Not Dead Yet, But Lots of Pictures

I'm going on a hike today, so I'll be taking another set of pictures. I'm still two sets behind in posting. It's only a backlog of, oh, 700 pictures, though. What's another three or four hundred?
I have picture's from Jeff's Christmas party, Yanavy and co.'s Christmas party, Jes and Roxanne and I's trip to the monkey park, and our trip to Himeji castle.

Today, we're going to go on a hike up by Arashiyama, then hopefully head down to two stores that I found yesterday. Oh, and maybe hit a temple on the way between them.

We also need to eat at some point in there...

Hm.

Santa Hattery

I went to College Res for a Christmas Eve party with what I can only call "Yanavy and her crew". I don't have Yanavy's pictures, but I got these pictures from Jes, and I think I look funny in a Santa hat, so here you go.

On top of that, she got a random guy dressed up as Santa motoring around town on a scooter. The shot's pretty dark, but with enough jerking around, I was able to brighten it up and only make the noise twenty times worse. Anyway, Santa on a scooter.

And no, that's not me on the scooter.

Anyway, Merry Christmas! I hope you ate as many sweets as I did. ... Unless you're trying to avoid gaining ten pounds in one day.

Drunken Guy and More Police

On the way home tonight, I saw a man lying in the corner of an intersection. I went past at first, but thought better of it and turned around. I stopped my bike near him and asked if he was alright. He was clearly drunk and I could smell the alcohol on him from a few feet away. He kept falling over into the street, and kept pulling himself back up using a guy wire for a utility pole.
After a few minutes, he pulled out a cell phone and called someone, presumably for help. Satisfied, I went to the nearest police box whose location I knew and reported it, then got a couple of numbers to call in the future.

To top it off, they were all impressed with my Japanese (not actually a good sign), seemed to think I was super-cool because I had both a cell phone and a radio, and I got some good info about an electronics shop for my trouble.

I'm still a little worried about the old man on the side of the street, but he looked plenty well off and I imagine the police will stop by there soon if they haven't already. I think most of their job here is dealing with drunks, so...

Post-Processing

Here's a great example of what a little post-processing work can do for you.

I'm sure there are people who disagree, but I think it's pretty easy to tell which picture is more pleasing. If you're going for something other than "generic nature picture", though, I can imagine why you might go with the left-hand picture.

The picture on the left is very cool (as in, blue-ish) because the day was very overcast. Lots of clouds.

Forgotten Picture

I took this when I went east with Yanavy, but forgot that I had taken it.

On top of not knowing how to say "widow" in Japanese, I simply didn't have the heart to tell them.

Church Toilets

I went to church with Jesimee on Sunday to show her where it was and I was surprised to discover the rather interesting signs they used on the doors to mark which bathroom was for which gender.

I also went to translate, but that didn't go nearly as well as trying to find it, which somehow went flawlessly. Translation... not so much. I can inbetween a conversation with a Japanese for her, but the sermons were completely hopeless. If I told her what was going on, I'd miss the next thing that was said. Really frustrating.

Pi

I refuse to take responsibility for lack of pie.

Winter Break!

Today is Monday here. It was my last day of classes before winter break starts. Why they put the first day of break on a Tuesday and the last on a Thursday, I can only wonder. On top of that, my Basic Japanese class had a section test today. I was considering skipping and just taking it when break ends, but I figured I'd rather suck it up and take a low score than worrying the whole break whether I had studied enough.

On top of the section test, we had an essay that was supposed to be a page. That's not really bad, but I thought I only had about 1/3 of a page written. As it turned out, my essay came out to one and a half pages when I wrote it out by hand and added a conclusion. Here's my essay in a nutshell:
- I wonder how クリームパン (cream bread) came to be...
- History
- History
- Some extra history
- Something about あんパン
- Mention ジャンパン
- I love クリームパン!

But that's over with and winter break is starting. Yay!

Note Quote

Some random quotes I found in my main notebook this morning:
"I was typing so long that I broke my finger. - Minji"
"It's an Amurican thing." Right before this, Valentina had written something like "I hate you, you know?"
"American +level otaku = normal JP-Otaku"
"As nuclear power generation proliferates, more and more waste is generated while we have nowhere to put it. The burning of fossil fuels releases more radiation out!"
"Developed by Egghead"
"(T)actical (O)perations (F)allback (U)nit"

Christmas Eve Class

(The picture is one I took a few weeks ago. It was my second attempt at HDR and you can see it didn't work so well. It's not my camera, but I just can't seem to get HDR to work right for me...)

I think I've mentioned this before, but Christmas here is treated about the same as Valentine's Day in the US. In other words, it's a holiday for spending time with your 恋人 koibito ("lover"), and you can expect them to be rather upset if you have to work instead, or if you want to go out with friends instead of with her. I think this expectation is one-way, and girls can do whatever they want.

I found out yesterday that we have a make-up class scheduled for Christmas Eve. In case you needed more proof that Christmas is a cheese holiday in Japan, there you go. On the bright side, that teacher invited Yanavy and I to a dinner at his place on Sunday.

On the down side, there's a $10 secret Santa thing. I'm no good at finding presents and I have two secret Santa things to do!

ごちそう！

Yesterday, instead of a second period of basic Japanese, we went out to a mall nearby and the teacher treated the whole class to dinner. I had 玉子焼き and some kind of あんこ soup. I'm in a bit of a rush, so I don't have time to explain those, but I wanted to note it.

Bike Repairs, This Time With No Carbs

So... I had a dandy little fix for my shifter lever. Then I snagged my judo bag* on it and popped it back off again. Unfortunately, I lost a very small piece of plastic that triggers a lever which releases a spring which brings my bike up a gear.
*The Cathy bag, in case anybody's wondering.
Naturally, I replaced it with something similar to plastic: a dry noodle. I took a soumen noodle I found in my cupboard and broke four small pieces of roughly equal length off of it, then taped them together.

Then I did it again, this time being careful not to snap the noodle by taping too vigorously. At left is the second one that didn't break. I cut it apart so you could see I could stack them and make that super-cool picture.

So... as it turns out, 80%, 15C thermal cycling, and a few heavy rains turn a noodle into a wet noodle. Normally, you don't care when that kind of thing happens, but you don't normally include noodles in bike repairs, either.

To illustrate - and because I was bored in Photoshop a few days ago - I took a few additional pictures.
If you were to look at figure A, you'd see an arrow pointing to the hole where one end of the noodle was glued. You'd also see a bunch of suspiciously mold-resembling spots that are little bits of superglue. I don't know how it did that, but that's what it is.

If you were to look at figure B, you'd see what the noodle-repair looked like in one piece.

If you were to look at figure C, you'd see why it is that it doesn't make for a great replacement for a piece of plastic.

At that's the story of how I fixed my bike with a noodle. The end.

Ish.

Yesterday, while I was talking with Yanavy, I cut a part of a spoon to size and I'm going to try that next. It's actually made of plastic, so I have high hopes for it. I've left it inside for a day to cure, and I had planned on putting the assembly back on my bike tonight, but I don't want to try and explain to the manager tomorrow morning why I'm riding my bike out the front door. I'll probably put it on tomorrow night as a break from studying for my doom kanji test.

Kitten Arrival!

Kitten is arrived!

Also, check out this nifty display they have set up by arrivals.

kitten

I know a kitty cat who arrives today!

Work Notes, part II

My notes for today's presentations:
"member of [the] basketball team"
"do you have any plan[s] tomorrow?"
"I will cook Chinese food tomorrow; do [will] you try some?"

A Yabari Moment

We were talking about shamisen today in class. A shamisen (三味線 "three flavor strings") is kind of like the Japanese version of a banjo, though the way that they're played is very different. To begin with, or at least, to begin with my very limited knowledge of the subject, banjos tend to strummed while shamisen tend to be plucked. I don't think I've seen or heard one strummed. In any case, the sounding chamber - the body - is made from a frame of some kind of wood, and then covered with the skin of a cat or a dog, whichever you happen to have handy.

Now, I don't know how I made this mistake, but I thought that the teacher had said that the strings of the shamisen were made from the skin of a cat, which would be... wrong. I said as much, and class went on. It was just a small Yabari moment.

元気先生: Do you know what part of a cat is used in the construction of a shamisen?
Me: The... stomach? (腸 "intestines" was a word I didn't know until later.)
元気先生: Er... The skin. You know... [strumming motion] right?

[I'm not certain how I construed this to mean that the strings (specifically the strings) were made from the skin of a cat, but that's the idea I got.]

Me: I, er, don't think that's right, but...
元気先生: I think it is.
Me, to Valentina: He's wrong.
Valentina, to me: He's Japanese, I think you're wrong.

This somehow upset me - more than it should have - and I started furiously researching.
Or at least, as furiously as possible with a pocket Japanese-English dictionary. I researched, in any case. As I said earlier, it turns out that the skin of a cat (or a dog!) is used for the sounding chamber, and that the strings are not only not made from the intestines of a cat, but "catgut" refers to a string made from anything except cat. I was exactly wrong. Ouch.

Oh, and to top it off, shamisen strings in particular are traditionally made from silk, unlike Western stringed instruments, though both usually use nylon or other plastic strings now.

Anyway, we saved the rest of the discussion for the break, and I looked it up on Wikipedia and - ha! - was mostly able to translate it on the fly. As an example, I admit that I don't know the difference between a donkey and a mule is, or what either one is called in Japanese.

Today's class was fun, but a little embarrassing because I Yabari'd - though I'm very much a noob compared to the Yabari himself.

Political Debate

I went to get pastries last night and ended up getting in what was at times a rather heated political debate with a the clerk at the pastry shop.

At first we were just talking about random stuff, and we eventually got onto the topic of water usage during bathing. She feels that Americans waste vast quantities of water by only bathing in bathwater once.

This is a great example of cross-cultural weirdness. For a Westerner, I think the idea of using the same bathwater that was just used by three other people is kind of gross. For a Japanese, not doing that is a terrible waste of water, and they don't seriously consider our cultural aversion to reusing bathing water as a valid point because, to someone raised with that kind of tradition, it's just silly. I'm speaking in sweeping generalizations here, of course, but I thought it was an interesting point.

On the other hand, I was able to counter by pointing out that Japanese shower before they take a bath, and that shower is as long as many people's entire bathing process. In other words, the shower at the beginning of their shared-bath thing may use a similar amount of water to what someone in the US might use in their shower.

At one point, we were talking about congress and various houses and whatnot, but I have neither the vocabulary nor the knowledge for a lengthy discussion on such things.

A bit after that, she said that she was someone disturbed by the fact that America drafts only black people and the poor into the military. When I was shocked by this, she said "I see there are many things Americans don't know", which I have to admit, I thought was kind of rude. I slowly managed to batter some sense into her (this is, of course, assuming that I am more knowledgeable about it than she is) about what the draft is and how it isn't currently implemented, and how the Selective Service works, and how it doesn't.

Later, she played the "You nuked us!" card and even knows history well enough to play the "You firebombed us!" card to trump the "You nuked us!" card.

Clerk: Attacking civilians... There should be a better way.
Me: I think it was done to lower the morale and try and convince the Japanese government to stop fighting in the war.
Clerk: Still.
Me: I agree, but that's how World War II* was fought.
Clerk: But napalm? Think of all the people, just sitting in their houses in fear, with no way out. And Japan is made of wood, so it's all the worse. It just burned completely.
Me: Yeah, but if you look at that from the enemy's point of view... That's good thinking, isn't it?
Clerk: Civilians.
Me: Yes.

It was quite an interesting discussion, and I enjoyed it. Further, it was very good practice, I think, and I felt I was doing a surprising job of holding up my end of it, which really shows the advances my Japanese has made from the first day of class last semester. I had to ask her to slow down a couple of times, but when people start getting upset, they're hard to understand no matter the language.

Oh, and the pastries were delicious, as always.

*第二次世界大戦 dai ni-ji sekai tai-sen Or "major second worldly big-ass war" Thank you, Okada! I don't what other vocab I remember from her class, but I've been wanting to use that one in discussion for two years now.

Judo Tournament

Woke up at 6AM yesterday to go to a judo tournament yesterday and... well, my club got its collective ass handed to it. The first guy lost in the groundfighting (far left. He's the one making funny faces and lying on his back), one guy won two matches before losing to a joint lock (at right, reading the information booklet), and two of our girls lost to good throws.

I didn't get any particularly good pictures of Reika's match, but you can see at left Shoji Erica losing about five seconds into her match to a nearly perfect tai-otoshi. Ironically, that's Erica's best technique.

I don't remember exactly what happened in the other two matches, but Tasku used his zombie-style gripping technique. I dunno if it works or not, but it sure is fun to make fun of. At right.

Last up are two random pictures of some nicely (not quite perfectly) executed throws that had no relation to my club members at all, but look cool anyway.

If you look closely at the second one, you'll see that there's one foot and one face on the ground.

I don't know how I forgot to mention this, but it was a pretty big tournament by my standards. I figured it would be, at most, 60 people or so. I think they had that many people in each of the four divisions. There were two weight classes (big vs not) and it was separated by gender as well (figure it out). I thought the white stripe in women's belts was to indicate that they had achieved a partial rank, but it's apparently so they can tell the difference between women and men. It pleases me to know that they need help in this endeavor. There were plenty of really cute girls, by the way.

I took a couple of panoramas so you can see more than just two people at once, and I think they really help to show the scale of the event. I'm not certain how they're lined up, but they didn't seem to have any problems finding their places. I already counted the edges, and it's a 21x12 (ish) square, which would put them at about 250 people. Surprisingly accurate with my 4-times estimate from earlier.

Work Notes

I'm at work, slacking off while they're working on the Chinese portion of the class. Yes, it's all completely over my head and no, I can't follow it even if I try. Yes, I have tried.

The first thing I do every day is work with two students individually on pronunciation. To practice this, they read a passage that either me or the teacher picks out. Here are my notes from that practice, 'cause I think they're interesting. They follow:

O idea - idear X
O area - arear X

the =
thuh/thee - X thah X


four
whore

OO originally synthesized tunes
XX originarry synsesized tyunes

Kind-of Sort-of Picture Dump

Some random pictures that have been taken and come into my possession in the past week or so. These were all taken on Tuesday.

First up is a picture of me because my parents always want me to post more pictures of me. If it were up to me, I wouldn't show up on cameras, but... Alas, physics don't seem to bend to my will. Much.

I... don't know how this one (far left, hugging) came about, but it ended up being one of the better pictures. Yanavy looks like she's not altogether comfortable with the idea of being hugged, but she was sick, so that may be what's going on with her posture there.
No real explanation for the closer picture, but I like the way it looks with her facing the other picture.

The next picture, at right, is Sara (right) and Magi (not-right) putting up with me taking a picture of them in their kimono. They had a tea ceremony test that day, I understand. Anyway, women in kimono.

You can see the flower power (attached to my head) gave me enough ninja power to dodge having my picture taken properly, if not quite enough to actually jump through the wall of Angela's room to make it out of the frame. Too bad, that. I blame the fan.

Once again, I like this picture of Angela, and having it placed so she looks like she's WTF-ing at the picture of me makes for bonus goodness, I think.

The flower looks much better on Yanavy, in case you're wondering. I don't really do red, you know?

And with that, I've filled my quota of pictures-of-myself for the next few months. Feels good to be done with that, at least.

Unnamed Teacher

Somehow, I don't know the names of most of my teachers. Being able to simply call them sensei is really convenient, and I very rarely am in a situation where there are more one or two sensei around, so it's usually not a problem. It's a little awkward when I go to the teacher prep rooms, but not really a problem outside of that.Well, and when I want to say whose picture this is. So this is my teacher on Tuesday for my afternoon classes. She has a name, I think, but I really haven't ever used it, so I don't know what it is.

Kitty... Kat!

I was out and about with Yanavy, looking at cameras and whatnot, yesterday. We stopped by an AM-PM so she could look for magazines with her dreamy guy (Nino from Arashi) and so she could look for random things involving chocolate. She passed these up, but I found apple-flavored and anko-("sweet red bean paste")flavored Kit-Kats. I found a muscat (green grapes) flaovr of Kit-Kat the last time we were in that area.

In order of eated:
Grape Kit-Kat: Surprisingly decent, and a nice change of pace. Based on white chocolate.
Apple Kit-Kat: Really, really good. Nobody else seemed to like them, but, well... me and apples... have a thing. You know. Based on normal milk chocolate.
Anko Kit-Kat: Opposite of the last one; I didn't really like them, but everybody else seemed to. Based on normal milk chocolate, which I don't think really goes with... beans.

Accidental Cleaning

I seem to get most of my housework done when procrastinating for big tests or when I have a lot of homework to do. Today, I got home and decided that I really needed to clean the bathroom, I guess. It was in need of a scrubbing, but I'm not certain what made me just start cleaning it all of a sudden. Worrisome.

Tomorrow, I have a kanji test for my kanji class, as opposed to the まとめ test, which I was complaining about before. Naturally, I'm studying for it today. Why study beforehand when you can cram? Graaaah.

I'll be omitting readings for this post because I'm tired and should be studying.

I have a kanji test tomorrow that will only be 20 questions, but for which I need to learn 100 different characters composing 104 different words. The small difference between those numbers is a coincidence as far as I know, as the 104 words use 189 kanji between them and about 220 送り仮名 between them. On the bright side, I already know or am familiar with quite a few of them. If I were doing that pace just with characters I didn't know, I'dve learned half the kanji in the language this semester. While my kanji skills have certainly improved, I'm much closer to being able read about a quarter of the 常用 characters, at best.