides disturbing quantities of pre-chopped musherooms, I also found this spam display, and felt it was picture-worthy. In case there was any question before of Spam's strangehold on the world's food supply, here's the proof.