Wobble?

Earthquakes are so weird.

Tokyo: Ramen Museum (Day 1)

I don't know how many of you know this, but I'm kind of a fan of instant ramen. When I was about 15 years old*, I heard about a mystical place filled with ramen, ramen history, and ramen-related stuff. Now, if you can think of a more delicious place, I welcome you to try - a cheesecake or licorice factory might give it a run for its money - but it's a great combination of educational and culinary goodness.

*I previously said that I'd been wanting to go for ten years, but when I went to write this post I thought about it a little more and I think it's closer to six or seven. Please excuse my zeal.

For a slightly heartier description, you might check out Wikipedia's article or this random website. If you can read Japanese, you might try the official website.

I'm not certain why I took these pictures, but if it helps, here's an image of the last intersection on the way to the museum form Shin-Yokohama station. It's at the far right of this picture, and the road that goes off in that direction runs North-South.

Finding it is pretty easy, as you can follow a path marked by convenience stores at each corner, which makes it really easy to follow a map to it. I mean, I found the place on my own - without getting lost one or more times - so I'm pretty certain anybody can. At right, you can see what the entrance looks like, and you can also see that they, for some reason entirely beyond me, spell ramen with a U. The "Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum".
No idea.

Inside, they have a gift shop, a timeline, a little fake ramen shop, drawers, examples of various kinds of ramen, and... the basement.

The gift shop takes up about half of the ground floor. It's got some neat stuff, and quite a variety, from musical instruments to cell phone charms to high-quality (presumably?) ramen and ingredients. It's pretty decent as gift shops go. With stuff that's not too painfully priced, you could say it's a bit of a rarity here.

The timeline was pretty cool, but since it was all in Japanese and I'm really not that much of a history person, I kind of stared at it for a while and tried to make noises that sounded like I was getting something from it. The basic gist of it was that the whole thing started around the middle of the 1800s and there are still innovations taking place in contemporary times. It seemed well-done, and someone with better reading skills than me would've probably liked it.

The fake ramen shop was pretty neat. It's a red-themed replica of a ramen shop - a bar, basically - but you can go on the other side of the counter and play around with some of the utensils and stuff. In addition, there was information on kinds of noodles and ingredients and their history here. I'm not sure why, but I never took a picture of the whole area, and only got a bunch of the details, like this one at left: examples of varous kinds of noodles.
In addition to this display, there was a display in another area that had various kinds of instant ramen from the past hundred years or so. You will see an Arnold Shwarzeneger one among some of the more strange ones - it's in the lower-right.

The drawers area was kind of like a morgue for ramen shops. It had memorabilia from probably two hundred ramen shops from around the country. They were numbered, though I'm not sure why. I opened up drawers three and four and took the picture at right.
"Ooo, bowls and a T-shirt", right?
This picture is a good example of when one might use a polarizer. I think I might have, actually. The flourescent lights tend to put quite a lot of glare on shiny stuff, and the glass covers for the drawers hardly show up in this picture.

Then there's the basement.

The basement is a two-level replica of some city 1940s Japan. It looks kind of like someone was filming a Western movie, and then accidentally imported a bunch of stuff from the 1940s and just kind of... blended them. I'm not saying it's not fairly authentic, merely that it was kind of weird.

I refuse to categorically go through what was in the basement on the basis that I don't want to spend the next week writing this one post, but some of the highlights follow.

I tried mizu-ame ("water sugar-candy" is about the best I can do with this one), which is basically runny, flavorless taffy. I guess this was Japanese kids' first experience with pure sugar, because it is just like eating caro syrup. Yum.

I had a bowl of ramen. At $10, I had pretty high expectations, but I was stupid and got a spicy ramen, and the Japanese don't really know how to make spicy food that has flavor without involving curry. Or something. Anyway, it was fairly average ramen, especially compared to the place I had gone to the previous night with Shimpei.
It was prettier when they sent it out to me, but I didn't think to take a picture until I had poked at it a little.

Lastly, I got some ice cream and headed back out. The ice cream was pretty decent and was really good after eating a hot bowl of spicy ramen. Cooler was the little stand they brought it out on. In? I don't know.

On the way out, I asked a random Japanese girl to go pose for me, and after a minute or two of giggling, she did. This picture really doesn't do her justice, but I'm not sure who would look good in that frame.

Back Home

I'm back in Kyoto and still alive. Food takes precedence over writing, and sleep is getting pretty high up on the list, too. I'm going to work on blog posts about the trip tomorrow after some errands, so they shouldn't be too long in coming.

Tokyo: Japanese Toilets (Day 1)

There are a couple of weird things about Japanese toilets. I don't mean the ones that are not a toilet as much as a hole in the ground coated with porcelain - those are definitely weird - but there are some features Japanese toilets have that seem to be pretty normal that I've never seen in the States.
The first is that it's pretty common to see toilets in private homes with heated seats. I haven't been to a lot of people's houses - nearly everybody I know lives in student apartments - I'll admit, but the few I've been in have had heated toilet seats. I've only tried it once, but I forgot I had turned it on and was a little confused until I remembered. I'm sure it would be nice on a cold night, but it felt uncannily - pardon the pun - like going right after someone else.
If you look at the picture at right, you can see the control knob and power cord running off from the seat itself to the wall socket.

You can also pretty clearly see what appears to be a faucet on the top of the toilet. This is, in fact, a faucet. Someone decided that, if you have to fill the tank, and the water in the tank is just going to be used to flush various human wastes, it probably doesn't need to be clean. Right?
So why not first use the water to let someone wash their hands?

In case anybody cares, that there is a high dynamic range picture composited from two shots. Given that it was handheld, I'm surprised it worked, but there you have it.

Tokyo: Wake-up (Day 1)

I took this picture of Shimpei - the guy whose apartment I'm staying at.

Down below is a panorama of his apartment. Close quarters always do bad things to panos, so please forgive the diagonal door.

[Edit: I don't know what happened to this picture, but it somehow ended up getting wedged into the links on the right side.
Want to guess the true reason this edit is here?
It couldn't be to push this down until it centers properly. That would be bad practice!

Probably.]

Tokyo: So Far (Day 0) - Traveling

First off: Apparently, you can buy large JR tickets with a credit card. Good to know.
I had a number of transfers due to the distance involved, but I ran into three other people going the same place as me on the second or third transfer, so I had a good time talking with them and we helped each other find the way. It was really lucky.

I somehow (probably due to the people I met) managed to get here without any major problems except my own stench - big thanks to Kyoto's humidity for that one - which I fixed by tossing one of my prized blue shirts. The last three times I've worn it, it's smelled really bad, really quick, so I think there may be something growing in it or something. It now smells bad somewhere between Kyoto and Tokyo, in a trash can in a bathroom.

It took Shimpei (the guy I'm staying with) a few minutes (~15) to find me due to the massive monstrosity that is Yokohama station. From there, a 15-minute train ride to the actual town he lives in, and a 15-minute walk to his apartment from the station.
Total time from leaving my apartment to getting to his apartment was... Long. 7:20AM to 6:30PM, so nearly 11 hours. Shinkansen (bullet train) would've put me here around 11AM, but would cost more one-way than my round-trip ticket did.

Dean said he's going to send me some cashes, so I should have some money to do some shopping while I'm here, which will be cool. It looks like Akihabara may not be the best place to get camera gear, but there's some pretty good deals at... some place. I dunno if I can find it.

Last thing before I hit the hay: the warm water here has a switch. I'm not kidding at all. You have to turn on the hot water knob, then turn on the hot water heater. Then you have hot water. I thought it was just really, really slow. I figured after five minutes, I was probably just missing something.

[Edit: I was just looking through my pictures I've taken so far, and I found these two signs, which felt left out, so they're getting put in to assuage their feelings.]

Sleep

I'm supposed to get up in about an hour to start getting ready, but I've only slept for about an hour tonight. I've laid in bed, staring at my ceiling, listening to the rain. It actually woke me up and one point and I had to go into the bathroom to try and turn it off. Then I realized the weird dripping noise was the drain outside, and not my sink.

INTERNETS AGAIN

I have an Internet connection again. Great timing, isn't it?

Apparently, they got my payment sometime last week and just forgot to turn the connection back on.

Yeah.

Waterville?

By the way, who lives out in Waterville that reads this? I think everybody I know that lived there has moved to other places. Drop me a line?
That reminds me! My email address is at the bottom, in case anybody was wondering.

Tokyo

I'm headed out tomorrow for Tokyo for a few days, and I don't know if I'll have ready access to an Internet connection, so there may be no new posts until I get back.

If I had foresight, I would've written some and set them to post while I was gone, but I don't and I didn't, so there aren't. As tempted as I am to leave my laptop behind and instead pack enough clothes that I'll be able to wear clean clothes each day of the four-day trip, I'll probably bring it with in the hopes that there will be a connection somewhere.

Non-Helmet Society, and Life is Like a Box of Chocolates

I'm not sure why I haven't mentioned this before, but it's definitely something that bears it.

You do not wear a helmet when riding a bicycle in Japan. I'm not saying "It's even dorkier here than in the States." I'm saying you just don't. When I got here, I looked for one, but I could only find them in kids' sizes. I've looked in a number of different cycle shops, and I have not a seen a single adult-sized bicycle helmet.

Now, I know they exist somewhere. While hiking, we saw two sets of three mountain bikers who were all wearing helmets. And on two other occasions, I've seen men riding bicycles in heavy traffic with helmets, but they were the kind of guys who wear the tight cycling pants and the bright yellow spandex T-shirts. All children up to the age of about six or seven wear them, but they suddenly disappear around that time.

In some ways, I can understand the sentiment; a helmet is a big thing to lug around, even if it's light, and adds to the massive pile of crap I might otherwise be accoutered with at the moment. In addition, fashion here is much more important than I've noticed before. This could either be an expansion in my awareness of it, or an actual change, but it's hard to tell either way.
Don't worry, I still pick my clothes based on how many pockets they have and blindly mix and match colors.

Now, with all of that said, some kinds of helmets do exist here, and you see anybody on a motorcycle or scooter wearing one. Now, whether them wearing it is any help to them or not, I'll never know, since half the time the things aren't even strapped on. I have to assume enforcement of some helmet law (which I also must assume exists) is pretty strict here, which would also explain the munchkins.

I know it won't help in terms of stopping concussive impact, but I do my best to wear my hat and cycling gloves every time I go out.
It sounds stupid - because it is, I know - but I figure a new hat or pair of gloves beats reconstructive scalp surgery or permanent scarring, and will also help to keep little bits of road from getting embedded in the bits of me that jut out. Like my head. And hands.
I dunno, it makes me feel better about not wearing a helmet, though.

To temper that, I should point out that been involved in four different collisions since I got here, but none of them have been serious, and one should hardly count. Here we go:

1. With a random mother and her kid strapped in a rear rack seat. I was dodging people near the Shijo-Kamagawa bridge and she was, as well, and we dodged into each other. Fortunately, the baskets on the front of most bikes are made of a pretty pliable (and very rust-prone!) kind of metal, probably iron, and make great crumple zones. And they usually deform just a little, but it sure helps and isn't hard to fix.
   A quick "Are you okay?" from both of us and we were off.
   
2. With a guy who decided it would be a good time to go through a red "Don't cross the street right now" light. I was turning the corner and neither of us stopped, so we sort of bodychecked each other. I got a bit of a rugburn on my inner thigh, which was less than comfortable, but I think we were both okay outside of that. Quick "Okay?" from each of us and it was over.
   
3. With a car, while coming out of my apartment one day.
   Usually, when I leave, I glide downhill into the road and merge happily in, but there's a wall that prevents me from seeing to the left until I'm actually in the road. Fortunately, Japan is a drive-on-the-left country, so I can see oncoming traffic plenty early enough.
   This time, though, the guy was on the wrong side of the road and only inches from the retaining wall. Combine that with the fact that I was turning left this time, and stupidly didn't stop to check left, neither of us could have known about the other due to the wall. Fortunately, I just barely heard his engine noise and was able to slam on my brakes. He hit his brakes, too, but too late and slammed into my front tire. Fortunately, it turns.
   I don't know if this is normal, but our conversation went like this:
   Car-Man and I simultaneously: "Excuse me!"
   Car-Man: "Are you alright?"
   Me: I glance at myself, look at the bike tire. "Yeah, I'm okay. ... Well..."
   And we head off.
4. This was just yesterday, on my way back from getting fried rice cakes filled with course red bean paste (tsubuan yakimochi). I saw the train going overhead and tried to get out from under the overpass before it got there. There was a junior high school kid coming the other direction and we both tried to go to my left to go around each other. If hadn't been rushing, it would've been fine, but I was, so neither of us had enough time to negotiate. We both hit our brakes and I came to a stop with my foot on his front tire. My 90kg (~200 pounds) is plenty to stop a small Japanese kid of probably 1/3 the weight, it would seem.

And that's about all I have to say about that.

Two Weeks' Plans

I'm currently planning and generally preparing for two trips I have coming up. One to Tokyo and one to Matsue.

Tokyo, besides being the capital of Japan, is also home to the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum. Well, technically, that's in Shin-Yokohama, but it's all part of the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area, but that's like the difference between Seattle, Renton, Tukwila, and the rest of Western Washington. It's all kind of one big urbana.
The main reason I want to visit Tokyo, however, is Akihabara. While KMD may think that it's Swahili, it's actually like Mecca for geeks. Imagine an entire area of town that's basically a big Radio Shack. Blocks on blocks of camera gear, various electronics, games, anime, and all kinds of a things otaku. Sounds fun, right?

I would normally not be able to afford this at all, but a graduate student who is the son of one of my teachers has offered to let me stay at his apartment and show me around.
I was talking to Sara yesterday while she was trying to find hotel reservations and she's looking at about $950 US for five days' stay. Not too outrageous, but that's double the amount of money sitting in my bank right now and doesn't include the two-person, two-way Shinkansen tickets, which are $110 each way if you get the student discount. Normal tickets are $135 or so, but they're both students, so figure an extra $450 for transportation.
You can see why I think they're rich.

Matsue is the place I was originally going to do my study abroad. It's the largest city in the Shimane prefecture, and home to Shimane University and Shimane Junior University, where Yoko KODAMA (a teacher of mine from a year or so ago) works. I've got some friends in the area, too, and hope to visit them.
Transportation to Matsue is roughly equivalent with transportation to Tokyo, but I'm told there are really cheap hotels you can stay at in Matsue.

Anyway, that all starts on the 27th of this month, which is three days from now, but somehow feels like more than that.

More Mosquito Griping

I just swatted a mosquito.

I watched it land on my arm, and it was there for less than half a second, and took off again. I'dve thought it had just bumbled against me on accident if it were any other bug.

Anyway, I got it and the thing exploded. Blood everywhere.
I hate the mosquitoes here.

Smells

A couple of times over the past few days, I've come back to my apartment and thought "This doesn't smell right..." Sometimes, it's because I cooked fried rice and didn't clean it up before I went out. Oil starts to smell funny if you give it a few hours' chance.

Today, I think I know what it was. I had just gotten back from buying rice at the store, and as I stepped in with the rice bag on my shoulder, it once again smelled strange.

I'm not entirely certain, but I think it was that I haven't cooked any rice in nearly four days. I made a batch that many days ago and it lasted me two days, but the smell of cold rice not very strong and doesn't... waft? It doesn't waft around the room and make everything smell like, well, rice is being cooked. You get used to that smell without knowing it, I think, and I think that's why everybody else's apartments smell strange to me. They cook all kinds of foods from all over the world - though I'll admit Italian food seems to be particularly popular here - while I cook, largely, rice.


Though it could just be that I hadn't done the laundry in a week and it was starting to pile up.

Queries

I have no idea how this works, but someone managed to find my blog not once, but twice, by searching orginal sexy prong in the prety on Google. I can't make any sense of the query, though. Am I just not up on the current terminology of society, or what?

Daimonji, but... Not. Instead, Obon Dancing!

The Daimonji... thing... was today [actually, a few days ago, but it took me three days to remember to get the pictures off my camera]. It's not really a festival, but there are these big shapes carved out of the hills around Kyoto, and there are torches in these that are lit up once a year for Daimonji, which means, literally, "big gate letters". They shapes are three letters ("big", "law", and "big" again) and two shapes (a boat and something else) if memory serves. Plus or minus a shape.
Anyway, I misunderstood my group's plan for the night, and ended up not getting a single picture of the letters you can read from any high place within 10 miles.

We ran into this group of girls at right while on the way to our destination, and when you've got a group of high school girls wearing yukata willing to pose for you, how can you not take a picture?

However, I did see a bunch of Obon dancing instead. It just lasted a lot longer than we had planned, which killed our chance to see the letters. No biggies, since the Obon was pretty neat.

You can see Ana at left and some unnamed little girl at right, both doing Obon. Can't do video, though, so that's what you get. Below and right is Sou Jong Obon-ing.
You can also see most of a family that came and allowed me to take their picture. There's a mom off to the left that you can't see, as well as a grandmother. They didn't want to be in the shot.

Obon is a kind of dance that anybody from the town can participate in, and there's a taiko (for those that don't know, just read taiko here as "a big, powerful drum" and you'll be okay) drummer and a singer guy, though I don't think he was singing words.
So you get a bunch of concentric circles around the platform the drummer and singer/announcer are in/on, and everyone does this dance. I'm not entirely certain, but I think you're supposed to slowly move inward, which signifies your progression as a Buddhist entity... or something? I didn't do the dance itself, obviously, but it looked pretty simple. Two or three steps, clap, half a spin, clap, reverse, double clap. Or something along those lines. I'm not certain it's that complex, or even that everybody was doing the same one.

Some of my friends from school were there, as you can see. And I also got them all to pose together with Ana. These girls don't really like me, but they seem to put up with me when necessary. They're all pretty nice, in any case.
From the left is Antonia, Alessandra, Sou Jong, Selena, and Ana (who doesn't go to my school). Ana is a master's student working on her engineering degree at Kyoto University.

Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that a little bit of post-processing can do good things for a picture, even in my hands. Or at least, I think so.

Which of these two pictures do you like better?

Rice and Cookers

Most of the time I've been here, I've made it my policy to always have at least a bowlful of warm rice ready. In theory, it's a great policy, but when combined with my air conditioner and electronics, it's too much power. Last month I went over my pre-allotted allowance by $10, so I'm going to try and cut back a little this month. I don't want to cut back a lot, since I'm paying for the rest of it anyway, but a little would be good.

Anyway, I still like to have some rice ready, but I don't leave the rice-cooker on it's "Preserve Warm" setting 24/7 anymore. In spite of that, the rice I made early yesterday morning (about 30 hours ago) still has some last vestiges of warmth in it.

So if you're wondering why Japanese rice cookers are so expensive...

Random Bits Not Big Enough for Post of Their Own

Miscellaneous interesting things that happened to or around me today:
- First off, these two pictures wouldn't fit in the Obon post, but I took them there. They're two of my favorites, so I couldn't just leave them out.
- Tried out some bug repellant that I got from Shari. Instead of getting gnawed to death, I was actually playing with the mosquitoes, and they wouldn't get within two or three inches of where I had put the repellant. Next time, I might leave one spot for them to land, just so I can swat them. I got at least four or five while I was checking my email today.

- I have never before been patted encouragingly on the butt by woman. Or rather, I hadn't. I don't know what that means. Thanks, Chen, now I will worry about that for weeks.

- Ran into Alessandra and company at the Obon festival. Alessandra is the Italian girl I've been chasing all semester and summer break. I have had no luck whatsoever, and she's leaving in two or three days. Well, that's normal for me, you know?

- Got a haircut. First time in Japan. It doesn't look so good, but... He did what I asked, so I have nobody to blame.

- I saw the police, uh, handling a drunken guy on my way back. I was making pretty good time (considering I was crossing 80-90% of the city's diagonal size), but stopped in Omiya to watch the drunken guy. The police were trying to get him to take a taxi, and had to rather forcefully wedge him in the taxi at least twice. I think the driver wasn't comfortable with the idea, so the cops called for a cop-van-mobile and they shoved him in that instead. They were really polite to him the entire time and the most physical force I saw them use was to keep the guy from falling on the ground again. See, at first they underestimated his drunkenness, and he fell into the street simply by epic walking failure.
I've never before seen someone roll down the street.
Anyway, I had hoped to congratulate the cops on handling it so well, but the four of them (two came in the cop-van-mobile) left the police box unmanned - yes, locked; yes, I checked - and took him away. Dunno where to, but he didn't seem to know where he lived, if "Where do I live?" and "My home? Where the hell is that?" are any indication of that. Have some pictures, but I was trying to be discreet, which is hard to do in a well-lit intersection.

- Was there, but not involved in, the creation of a new standard of beauty: long ass and tight legs. Little too much sangria for some people? I dunno. It was pretty funny, though.

- Went farther to the East than I have previously, to the point where many of the main roads simply stop existing. Hung out with Ana, Waii (sp?), Chen, Eileen, Jonas, and some other people whose names refuse to come to my mind in it's groggy state of dogged fogginess.

- Ate a strawberry jam mochi pan which was basically a strawberry jam sandwich.

- Was very glad I had an extra shirt, 'cause the one I was wearing when I got to Chen's place was... pretty damp. It was so wet, it was difficult to take off, and when I went to dry myself off a little with it, I couldn't find any dry spots.
It was not a good-smelling thing.

Repellant Testing

Alright, here's pretty much the ultimate test for this bug repellant stuff I got from Shari: I'm going to go to an area where there are lots of mosquitoes and ants and whatnot, while wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals.
I've put some repellant on all of my exposed skin (don't forget the ears - seriously!) and anything near a clothing boundary that could become exposed through normal movement or by someone far more flexible than I.

If I survive to write the next post, the stuff works.
---
Thus far, it's seems to be working great. I appear to have missed a small part of my left elbow, however, which went from one bite when I left to... somewhere between three and ten.
I have the next two posts written, and I had meant to post them now, but I forgot to get the pictures off of my camera. No surprise there.
---
In other news, I now know what mosquitoes look like during sex. Until they broke apart, I was trying to figure out what has 12 legs, four sets of eyes, and wobbles back and forth without going anywhere.

Basic Camera Modes

People are often a little bit confused on what some of the things on the mode dial on their camera does, and which they should use, and when. What symbols and abbreviations are used varies a little, but the basic concept is the same, in general. The standard for me is the set that Nikon uses on its SLRs, but you should be able to figure out what's what given the following information.

Green = Take pictures mode
P = Take pictures mode, but stop popping up the flash all the time mode
S (Tv) = Take pictures at the shutter speed I specify mode
A (Av)= Take pictures at the aperture I specify mode
M = I'll figure own damned exposure, thank you very much mode

Green - The first mode is usually a symbol of some kind instead of text, and it's usually green, so that's what I'm calling it. The "Playback" mode, is also usually green, so don't get the two confused, or you will be very lost.
Green mode is generally what you want your camera on if you hand it to someone else, as it lets the camera make its best guess at what the picture should look like, and often has a simpler interface than the other modes. A good place to start, if nothing else.

P - Stands for "Programmed Exposure". On a Nikon SLR, this is mostly the same as Green, but gives you control of whether or not the flash pops up when the camera needs it.
I use this as my default mode, simply because I don't like having the flash pop up all the time, and I never take pictures in decent light.

S (Tv) - Stands for "Shutter Priority" mode. On Jes's Canon Powershot A540 (an excellent camera I could recommend to nearly anyone), this is Tv, but I don't know what that's supposed to stand for.
In any case, what this mode allows you to do is set the shutter speed, and the camera will try and get the correct exposure by varying the size of the aperture. Shorter shutter speeds (1/125 is shorter than 1/30) let in less light, but also combat shake and subject movement.

A (Av) - Stands for "Aperture Priority" mode. Again, note about other cameras' abbreviations.
This mode allows you to select the aperture and let the camera worry about changing the shutter speed to match.
Larger aperture numbers (f/32) indicate a smaller hole through which light can hit your film/sensor. This inverse property is due to the fact that the f-number (ex: f/32, f/8.0) is a ratio of the focal length (zoom) of your lens compared to the size of the aperture. So as the aperture gets bigger, the ratio becomes smaller because it approaches 1:1.
What does this mean to you?
Large apertures (f/2.8 is pretty big) let in a lot of light, which is good for low-light photography, but give you a very small depth of field (the area that's in focus).
Small apertures (f/16 is small, but f/32 is smaller) give you a larger depth of field, which means you don't have to be quite as worried about getting a super-accurate focus. On the other hand, smaller apertures let in less light, so you are more likely to lose a picture due to shake when you use smaller apertures.
Zooming in generally forces you to go to a smaller aperture, so if there's not much light, zoom all the way out*.

M - "Manual exposure" mode. You control the shutter speed and aperture, which means the camera will not help you much at all in terms of getting the picture to come out at the right brightness. Depending on the camera, it might mess with the ISO for you, but you can turn that off. If you do, it's entirely up to you to get the picture right. You have to balance shutter speed and aperture, along with ISO, to expose the picture. Your camera will usually still help you figure out white balance and focus, however.

*For those of you that have $1,000 to drop on constant-aperture lenses where this wouldn't be the case, I expect you to know what I mean, and to know that it doesn't apply to you.
I'm also envious.

Air Conditioner-ing

The air conditioner in our rooms is pretty cool. It not only is an air conditioner, but a heater as well, and has timer and temperature control settings. You can have it turn on or off after anywhere between 30 minutes and 10 hours, but nobody I know has gotten the temperature control setting to work right.
It has three blower settings, though they don't seem to affect how much it cools off a room, just how many papers it blows off my desk

One of the most convenient features is that the output fan is, instead of built in with the rest of the unit, down on the veranda, pointing across, which means that running your heater/AC makes your clothes dry faster.

Things You Lie On...

Watching some anime today. Got it from a Portuguese friend of mine, so, naturally, it's subtitled in Portuguese.

Now, for me, it's really hard not to pay attention to subtitles if they're there. As it would turn out, Portuguese is not nearly hard enough to understand to kill off that habit.

It was pretty convenient, though, because they are different enough from English that I don't watch them as much, but they're similar enough that if there's something I don't get from the Japanese, I can figure out from the subs. I was surprised at that.
It took me 15 episodes to stop reading the subtitles constantly. I mean, this is nearly 10 years of conditioning I'm trying to fight here.

I'm watching a samurai drama, and I don't know if I'm a lot worse at understanding speech than I thought I was, or if it's the bucketloads of formal speech and antiquated words that are making it difficult. If it weren't for the subs, I would've never figured out that jabura is the same as samurai. It's not in my dictionary, that's for sure.

Speaking of my dictionary, I've got it set up to search through the antiquated words databases, and I found a great little gem of an expression. I don't know if it's actually antiquated, or what, but... Well, here you go:
女房と畳は新しいほうがいい
nyoubou to tatami wa atarashii hou ga ii
Wives and tatami are best when they're newI have to wonder if we have an expression like this in English.

管理人 Departure

The manager of my apartment has had back pains for a while, and since it's interfering with his ability to do the job, he's going to quit. Apparently, the manager of the sister building will go back and forth between the two starting next month. It's too bad, really, 'cause the manager is probably the Japanese person I know the best. He says he wants to use the massive amount of free time he'll have to "play".
He was born sometime around 1941, which puts him at nearly 70 years of age.
Did I mention that, for the most part, hiking is an old person's activity in Japan? Hiking gear here is painfully expensive as a result, since most of the people who hike are retired, and retired people... have too much money?

He makes some kind of bittersweet juice at home and keeps a bottlen hand here, and occasionally shares some with me. It's pretty good, and we had a "Splitting of ways toast" today, and I brought some mochi.
Mochi are those candies I always try to get people to eat that feels kind of like "some kind of... fetus... covered in cornstarch". It's actually made of rice that is percussively gelatinized, then filled with something, such as bean paste or fruit-flavored goo.

Some More Cops

I was using the Internet out by the mall for a while, and there were some cops (actual cops!*) patrolling the bike parking area I was in. Once I was done with my email and whatnot, I went over to talk to them.
I was surprised to find out that they don't know the caliber of their own weapons, only that they're revolvers. He said that both their revolvers carried five rounds, which says to me that they must be pretty large rounds, 'cause the cylinder's about the same size as my mom's Ruger GP-100 chambered in .357. For common police rounds, that leaves pretty much just the .45, I think. I mean, there's .40S&W and 10mm, but I think those're only commonly used by American law enforcement.

Anyway, this surprises me because Japanese tend to have a small frame to being with, and using a compact pistol will increase recoil due to the reduction of weight. In addition, a revolver won't lose any of the recoil to the action like a automatic does.

But they also said that not everybody carries the same gun or uses the same ammo, which surprises me to some extent, given the Japanese need to have everybody be the same. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down", right?

I also asked them both why they decided to become police officers, and they had the same opinion there "To arrest the bad guys", and one guy said he saw a documentary on Japanese cops and from then on knew he wanted to be a cop.

We talked about other stuff, but all I can remember is that I must've had an off day, because they kept complimenting my Japanese, which is a sure sign you're making headway on epic fail. Or at least, for me.

Ha, I'd Go For That...

I met a Vietnamese guy at the fireworks show who apparently took a picture of me. He tacked these speech bubbles on, for extra goodness.

Sonna...

So I've spent the last day and some change watching an anime, Hajime no Ippo ("the first step"). I'm on the last of two movies right now, and it just occrred to me that the single most common phrase in anime* is 「そんな。。。ばかな！」 (Sonna... baka na!) which is usually translated as "That's... impossible!"
In just this hour of anime, I think I've heard it nearly twenty times, but I haven't been counting, so maybe I'm just imagining it.
In any case, they bandy it about much like Vizzini bandies about "Inconceivable!"

I'm sure other people have noticed this, too, and I feel a little silly for being so slow to follow it through.

I probably missed a lot of Sonna... baka na!s because of the way I was watching Hajime no Ippo: by keeping my finger on the Skip-five-seconds-forward key combo through the last forty-five episodes. Whenever they got into an extended match of "AAARRRRGHHH!" and it looked like DBZ syndrome would set in, I'd skip forward, check to see if it was over, then continue. By this method, I was able to watch most of the twenty-minute episodes in about ten minutes each.

So that's my new strategy in the event that I want to watch a Shounen Jump-styled anime from now on.

*Probably in manga as well, but I don't read much manga, so I dunno.

A Narrow Escape? Nah.

I was just stopped by cops for the first time! I was out using the Internet at 4AM and - purely by coincidence - was wearing mostly black: black BDU pants, a black ACU top, and my big brown desert Marine boots. To top it off, I was wearing a hat and had on my black photo gloves. Truly a suspicious sight indeed.

If I were going to commit a robbery, I certain wouldn't dress in all black. Would you?

On the other hand, I was out there for about an hour and I don't think I got a single mosquito bite. And I got to talk to the cops, who were surprisingly easy to understand.

One of them - of three! - triggered his siren (on accident?) about three blocks away, which gave me a bad feeling and I was thinking I should pack up, and I could've been out of there if I had hurried, but I think that would've just made things worse. So maybe the siren was on purpose to spook me if I were doing anything actually questionable? Dunno.
As it was, they came up and I think I might have greeted them before they said anything. I greet cops whenever I see them, so that's normal for me.
Anyway, they asked what I was doing, and I responded that I was using the Internet. I explained how it was close to my apartment, and my rather suspicious location (by a dumpster, in a dark corner!) was due to the relative low number of mosquitoes*. At some point, I explained that I was having trouble with the "Internet company" because my credit card is foreign, so the company says the numbers are wrong. I *think* they asked, but I might have just been too stressed and said it.

*For some reason, no matter how many times I talk about animals, I am completely unable to to use the iru verb form. I kept using aru which is the verb of existence for things that don't that don't move perceptibly, like plants and inanimate objects. Say, a chair.

I was patted down and they checked all but one of my pockets, which I thought was pretty weird; I was surprised they missed my only pocket that actually had stuff in it. I mean, one of my cargo pockets had my card wallet in it, and they had me pull out a couple of cards at random. Then he found my left-front pocket and apparently thought my changepurse was suspicious. I was so nervous at this point that I opened it to show him and managed to launch a $1 coin onto the ground.
Then he he checked my rear pockets, while saying something like "We're men, so it's okay". Strangely, they didn't check any of my jacket pockets, though I was careful to use those in front of them.
They also checked the pouch I keep my dictionary and insurance information in, and I guess checked my insurance to see if it was all in order. Presumably, they found the bandages I had stuffed in it.
*The reason this surprises me is because they were pretty thorough, so it seems odd that they would miss the one pocket that almost everyone would have. Also, in that pocket was my only vaguely dangerous object, a pen.

They didn't seem suspicious of my flashlight, though one of them got a little bit concerned when I reached to my waist to pull it out. I guess I could've as easily been drawing a weapon, though, and he would've been out of luck: anybody can shoot from the hip at 2m and get a solid hit, and none of them reacted enough to do anything about it, had it been a weapon.
My jacket had been covering the flashlight until that point, so I doubt it's the case that they knew what it was. They didn't check anything above the waist at all, thinking back on it.

They also searched my bag, though they didn't check the main compartment or any of the small ones, which seems odd. They checked the laptop section and two of the miscellaneous crap pockets. I have to wonder what they were thinking as they saw the what I was carrying with me.

In addition, they wanted to know what I was using the Internet for. I responded that I was checking my email and reading comics. They didn't think I could really be out here using the Internet, so I showed them that I had had my email and comics open and pointed to the balloon tooltip and translated for them. I think one of them said "Ah, it was Gmail!" at one point.

So while all of this was going on, one guy hung back out of reach and at a different angle and watched what his partner was doing, and a third guy checked my bicycle and foreigner registration information. I don't think the second guy ever said a word, and expect he may have been trying to go unnoticed, which would make sense.
I learned that the radios they have apparently have long enough cords to reach at least a meter in any direction. Never know when that might be useful. At least two had firearms or firearm-shaped things (but probably normal pistols) on their belts, but I never saw the third guy at an angle to be able to see. I expect they all had asps in addition, and beyond that, I didn't note anything about their equipment, as it was all in leather (I think) cases. Japanese police officers have their firearms on coiled tethers, by the way.

They escorted me home and hung around for a few minutes at least, and were still out there five minutes later when I went to check to see if I'd left anything in my bike. I want them to still be out there so I can maybe get a picture, and to see why they didn't search my jacket, but I don't think they are.
They're not, but it's been nearly an hour.

I asked right before I went inside the first time why there were three instead of two, like normal, and the guy that had been interacting with me the most responded that they usually work in groups, but they're sometimes on their own and sometimes in groups of up to four. As they were leaving, I apologized for causing trouble and thanked them for their hard work.

Even though it was stressful, it was fun and it's an experience I'm glad to have had. I should've asked more questions, though, as it's usually really hard to get cops to talk to me.

Well, for as long as this post has been, the entire thing probably didn't last fifteen minutes. And it's nearly 5:30AM, so I'm calling it a day.

[When I went to actually put this online, two cops walked by and I greeted them. I've never seen cops around here with the exception of the past 24 hours.]

Well, Yesterday, Actually

Today is the second-longest I've stayed up since coming here. It's 6:40AM as I write this post and I'm going to stay up until 7:30 or so if possible so i can wake up Bryden. He's got work of some kind at 9, and came to the Katsuragawa party at my request, so I feel somewhat responsible.
I got to practice my 二人乗り (futari-nori "two-person riding") by way of going about five kilometers with Valeria on my bike's rack. When I let her off at her house, she said "Thank you so much for making my ass hurt!" Take that how you will.

Party was pretty cool. We got a decently large fire going and cooked some sausages, and everyone sat around and talked and poked at the fire. Around 3AM, we lost most of the people, and half an hour later, two more people left, so it was down to five of us. It was about 5:40 when we left, and I didn't get back until about twenty minutes ago, but I was going slow to let everybody else keep up.

I don't get how people can be so slow, though. I mean, it's not like I'm rushing or anything, but I leave people in the dust by going at a liesurely pace, and I have to go... so... slow... to keep pace with them. Once or twice I've just given up and one ahead, then waited.
Anyway, that's my current pet peeve.
Also, other Asians' pronunciation in Japanese. I can't tell when they're using some kind of dialectal words and when they're just failing to speak clearly. I heard one from someone today jouzu said as chuuzo.

Mosquitos. Yeah, Again

So in my last trip out to get some Internet - not that I'm an addict or anything, though - I was online for a total of roughly twenty minutes.
On my left arm, I have seven new bites, and I have three new bites on my right arm. Strange thing, though, is that about half of the new bites look much more like I've been stung by a honeybee than a mosquito. I mean the fairly mellow ones that don't hurt that much, and you sometimes don't notice until afterwords, so it's not anything serious, but I'm surprised to see a wound like that from a mosquito, still.

Flash Rust

[Edit: I took some pictures so you can see what's going on.]
It so hot and so humid here that the flash drive I carry with me has started to rust.
Actually, I don't know how long ago it started. I checked it this morning, and it was worse than the last time I checked. Seems like the metal had some kind of protective finish on it, and by filing off the old rust, I took off the finish and only encouraged new rust to grow.
So this morning, I filed off what rust I could, then put a thin layer of cooking oil on it. Oil is a great insulator, and while flash drives get warm, I sincerely doubt it'll reach the flash point of oil.

It may not be the best solution, but it's worked great since I put the oil on two days ago, when I started writing this post. No visible new rust, and the oil seems to be holding up fairly well.

This is Becoming Normal For Me

Well, I may have mentioned once or twice that it's... rather hot here. And it's fairly probably that, between the four-ish posts I've showed it in, you're aware I have a massive sliding glass door that essentially makes one wall of my apartment a heat exchanging chunk of glass.

Something I haven't mentioned is that my bed was a little too soft, so I pulled out one of the blankets I had stuffed under the futons.

Now, those of you that have seen our place in Ellensburg will know exactly what I did next.

For those of you that don't: blankets are great insulators. Or any good blanket is.
And, uh, what's the opposite of a heat exchanger?
"An insulator"?
ding! Very good!

...

So now there's a blanket in my window.

No, I don't have any aluminum foil handy or, yes, I would've used that, too.

An Old Picture from a Maid Cafe

A few days before he left Kyoto, Aaron went with me to Osaka, where we wandered around dendentoun (literally "electric electric [town]"). We also stopped at a maid cafe, as we didn't have enough time for our alternate plans.
They didn't want you to take pictures, because they wanted to charge you $8 a shot for them, but I managed to piece together a couple that we took and got this:
Which looks a lot like a random room, but frilly. The maids were all noobs and not very good, and I think that's pretty normal if you go at the start of summer. It's the only time I've been, but I'll make sure to go near the end of summer next time, if I feel the need to blow another $20-40 to talk to 16-year-old high-schoolers in maid outfits.
Alternately, my university has a high school stuck on the back of it, so...

Internets...

The wired 'Net connection at my place hasn't been working since this morning, so I'm standing in the road to Internet again.
I have no idea what's wrong, though. The modem says everything is good and the router is unmanaged, so I can't have done anything to it. I plan to try and talk to the ISP tomorrow, since I don't think anybody will be around on Sunday.

やっと、Fireworks!

Go here for the gallery!

Okay, this post a lot more pictures than I have anything to say, because you can only say so much about fireworks. I mean, they're pretty and all, but how many times can you say "I thought this one was particularly pretty" before that's worn out?

Pretty much the same thing goes for yukata: they pretty much all look good, so it's silly to say "Oh, this one was pretty!" Some of them look really good, but I had issues deciding. I was basically running in a zigzag up the street, trying to keep up with the people I was with while taking pictures of people left and right.

Now, since I took about 250 pictures that came out reasonably, and it seems like a shame to just let them sit on my hard drive, I'm going to post all of them up in a gallery once I'm done with this post. But unless you really like fireworks, I wouldn't bother. I've got most of the shots that came out nicely in this post already. Or I will by the time I'm done. So my plan is to just mix in pictures of fireworks completely at random in the text until I run out. As you can see.
On the other hand, there are 17 pictures in this post and 201 pictures up in the gallery, so if you want more, you know where to get 'em.

A surprisingly small number of people actually declined having their picture taken. If I asked about 80 groups of people, I think about four asked that I not take their pictures. One of them had a headache and didn't want to cope with the flash, and the rest were just like "Uh... No, it's better if you don't." My response in each case something along the lines "Oh, okay. Well, I understand. Excuse me..." and I would run off to the next group.

I'm not sure if this is clear or not, but it was very hot. And muggy.
No, no. It was very muggy. And very hot. If you look at me in the picture at right, you will see what I'm talking about. Actually, any of the pictures of me show it, because I was silly and wore an unpatterned shirt.
That said, the next one doesn't show it nearly as much, though, which is nice. All but two of the pictures with me in them were taken by Ana, and a bunch of the fireworks pictures were, as well. Figure the middle 1/4 or so.

Anything where the fireworks are doing things they shouldn't be, like this green one at right, is one I took. I wanted to play around a little so I wouldn't have all of the pictures "Look, uh... a firework. Whee?" Now they don't do that till you've looked over 350 of them three or four times.

While we were watching the fireworks, I kept thinking "Wow, if just one of those big ones, like, fell over or something, we'd have an entire beach full of people covered in light clothing that it would be pointing at. I also kept thinking "So one of those probably costs $100, at least. They just launched three in a burs - Ah, make tat fifty in a burs- Or two hundred. So that's... A lot of cash." and then i would give up and go back to taking pictures.

I would occasionally glance back at the buildings. I mean, as silly as this might sound, it seems like the perfect time to do something untoward to a crowd of people is something where there are bright flashes and everybody's night vision is screwed, and 95% of people are going to be looking towards the bright flashes anyway. With the random explosions and random talking noise, you could set up just about whatever you want anywhere behind the crowd completely unseen.
Maybe that's just too many movies.

Okay, I also got this picture at right. Guess at what I did?
...
...
I got the shutter-opening noise confused with the shutter-shutting noise and moved the camera when it was exposing instead of when it wasn't. Kind of a cool effect, though, isn't it?


I especially liked this shot because it was of a family. It was the only group with kids that I recall seeing there, which is too bad. The kids looked really happy with the whole thing, and the parents seemed to get along well.

Extra link to the gallery, in case you still haven't looked.