Short, but finally a picture

Went to club, wandered off, and got overconfident in my ability to find my way home. Took me an hour and a half, but I (as you can see) managed it decently.
To demonstrate the extent to which I was lost, here's a picture of a fountain I found that neither Sandy nor Aaron had seen before.

Disgustingly enough, this picture is from my phone. You will note that the biggest problem with this picture is a little CA on the zoo's roof.

Pantyshots and gropers

I walked my friend back to the train station last night, since it was nearly midnight, and when we left, there were two guys standing outside my building's door, just kind of chatting. Eh.
So I picked up two $1-menu things, had dinner, and went home.

When I got back nearly 45 minutes later, they were still there. It was pretty warm and rather humid outside, so I stopped and asked:
Me: "Why not go up to your room, with the air conditioner and whatnot? It's kind of warm out here, don't you think?"
Short guy: "The air is bad."
Me: "Oh, I know what you mean. I kind of like the way the wind feels, too. But it's still pretty hot out here, yeah?"
Tall guy: "But it feels nice."
Once I stopped moving and was just standing and talking, the temperature was perfect. Walking up and down hills, though, it was a touch muggy. I stood and talked to these two for about ten minutes, and then one of them made a gesture I didn't recognize.
Short guy: "Man, I can't wait for the Gion festival..." This is when he did the gesture.
Me: "Wait, what? What's that?"
Short guy: "What's what?"
Me: "This." I did my best to imitate the gesture. "What's that?"
Short guy: "It's... man, I shouldn'tve said that..."
Tall guy: "That's his groping motion."
Me: "Sorry, what?"
Tall guy: "It's kind of like..." and this is when made another gesture, though this one I at least recognized: he took his phone, but it between his legs, and tried to make a camera noise.
Me: "Oh, like chikan?" (chikan are train gropers, generally)
Tall guy: "Yeah! I'm not nearly as good as he is though."
Me: "So you guys are iya na yatsu?" (... basically "bad people")
Tall guy: "Yeah, pretty much."

So apparently, you need to watch out for gropers during festivals. News to me. One guy was a stuntman, by the way. I thought that was pretty cool.

電子辞書

Some of you might recall that I have two electronic dictionaries, both of which I picked up by way of working in the computer labs and having access to the lost and found, from which we are allowed to claim stuff if after one quarter of school has passed.
One is pretty cool and has all kinds of features, but I think it got left behind because the keys don't work quite perfectly, so you sometimes press a button and it doesn't register. It's frustrating for me, but this is the dictionary I usually carry.
The other is super-old and is from, like, the year 2001, maybe earlier. In any case, the thing is... venerable. But! The keys all work very nicely. Its screen is lower resolution, and it has very few dictionaries in it, but for the most part it works just fine.

I sold off my more advanced one to Bryden, who has been looking to buy one, for 一万円 (~$95). It was convenient, since I've been planning to sell one of them for quite a while. I mean, there's little point in having the two of them, except as a redundancy. If I had two that had fairly separate functions, that would make sense, but they don't, really.

Woot for liquidating assets.

Surprisingly Cheap

I went down to the bike shop at the mall to see how much it would cost to have the brakes fixed. The conversation went something like this:
"Excuse me."
"Yes?"
"My rear brake is always about halfway brake... ing..."
"Hm." The bike shop guy pokes at the break, walks inside, grabs a small wrench and screwdriver, makes a couple of adjustments. "Yosh." He proceeds to spin the wheel to demonstrate that it's fixed.
"How much to fix that?"
"No, it's fine."
"Really?"
"Yeah, thanks for coming."
"Thank you very much."

Then I went and bought a donut.

Unforseen Bicycle?

I went out to a bar called The Pig and Whistle today with a friend from club. It's described as a British pub, so I had hopes their fish and chips would be decent. They were actually pretty good. My chicken and chips was pretty good as well, and the dressing on the salad was the perfect amount, which I thought was pretty cool. We ended up spending about two hours there, and had some pretty good conversation.
I'm getting in the habit of using a lot of diagrams. I drew, to scale, the US, four different cartridges (.22LR, .223, 12G, and .45), and made an attempt at Portugal. And between my friend and I, we sketched out a unit circle and poked fun of my math.
By the way: KMD, you make for a great topic. I've talked for hours about my crazy American friend with twenty guns and a box of assorted knify bits.

Anyway, the bike, which is the subject.

[Edit: I seem to have forgotten to mention that a new bike, from a bike shop, will cost between $120 and $200. Probably towards the upper part of that range, since I want a bike with more than one gear.]
[A second edit: I should also mention that while Kyoto has a very usable mass transit system, it's small enough that I can get anywhere on my bike just about as fast, and while getting exercise, and it's free. I was just doing some math, and if I go downtown once a week for the remaining time I'm here - and I am much more likely to go two to three times a week - it would end up at about $120, assuming I never use the buses, which are much more expensive. This is why the "walk, you bum!" option isn't really.]

As it would turn out, my bicycle's rear brake chose today to decide that it would get stuck half engaged. Today, I went 6 miles (8.4km) - not a long way, right? - with the rear brake half engaged.
I thought I was just being particularly out of shape at first, and then it started to squeak more and I realized what the problem was. I tried poking at it, but this is Japan, so I can't carry my Leatherman with me. I kicked it a couple of times for good measure, and generally pried at it with my flashlight, but to no avail.

I poked at it anyway on a couple of different occasions. On the way back, it was extra sludgy, though not as squeaky, so I did my best to go at a decent speed in spite of it. I stopped at one point in hopes of getting a picture of some policemen, but they said they can't do that while they're working. When I got back on, I felt the brake assembly, and it was a touch under 100 Fahrenheit after two to three minutes of cooling in humid air.

I'm going to try and disconnect the brake so I can use my bike tomorrow morning, but I think I'm going to see about buying a new bike either this weekend or tomorrow afternoon. What I'm thinking is that this bike cost me about $60 with the registration and whatnot. Having the tires replaced would cost about $30, and that needs to be done anyway, 'cause they only hold a safe amount of air for about three days. After that, the tires slide sideways on slight slopes. So, $30 there.
I have no idea how much it would cost to have the rear brake fixed, but I can't identify anything wrong with it, and I can't imagine it will cost any less than having the tires replaced. So, figure another $20-30 for that. We're up to at least $50.

The light on my bike won't engage when the tires are wet, which is exactly the kind of situation where I want cars and other cyclists to know I'm there. Those are about $15, plus an unknown installation fee, though I could probably do that myself. About $65, so we've now exceeded the original purchase cost of my bike.
To add to this, there are no reflectors on the wheels, and only a small one on the back and just the light on the front, so I'm nearly invisible at night. Good situation, right?

Then we can get into things that aren't actually broken, but are merely inconvenient. This is my first bike of this sort, so I'm looking at it much like my FZ8: a learning experience to grow from.

• Height: It's a small bike, even for a Japanese person, which I am not. The seat does not go nearly high enough to make for a proper ride.
• Gears: This bike has one gear: "Go." Seriously, it has just one gear. This is fine as long as you want to go roughly ten miles an hour and never encounter a slope, but it's not so great if you're trying to not get run down by cars doing 30km/h.
• Racks: The basket on this bike is small, and it's rounded, so a lot of things just don't fit into it. Oh, and the paint burnt off where someone tossed a cigarette into it, for some reason, so it's going t
  The back rack is the same as just about every other one, though, so no complaints there
• Form: If I wore an ankle-length skirt, this would be a great bike in terms of form. But I don't. I wear pants. And the traditional triangle shape is traditional for a reason: it's strong. The wobbly curves of this bike are scary if you put any more than about twenty pounds on the two racks.
• Even when the rear brake does engage properly, it still doesn't effectively slow me down, it more just makes a loud squawk and tells people that I'm there. This has it's uses, but I'd prefer that it didn't do that. I'll be avoiding a rear drum brake if possible.
  

I will totally take the pedals off, though, and have them put them on the new bike, when and if I do buy a new one. That should only cost about $5, and then I get to keep my $20 pedal investment. As it is, this bike has too many things wrong with it for me to feel safe riding it, let alone comfortable. But these are things I would never have considered before I bought it, and now maybe some of you will have been able to learn from this, as well. Most of this has been bother me for a while, but the whole brake thing makes it effectively unridable. I can walk next to it with less effort and at the same speed.
I'll make sure to post a picture once it's gone, if I can't fix it, since I haven't put a picture of it up as yet.

[eloquent segue]

Like I said, I'm looking at this bike as a learning experience; it cost me, but now I know much more clearly what I do and do not want in a bicycle. Hopefully I can sell it back to a cycle shop for $20 or something, and they can fix it in-house and resell it at the same $50 price or something.

Input would be appreciated.

Summer Plans

Well, after consulting with my parents, I've decided to stay here over the summer. I was thinking that I might come back for three-ish weeks so I could visit family, and so I could get my dose of kitten, which I am dangerously low on.
This is largely from a fiscal standpoint, which makes a very strong case for staying right where I am.
$1400 - Round-trip plane ticket to Seattle, Washington, and back to Kyoto, plus transportation on both ends
$425 - The amount of rent that I'd have to pay despite not being here

And that's really about it. I just don't like to think in numbers that large, and I have no idea where I'd come up with that kind of cash. On the other hand, I'd like to do a little traveling over the summer, and it looks like I'll at least be going to Matsue for a while. I might be able to get some work there, even.

Even if I can't, there's still a lot of Kyoto that I haven't seen, and there's also Osaka that's not very far away. Tokyo is a $130 and three hours of bullet train away, so I might get to visit Akihabara, which is pretty high on my list of things to do.

Trains

The trains here run pretty much all day, except the times when pretty much everybody sleeps.

Just now, I think I just heard the first train of the day.

[Edit: It wasn't. The first trains didn't start until an hour later.]

Studying for Grammar

We have a test in my grammar class tomorrow, and here's what's on it:
o~suru (humble generic verbs)
o~naru (honorific generic verbs)
demo ii / demo kamaimasen (asking permission)
ageru/kureru/morau/yaru (giving and receiving verbs)
moraitai/hoshii (requests)
oshieru<>narau and the like (various verb pairs)

First, I know, Ick! Romaji!, but I'm tired and should be studying, and it's 3AM. And it's 3AM.

Now, almost all of this is covered in 2nd year Japanese, and some of it in first year, so it should be old hat, right? Right!
Except this is grammar class, so she comes up with the most bizarre ways to use them she can, or combines them all in one question. As an example, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she throws a question such as "oyasuminishitaindaga, sonoue narattehoshikute oshietekurenaika" which is fairly simple, actually, but... Honestly, if I could come up with what she was going to throw at as, it wouldn't be a problem, would it?

Anyway, that's all pretty simple stuff, so I'm not too worried about it, but I have a vocab test in the morning with, like, 50 new words on it that I haven't looked at yet. I was kind of busy studying for, you know, the one today that had 50 other new words.

Apparently, I'm grumpy at 3AM. Nearly 3:30AM.

"GTFO, shopz0rz"

I was in the local grocery store near closing time and I heard Auld Lang Syme being played. I thought Gee, what an odd choice of music for a Japanese store. Wait, they don't usually play music, do they?
A few hours later, I went to Jusco at about 10:40. After a few minutes, I noticed that Auld Lang Syme was playing there, too. Then I finally made the connection and remembered reading somewhere oh-so-long ago that Japanese stores play Auld Lang Syne when they are about to close.

PB&J tip

Spread peanut butter with a knife, even if you can shave with that same knife. It works so much better than a spoon.

G8

Oh! I completely forgot to mention it, but I was wandering around looking for an arcade in Kawaramachi and was stopped by a policewoman who very, very politely (and nicely!) informed me that you're not allowed to ride a bike in that particular area because it's dangerous on both the sidewalk and the road. For how many police officers Japan is supposed to have, I don't see them very often, so I was surprised to see about twelve of them in one area.

As it would turn out, G8 apparently met in Japan this year (in Hokkaido, though...) and this had something to do with that, according to a policeman I asked. The cops in this group that I looked at were carrying batons and some light gear, but not the heavier loadout and bulletproof vest you see the beat cops wearing. Also, I didn't see any guns present.
Just, you know, for the record.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

I just ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The peanut butter is kind of dysfunctional and the bread is too thick and bleached way too hard, but it was decent. A little bit uncanny valley, but in terms of sandwiches.

In other news, my green pants gained a battle scar today. Calligraphy day I, for some reason, wore my only light-colored shirt and my green pants of "How old are those?" that Jes has patched up in at least two different places - which I greatly appreciaite!

I'll see about getting a picture up before I try and get the ink out of them. I'm... not optimistic, but I'll still wear them anyway. The fact that Jes has worked on them makes them very special to me somehow.

Lesson for today: Don't wear your only light-colored clothes on calligraphy day.

Not Completely Useless

I did do something productive today. A couple of things, actually. I took out the trash, for example, which has needed doing for a while now. Last week was busy, so my basic cleaning got neglected. Despite that, two different people came to my room the first time and commented that it was so clean. I'm thinking Can this really be my room?

Anyway, I also wouldn't want you to think the only random ads we get are porn ads and other unsavory things. While there's nothing savory about this picture, I feel somewhat redeemed by it.

It's a pizza menu that I got in the mail today, and nowhere on it is pepperoni pizza. And you're not reading that wrong; the average price for a large pizza is $31.

To, uh, top it off*, I thought I would show a sample of the stuff I drink. That's four flavors of Kagome, two cartons of orange juice, and a carton of milk. I ended dumping the milk 'cause it was only half gone in almost two weeks, which is roughly how long it took me to consume the rest of these cartons. That means I'm averaging roughly half a liter of Kagome-ish-ness each day. That's pretty much my entire vegetable intake, so I'm a little worried, but the Japanese seem to do fine like that, so presumably there's something going on I don't know about.
[*I feel safe making this one, knowing that KMD is on a different continent and doesn't have ICBMs... yet. That I know of.]

Things don't last long in hot, very humid weather, by the way, which is why the milk got tossed. Also, it says "delicious milk" on the front, which I just couldn't get over. It's very creamy.

In case any of you are wondering about my diet, I usually eat rice for two meals of the day and eat out for the other one. I vary where I eat, sometimes eating 牛丼 (rice with beef on top), sometimes eating お好み焼き (vaguely like a pancake. Very, very vaguely), and with some random うどん (big, thick noodles in sauce) thrown in every three-ish days usually with some tempura squid for protein. I also occasionally eat たこ焼き, which are fried balls of dough with a piece of octopus in each one. Today was 回転寿司 ("conveyor-belt sushi") where I had raw squid, shrimp, some kind of seaweed, a cream cheese (!) sushi roll, and... stayed far away from the inari-zushi, 'cause I don't do pickled stuff unless it's ginger.

Dinner was $8.40 and I had a crepe at lunch that cost $3.50, but was totally worth it: apple slices with ice cream and "rare cheese", which tastes suspiciously like yogurt.
Looked it up on Google and someone says it's uncooked cheesecake filling. Go figure.
It was definitely tasty.

Here's a random rabbit, because the last few blog posts have been rather picture-scarce.
Anybody recognize the style?
Hint: it's by a hugely popular artist who likes Pokemon probably entirely too much.

Oh, and I think I did the dishes this morning.

An Interesting Shop

Warning: Vaguely NSFW.

Though you'll be happy to know that this post has no pictures.

Ever since I heard about the existence of shops devoted entirely to sex-related stuff, I've wanted to go one. I mean, it just seems like something that everyone should do at some point. I mean, besides Jes.
Anyway, I heard there was one in the area, got directions, and then headed over to it today. Unfortunately, it turned out to basically be a four-story porn shop with random anime and manga of the non-porn variety mixed in on the first floor - plus some clothes and various otaku miscellany - and sex toys, bathing suits, and underwear on the top floor. There really wasn't anything particularly exciting here, though I think the swimsuits actually looked fairly nice.

In any case, the way I found the place totally beats what was actually inside. See, I went past the first time on my bike and didn't see it. I turned around and head back the direction I came from, hoping to spot it since I knew which side of the road it was on. Naturally, this means I was only mostly looking forward. It also means that the pole that hit the left side of my handlebars and drive my left should right into said signpole was totally unexpected.

Want to guess which store this sign was in front of?

Frawress Victoly!

I was playing a game with Meli's boyfriend, Kazunori. The basic idea of the game is that one person comes up with a word, then the other person comes up with a word that starts with the previous word's last syllable. If you pick a word that ends with ん ("n") you lose, as it's not possible to start a word with ん.

Here's how our first game today went:
Will: サル (monkey)
Kazunori: るすばん (not at home)

The rest of them went on for quite a while, but I ended up winning another game and losing one, which puts me ahead one game. We've got the current game on hold while Kazunori thinks of a word that starts with る ("ru"). There are plenty of words, but it's kind of cheating to use a dictionary. I've also been avoiding 外来語 (foreign loanwrods) because that would take all the challenge out of the game.

An Otherwise Unheralded Advantage

We just got a thunderstorm. It went from no rain to "I'm in the street and I'm drowning"-type rain in the span of about thirty seconds. I was standing outside, admiring the rain when I saw the quick flash of lightning nearby, followed about four seconds later by thunder. By the time the thunder got there, I was inside and checking which things I would need to unplug to isolate my computer gear. The answer is "Just about everything." I'll be optimizing that in just a few minutes.

Anyway, in spite of having no connection to any outside circuits, I'm still able to post online. Why? Because I'm using Wi-Fi, and a lightning strike that fries my $50 router won't fry the other $800 of gear I have on my desk because they aren't physically connected. This would be the unheralded advantage, by the way.

I'm not too worried, just a touch paranoid. I think there are a lot of buildings nearby with lightning rods, which are a rather fearsome thing to actually look at up close, if you ask me. I think it's because you know what it's for, maybe. In any case, Jusco has twenty to thirty 10m rods on their roof. I think that's cool.

An ambulance just drove by.

The Pile

Chibi Store

I found a cool little kids' store. It has all sorts of little candies that can be bought for about 10¢, and a wide range of candy under a dollar. For about a dollar, they'll do all kinds of tempura, as well, from what I can tell.
It's not so much a shop as much as a shack that's been hot-glued on his back door, so it's not really a classy place, but it's one of those things that really doesn't have upkeep, and it probably makes kids really happy.
Yum, cavities!

Archives

I just found what was wrong with the archives: I had set the archive URL for Blogger to upload the pages to, but you apparently have to set where the links to the archive pages will point separately from that. Why, I don't know.

Judo "Incidents"

I was doing randori* (free practice) with Erica today and managed to force a lefty osotogari ("large outside trip", literally. Anyway, she's apparently bad at ukemi (falling techniques) to begin with, and particularly bad at them with her right side, which is the side the performs ukemi against this particular throw when it's done left-handed. In addition, I lost my balance and went to the ground as well, and wasn't able to support her fall properly. Install, I added to the weight hitting the ground.
Anyway, the point is that I totally nerfed some poor girl and we ended up sitting out the last few minutes.
Oh, and add that to the fact that I was joking around, tried to grab her eri (collar-ish area) missed, grabbed her left tit, and it totally looked like that's what I was trying to do. I apologized three (maybe four...) times, but she didn't seem to react to it at all.
[Edit: "it" here, refers to the squeezings, as opposed to my apologies. I'm not sure she understood what I was apologizing for. "I'm sorry I groped you on accident." isn't something we've covered in class that I recall. And you all know I would recall that if we had.]
On the bright side, I don't think I hurt anybody else tonight. I usually get someone with something good each night.

New Windows

Alright, I finally got Windows installed again. I tried to get Linux running, but it couldn't figure out my wireless card, and I dunno how to fix that. And it's difficult to look up such a thing online, given that it was my wireless card, which I use for my 'Net connection.

In case you're wondering, no, it didn't take me three days.

Unfortunately, there's not much interesting going on this week. Some people are going to a club, but we have a big test the next day and I'm too boring to have much fun in a club. By that, I mean that I don't dance and don't drink, and the two combined seem like they'd make for a less than fun time.

I'll try to do something fun soon so I can get something interesting up.

Reinstall of the Windows

Now that I have a drive that I can back stuff up onto, I'm going to reinstall Windows pretty soon. I'm hoping to have the install run tomorrow night while I'm doing judo, if all goes well. Being able to completely disconnect my data drive from the computer I'm formatting from is reassuring, too.
Anyway, it may take me a day or two to get settled in from that, and I have lots of stuff to do on Mondays, so I probably won't be putting much up until Wednesday.

Camera Economics

I'm mostly just pulling numbers from the air to do this math, but I checked them and they aren't too ludicrous, so they're good enough for me.
My camera says I've taken roughly 5,300 pictures. I reset that counter a while back by accident and it had already reached about a thousand. This puts me at roughly 6,300 pictures.
Assuming that a roll of film has 28 frames in it, I've taken 228 rolls' worth of pictures thus far.
Assuming that it costs $2.50 for such rolls of film, and an additional $4 to have each roll developed, I would have spent about $1,490 USD on just development costs. As is, I've spent about $2 on batteries for my external flash and probably about a dollar on power to charge the camera's batteries.
It would be weird to not give this post the "pictures" label, but I'm reserving that for posts that actually have pictures in them, so here's a random picture of me.And while I like that picture, some people (who just might be my parents...) have been bugging me to put up more pictures of me, and that only mostly counts, here's an actual picture of me, though I apparently won't smile, even when I'm taking pictures.

Hard Drive!

I'm uploading this straight off the camera, so it's rather huge and bulky, but here's my new hard drive, all connected and whatnot. Of course, it won't live up here, but I was excited to get it hooked up. You can see it's got some weird things on the corners. I found these drive condoms for $10 a piece and it seemed like less work than killing some poor, defenseless piece of Tupperware. Besides, these stack.

Anyway, the blue thing sitting on top of the drive is an adapter I found that allows me to connect this drive (which uses SATA) to my laptop via USB. Normally, drives which use USB are pretty expensive. By this method, I have a 400GB drive that cost me less than $80. The difference, besides cost, lies in that my drive is open and has no enclosure or cooling or anything like that, so if I spill a drink on it, I'm pretty much boned.
On the other hand, it's behind my laptop and speakers now, and is elevated almost half an inch off the desk.

I originally had bought a 500GB drive, but it had some kind of defect. If you've ever gotten the clicky-drive noise, you know it's not a good sign. Anyway, the place gladly took it back, gave me a full refund, and I bought a 400GB from them instead. It's not nearly as good of a value ($65/$70 for 400GB/500GB, respectively) but it's enough that I should be able to pull my 60GB off and use it as a portable hard drive like it's meant to be.

Anyway, I'm glad to have my drive space issues solved. Hopefully nothing will go wrong with it.
Ha.

I thought I posted this before I left for stuff today. I got home at ~2:10AM, jumped in the shower, and it's now 2:23 and I'm finally posting this. I wrote it about 10 hours ago.

管理人

The manager of my apartment building spends a lot of time working on pictures and editing random stuff he's scanned in. The bizarre thing is that he uses what I can only guess is some kind of tracing software that appears to be roughly akin to using MS Paint for everything.

I just came back from watching him touch a black and white scan for ten minutes. He's probably been at it for an hour or two and will be at it for a while yet. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I can do the same thing in Photoshop in about five seconds.

But this sort of thing is really common in Japan. As an example, if you go to the mall, there will sometimes be three people at one entrance controlling traffic. They stand there and do nothing for the better part of the day, then hold up their arms for a little bit every time someone goes by on a bike or by foot. On the way to school every morning, I see a guy named Yamada. His job is to stand at the front gate to the school, keep track of visitors, and answer questions about where and when things are. This is fairly normal, right? Well, except that they have three people in the little guard shack he's in.
In addition to him, there are two or three crossing guards at the nearby intersections, and three more people who just stand at corners whose jobs I cannot fathom. But this kind of thing is normal for them.

Heian Jingu, kind of

I felt bad for not posting anything today, despite having 200 pictures in my backlog of stuff to sort through.
Anyway, here's probably my favorite picture of the trip.

Ah, Engrish.

Spendy... Pedals?

Once again, I've killed the pedals on my bike. I seem to perpetually be having this problem, but other people who are heavier than me don't seem, so it seems kind of weird. Maybe I don't actually know how to ride a bicycle? Whatever it is, the pedals on my bike were coming apart. I managed to get another week or so out of them by way of about ten zip strips, but they were still slowly getting worse, despite my best dollar-store efforts.
So, I went to the cycle shop and did it right. As it turns out, they sell some pedals that look and feel to be cast from iron. At $17, they're nearly twice as much as the other, plastic, pedals, but they should last a little longer, I figure. Spent another $5 on having them change the pedals for me*.
Cool thing is that they also oiled my bike lock, pumped up the tire, and... something else I can't remember. Definitely worth the $5, I think.
Between this and the burger I had while I was waiting, I spent $25 getting new pedals for my bike, which is half of what I spent on it in the first place.

*I tried to remove the pedals earlier this week, just to see how difficult it would be. To do this, I borrowed the 管理人's (manager's) crescent wrenches, found one that worked, and... completely failed to get the pedal nut to move. We grabbed another wrench and beat on it for a while, and we tried having him steady the pedals and bike while I put my weight down on the wrench... Nothing.

Before you say anything: yes, I am fully aware that pedals are reverse-threaded. Yes, I was fully aware of that when I was trying to take the pedals off.

Translation Errors

If you've ever wondered where errors in translation come from in seemingly simple sentences, I found I great example today to illustrate it. Even if you've never wondered, I still found a great example today. Is that not dedication?

ashita	tenki	ni	naru
あした	天気	に	なる
tomorrow	weather	(to)	become

The most often implied subject is the speaker, so someone might translate あした天気になる as "Tomorrow, I will become the weather." Obviously, unless you're talking to someone very, very special, this sentence is simply wrong. Guesses at the true meaning?

Well?

"The weather will good tomorrow." See? Much better. But remember that Japanese doesn't have future tense, so if you're looking for it, give up. It's implied by the fact that we're using the nonpast and a time noun that's in the future.

Tests

I wanted to post about our trip to Heian Jingu, but I kind of have two big tests today and I've only studied about an hour in total. Beth should be getting something up, too, since she doesn't have club stuff tonight. Or tests.

Classesssss

Some of you have asked why it is that I almost never talk about classes here.
Part of it is that what we're studying really doesn't make any sense unless you can read Japanese and have a fairly thorough background in Japanese grammar. I'm not out to give grammar lessons - though that's not to say I won't ever post language-related stuff. I intend to, but not until I find something truly useful that I understand well enough to talk about at length.

So I could talk about what I'm learning in classes, but it would look something like this:
Today, we learned about some of the various uses of ということだ and わけにはいかない. ということだ is similar in meaning to だそうです, except it also serves double-duty functioning as a more distant-sounding つまり.

Anyway who can understand that will already know what I'm talking about, or will have had to look up every word, and then make the connections from there. Probably with some sort of paper in there somewhere.

In any case, that would just be boring.

So that aside, I can just say something like:
Classes are going like they usually do, which is to say that they are usually boring with interesting bits scattered around about once a day.

Which would also get old quick. So if you ever feel like asking me how classes are going, you can feel free to point yourself to that. There's a 99% chance that's how classes are going.

Oh, and here's some Dilbert. The post needed a picture.

Heian Shrine Visit

With about twenty other people, I'll be going to a shrine later today to talk to the people who run it. They want to know what foreigners might be interested in, and what it is we may already know.
Or at least, I think that's what we're doing.

I intend to bring my camera with me, in any case.

What? I live?

I have learned several things since coming to Japan:

1- If you intend to leave the Saiin area via public transportation, don`t. You will never return.
2- No one outside of Saiin knows what it is.
3- Boiling oil is hot.
4- Moo
5- I can make it to school in seven minutes if I try really hard.
7- The snooze button is your best friend.
8- There is no six.
10- While we`re at it, nine is overrated too.
11- There is always Domo-kun.
12- That`s about it.
13- Seriously, stop reading.
14- Haven`t you wasted enough of your life reading this?
15- Okay, on three.
16- 1
17- 2
18- 3
19- ......dammit what are you still doing here?
20- Okay seriously. That`s getting annoying.

Bleh.

Not feeling so good today, so I went into to class to take the quiz and headed back home. The teacher was really nice about it.

Oh, shoes.

I wanted to get some sneakers, so I had one of my (Canadian) friends show me a place to get some cheap shoes yesterday. Unfortunately, I have fairly large feet even in the States. Japanese people have tiny feet.
They don't sell anything over 11 at the two stores I went to. An 11 is wearable, but I am not paying $100 for sneakers, and at that, sneakers that don't fit. I love my 240GTX*, but they're a winter boot, and are not really suited to the summers here in Kyoto, which are very humid and sometimes go above 40C (104F) from what I've heard. My giant desert boots of stomping are surprisingly quiet for sneaking up on people on accident, but I'm apparently scaring people by dressing too militarily.

Osaka with Yasuko

Last Saturday, I went to Osaka and was shown around my Yasuko, the daughter of a teacher from about a year and a half ago. Here's her posing with some たこ焼き (... it's pronounced takoyaki...). Trying to describe takoyaki is... well...
Basically, they're little balls of fried dough with bits of octopus inside. I had some more today, actually, on the way to judo club.

It ended up being a day full of coincidences, but basically we just wandered around Osaka for five hours. We visited the Umeda Sky Building, which was ... Disappointingly unfrightening, but sufficiently high that I got a good pano. I still need to stitch it together, though.

They had a couple of gift shops, and I almost bought these for Josh. It is, in fact, pudding cups. They're called おっぱいプリン, literally, "breast pudding". The text on the right reads "A sweet desert!" and the text on the left reads something like... "If you want to lick, it's okay to lick!" but in some sort of cutesy fashion, I guess. They're caramel flavored, I think.
I also ate some cake and discovered this Engrish, seen at left.

At this point, we ditched her friend and wandered around Osaka for a while in search of cheap radios. I found a couple of shops that sold them, but they were all really expensive. I asked one of the shop owners where the cheap radios were and pointed at the one I was standing in front of that was only $120 without an antenna and for a single unit. What's more, they only interoperate reliably with other radios of the same model. That's totally... cool, I guess?
Also, I intend to go to at least one maid cafe, just so I can have gone to one. We didn't have time, though, so not today. We did find a couple to check out later, though.

At left are Yasuko, Yoko, and Toru Kodama, who totally bought me dinner at a really nice place. Nice as in, it had courses. Nice as in, they had delicious, properly-cooked steak. I don't want to know how much my part of that dinner was, by itself.

On the way back, I ended up talking to a cute-ish girl on the way back to Kyoto. As it turned out, she had just gotten off work and was about to go get dinner, so we went and ate at a bar. I totally misread her and thought she was going to try and get me to pay for her to drink, but she ended up paying for my food and the weird juice stuff I had, so I felt bad for thinking she was up to something, but we met up with some of my other friends and everybody had a good time, I think. At left is her posing with a gay Japanese man and some guy from my apartment building. I don't know either of their names.

The pano just finished pano'ing, here it is, in the most friendly format possible. I left it all weird-looking because I think it looks cool. That's five different pictures, believe it or not.
Warning: full size is 2.8MB and will take forever to load.

It's just about 11:30PM here now, and I am, as they say in Kansai dialect, meccha tired. That's pronounced "may-chuh", by the way.

Now for homework!

Harvesting All You Can Eat Strawberries

So I went to a strawberry farm during the trip, and I finally got around to putting my two chibi-pano shots together. I like the composite at right, personally, and think it works fairly well.
Anyway, when we went to the strawberry farm, they gave of us these little paper cups that we could put strawberries in. They were your standard paper cups capable of holding about 5 ounces of water, so they filled up pretty quick given the place.
As it so happens, I had a bandanna in my pants pocket. As it so happens, two knots transformed it into a bag.
As it so happens, I was standing in about an acre of densely-packed, ripe, delicious strawberries. Some were so moist and delicious that they exploded when I tried to pull them off the... vine? Anyway, I ate a bunch of strawberries, and brought out this bag.

As I we were driving away, I found out that that we weren't allowed to bring any strawberries out of the greenhouse. They enforced this to the extent that someone tried to walk out with three or four and they wouldn't let her go until she ate them.

The bag weighed three to four pounds, just so you know. Also, as far as I know, there were no signs indicating that you were not to harvest the delicious fruits contained in this greenhouse for purposes other than immediate consumption.

To make me feel better, me and some friends finished them off the next day.

Surprisingly enough, as far as I know, nobody in our whole group got sick.

INTERNETS

Someone a few doors down finally got a 'Net connection, and I agreed to share the fee with him if we hooked up my wireless router and I could access it from my room. I can't download for crap due to UPnP issues, but I can check my email and browse teh Intarwebs.

This Isn't Twitter, But...

I just had menchi curry for lunch. Menchi would appear to be whatever random animals were lying around and they get tossed into a grinder, then deep-fried and turned into something like a croquet. It was less disturbing in taste than it sounds at first.
To contrast that, this quote:
"My favorite animal is steak." Fran Lebowitz

Pitapa

There's a cool thing you can get here called Pitapa that allows you to not worry about buying tickets for the trains and stuff. You post-pay at the end of each month through a credit card. This would be really nice because it means I don't have to worry about finding out how much a ticket will cost and carrying around piles of change or making piles of change by breaking a 1000-yen note to pay the ￥150 to get to Kawaramachi (downtown Kyoto, about a half hour by bicycle, if you know the way).

Okayama Field Trip, day 1

I'm going to start off by saying that if it seems like this is an awful small number of pictures for a two-day trip... Well, it is. The reason for that is that I have about 50 up in the gallery for this trip.
On Wednesday and Thursday, all the study abroad students went on a field trip instead of classes. I'm sure a couple people skipped out, but pretty much all 120 or so of us went, I think. It was school-sponsored, and it would be entirely possible to go and not pay a dime more, but I spent about $60 during the two-day period between various random food and ice cream and drinks and omiyage.

We left the school around 8AM, stopped at some kind of rest area about halfway, and got to our first place around 11. It was the Bizen sword smithing village, which is cool, but we pretty much just wandered around in a museum, which was not so cool. Everybody else must have thought it was pretty boring, too, as the three little smithing video games they had set up never fell into disuse for more than about thirty seconds. They had some hand-forged kitchen knives for sale, but I fortunately only had about $90 on me and they were averaging about $120. As cool as swords are, I'm not really a museum person. They always feel kind of snobby, I think. Or at least it's similar to snobby.

Next, we got back on the bus for... a... while? Anyway, we had lunch a bit later, and I ate most of it, but couldn't convince myself to eat the little sardine fish thing.

Ew.

On the bright side, after lunch, we looked at another random tourist-trappish shop, then went and played in a park. I'm not sure if that was planned or not, but I think it was one of the highlights of the trip. There are some good shots from the park in the gallery.

This is a picture of the girl I sat with on the way back. I can neither spell nor pronounce her name, but it's Russian, and is apparently very common.

Next up is the oldest public school in the world. Or at least, so they claim. I thought it was a nice area, as it was the first time I've seen grass in decent quantity since comng to Japan. There were a couple of other schools touring around here, too, and I accidentally got a pantyshot on some random girl when I took a picture of their class. There was some interesting stuff here, but I would have to recommend the Korakuen garden over this place if you're choosing between the two. The school's name was something like shizutani, which I would venture to guess means "quiet valley". By the way, gallery.

Later, we went to an all-you-can-eat strawberry farm, where you basically get an hour to pick and eat as many as you can. This by itself was pretty cool, but I had a bandanna in my pocket and ended up bringing about four pounds of strawberries with me. That bandanna now looks like I tried to kill someone with it and smells like I put about four pounds of strawberries in it. Strangely enough.
I later found out that they were stopping people when they tried to bring out even a handful of strawberries, so I guess it's just by chance that I managed to walk off with my big bag o' fruity business. Even though we didn't have a fridge, we managed to eat them all before they went bad. Some were so plump and juicy that I popped them just by pulling them off the vine. You can see the fruits of our labor in the picture at right, but somebody else got a picture of my sack, and I want to get that from them for my own uses. You really should check out the gallery, by the way.

After this, we finally went to the ryokan (Japanese-style inn), where many people immediately went into the onsen, but my group of guys just kind of sat around and talked. It was cool anyway, as the onsen was probably overcrowded with everybody in it and I was pretty wary of the whole idea, anyway. It's been a long time since I got naked in front of random people, and I wasn't intending to stay naked previously, which psychologically makes a big difference, maybe.

Dinner was traditional Japanese cuisine, which means I couldn't recognize any of it and most of it was completely inedible. Raw beef was surprising, but it was the most delicious thing there. After all the scary foods, they finally brought out some rice just before the end, for which I was oh-so-thankful. Even if the rice blew, it was still nice to eat something I could identify. I mean, I'm all for trying new foods, but this trip used up all of my food bravery for about two months. Did I mention lunch was also traditional Japanese cuisine?

Oh, and breakfast the next day.

Traditional Japanese food might be okay if you are against cooked meat, really like fish and random seafood, think that everything is better with fish eggs sprinkled on top, or have just always wanted to eat vast quantities of raw egg, or don't have taste buds. I qualify none of these conditions, and will happily go on eating plain white rice every day. Oh, and the Japanese food that's imported from China, like ramen. Yum.

As an added bonus, us silly Americans were just about the only people wearing our street clothes at dinner. At breakfast, we were just about the only ones wearing yukata. There's just no winning, I think.

[eloquent segue]

Well, that was day one of our two-day trip! It was my intention to do the whole trip in one post, but this is already well past a printed page (though it's less than I thought), so I'll end here for now.
Oh, and check out the gallery.