Calligraphy Brushes and Combinations

I went to a calligraphy class today* and talked to the teacher for a while afterward since he let everyone out early. We talked about various paper sizes, various weights of paper, and the different things you call some quantities of paper. I was kind of surprised he didn't have any business cards on him.

Apparently, he gets a paper the size of the classroom and uses a brush that could very well be a broom to write out a massive... thing. I don't know what he does with these things. I mean, we're not talking a small classroom, in case you're wondering. Figure... 30' x 40' or so. It's about $200 worth of paper. Yes, he stands on it to write and, yes, he has to walk around to write individual strokes.

He had some of his brushes with him, and he let me take a picture of them. Well, about 20 pictures, actually. Today's pictures were an exercise in photography and photo manipulation more than anything else, because I'm sure most of you know roughly how I feel about calligraphy.

First up is an overhead view of all of them. The one on the right is made from horse hair, though I don't know if it's tail or mane or of there are very fluffy horses, or if they pick their ears, or what.
The next one to left is made from sheep hair, and the next one from tanuki, which is something like a hybrid between a dog and a raccoon. I was going to link the Wikipedia article, but I can't access any of the Wikipedia servers right now, strangely enough. Anyway, there's quite a bit of folklore about them, apparently, and then there's the actual animal.
So what I did to this picture is fairly limited. I corrected the horrible distortion using my 18-55mm at its wide end creates, and I think I changed the colors slightly.

This one was just gratuitous and really didn't need to be included, but I had two similar shots, so I thought I would see about combining them. I've carefully exported this at the same low resoluation as everything else, so it's hard to see the weird misalignment. Apparently, I can't kep the camera perfectly still while handheld. Imagine that! It's one with the flash on, and one with it off and a longer exposure.
Anyway, don't do this, and if you do, be steadier than I am. Or use a tripod, like someone smart would.

Last is a dramatic (in as much as a pile of inanimate hair can be dramatic) shot of the brushes. I took a few pictures, doing my best to keep it lined up by using two scene elements and my viewfinder. I focused each one on a different brush, and then I picked the two that had the most of them in focus and combined them by hand.

The next version of Photoshop will do this for you automatically. And it only costs $800! You can even trigger this kind of stuff from inside of Lightroom, if you've spent a further $300 on that. It's probably worth it for people who do this kind of stuff a lot, but this is the first time I've done it and I don't see myself doing it a lot in the future.

Anyway, I like this picture the best.
...

DRAMA!

An Embarrassing Class MIstake

So I went to my first day of Spanish class tonight. When I got there, there was an American-sounding woman speaking English and confused why I was there, in her class she was to teach English to. She was also confused about why a bunch of people were taking the class twice.

As it turns out, she was in the wrong room.

So a few minutes later, the real teacher comes, and is confused why I'm there in her class she was to teach Spanish to. I later discovered that the class I was in was a special class for people who had failed some other kind of Spanish class.

So as it turns out, I can't take the class.

Fortunately, we still haven't registered for classes, so it's not a really big deal. I can't take any other languages, though, because they're all second-semester ones, and I don't want to try and catch up on a semester of people studying German for six hours a day. Or Russian. Or French. Maybe Esperanto or something cool, but not French.

I do want to take a foreign language class in Japanese, though, because I want to be more comfortable talking about language in Japanese. Many Japanese people are confused when I use even simple grammatic terms, such as "noun", "verb", or "adjective". I know that there are plenty of people in the States who couldn't tell me what an adjective is, but it's not something I'd expect from 2nd- and 3rd-year college students, let alone those studying language.

Some Pictures; a Review

I took this picture a few days ago and it was kind of random. This guy is the faculty adviser... for world peace. I'm not kidding. My schools motto, by the way is "Pax Mundi Per Linguas" ("World Peace Through Language"), so I guess it's not really too surprising that we have someone like this guy working there.

Anyway, these girls are a part of Habitat for Humanity here, is how I understand, and that's one of the many programs he controls, I guess? Anyway, I had my camera with me and offered to take a picture. I didn't mean to upload this, but it was in my "Put on the blog" folder because I use it more as a generic export folder.

At left you can see Sara (in pink), Sou Jong (with the white hat), Park Mingji (sitting, looking away), and Paul (the, uh, only guy). Sara and Paul are exchanging contact information by IR transfer, easily the most common way of doing so among the people I know. I have a hard time imagining salarymen huddled under an umbrella, trying to get their phones to connect, only to end up exchanging cards anyway. I think the card exchange is important for them. I don't have IR on my phone, but it's called 赤外線 sekigaisen ("outside of red waves") if you want to know.

The next few shots are from a birthday party for some friends at Kyodai I was at Sunday afternoon. On the left are the three birthday girls and a bonus girl, since the group was one short of all the women at hand with the birthday girls.
They didn't all have the same birthday, but it was one of those "let's celebrate a couple of birthdays at once" things. There was cake. I'm still alive.

On the right we have a great example of my progress on Operation Take Pictures of People While They're Eating.
The title's creative, don't you think?

Also, I enjoy surprising people and warning them just a tiny bit before I trigger the shutter, which resulted in this next picture (left). I guess her shoes were rubbing her ankles, and she was headed out into the rain, so she was going to put on more suitable ones. I don't know her name.

At right is a picture from my judo club. Last I heard, these two broke up, so I don't know what's going on now, but it looks to have taken a turn for the better.

The girl on top is Takako, and the guy on the bottom is Aki-chan, whose massive umbrella I accidentally stole. He said it was okay and that I could keep it, because he had already bought another one. They're both a lot better than me at judo. Like, Takako weighs half as much as I do and she kicks my ass. When I took this picture, we were all pretty much just messing around, 'cause time was about up.

Last is a picture of everybody screwing around a little later after practice. Far left is Ryohei, the team captain. I was talking to Aki-chan earlier after I nearly broke his spine, and he said that it's everybody's wish to throw Ryohei just once. My dream is to throw someone. I aim high, you know?

Behind him is Aki-chan. On the right is Takako again, and Keiichiro is on the far right with the wooden sword. Keiichiro has really good English and has no problems talking with me at conversational speeds. He also speaks some Chinese, I think.

And with that, I need to get ready for class.

Oops, Sleep.

I kept meaning to write a post about the stuff I've been doing the past few days, but I got in a long and very involved email conversation with someone and ended up writing a few pages of that instead.
I'll try and get up early and get some pictures up here, with some accompanying textual bits.

For now, sleepy bed bed, says my sleepy-o-meter.

Cuy and Culebron

I had one of the guys from my Basic Japanese class come by tonight and we watched parts of a couple of movies. Afterwards, he was telling me about something, and ended up looking guinea pigs on Wikipedia.
Me: "You guys have guinea pigs in Peru?"
Kilk: "Yeah! Haven't you ever had one?"
Me: "Yeah, I sure miss him..."
Kilk: "I know! They're so delicious!"
Me: "... Heh?"

Lo and behold, he wasn't kidding. Apparently, guinea pigs are a common food in Peru. On the news of other pets that you eat, they sometimes mix dog meat in with beef. I was able to verify the guinea-pig-eating with a couple of sources online, and Wikipedia comes through once again, though I didn't find that article until I went to find a site I had found previously. Here's a small quote:

"Peruvians consume an estimated 65 million guinea pigs each year, and the animal is so entrenched in the culture that one famous painting of the Last Supper in the main cathedral in Cusco shows Christ and the twelve disciples dining on guinea pig"

What spawned this sudden interest in Peruvian foods was Kilk explaining to me one of his favorite (I guess?) drinks: culebron. Plus or minus an accent mark on the O to make it sound less French.
Culebron is made by taking a live snake and putting it in a bottle, and getting some kind of alcohol, usually 35-50%, from what I've seen online. You then fill the bottle with alcohol and drown the snake. Then... I guess you drink it? I don't know what you do with the snake.

My Arguably-NSFW Breakfast

This is what I had for breakfast this morning. It had all the qualities as stuff I cook: it's ugly as hell, smells delicious, and the taste was weird at best. At times, it was good, but other parts, I hadn't cooked enough water out of the broccoli, so the egg got wet, which created a bit of a texture issue. Egg to me is a fairly dry food. Not soggy, anyway. Or at least, not a gushing kind of soggy.The ingredients are a yellow pepper I've had in my fridge for a few days, some half-frozen broccoli, about a half pound of chicken, three eggs, soy sauce, ginger sauce, and some pepper.

The title of this post is due to how scary the food looks.

Fireworks

There were a couple judo club parties I wasn't invited to over the summer, for one reason or another*. At one of them, they did some fireworks, and they got this pretty cool shot. I saw it and asked Ryouhei to send it to me, and he did. Here you go:

*I'm kind of on the edge of the network of people, in a way, so it's entirely possible that I simply couldn't be contacted, or was forgotten about. Only one or two of the club members has my contact info, so...

Charged into Overdraft

Most of the time, I like my bank, Washington Mutual. They generally have pretty good people, and they do everything in a fairly reasonable timeframe. My opinion of them was lowered somewhat today when I discovered an email in my inbox labeled "New Overdraft/Non-Sufficient Funds Notice". Since I haven't done anything with either account in about two weeks, it seems kind of strange to have an overdraft funds notice.
As it turns out, they hit me with a $5 fee for going too long without having the minimum amount in my savings account. Well, the 78 cents in my savings account really isn't enough to satisfy that five-dollar charge, so it naturally went into overdraft. They have a policy of optionally charging you $30 for overdraft incidents, depending on how good a day they're having at that moment.

I've transferred money from checking to that account to cover it and hopefully bring it past the minimum amount. I just wish someone would've been a little more thoughtful and maybe notified me that I was outside of some kind mystical limit.

Why Always Me?

So on the first day of class last semester, the teacher asked me to go sit in front of the whole class while they solicited me with questions. First day, new teacher I've never met, and the most familiar I am with anybody in the class is Sara, who I'd met during our entrance ceremony.

So I'm sitting in front of the whole class of about 17, shaking with nervous anticipation - the bad kind, if there's any question in your mind - and the first question I get comes from Yabari. See that link for more info, but it basically ended up with me sitting in front of the class looking like an idiot for fifteen minutes while responding to questions with about as much fluency as my little sister reading a physics textbook. She's 8 years old, by the way... I think...

So today, the teacher wants us to individually volunteer to get up and do and do pretty much what I did the first semester. Of course, nobody volunteers.

Naturally, she picks me to go up to the front of the room and talk. But not for fifteen minutes this time. No, no, no. She just waited until she got bored of asking me questions.

To start with, she asked if I liked sweets, which is like... Well, I like sweets, anyway. After we talked about where you can buy what, and what temples are involved, and how to get there via the train system I haven't used in months, we went on further and someone asked what else I know about Kyoto.
Ten minutes and two maps later, "What other hobbies do you have?"
Ten minutes and probably a diagram or two later, "Where are you from? America, was it?"
Three minutes and a very rectangular map of the US and Washington later...

And this went on for upwards of an hour. Sometimes, it was kind of cool, and I totally got to make maps and diagrams, and we basically spent an hour of the class with me teaching the class a little bit about almost all of my interests. At times when I found my vocabulary particularly lacking, it got a little embarrassing.

Here's my best blunder of the day that I can recall:
宇宙引っ越し　うちゅうひっこうし (uchuu hikkoushi) "Change residence to space"
宇宙飛行士　うちゅうひこし (uchuu hikoushi) "Space pilot"

I also got to talk to a math teacher for a while, who strongly recommended I not take his class because it was too easy. That's weird for me. That's like someone telling me not to take a kanji class because I know them too well or something. Shocking, anyway.

Oh, and I got full points on a kanji test today. Also shocking.

Oh, and I think I finally figured out how to cook gyouza and make it come out right.

Despite the title of this post, all in all, today was pretty good.

Peanut Butter and Jelly Victory!

I was just looking through the statistics for this site and I was happily surprised. Someone found the post I wrote on peanut butter and jelly rice and not by accident. I kid you not: someone actually searched for peanut butter and jelly rice on Google, and this blog comes up.

Not only that, but other people have recipes up for it.

Pretend I've got a spiel here about how "They all laughed" and "I'll show them all" and "[maniacal laughter]".

Drinking Water

Not necessarily out of thirst, but much more out of boredom, I've been drinking a lot of water today. I just finished my fifth or sixth liter of water today, and I've also had about a liter of Kagome of varying flavors.

When my mom asks "Are you drinking enough water?" I feel like I can pretty positively say "I think so."

I understand the average person would need to drink in excess of a liter of water per hour for an extended period of time to notice any deleterious effects, so don't worry about me getting water poisoning or anything like that. My laziness limits how much I can drink because I have to go almost twenty feet to go get another liter of water.

Also, you need to have limited intake of foods to be at serious risk for long-duration water poisoning, and I'm sure you all know that I have no problems with consuming plenty of food.
But if ou are concerned, you could send me money to go eat out more often. I wouldn't complain.

I appear to have run out of water...

Rice and Water... Disaster?

I went to make another batch of rice last night only to discover a couple of flies flying around in the bag. To me, that says there's probably something in there that I don't really want to know about, much less eat, so I grabbed it by the top, twisted it shut, and tossed it in the trash. Unfortunately, I was not smart enough to get a reserve bag of rice, which I fully intend to do soon. I understand the Japanese disaster recovery system blows, and it sometimes takes a long time to get basic services back. Having enough rice to eat for a week or two set aside seems like a good way to at least combat that somewhat. Rice in an airtight bag should last quite a while, I think.

I have 10 liters of water store in bottles that are completely full and under negative pressure to inhibit bacterial growth. It's not enough (about two and a half gallons), but it's something I only recently started building up with bottles as I use them. It's potable water to last me a few days if I don't wash my dishes and whatnot. I regularly use the same bowl for weeks, so that's not really an issue, though going without showering or clean clothes would kind of suck. I'm slowly adding to it, but I'm going to need to move some of it outside soon so it doesn't take up too much floorspace.

I've heard that you should expect to use five gallons of water per day per person, but that seems awfully high to me. In addition, it's simply unreasonable to expect to be able to store that much water. For reference, the big jugs on water coolers are usually five-gallon (19 liters) containers. Imagine having seven of those in your living room and you can see why I think that's a little unreasonable.

Surprising Weather

Last night was really cool. By that, I mean that it was actually cool enough to be slightly chilly. I usually keep my door open so that the humidity and heat from me and my electronics doesn't build up, but I actually got cold last night.
I climbed under the blanket, I guess, and had one of the best night's sleep I've had in a long time. Also, a really nice dream that lasted nearly six real-time hours.

There were explosions, it was nice.

School! I think.

Okay, tomorrow is my first day of school. At least, according to our official calendar.
We shall see if I can get some decent sleep tonight. Something I ate isn't agreeing with my stomach, so I'm not certain. I just ate some Saltines, though, so I should be fine in a few minutes.

Flower Park/Not-Park

I went up to Northern Kyoto yesterday and was somewhat surprised to find out that it's less than half an hour away by bike. I visited the park I talked about in the day before yesterday's post, but it turns out it's not so much a park as... A 50'x30' dirt field with flowering plants on three sides and a bench on the fourth. There's a also a large fenced off building. I'dve gone in, but it was locked, so presumably I'm not supposed to go in.

[Left: A rock.
Right: A leaf.]

I imagine this place is beautiful in the spring and summer. It should look fairly pretty once fall comes, as well. Many of the trees and plants have wooden labels attached to them, written in kanji with yomigana (how to read the kanji).


It's nearly fall, of course, but there were still some flowers in bloom, like you can see on both sides of this paragraph. There was also a shrine of some kind, but I'm not sure what it was dedicated to. There were flowers and maybe a glass of water, which leads me to believe it's similar to the shrines that you find all over town. I think there are are a few hundred scattered around Kyoto. I'm not certain why I didn't take a picture of it... It has some nice carving done on it, so maybe I'll grab a shot later and at it here.

They have an interesting choice of lights that I don't really understand the reason for. I mean, it appears to be a normal socket that's completely exposed to the elements and simply protected from physical shock by the cage around it. Seems as though you would go through a lot of bulbs or power due to shortages and random water, but I have to assume they don't. Either way, it looks pretty cool.

They seem to really not want you to bring bikes in, as there's this freaky fence thing at the entrance, and a sign saying not to bring bikes into the park. It also warns against playing ball games, especially baseball, in the park. Please see the picture at right for further details.

These last two were just me playing around with my camera and flash. I couldn't tell whether the bug-thing (left) was alive or if it was just the molted skin, but I didn't know what it was, so I stayed a few feet away.
You can see a little of the shrine in the background as that out-of-focus speckled gray splotch.

And, yay, flash.

Once Was Lost

An ellipsis in the title for this post would make it smoother, but a little melodramatic. So, no ellipsis.

So I wrote a disc with pictures on it for the Russian girl whose name I still cannot spell. About a week later, I had my first hard drive crash and lost about 4,000 pictures I'd taken while here in Japan. Well, she had that disc, so I asked to borrow it so I could copy the pictures onto my new drive (which later ended up crashing...). Well, I thought I managed to lose the disc, so I found all the pictures I could that I had published here and on Picasa Web, and some that I had processed and had random bits of, and put them on a disc, gave it to her and explained what had happened.

Well, I just found the disc that I gave her originally, and it contains all 419 of the original, full-resolution shots from my camera for the Okayama field trip and a couple from the school festival.

I need to clean my room more often.

Some Bikery

I wandered towards northern Kyoto on my bike today with Bryden. We found a park I fully intend to visit later with my D80, and a few hundred preschoolers to dodge. I tried to ask one of them if there was anything at the top of the hill we were on, but they kind of looked at me like "What's that? Is that a person?"
Beyond the staring, they didn't respond. They watched us until we were out of sight, though. Kind of creepy, all in all.

On the bright side, today was a very nice day for a bit of bike riding, though I ended up using a bandanna to keep the sweat out of my eyes, the exercise felt good. Ten kilometers on a bike isn't much for most people, I'm sure, but it was a nice way to spend a few hours. Cut me some slack, there are hills and we ate lunch.

I'm planning to run a similar path tomorrow, and I'll bring my camera with me, so maybe I'll have something for you next time.

Bland Map of Explanation +1

So in case you're wondering why it's so hot here, you might want to look at this map. I mean, Japan is generally considered to temperate, but it's on par with southern California, which is not generally a chilly place. And we've got large bodies of water in two directions within about 30 miles.

View Larger Map

New Bike

Yay, a new bike! It's the same as my previous bike, but the guy who calibrated everything wasn't quite as skilled, so it's not quite as nice as before. Also, after having ridden a number of times every day, I haven't been on a bike in a three weeks, so riding feels a little weird.

Between the calibration and the three weeks, I'm pretty awkward on it. I don't think the guy filled the tires up enough, either. But, it's a bike, and it means I can get around again. Yay!

Another $300 down, though, between the bike ($250), registration, a second lock, and lunch while I was waiting for them to get it ready to go. That puts me with $100 for this month, and $50 of that should go to my 'Net connection, if they ever actually charge me for it.

... Not!

So... Walking to school, it seemed awfully quiet. I couldn't point to any single sound that was missing, but there's a background hum of a city that usually doesn't go away, and that wasn't there. It's just my imagination, I thought.
So I get to the intersection by my school and I notice that not only is there not a massive pile of people waiting to cross the intersection, there are no crossing guards. Weird, but I'm running a few minutes late at this point, so not too surprising, I guess. Mental shrug.
So I open the door to building nine and - actually, I didn't. It was locked, and while a quarter inch of glass isn't even close to impassable...

So after not opening the door to building nine, I went over and talked to one of the guards:
Me: [inhaling to start talking]
Guard: Oh, hi! It's been a while, hasn't it!
Me: Have I met this person before? I mean, I guess I have, but... Uh...
Me, out loud: Uh, yeah! Do you know when building nine will open?
Guard: Today's a holiday. It's respect for the aged day. [She said this part v-e-r-y slowly so I could pick up the syllables. I then went on about how I thought today seemed strange due to this, and that, and this other thing.]
Me: Anyway. So I should be able to get into building nine to talk to someone either tomorrow or the day after, as long as I go in in the afternoon?
Guard: Yeah, you should be able to.

Having written that down, the conversation doesn't sound nearly as fun as it was when I was actually having it. She had a cute accent in her English, which she would use occasionally for some more common words, though I suspect she's pretty skilled.

So today is not only not the first day of classes, but today is so not the first day that we don't have class for another two days in addition. Woo, more summer break.
[Edit: It turns out I may have been off by an entire week.]

I never got to sleep last night...

Can't Sleep...

I have a history of not being able to sleep on the first day of school. I don't mean to say that I can't seem to fall asleep during class on the first day - that's never been a problem.
But the first day back always seems to result in me tired, lying, in bed, wondering why I can't sleep. It's 3Am here and I got about two and a half hours of sleep, but I was awake for a good portion of that, which was really weird. I was awake and trying to talk to someone in a dream, and managed to do both at the same time, which was really weird.
...

Anyway, going to play some games and hopefully I can get a few more hours of sleep in a bit.
[Edit: Half an hour later and no luck yet.]

Ubernets on the Intertube

I was able to get 7.5 megabytes per second of uploading going on a few days ago. That may not seem like much, but with a speed like that, it's as likely that I'm hitting the limits for how fast the Ethernet cable connecting my computer to the router, and even the router's ability to process packets, as I am to be hitting the connection cap applied by the ISP.
7.5MB/s is very fast. Our connection back in the States in Ellensburg is a 10Mb (megabit) per second connection, and usually runs at about 8 Mbits/s, while my connection here passed 50Mbits/s.
Our connection in the States: 10Mbits/s, $80/month
My connection here in Japan: 100Mbits/s, $50/month

But, and this is kind of a pain, for about a quarter of the day, from about 6PM until midnight, the ISP blocks peer to peer software as best they can, and you generally get very poor bandwidth and generally a poor connection during this time. What this says to me is they've oversold their infrastructure by quite a lot.
The rest of the time, though, it's a nice, fairly stable connection that is blindingly fast.

Grades and The Test

The proficiency test yesterday wasn't so bad, except, of course, the kanji. Kanji are an evil doom-plague on the face of the earth and must be destroyed. Evil, evil, hate hate.
"Just say 'No' to Kanji" is my new slogan I think. Maybe "Only you can prevent kanji."

I shaved beforehand because what little beardness I had was really itchy and I didn't want to cope with that. I'm officially never growing a beard, by the way. At right, you can see me looking somewhat Amish. I guess.

In addition, I got my grades back yesterday - finally - and I think I did alright. I got either a B or an A average, depending on whether you go by this university's standard or by my home university's standards. I honestly don't know how these will transfer.
I have some hope they'll transfer as the nearly all As, but I'm not quite positive enough to expect that.
Still, worst case is that I end up with a B average for this last semester, and that's not bad.

Query Responses

In other news, here are the top results for how people search to find the blog. The majority of people just straight to the address ([my name] + ".com" + "/japan"), but a good percentage of people gett here by completely different methods.

Percent	Terms
21.9%	maiko
9.4%	monkey
9.4%	japan the land of only two prongs
6.3%	judo choke out
6.3%	rice cooker

But some of the best things are the completely random ones:

frawress victoly	what is kouhai mean
mcdonalds english menu japan	japan america land area
butterfly seek hdd	how to buy a bike in japan
japanese camera bag	bicycle drum brake japanese
ramen museum+tokyo	okonomiyaki utensils
Okayama farm picking	tikimee
japan 3 pronged plugs	soap japan
sex shops in oomiya city

I'm going to do my best to satisfy the searches that actually make sense.

• Maiko - Maiko are like the oh-so-famous geisha, but are in training. Maiko tend to wear brighter clothes, and have more colorful decorations. In my experience, maiko are more likely to be attractive, probably because they're tend to be much younger and in better shape.
  My post "Jeff" has some pictures of actual maiko, and my post Maiko'd has my friends getting dressed up as maiko.
• Monkeys - I've run into these while hiking to the east of Kyoto, and at the monkey park.
• Judo choke out - There are lots of different ways to choke someone out in judo, and honestly, if you manage to get someone into a choke hold, they deserve what they get. For more information on the chokes in judo, please see JudoInfo's page on the topic.
• Rice cookers - I use my rice cooker almost as much as I use my computer. It's constantly either keeping rice warm or making it warm. I paid $60 for mine at Joshin's, an electronics store, when I first got here. I would recommend anybody staying in Japan longer than a few weeks to look at getting a rice cooker. You can probably find a small, cheap one at a recycle shop for $20 or so.
  The cheapest rice cooker I've seen was $47, and was a total waste of money. It held 1.5 cups of rice, and had no warming feature, no timer. Switch on, switch off. Same thing in the States would cost $10 and hold twice as much rice.
  The most expensive rice cooker I've seen was priced at about $1,200. It was a 10-cup contraption with stainless steel casing. Presumably, it makes rice taste better?
  
• Frawress victoly - Uh, I guess I used this once? It's just "flawless victory" with the Rs and Ls flipped, as per the basic rules of Engrish.
• mcdonalds english menu japan - The McDonalds here in Kyoto have Japanese menus, then on the back of those menus are English versions. Same in Osaka and Kobe, so no worries.
• Japanese camera bag - Don't buy camera gear here in Japan. Just don't. I mean a bag isn't usually a really expensive piece of gear, but in general, it's cheaper to fly to America and buy it there. Nonetheless, I did buy a small camera bag here for $27. It's an American brand, though, just like nearly all camera bag brands are. I mean, LowePro, Tamrac, National Geographic...
• ramen museum+tokyo - See my post on the ramen museum. You should be warned that the museum is in Shin-Yokohama, and not Tokyo. It's probably a half hour out of, say, Shinjuku, but don't quote me on that.
• Okayama farm picking - I guess this is a common thing? I haven't heard of anybody doing it except our trip to the strawberry field. If anybody seriously wants me to research this, drop me a line via email and I can look into it.
• japan 3 pronged plugs - Key word here is konsento, which, while pronounced like the English consent ("permission"), means an electric plug. Almost all plugs here in Japan are only two prongs, hence the name of this blog. If you're wondering if your American electronics will work here, they should be fine. My laptop had no problems in Yokohama, which is in Eastern Japan, and thus uses 50Hz. Neither did my cell phone charger or Bluetooth headset charger.
  If you're looking for a converter, you can probably get by with some obscene gestures involving fingers and holes. People who work in shops here often don't know what their store sells, so don't believe any employee of a large store who says that they don't sell a particular item. This happened to me and I got a little upset, and proceeded to show the Joshin employee where they keep the converters.
  
• sex shops in oomiya city - ... I've never been to Oomiya city, but there's a part of Kyoto called Oomiya. The only sex shop I know about in Kyoto is over by Kawaramachi, though. If you're looking specifically for sex shops, I'd look for a larger city like Tokyo or Osaka. Osaka's less than an hour away, though, so...
• what is kouhai mean - All criticism about grammar and the formation of effective search queries aside... kouhai refers to someone you are senior to in some kind of organization, be it a club or a company or school. The term isn't used very often, though you hear its opposite, sempai, quite often.
  Again, people with less rank than you are your kouhai, and your superiors are sempai.
  
• japan america land area - The entire Japanese archipelago (377,873 km²) has roughly the same land area as the state of California (423,970 km²), and that's pretty much the best comparison I've seen between the two. It's worth pointing out that while California is mostly habitable, Japan has something around 7% arable land, and in spite of that, has over half the population (127,433,494) of the USA (estimated at 305 million).
  
• how to buy a bike in japan - Go to a used bike shop with $60, and buy a bike. Point to the one you want, and wave the money around. New bikes start at $100, and go up through $400 for normal ones, with battery-powered ones at about $900. You don't need to bring anything with you except for some kind of proof of identity, but to fill out the bike registration card (required), you will need to know your address, and they prefer it if you have a telephone number as well. There's a $5 for buying any kind of bike, new or used. If you don't have to fill out a registration card, there's a chance the bike was either stolen, or that there's some other questionable thing going on. Keep in mind that if you get a bike from your buddy who's leaving the country, and the cops stop you - I've heard they stop foreigners a lot, but I've never been stopped on my bike - they're going to wonder why you're using someone else's bike.
• bicycle drum brake japanese - Japanese bikes tend to use drum brakes instead of the pad- and disc-type brakes common in America. They consist of a band of metal that compresses around a central cylinder, probably made of something heat resistant like arsenic. They're loud and squeaky and often used instead of the bell on a bike. "Drum brake" in Japanese is, unsurprisingly, doramu bureeki.
• okonomiyaki utensils - Okonomiyaki can be made with any generic turner, or even a spatula if you must. Okonomiyaki shops tend to have little metal spatulas ("spatulae"?) that you use to cook and murderate the okonomiyaki. You should be able to buy them at any supermarket or someplace like Jusco.
• tikimee - That's the name of the guy that tagged my site on StumbleUpon. I guess he does this a lot?
• soap japan - Soap is soap. There's nothing special about soap here as far as I know. They have a similar selection to what I've seen in the States. Prices are decent.
  

And that's the end of that. I've been meaning to do this post for a few months now. I wish I could email these people somehow, but you can't really send emails to IPs, and with XP SP2, NT Messenger Service was disabled by default...

Odd Test Problems

The proficiency test is tomorrow and Bryden and I just realized we know neither where it is or when it is. Hopefully, that's not part of the test. That'd be way too cliche.

Bicycles

When I first got here, I bought a bicycle. Seriously, within the first week, I think it was. It was a $50 POS bike, but it hauled me around for three months before I upgraded to a new $260 bike that my dad sent me money for (on top of the piles of cash he normally sends to keep my mooching butt afloat!). I lent my old bike to a friend who left a few days later and it was stolen some time after he returned it, around the beginning of August. No biggie, though, 'cause I still have my new bike. Right?

Well, when I went to Tokyo, my new bike was stolen. After not quite two months of owning it. So much for Japanese crime rates, I guess. At right is an artists rendition of me upon discovering my bike stolen. Sure it, it sucks, but it's the best I could get for two pieces of gum and some pocket lint.

The weird thing is that they were both locked up, and I still have both keys for both bikes' locks.

Anyway, I went to the police last week and reported that my bike had been stolen, but in a bizarre twist of paper shuffling, I told them my new bike had the numbers from my old bike, and when I discovered the new bike's registration the next day, I went down to the police station and sorted the matter out, which only took about an hour. The police now have the right number for my now-stolen, two-month old, $260 bike.

That was all last week. A week and seven trips to the police station later, I have a case number, which I can use to take advantage of the insurance policy that I got on my new bike. It only covers half the cost, but that's $130 more than nothing, and I'm sure going to take it. I'll probably end up spending another $20 or so to get a bike that isn't a mamacheri (mama's bike) and that is the right size.

Slow Week, part three

This is my last full week of summer freedom and I have a proficiency test coming up on Saturday. Between that and trying to switch over to a awake-during-the-day sleep schedule, I'm not doing much that's particularly exciting stuff to write about right now.

Grah, so tired...

漢字、大嫌い！

I was watching xxxHolic and I ran across this clip. It should help to give you some idea of why I hate kanji so, so much.

I apologize for the tiny subtitles, but I'm too lazy to try and fix them. Stupid MKV format is a pain to work with.

Burliquitoes?

I just got a mosquito, but didn't. Like, I hit it hard enough that I can see on my hands the traces of it, and it left some weird black stuff on both sides where it hit. My hands stung, I hit this mosquito so hard.
But it's not dead. It kind of fluttered out of the air, and I guess it flew off again. When something a million times your weight hits you as hard as it can, and you get up and fly away, you know you've got perseverence.

日本の物価

I just bought floss and laundry soap. A two-pound box cost me $2, while 40m of floss cost me $5. That seems strange to me, somehow. Maybe next time I'll just get some twine.

Weird 'Net Twitchiness

I don't know what's causing it, but I've been having problems accessing services authenticated by Google, such as Blogger and Gmail. Around 6PM my time, the connection starts become a little wonky as it becomes evident that Japan has expanded access to broadband faster than it's expanded the infrastructure to support it. From 6PM until midnight or 1AM, the connection is not very fast, and the ISPs do their best to stop any kind of peer-to-peer filesharing, such as Winny, BitTorrent, and eDonkey.

During that time, I have issues getting logged into Blogger, for some reason, though if I'm already logged in I have no problems using the site. I had to restart my web browser around 4PM and didn't log into Blogger again until about 7PM, and it naturally failed. I was able to login around 1:30AM and now it's all good.

As far as what the problem is, I'm not certain. Only Google seems to be affected, strangely. And only if I'm trying to log in. It's weird.

Tokyo: Akihabara (Day 2)

This day was originally supposed to be entirely Akihabara, but in all honesty, I simply ran out of enthusiasm for looking at figures, porn, and porn figures after the first fifteen shops. I mean, there was non-porn stuff as well, but there was as much that was blatently pornographic as there was anything else. This may have had something to do with being led around by an anime otaku, but I'm not certain. This kind of stuff was largely limited to just a few buildings we went into, so don't let it deter you from going. Then again, if it's what you're looking for it won't be difficult to find.

I picked up some little omiyage for people, but none of it has shipped yet because I've been lazing around and breaking my computer instead of being productive. I left my room once today to go check the mail, if that gives you an idea of just how lazy I'm being right now.

Okay, so on with the Akihabara! Well, after this picture of a flower I took that morning. My 18-55mm just doesn't do macro well, you know, but I like it and this picture anyway. So there.

We left the house around 10:30 or so, and got to Akihabara within an hour or so, and it cost us about $5 in train fare. We got off at Akihabara station, where we met our guide, a Mr. Kanayama. You can see him posing at left.

We started off wandering around in random stores, as far as I can tell, and I saw a lot of figures that I wanted to buy. This confuses me for two reasons: I didn't think I liked dolls; the starting price for the good ones was about $50. Two of those would be the same as a brand new tripod. Four would be a cheap lens... You can see where this is going, I think.
I'm generally not a big fan of things whose only purpose is to go on a shelf and never be used, so I don't know what I would do with figures if I had bought them. Fortunately, I didn't, so all is well.

There were a lot of figures in each store, and I we visited at least four stores completely dedicated to them, each about... figure the average size of a Radio Shack. In spite of the quantity, I really didn't find myself drawn to many of them. Here are some girls, I think - it's often hard to tell with Japanese people - checking out the scantily clad figures.
Go figure?

But there were a couple that I was very tempted by, such as these Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball figures. Some of you may remember these characters either from that game, or the multi-platform game Dead or Alive 3. A number of people have played it on my Xbox at our Chamith house.
Looking at this picture more closely, I can see that they're supposed to be from the second version of DOA:XBV that's for the Xbox 360. I haven't played it myself, or even ever seen it. I mean, I've only played the actual Dead or Alive 4 for Xbox 360 once, and that was at Sakura-con. Was very thoroughly schooled.

This one was surprisingly low on the creepy figurines list, despite the human-size scale. I've seen people here that look less realistic than this giant doll, though, which I will admit worries me to some extent. Japanese women have a tendency to wear... rather more makeup than one might think. I've checked with at least five other people and they all agree with me, so I'm not alone on this.

I watched Shana and Fate with someone who hasn't been reading this blog lately, but I'm putting these up because I found them and thought they were cool. The Zero figurine is a little bit odd, yeah, but we are talking about a store for otaku, so it's either that or a maid outfit, right?

We wandered around quite a lot, but mostly found more of the same general sort of thing. I mean, I probably have 60 pictures of random figures that I took while no one was looking, but honestly, you can only see so many before you start thinking "Oh, on this figure, only the skirt comes off?" and "Look, it's another random anime character I don't recognize!" Though I would wager I recognized at least half of all the characters I saw. Given I haven't watched but two anime since coming here, that make me feel good as an anime-watching person.

While we were doing the aforementioned wandering around, we stopped for some ice cream, and right next to the place was a place selling some kind of pork-based food. You can see the guy shaving off little bits of pork at left. Interesting method, don't you think?

And here (at right) you can see why it is that I don't want to buy radios (AKA walkie talkies) here in Japan. The cheapest price I see in that whole lot is about $100. For one. Oh, and did I mention that they're not interoperable? They only work with radios from the same brand, and even then only sometimes.

I'd love to get a batch of six or so cheap bubble-pack radios here. They'd be so nice for coordinating groups and meetups. Given the cost of voice calls on a phone, they'd pay for themselves pretty quickly, too. And they're usable in an emergency, unlike a cell phone, as cell networks are so easily overloaded.

Specifics aside, my overall take on Akihabara is as follows:

• If you're looking for anime, manga, or anything related to them - including music and third-party porn - come to Akihabara and you will be at home. You'll be broke pretty quickly, too.
• If you're looking for hard-to-find electronics and have exhausted all other methods of getting whatever it is, come to Akihabara. They have it, I'm sure.
• If you're looking to build something that involves any number of a variety of different random tiny eletronic thingamawhatsits, come to Akihabara. They have more thingamawhatsits than you can shake a doohickey at.
  
• If you're looking for name-brand or popular consumer electronics - say, camera gear - don't bother. Prices in Akihabara are no better than you would get from anywhere in the Western world. They're slightly cheaper than average for Japan, on average, I think. But not enough to make it worth the trip unless you're also coming for sightseeing.

In the end, I can't say that it was a really amazing place, but it's a place that I couldn't not go, given the chance. I'm glad I was able to go, even if the only thing I gained was to be able to say, "Yeah, I've been to Akihabara." I may just mentally add a "... So?" on the end of that.

[This is, I think, the last of my posts about my trip to Tokyo. People keep asking, so here's what I thought of the trip as a whole: It wasn't great, but I definnitely don't regret it, either.]

Follow the... Yellow-Striped Road?

I took the pictures for this post while I was in Tokyo, but I have been keeping it ready and written it for a rainy day. Or a slow day. Either way.

I don't know if this is a normal thing to Europeans, or maybe just people from large cities in general, but when I first got here, I had no idea why there these yellow tiles in a bizarre network across the entire city.

The reason they're there is so that people who can't see can navigate around more safely. Those patches with the dots mark intersections and terminating points, and are different enough from the ones with the straight lines that you can feel the difference through shoes without too much of a problem. I imagine it would be much easier with a little practice.

The weird thing is that I've never seen a single person using these. I know blindness isn't a really common thing, and you wouldn't expect to see people who can't see wandering around the city much. The thing is, I've seen a couple of blind people wandering near these things, but I've never seen anybody but me using 'em.

I think they're cool anyway.

In addition, it's fairly often that you will here a repeating doorbell-like noise that helps the visually impaired to find entrances to buildings, the subway, and whatnot.

New New Hard Drive Setup

In light of my hard drive failure and the corresponding 250GB of data loss, I decided that enough is enough, and I've changed my setup around drastically. First of all, the heat can't be doing good things for the lifespan of these drives, so I bought a second external interface, but this one completely surrounds the drive and has a small fan on one end and an opening diagonally opposed to it. Inside that enclosure is a Seagate 500GB 7200RPM with a 32MB cache, and in my normal, slot-it-like-a-tape interface is (yet another) Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM with a 16MB cache.

Now, any sane person, after three WD drive failures, would stop buying the things. But I've figured out my stupidity. Oh yes, that was a fun conversation.

Me: I bought this 400GB drive here about two months ago, and now it's making this kind of clicking noise.
Employee: Uh... How long ago?
Me: About two months.
Employee: ... Do you have the receipt?
Me: You're holding it.
Employee: So I am.
Me: [Wait for 15 minutes]
Employee: It's a little... difficult.
Me: So you can't do it? That seems odd, because I'm looking at these drives and they all have a one-year warranty. Is it just my drive that's just like this one that doesn't? Just the one drive that I bought?
Employee: Yes.
Me: Doesn't that seem a little strange?
Employee: ...
Me: ...
Employee: I'm very... sorry?
Me: Well, thanks for your help.

As it would turn out, the drives that keep crapping out on me were used. Yeah, used. You know what you shouldn't do? Buy used electronics that have moving parts. Yeah. Apparently, you tell them apart by the fact that the used ones have pink anti-static baggies that they come in, while the new ones come in white anti-static baggies. How could I not have known? It's so clear and intuitive. Was that enough sarcasm to make the hate clear?
The best part is that the new ones don't cost a yen more. They're actually cheaper, in some cases.

Still, it's my fault for not asking or something.
If you need me, I'm going to be beating myself about the spleen with this kanji dictionary...

"Another Hard Drive, Please."

I'm really beginning to hate magnetic hard drives. I think I just had another one fail on me. On the bright side, it gave me one warning death, revived itself, and I had enough time to get all my pictures. I'm trying to bring it online so I can back the rest of it up onto DVDs, but to no avail at this point.
There are a number of things that could be causing them to fail, but I don't know which of them it is, or if it's a combination of a bunch of things. For the past two months or so, it was rare for humidity to drop below 90%. The drive would regularly get hot enough that I couldn't hold my fingers against it without risking a burn due to the lack of cooling... THere are other things, but I'm hoping it's one of those to, and also that they'll take this drive back. I have done nothing to it and am using the same gear the store uses.
It should be fine!

English Accent

I went to a pub with a friend and one of the guys there was trying to help me find something nonalcoholic to drink. Well, he recommended the "Kodomono Cider".

I should take a moment to tell you that Japanese has tonal patterns in every word that help you to figure what the other person is saying, since they don't really believe in spaces in either writing or speech, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say that they have more homophones than some languages have discrete words. In writing, you have Chinese characters (kanji) to "assist" you in figuring out what's going on.
In speech, if someone says hashi, there are three possible meanings: "bridge", "chopsticks", and "edge". Now, this seems like it could be really confusing if you happened to be eating while walking over a bridge, but the Japanese have two ways of solving this:

1. Never eating while performing any kind of locomotion. Bad, bad, naughty.
2. Tone patterns!

Now, while the Japanese are nowhere near as draconian when it comes to tonal accentation as the Chinese are (I can't even count to ten in Chinese without saying that someone's mother is a donkey. Or something.), it does cause a little confusion if you completely fail them. If you've ever talked to someone who doesn't pause between the words he's saying, or read something that has no spaces, it's fairly similar. It'salittlehardertofigureoutwhat'sbeingsaid, I think. I mean, you can still get it, but it throws you for a second.

So, back to the cider I got. What it was was "child's beer", or こどものビール (kodomo no biiru). When the guy said this, though, he said kodomono, with a flat accent on the whole thing, which says to me a brand name or something. I think he also transposed two syllables at one point and said komodono, and I couldn't help picturing him trying to get massive lizards to drink for the rest of the night.

Now, that looks pretty confusing, and I wrote it, so to recap:

1. kodomo no - "child's"
2. kodomono - No meaning that I'm aware of, so I assumed it was a brand name. I don't really frequent bars, you know? Sounds like kudamono (fruit).
   
3. komodono - Either a large lizard, or someone respected named "Komo". This style isn't used anymore, so...

Now, I mentioned that Japanese has no spaces, so you may be thinking "What's the difference between kodomo no and kodomono if the space isn't it?"
Having the space there tells when written in roman characters will make you subconsciously pronounce it differently. Try reading it out loud and I think you'll see what I mean. What you should hear is that you, as an English speaker (presumably, anybody who's reading this also speaks English), naturally place the stress accent in a certain place. The Japanese language has something similar with tones - though I still have a pretty strong American-sounding stress accent.*

Okay, class dismissed!

*Americans are, from what I've heard, well-known for saying waTAshi or WAtashi instead of the volume-flat watashi, and killing other words in a similar manner. Now class is dismissed.

Signage

And these two random signs I found.

On the left we have Pikachu, who is apparently concerned deeply about whether or not I'm eating right. Rightly so, I might add.
Version without any superimposed translation is the small one to the right of the larger one.

On the right, we have a sign that read "People who have dropped something onto the tracks should tell a station worker." It reminds me of the Dreamworks logo, in a way.

Tokyo: Wandering (Day 1)

Yeah, this is the third or fourth post for Day 1. It was by far the most fun day. I spent the first half of it navigating on my own, which was fun. I mean, sure, I was headed to a popular tourist destination that hundreds of thousands of other people have no problems finding every year, but I'm a little... special when it comes to pathfinding. It's an aura I have with me, I think, as people have a tendency to get lost more when I'm around even if I don't say a word.
In the end, I was able to find my way to the "Raumen" museum without getting lost. I think I already said that, though...

So, what'd we do after that?

Well, I met up with Shimpei and his fairly cute girlfriend. You can see the two of them posing on the left. Apparently, she was going to help us navigate the city, and is a "train expert" in Shimpei's words. Oh, her name is Natsumi, though I'm not certain which kanji she writes it with. I haven't checked, but I would assume there are at least ten different ways you can write that name.
I hate kanji.

So we visited some random parts of Tokyo: Ginza... and... other places I don't know the names of. Yeah, I was completely lost and just following our train ninja.

I took the obligatory picture of the Tokyo Tower. Or rather, about 30 of them, when all was said and done.
The sky was pretty bright, but nothing compared to the tower, so I couldn't get them to expose with each other. I didn't realize it was that much of a problem until I got back, or I would've set up a couple shots to make into an HDR picture when I got back. Tried to pano everything together, but to no avail.
I got Natsumi to take this picture of me, but it took us a few tries because I was backlit. She moved the camera a little and blurred the background. Honestly,I think it makes the picture better. It looks cool. Though I'm a little worried for my right kidney and lung, which might have something to say if that part of my body started disappearing.

After about six hours of wandering around Tokyo, we headed back home, where Shimpei and I intended to make some food. Really, though, he made the smart decision and didn't let me try to cook anything, so I just watched. Mabudofu is pretty good, by the way.
Tempura eggplant is not good, by the way.

Saw this random bit of goodness on the way back. I want to make some connection between this and traditional Asian healing practices I don't believe in, but I've got nothing witty for it, really.

After dinner, we basically lazed about until it was time to go to bed. After a day filled with standing up and walking around and riding the train, it was really nice to stop, sit still, and just kind of exist without all the people and noises and... everything.

やっぱり、田舎の人なのね。。。

Erm...

I'm not quite sure what happened today. I have stuff to write, and pictures to post, but somehow I didn't get around to it.
It's on the list for tomorrow. Well, later today.
Gr, 1AM...