先生の家

Today, I visited one of my teachers from last semester who I've been in somewhat constant contact with. He invited me to lunch a few weeks back, and I kind of invited myself up to his house. He said it was fine, and we decided on a day, which was today.

It takes him (who was sick today, hence the mask) about ten minutes to get to school by scooter; it took me about an hour to get to his house by bike. Needless to say, there're some slopes involved. It was difficult, and I barely managed it, but I was able to bike the entire way up and even farther than I had to go by quite a ways. He lives up in a suburb about eight kilometers (5.7 miles) away from where I live, and while the elevation gain is only about 200m (~650 feet) it feels a lot more significant on a bike.

He met me at a traffic circle - the first I've ever actually seen - which I went to kind of on a hunch, and it ended up being right next to his house. This picture is a 360-degree panorama taken from nearly the middle of the traffic circle. Guess where the sun is.

I met for the first time both his children (two of 'em) and his wife (one of those!) and both seemed very pleasant to say the least. My teacher is well into his fifties, and from the time frames they mentioned while we were talking, his wife (who is Canadian, and appeared to be of Northern European ancestry, maybe so far as Irish, but I didn't ask) must be getting near that mark as well, but she must be benefiting from the Japanese lifestyle or something, because she could very well be in her early thirties judging by her appearance.

Oh, and they had cheese. Real, honest to cheese, cheese. White cheddar, yum, yum. You have no idea how long it's been since I had cheesy cheesy cheese. Cheese. ... Apparently, they had gone to Costco (there's one in Osaka somewhere) the previous day with some friends, and had just gotten back, as they gave me about a half a pound of cheese to me and a further half pound to deliver to some friends. Yum. Cheese.

We went for a walk and ran into some kids who were walking a dog. When they saw me, they started talking about me a little, and eventually, one of them said to another "Hey, say something in English!" I turned around and interjected "Japanese is okay, too." I love getting people with that one. They had a cute little dog, as well. Isn't he (?) cute?

We visited a bird sanctuary near where he lives as well as a couple of parks, then came back to his house for a bit and talked for another hour or so, then I headed home. The ride home didn't take nearly as long, since the whole thing was downhill and I don't need a map to simply go down a hill.

[These random plants are blurry because I have my camera set to use a shutter speed of 1/60 when the flash is on, and I didn't think to compensate for the fact that I had the lens zoomed at 200mm on top of the 1.5x magnification from my APS-C sensor. That gives an effective 300mm of focal length, and while my lens is rated for a nominal three stops (1/60>1/120>1/240>1/480) the flash didn't take in enough light to overpower the ambient, hence the blur.]

With just a few days left in Japan, I'll be selling my bike tomorrow. I've used it pretty hard, so it looks older than it is, but used bikes don't fetch much anyway. I'd be getting a pretty good deal if I got $30 for it. The other one (the first new bike I bought in Japan) is too beat up to fetch me more than $10 if I'm lucky, but one of my friends is going to fix it up and use it, since it has gears and she has a tire patching kit.

[Edit: We also saw this car while we were walking around. You can see on the front it's a GT-R, but we saw a couple of other really nice cars while wandering around.
On the way back, I saw an import car shop and saw for the first time in nearly a year a car with the steering wheel on the right (which is to say, "left") side.]

[Another edit: I asked my teacher later if it was alright for me to put this up later, and I like it, so here it is. My teacher and his wife, at right.]

Ko-Un

I woke up at a decent time today, for the first time in a week. Not such a big deal on its own, but I came with some good ideas for RPG stuff and read some interesting stuff from the GM guide.

When I went to school to meet with one of my teachers, she wasn't there, but I met up with another teacher, who took Kilk and I out to lunch for yakiniku (fried meat). When I got back, the teacher I was supposed to meet was there (she was coming in for work, so I was just supposed to meet her at some point after 1PM) and we talked for about three hours while she let me pick all the books I could carry from her bookshelf to take home with me. She also gave me a brand new electronic dictionary. It just happens to be one with a special feature that I will make great use of in the next year or so, as a random bonus.

Now, I just need to ship them home...

Food Pictures - maybe NSFW

Alright, three food-related pictures from the past week or so.

First is a giant parfait, aptly named the "Crazy Big Parfait". Not kidding.

Next is me after having defeated it.

As you can see from how big the bowl is in relation to my hand, it was, indeed, crazy big. It was filled with whipped cream and strawberry ice cream, with green tea pocky and waffle cones jammed in the side. It was yum! Fortunately, we split the $40 price between seven of us, so it wasn't so bad.

Today, I got this in the mail. Tell me what is wrong with this scene. What's that? Yes, "everything" is indeed the correct answer. Broccoli on pizza, covered in what appears to be a baked potato with nacho cheese being dribbled over it. WTF JAPAN?

On the other hand*, boobies! Chocolate!
Chocolate boobies! Surprisingly tasty, even. I only got six, as there were a bunch of other candies I wanted to get as well.

I made sure to use these backwards and eat the nipples first.

*Yes, I have the mind of a high-school kid. Did you really not see that one?

Bowling Scorecard

When we went bowling a few days ago, they printed us out individual scorecards. I took a picture of everybody's, just for good measure, but here's mine.
I'm not posting it to brag about the score (average of 120, go me! <- bragging), but so you can see what it looks like. I haven't been bowling in a long time, and I don't even remember what the ones in the US look like.

寿 【ことぶき】 kotobuki "congratulations!", "long life!"

So with Photoshop finally up and running again, I took my feet out of the picture and cleaned up the messiness in general. Oh, and turned the whole thing the right direction, since I took the pictures backwards and sideways.
The character was written in a script form, which is why it doesn't really look even vaguely like the character when typed. But the brush weighs something around 20 pounds, I think, and was dripping all over. There were puddles of ink in places that could've filled an entire normal-sized sumi bottle.

寿 【ことぶき】  kotobuki (n) congratulations!, long life!, (P)

And two other words, so you can see why kanji often make no sense.

恵比寿 【えびす】 ebisu (n) The God of Wealth, (P)
寿喜焼 【すきやき】  sukiyaki (n) (food) thin slices of beef, cooked with
   various vegetables in a table-top cast-iron
   pan, sukiyaki

Pictures of Me Not Being Dead Yet

So this probably doesn't make much sense, since it's just a random spam of pictures from the past week or so. There are pictures from the farewell party, from when ten of us went to Mr. Young Mens (a small okonomiyaki shop, not a gay bar), a random picture of my school from the outside, and a picture from when we went bowling.

Oh, and here's a random picture of me, 'cause I look funny.

To start off this picture spam are the pictures from the farewell party. Such as the wide shot with a whole bunch of people standing around, and Simon playing guitar off on the right side. The school's calligraphy teacher painted a huge character as a kind of performance, and it was kind of cool. I tried to get a direct overhead shot by way of a bunch (about twenty) pictures from above with me wandering around on the thing. Hence the character being surrounded by my feet.

After that, I went to tea ceremony, where Valentina took this picture of me and Tanaka-sensei, who is the guy sitting next to me who looks like he's about to wet himself. Formal sitting style is apparently his kryptonite or something. On the way home after that, I waited for Angela and Yanavy and took this picture of my school, since the light seemed to be just about perfect for it.

The next day, we all went to karaoke and I didn't sing. Then we went to Kawaramachi and tried to go to a Mexican restaurant, but we had too many people, so we went to a nearby okonomiyaki place and pretty much took up the whole store.

I've brought them a considerable amount of business, now that I think about it...

After that, the girls, QB, and myself went bowling. I think I got the best scores both games with something like 110, if that tells you how skilled our teams were.

Presentation (Divtesting)

I was just awake enought to get this up last night, and I honestly don't know what I changed that made it work after two hours. I think Blogger might have just had pity on me.

I woke up on Tuesday at 6AM cooked a super-duper protein breakfast, and worked on my presentation and went over some last random notes for Japanese for Certified Tests (JCT), in which class I had a test. As expected, it took about 15, maybe 20, minutes. No clue how I did, but if you wanted a guess, I'd say 80%. Ish.

After that, I headed up to the school's Japanese Room. I kid you not, we have a room called the 和室 - "Japan (-style)" "room" and it's where the tea ceremony class takes place. I have no interest in tea ceremony itself, but the girls (of my little squad 'o gaijin anyway) were wearing kimono and this would probably be my last chance to spam pictures of them.

Once I was allowed in, I was sat between the head and sub-head - I don't know their official titles, but between Michiharu TANAKA and Mariko UCHIDA. Pictures. Tea. Sweets. Pictures.

Tanaka is the one at the right who looks like he needs to go to the bathroom. He was probably just about to change to a different sitting position than seiza (which should translate to "death to the foreigners", but doesn't, as far as I know). When I asked if it had defeated him, he replied "I think I must be an alien..."

So after ingesting about two handfuls of pure sugar, I had ten minutes in class and a further 30 minutes of sitting around while we talked in class, etc. IE, just enough time to come down from the sugar and be nice and shaky.

---

Good points

1- Researched extensively and summed everything up neatly
2- Hard-to-understand words were clarified, so it was easy to understand
3- Clearly introduced topic at the beginning
4- Looked at the listeners while speaking and used clear pronunciation
5- Speed and loudness of speech was just right, so it was easy to listen to
6- You had fun with your topic, and that came through in the way you held on.

よかった点

・くわしく調べて、きちんとまとめて発表できた。
・わかりにくいことばは、もう一度違う表現で説明しなおしていて、わかりやすかった。
・はじめに何について話すかはっきり伝えていた。
・聞き手を見ながら、はっきりした発音で発表できた。
・スピードも大きさもちょうどよい声で、聞きやすかった。
・自分が内容を楽しみながら、そして、その楽しさをみんなに伝えようとがんばっていた。

Not-quite-there points

7- Sentence-to-sentence connecting words were almost nonexistant.
8- Because of that, there ended up being a lot of "because"
9- You used a lot of "you know?". Instead, it would be good if you used others, such as "... don't you think?", "... isn't that so?", "... or at least, that's what I think.", "... you may be able to look at it like this." There are a variety.
10- Sometimes, you stopped in the middle of sentences, and just kind of lined of words, which had kind of a weird feeling.
11- There were some words where your pronunciation was hard to understand. Especially long words with lots of kanji. I totally couldn't understand "converters"

もう少しの点

・文と文をつなぐ言葉（接続詞など）があまりなかった。
・そのため、「から」が多くなってしまっていた。
・「でしょ？」も多くなっていた。かわりに、他のいろいろな
言葉を使ってみるとよい。（と思いませんか、ではないでしょ
うか、だと私は思うんですがどうでしょうか、という見方もあ
るかもしれません等、いろいろあります。）
・時々、文が途中で終わってしまった。語だけが並んでいる感じで、少し変だった。
・少し発音がわかりにくい言葉があった。特に漢字の長いことば。
（「てんかんしゃ」は、私は全然意味がわかりませんでした。どういう意味のことばでしょうか？）

Thanks for taking so many pictures.
I bet you can make a good compilation with them. Have fun.

Well, be careful not to eat much cream bread!? LOL

写真をたくさん撮ってくださって、ありがとうございました。
いい文集ができることでしょうね。楽しみです。

では、クリームパンの食べすぎには気をつけて！？（笑）

---

So that's what my teacher thought. I have a pack of notes of what the other students thought as well, but I haven't looked at it yet.

Kilk at left, being cheesy. Me at right... WTF? I don't know.

After the presentation, we hustled the class outside for a group portrait, which we took a couple of just to be sure, which was fortunate, as the first three of the four we took didn't turn out well once I checked them.

Then, I spent an hour and a half helping Uchida-sensei piece together a Word document that had quite possibly the worst formatting I've ever seen in a word document - maybe second worst, thinking about it. Someone I live with has done much worse things in Word, if I think about it, which I'd rather not...
Ahem.

Then, we went shopping for ingredients for the food we were preparing for the farewell party, which I need to be at in about half an hour. It's a potluck and I'm being lame and bringing fried rice, but... It's what I can cook that isn't gyouza.

Jes Visits! - Himeji

So while Jes was here, her, Roxanne, and myself went to Himeji, a city to the South where Himeji castle is located.
As you approach the castle, there's a large field that was probably used as a staging ground or something. It's just a big dirt field. You can see Jes wearing her new jacket in the center of the picture at left. This is a panorama that is composed of, I think, 12 different pictures.

As you come closer to the castle, you can see some of the battlements and the arrow slits and stone-throwing holes and suchlike. At left, Jes is just about to look out one, and you can see another square one at the right side of the frame. There were circular, rectangular, and triangular slits. I would guess they were for different purposes, but I don't know how those specific shapes would be advantageous to anything.

At right is a sign that I liked for the "No danger!" symbol in the lower right. The blue text above the sign says "Plastic bottles are allowed".

This just occurred to me now, but the walk up the walkways was pretty tiring as-is, so I can't imagine what this would be like while constantly trying to dodge rocks and arrows and oil and fighting well-rested sword-/pike-men.

Oh, feel free to add musketeers to that list as well.

This was one rack of guns that was to be seen, but there were probably racks for well over a thousand longarms such as this.

This is "Princess Sen's room" or one of them. She had a whole section of the castle devoted to her and her serving girls, if the signs are to be believed. I don't know what she's doing with the rocks, but I would guess it's some kind of prayer ritual or something like that.

This room is not very high up in the castle and kind of off to one side, but as you go up into the main castle area, you see these little fish guys (left) at random. I think they signify some kind of dolphin (though the tails are sideways for that) or dragon or something. I dunno.

Of the stuff at the castle, I think these fishy statues are probably the most artistic, useless thing there. The rest is fairly bland and militaristic, largely because it consists of empty rooms and hallways.

And doors like the one seen at right. They still work, I think, but were locked so you couldn't open them.

From the top, you have a great view of the city, and I managed to get something like a 280-degree panorama, as you can see.

On the way down, we saw a couple of really neat sights, and I got what is probably my favorite picture of the castle proper, at left. The sunset is what's causing it to turn that nice orange color, though I think they have lights that come on at night to keep it that color. If not, I don't know what they use the massive lightbanks that they had set up for.

Here's that same sunset, a few minutes later, looking the other direction.

And some cats we found. A little after us, an old guy came with two little girls and they fed the cats.

These pictures could really use some warming up, but I guess I missed that when I was working through this set. Oops.

And then there's the toilet. We went to an okonomiyaki place on the way back to the train station, and the place we ate had this toilet. The picture at right really doesn't do the horror of the thing justice, but suffice to say that it had the strangest color scheme of any bathroom I've ever seen.

On top of that, the girls commented that the toilet was kidn of strange, so I had to go investigate. It turns out that it's an old-style toilet with what something like a booster seat on it so that you can sit down like a Western-style toilet. I moved the seat aside for this picture so you can see sort of what's going on. And yes, I washed my hands afterwards.

Random Picture Post

While going through the pictures I want to post in the next post about our trip to Himeji, I kept finding random unrelated pictures I wanted to put up. So, here are some of them.

My parents send me to some stuff for Christmas, including a jacket that basically works magic and a nice pair of sneakers. Even while unwrapping the presents on Christmas Eve, it didn't really feel Christmas-y. What really reminded me of Christmas as a kid was the pile of discarded wrapping paper.

At right is a train in the 通動快速 mode, which I've seen on all kinds of signs and things, but never actually ridden before. It's nothing really impressive, but I've been wondering whether or not they exist since I got here, and I was really excited to discover that I had finally found one.

My airsoft arsenal has grown considerably in the past month or so, as you can see here. Included in that pile is my $4 cheapo generic airsoft gun (far right), a Tokyo Marui spring-powered H&K USP (middle-right), a Tokyo Marui AEP H&K USP and its associated battery, charger, 30-round magazine, 100-round magazine, and 20mm rail converter, and a quick loader that works for every airsoft magazine I've tried it on as yet.

And Yanavy sketched this out because we got bored at the Italian food place near here. That was Jes's first time meeting that group as a whole, and I think she was bored out of her mind because she ended up on the far end and didn't get any of the massive quantity of in-jokes. Poor kitten...

Nara: Sleepy Pre-Post

Yanavy and company (plus me) went to Nara today. I took a lot of pictures, but I haven't really looked through them yet. A couple of them that needed some Photoshopping, though, I did just now.
These picture are from a game center (usually "arcade" in American English") we found completely by accident on the way back to the station. Cool thing: four-player air hockey! I teamed up with Angela against Sara, Cassie, and Yanavy, the latter two of whom took turns.

We also found a super-super cheap place to get takoyaki and I found some really tasty mochi to boot.

Anyway, inside the game center were these banners, which I felt pretty much required to take pictures of. Tails is my favorite character of them, and pretty much always has been. I just noticed that Sonic and Knuckles both have a species name, whereas Amy and Tails both just have their full names.

The quality of the pictures is kind of bleh, at best, but I did what I could for them. Eh.


Here's one last picture so you can see what they look like coming out of my camera:

Jes Visits! - Jeff's Party

One of my teachers is a rather famous guy in this area and is a published (he has, like 13 books) researcher of intercultural communication. He also teaches English to a lot of people, and he hosts parties at various times to help give his students chance to interact with each other and to practice the languages that they're studying. To aid this end, he used a lottery to figure out seating, which made sure everybody was nice and mixed. Jes was at the center table of three and I was at the South table, where the population varied widely. Hidemi, at left, was one of the people at my table.
[Edit: I guess I forgot to mention that he has a couple of television shows and he teaches at his own English school. To quote Anchorman: He's "kind of a big deal".]

I took some pictures, as I am wont to do, though almost all of them came out a little blurry. Once I pulled out my flash, there were no problems, but before that the light level was too low even for my fast lens to get sharp pictures.

Stupid physics, stupid optical levers, stupid 50mm.

Anyway, as long as you look at them really small, it's not so easy to see the blurriness, so here's what I've got. It's mostly me and Jes, but she's cute and my parents always want pictures of me, and Jose's apparently a photographer. He was drooling over my camera, in any case, which is a little weird - it's kind of backwards - for me.

First up is a picture of Jes with Jose, who everyone calls "Josie", using the girls' name instead of the Spanish pronunciation. I think this is weird, but maybe that's his actual name. Who knows.


At far left is me setting up my tripod. I like this picture, because I'm decently far enough away that you can't see how doom I look.
The next picture I'm not so happy about, but I think it would look pretty good if I weren't so tired. It was nearly 1AM at that point, though, and we had gotten up around 7AM to take Jes to church.

I think this may be the first picture on the blog of me in my blue shirt, which is one of my favorites. It's pretty much my favorite color, though it looks a little different in these pictures.

At right is Jes being cute. That's really all that needs to be said. I wish that I could say I took this picture, but I think Jose took it.

Moving on.

We did a gift exchange that was... weird. Everybody brought a ~$10 present and then we sang a song and passed it around. I got a nifty blankety thing.

No real idea what's going on at left. Maybe it was when he was saying how she had prepared all the food. I remember that she was the one who did it, and apparently on really short notice, but I dunno if this was when he said that. The food was good, by the way. Speaking of food, this is one of the sweets that was brought out, along with about two hundred creampuffs and a huge box of very, very good mikan, which are known as satsuma oranges in English, I think.

This was the group of people who stayed until fairly late. Remember I was setting up that tripod earlier? I've got the remote in my right hand in this picture. I used the two-second timer to hide it. From left to right: Jeff, guy whose name I don't know, David, Hidemi, Jose, me (Will!), and the kitten (Jes).

To finish the night off, Jeff played his Japanese flute for us. Calling it a "Japanese flute" really doesn't do it justice, but I don't remember the special name it has. It's got a special name because it's longer than the normal flute, known as a shakuhachi.

It was interesting, though a little slower-paced than I was expecting. I was excited to hear him play it and Jes really enjoyed it as well, apparently, because she got to learn about new musical stuff.

Jes Visits! - Monkey Park - Forgotten Pano

Somehow, I forgot to post the pano shot I took that shows the view of Kyoto from the monkey park. Here it is.

Jes Visits! - Monkey Park

On the 20th of December, last year - yes, I'm actually this far behind on posting - we went to the monkey park in Arashiyama, a touristy area near here.

I've been to the park before, but not since the beginning of my stay here.

We bicycled to the entrance, paid the five-dollar admission fee, and... spent ten minutes taking turns in the bathroom. During this time, we noticed a rack of shoes that is apparently there so that you can have something decent to wear to walk in. The idea is that you would use these if you came to the park in high heels or something, not knowing that there are somewhat significant slopes involved that would probably be dangerous in heels. I guess I didn't take a picture of it, but I think it's noteworthy, and pretty nifty.

We walked up to the top, and we made it about halfway before Jes and Roxanne start freaking out over the half-seen monkeys near the top, the better part of 100 meters away. Having already had my chance to do that, they thought I was a bit of a spoilsport:"Stop being so grumpy!" Thanks, Jes, I'll try.

Looks like I took one picture on the way up that came out, which you can see to the left.

Some other photographers were around, and SLRs were in no short supply. I saw at least ten different people with various SLRs, and all but three(if you count Roxanne's D40) were in the advanced (eg, Nikon's D300 - $1,600, body only) or pro (eg, Nikon's D3 - $5,000, body only) range. For reference, all the camera gear that I own costs about $1,500. That's about how much the lens the lady in red is using costs. You can say "It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it", but that's not going to make me want that lens any less.

At left, two random pictures of monkeys being monkeys. I think the second one looks kind of evil, even if he's just chewing a chestnut.

One of the funniest things I saw was a little monkey who angered another one, and was rescued by his mother (I assume). The coolest thing is that they had this really cool interception pickup thing going on. See my amazing MSPaint diagram of the action? It was like that, but with monkeys. Action shot at left. You can just see the Chibi Monkey on the stomach. It was pretty awesome to watch. Here's him and his parental monkeys (again, I assume) taunting the pursuer afterwards.

Right:As dirty as this could be to the right minds - you know who you are - I imagine the picture at right was the end of a similar pursuit.

I think the part that Jes enjoyed the most was, by far, getting to feed the monkeys. The feeling of their hands is really strange, and it's very fun. Having fed them plenty already, I resigned myself to taking pictures. Jes has a knack for never looking at the camera when I'm taking pictures, but I did manage to get a few of her that I rather like. She found this really small monkey that kept getting chased off by others, and she would wander back and forth, feeding him. She fed the others as well, but she really seemed to like chibi monkey. I even got Jes and Roxanne to pose at very nearly the same time, for once. This is by far the best picture I've taken of the two of them.


I'm not certain how this scene came about. I want to think she engineered it and isn't just that lucky, but I don't know how she would go about doing that, so...

On that note, I was barely lucky enough to get this shot, which is one of my favorites.


After that, I even had the luck to get Jes to turn around and for her not to notice I was taking her picture until it was too late for her to put on her dour stop-taking-pictures face. Instead she was wearing her "Squee! Monkeys!" face.

We got to the park a little later than we had hoped and they were closing an hour early, but we managed to get our fill of monkeyness before the monkeys left for the mountain and the parkkeepers rounded us up. I got Jes and Roxanne to pose once again before we left, as you can see from this shot next shot of them by the feeding house. This is composed of six or so pictures.
The first time I was putting these pictures together, I was trying to perform other operations on them while that ran. Bad idea, and the mess at right was the result.

Oh, and there's this slide at the end of the whole thing, if stairs are just not your style. It... didn't work so well. Sure, she may look like she's having way too much fun with the slide, but she was bemoaning the kiddy slide's tiny width.

Now, it's 2:45AM and I've got to get some sleep before I head to Osaka tomorrow.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Cleanup Discoveries

I was cleaning out my temp folder and found a set of picture I had taken of the Tokyo tower with the hopes of doing a panorama of them. I gave it another shot just now and got them to come together a little bit better this time. Anyway, here's the result.Yes, you could take that picture with just one shot if you had the right gear, but the shortest focal length I have is 18mm, and it's very poor for low-light work. That said, a brightly-lit tower can hardly be considered "low-light", so I used my 18-55mm, the cheapo kit lens that comes with every low-end DSLR for the past five years.
it would take at least six separate pictures at that focal length to do this from where I was standing, and I was far back as I could get without standing (too deeply) in shrubbery/gardening. This picture is taken from 17 of the 20 or so picture I took from that spot. You'd think with that many, I could've got the tower to expose properly in one of them. Unfortunately, though I did, I took those picture from a slightly different viewpoint, so I can't match them. Cool, huh?

I'd like to go back and try this again with the proper gear, ie: a tripod, but I don't think I'll be able to afford it this trip.

「紅葉」 or "It's fall. The trees are dying. Yay."

The Japanese celebrate the changing seasons like... well, like the Japanese celebrate the changing of the seasons. Partly, I think it's an excuse to party and generally make merry and, more importantly, imbibe some final alcohol before it's too damned cold to go buy beer. In any case, trees changing color is a Big Deal here. Photographers come out in troves, and festivals are had all around the city on every other day. If you imagine Leavenworth, but with 1.5 million people living in it, you have the right idea.

Anyway, I'm here, so I have to take pictures of the trees going into a coma or people look at me funny - er, funnier? I don't know.

Fine, it's an excuse to take pictures. Here's what I got today, whatever the reason.

This (above) was a place that looked nice and was on the way, so I stopped to take some test shots. It started raining just as I was finishing up, so I hurried to get packed up and move on.

Totally random trees. I photoshopped this one pretty hard, and I'm not so great with Photoshop, so there are quite a few artifacts, but if you look at it like this, it looks good enough.

Don't worry, I don't intend to put all the pictures up in this massively space-consuming fashion, but I spent a long time between taking these four and doing the post work, so they're getting the annoying treatment.

Random bridge where I took advantage of my waterproof boots to tromp around in a shallow river that runs through town and get this picture. Boots, boots. I didn't like the view from on the bridge is why, in case you're wondering.
I'm kind of kicking myself for not getting the left-side pillar, but it looks really weird if I crop out the right-side one, so...

This is one of places we've done parties, and it was my goal for heading out to the middle of nowhere. I saw some friends boating along, so I photosniped them and headed to where I thought they were going and helped pull them ashore and got to show off my super-cool waterproof boots. Muahaha. Danner boots: Mmm, mmm, good! No, seriously!

And now is time for yet another picture spam.
Really, there's not that much to be said for momiji ("crimson leaves") 'cause I think almost everyone in a temperate climate knows what fall looks like.
Random flower picture, because it was required. It's a shibazakura, which means someone thinks it looks like a cherry blossom. Kind of.

(Far left) Probably the prettiest single tree I saw, and it was a Japanese maple, which my mom seems to have some kind of fetish for, so, again, required.

Some more pictures taken while tromping around in the river. Dunno what the weed-ish things at the bottom arm, but they looked kind of wheat-y. The far right tree looks... like I need to leave the 9th grade.

Still tromping around in the not-quite-a-river, I found this random fish and about six of his buddies. I wasn't sure it was a real dead fish until I poked it with my shoe. It felt real enough. And no, I don't know why someone would scatter fake dead fish around. It's Japan; you never know.

Mun, the guy at the paddles, finally squinted at me in recognition, so I gave myself up and waved at them. They went and bought some random sweet wine and passed it around.
Some more people came, and we took a bunch of pictures, and my tripod got passed around like...

In any case, I need new similes.

Mundane Bike Repairs

My poor, poor bike brakes have been getting worse and worse of late. A few weeks ago, some an old woman in a in a tiny car passed me, swerved in front of me, then stopped suddenly so she could s-l-o-w-l-y turn into the parking lot. I had a garbage truck approaching on my right, and a curb that I was at too shallow of an angle at to jump onto, and you can't safely stop even a bike with good brakes in three feet, but you can at least slow down the impact.

I was fine and only left a trail of tire-smudge across her bright white back bumper. She was almost kind enough to roll down her window and ask if I was okay, but not quite.

Anyway, after ten or so trips up near Kinkaku and back, plus my two-three times daily commute to the school and back, my poor V-brakes were not so much braking anymore as much as slowing. More useful than a kick in the pants, but not nearly as useful as working brakes.

The mechanic was a little confused about why I wanted my old brakes, but I managed to wrest them away from him and flee. Anyway, you can see them at right.

Learned today that the mechanic that usually does work on my bike worked for five years as a racing pit mechanic and spent most of his life working for Nissan as an engineer. Can't remember his name, though.

Bike Repair

I don't know why I have such poor luck with bikes here in Japan. I've had a brake failure on a used bike, fixed that, and that bike got stolen - $120 total expenditure for the first bike. I bought a new bike for $250 with some metal pedals ($20) because they slip less and I just destroy the plastic ones. Too fat, I guess. Then that bike was stolen - $280 total expenditure for the second bike, bringing me and those I leech off of (ie, parents) up to $390. $125 of this was refunded as insurance, fortunately, for a new total of $255.

I'm currently on my third bike ($250), but I'm using two locks now ($12 for the extra lock - one comes standard on almost all bikes) and have the normal plastic pedals. All is well with this bike, until someone got a little overzealous trying to park their bike and managed to snap off the upshifting lever. Kind of them, I know.

At right is the part that was broken off. I was fortunate enough that it happened to fall on the ground in a gutter, so nobody stepped on it or anything. I stuffed it in my pocket and headed home. At left is what remains of the shift lever that is attached to the bike.

A few days later, I took it into a bike shop and asked them what it would cost to fix. They said they'd have to replace the whole unit, which, after some runaround, turned out would be $60. I think $5 of that was labor, in case you're wondering.

I'm not upscale enough to make this kind of repair worth $60, nearly 1/4 the original cost of the bike, worthwhile to me. But you know what is?

A $3 tube of superglue and some duct tape. Yeah, classy. I know.

So I dabbed some superglue on a few contact points and fixed the whole thing in place with duct tape, then let it set for about two hours.

It seemed pretty secure at that point, so I turned the whole thing on its side and filled everything that didn't look like a moving part with superglue. Then the duct tape again. My bike is back outside, nursing its wounds, but I can now shift up again. It's not a Knife Man Dan level of glue-ninja, but it holds the thing on.

Total cost of materials:
$4 - Scotch-brand superglue
$3 - クリームパン等 - Tasties
$20 - Incidental costs in visiting a hardware store. IE, "Look, gloves!" and "A non-slip pad! I can freem that on the bottom of my DDR mats and make for bonus goodness!" and... Well, you know. I bought a six-pack of chopsticks, for some unknown reason, and almost spent $10 on glow tape.

I very nearly bought this flashlight, as well, and I think most of you can understand why. It's 5W, making it nearly three times as powerful as my current 1W belt-carry. The thing looks so nice and Mag-Lite-ish, too, as you can hopefully see through the cellophane wrap. I may buy myself that for Christmas if I have money left...

As a last random picture, I also found these hammers. They completely outnumbered what I consider to be normal hammers. Out of frame is a massive wooden mallet, various sizes of crowbars ranging from six inches to 3.2 feet, and a Japanese couple running away from the gaijin with the 1-meter crowbar in his hands.

Pudding/プリン

So Chikari, my cute パン屋 (bakery) girl brought me some yummy apple pie and...
this, a half-liter bucket of pudding. The pudding was delicious.

旅行茶碗 - Trip Chawan

My school's study abroad students all - minus one or two - went to Shiga Prefecture on a day trip. One of the things we did was to make these rice bowls, or chawan. chawan is written with the characters for "tea" and "teacup", so your guess is as good as mine as to why it's a rice bowl.

Anyway, we were allowed to make one piece of random pottery. They recommended a chawan because they're fairly simple and hard to mess up. A lot of people did cool artsy stuff, I'm sure some people did not-so-cool artsy stuff, and... then there's mine. It's an ugly beast, but it does successfully keep my chopsticks on the top of the bowl where I want them, and that's all I was trying to do.

Mission accomplished, I guess.

Calligraphy Ninjing

[I have more pictures than things to actually say about them, but it's not enough to put in a separate gallery, so I'm just going to interject comments or info about the pictures wherever happens to be convenient.

By the way:

If you're in any of these pictures, I can get you higher-quality versions with no trouble at all, so drop me a line if you want 'em.]

I snuck my camera into the calligraphy class today during some free time I had today and I got some pictures.

(To the left is Cristina (Italian) and to the right is Alessia (also Italian). Or at least, I think that's who they are. I also get the two of them mixed up.
Far right is Valentina (also also Italian), my partner in level four.)

After this class is a tea ceremony class, and a bunch of the students wear kimono to it, purportedly because it makes the teacher happy.

(Far left is Yanavy (French), our French-/German-/British-English-speaking language ninja. I have recordings of her accent, which is probably the cutest of the students I know, but there are something like 32 different death threats if I ever show them to anybody, so they're just going to ferment on my hard drive.
Right is Cassie (American, by the window) and Magi (Canadian, closer, light purple kimono).
You can see Sara (Australian) and a guy from level two whose name I don't know in the middle picture.)

(This last picture is of two of the three Koreans in our level four class, Park Sou Jong and Park Min Ji. I honestly have no clue how to romanize their names, so I hope they will forgive me if they see this. Sou Jong is the one with the hat.)

The two characters they were writing that day were 山 yama/san/zan ("mountain") and 寺 tera/dera/ji ("temple"), pronounced together as any combination of the above, or even other random readings I don't know, like 山's yano reading, which is only used for names. That said, if you're rendering it as a normal word, it's pronounced yamadera, meaning "mountain temple".

I believe I may have mentioned that kanji and I are not on the best of terms.

Safety Cone

I took this picture during Jidai matsuri, but I guess I forgot to put it up.

It reads "Center Line Here"

Strange Day

Today has been interesting, despite not starting until a good deal past 11AM. I hung out with Yanavy and her group who just sort of dropped by around 10PM and we all watched a movie and sat around and slacked off until 5AM, when we collectively realized we ought to get some sleep. My room still smells like Magi's (sp?) perfume very faintly. Could just be a little left on me, though.

That sounds bad, but nothing happened. She sprayed some around at one point.

Anyway, everybody went home and I... was at home, so I just fell over and went to sleep.

On my way to practice today, I stopped and stared at some pigeons, and found one with a peg leg - or at least no toes. I did my best to take his picture with my cell phone camera, but... Cell phone camera, so...

Once I got there, I found out practice was canceled and there was an art show. Random, no? I bought a scrunchie (シュシュ) I liked and headed back home.

Upon returning, I was summoned to go do some tech support. But on the way, I saw a wallet lying on the ground, open, stuffed full of money, in the road. I stopped my bike, parked it off to the side of the road, grabbed the wallet and immediately signaled a nearby guard and explained the situation. He wanted me to hang out for a while so the wallet's owner could thank me, and while I was saying how I was in a hurry, the owner of the wallet came out of the store looking confused and patting his pants pockets. The guard flagged him and we returned his wallet, they both thanked me, and the guy gave me $30 for my trouble. He said I should go buy some ramen or something with it. I thanked him and we went our ways.

So I got to the Cristina's apartment, where Valentina, Betta, and Daniela were waiting, and was able to figure out why they couldn't get on the Internet (they were connected to the wireless router as a gateway instead of the router plugged into the VDSL modem - and their modem had locked up at the same time). Being somewhat short on time, I set up their computers to use static IPs and assigned the gateway and DNS settings manually, and left them with instructions on how to power cycle their setup. It's nice to be able to help like that.

Oh, and I'm currently waiting for Chise and Mikako to show up, and we're going to make okonomiyaki and play some Super Smash Brothers.

Barring anything really bad happening, this has been another pretty decent day. This makes me worry a little bit about tomorrow, but...

外大際

This weekend was the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies festival, AKA, the 外大際 gai dai sai. It included a lot of live music and dancing and some cafe's and stuff. If you've ever seen the cultural festival episode of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi or - though any anime about high-school will have a festival episode or two - you know the basic idea.

I went on Saturday for a bit, but the act was not particularly good, so I left about only being there for about half an hour. They were supposedly doing go-go dancing, but it looked much more like para para than anything else. Further, they didn't seem to be really confident of themselves, but it was probably the first time they did their routine in front of a hundred (maybe two hundred?) people, so that's fairly understandable.
I took some pictures, but they didn't really come out well. The harsh sunlight was making it hard to get their faces to expose properly. If you look, you'll see the exposure bias was set to +2/3 stops, and I'm not really sure when that happened, but it's another thing I need to watch out for in the future. I very rarely use positive exposure biases.

After this, I went to a shiatsu lesson, but I wasn't in the right mood for it, and I felt like "Urgh, end already...". Probably because I stayed up until 5AM that day playing games with Yanavy, a French girl from my school's level two class. I think she speaks four or five languages fluently.

Wake up, go to club stuff, and got this picture of Melissa lookin' good, as she tends to do, while we were all getting ready to leave. Taken simply as an excuse to play with my new flash, though. The SB-600 has a head that both twists and rotate on the vertical axis, so you can do bounce shots while holding the camera vertically. I don't know quite what I did in this picture, because I certainly didn't bounce it. I guess it's direct flash?

Came back later on Sunday, around 7PM, and watched an hour of people dancing around. They were much, much better than the first group I saw, but they had quite a bit more invested in it and it was a larger group. This is probably why they were put on the main day of the festival during the peak of the students being around.

They had maybe eight different outfits for each of the ten or so different people, and a couple of times they just changed on stage behind a big pink tarp.
The thing that confuses me about this: where do you find a big pink tarp? That's not really a standard color for tarps, you know?

Now, I don't want you to think the entire set of dance routines was just a bunch of women in short skirts shaking their stuff around - though it was, for the most part.
Two guys came on stage and did some breakdancing, which I couldn't see due to being fairly far back. They looked fairly in shape, but they didn't really have any costuming, which might have helped.

They did a bunch of songs that I would consider serious for breakdancing, but they also did the theme song from 崖の上のぽにょ Gake no Ue no Ponyo which is pretty cutesy, as well as Cruel Angel's Thesis from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Both were met with cheers.

One of the performances had this chick (right side of the left-aligned picture) in it, and she's probably the most buff Japanese woman I've seen yet. She also gets bonus points for being pretty cute anyway.

At the end, I saw a bunch of the dancers (right) kind of... dancing around, in the open, and I took the opportunity to actually get a picture of a few of the whole outfits.

I also spotted one of the other study abroad students trying to pick up some girls. I don't know how this turned out, but I think he was fairly drunk while they were fairly not. Note the expression of the girl to his right.

While the obon dance was going on, there was someone providing cues for the announcers, but I guess she didn't have them in a useful format to read from a distance, so she was furiously scribbling away on this big notebook and showing them their cues like that. Pretty nifty idea, I thought.

New Sack

I'm not certain what spurred it, exactly, but my dad sent me some cash to by a new backpack. "What's wrong with your normal backpack?" you might ask. The answer is "Nothing... in Ellensburg." My black and grey Pacific Crest backpack has served me well for quite a while and I intend to continue using it to transport my laptop and whatnot.

The primary problem lies in the foam padding on the side of the bag that rests against my back. Because it's a very soft, comfy foam, it conforms to fit my back just right. While fine and dandy in many circumstances, that's less than ideal when 100% humidity is considered to be fairly low. (That's only mostly a joke.) The solution is to get a back that is somewhat separated from your body, utilizing either an external frame or a combination of hard foam pads and an internal frame.

After about six and a half hours spread over two days of looking at bags in a local hiking shop and having already checked prices elsewhere, I ended up picking the Deuter Navajo 35, which is a very simple bag, but it's got twin sets of compression straps, shoulder straps that are adjustable from both ends, pockets on both sides (something my black and grey bag doesn't have, for some unknown reason) that are both big enough to put a one-liter bottle of water in, and it's rated to hold 35L of loot. Now, those are just extra features that are really, really nice. What makes it simple is that it has one main compartment with two places to access it from, and a zipper that allows you to separate the bottom 1/3 of the bag from the rest. That's all. No weird little pockets or anything as yet, though I may look into strapping some on the side or on the daisy chain.

Left: Me, being round.

Right: See the hard foam strips?
They're magical.

Now, this bag uses a flexible internal frame with a layer of medium-soft foam on top of that, with two strips of fairly hard foam that keep the bag about 3/4 of an inch off of your back. When you combine that with the fact that you can distribute load and place the bag much more precisely, it makes this bag much easier to wear. I wore it to school today it was very comfortable.

In this picture of Kilik at right, the bag has two 1.5L bottles of water in the side pockets, two in the bottom pocket with a 1L as well. The main compartment has all of my school stuff in it. You might take notice of the fact that it looks nearly empty, despite having seven liters of water and a stack of books and papers about 6" thick in it.

The bag itself weighs something like 700 grams (1.5 pounds), I think, which puts it in the middle to light range.

Anyway, I like it.

Thanks, dad!

Shopping Wander with Fish and "Lady's Only"

I went out and did some shopping in Kawaramachi today. I should've gone to club practice, but I just didn't feel up to it.
So I went via Sanjo street because it has long portions that are covered and it was raining pretty decently. I was wearing my rain gear, so I wasn't getting wet, but the opportunity to undo my jacket and cool off was certainly justified the choice. Further, I found these delicious fishes. Some were filled with cream and some with bean paste. Kind of expensive, but something I've wanted to try for a while. They were decent.

I also found this sticker on the side of a public telephone. The red-outlined stuff is my appended translations. I'm not quite sure what to make of the whole thing, but the whole thing was worth it for the "Banana Milk" bit.

Numbers have a couple of ways of being read and you can take advantage of this to create mnemonics to help remember them, such as they have done here.

A Little Late, But Good Enough

I want to start this post off by saying that I'm straight. That is to say, chix FTW.
While Japanese men and women are about one pair of genitals apart, that's a topic for another time.

So last Tuesday, a bunch of the the 留学生 (study-abroad students) went out to an 居酒屋 (kind of like a bar) and for dinner. The people I was sitting with (seated at lower left in the picture later) decided to leave early and go get ice cream.

I later discovered that the reason we had gone to this particular place was because four of the five girls I was with had a crush on one of the guys working there. Now, these people are all fairly new to Japan and are not quite comfortable with the language.

This led to me using my Japanese for something I never expected to: asking a Japanese guy out.

...

Yeah, it was for Maggie, who stood there the whole time and made little noises at random times, but still... Well, at least I know I can ask out a Japanese girl now, if I need or want to, 'cause there's no way that could be more awkward than this.

I took a bunch of pictures while we were out at okonomiyaki, but didn't gel my flash, so they all came out kind of lame. Random picture from the set that I stitched together:

Jidai Matsuri

Gallery links at the bottom of this post!

Jidai Matsuri (時代祭り) is a parade that includes elements from the 1,100 years or so that Kyoto was the capital of Japan. For perspective, this is nearly five times the length that the United States has been recognized as a country. On the other hand, Commodore Perry might have a couple of things to say about these kinds of things.

In any case, there's really not much more that can be said about the parade. I think I prefer Apple Blossom over this one, as at least the Grand Parade has girls in short skirts in quantity. Massed cheerleaders are awfully hard to beat, you know?

I think my favorite part of the Jidai Matsuri parade was when one guy's horse decided he wanted to go the other way for a while. They stopped the whole remaining part of the procession while the handlers got the horse to turn around. This happened with three or four of them, but one took the entire six-lane street to turn around.
There were a couple of touchy spots where I was worried about the stability of the horses, as they kept ending up going sideways by the corner, and if you've been around horses, you know they don't strafe well.
Actually, I think you can circle-strafe in Dynasty Warriors, but... Well, you can do a lot of things in Dynasty Warriors.

Galleries

The first gallery contains all the pictures I thought were particularly good. This is the gallery I'd recommend to anybody in general. This is the top 20% or so of the pictures I took, and I really like some of them. If you just need more pictures of the parade than are here, there's the...

Second gallery, which includes the first gallery and a further ~150 of the pictures that I took at Jidai Matsuri. It consists of pretty much all the pictures I thought weren't boring. I took another 200 or so that came out just fine, but they're not worth including due to space restrictions and me being lazy. Mostly the latter.
My email is at the bottom of this page if you have any questions, and you should also feel free to leave a comment. Either way.

(ヴァレンテナと言う直おばあさんになる人が読んでいたら、このページのギャラリーを無視してもいいよ。ばあさんのためのギャラリーも準備できているんだからね)

Busy Days

So the three days prior to today were busy. This is going to be a messy summarization of what's gone on, and it's may not make a lot of sense or be particularly well-connected.

Thursday was a trip, but further information on it is secret pending my Evil Scheme©, but it started at 8:30AM and we got back some time around 6PM. With the other stuff I had to do before I left school, it ended up being nearly 8PM before I got any peace.
So then I worked on Evil Scheme© with a friend and got back here around midnight, when I started working on my presentation for Friday morning. Oh, and I ate a maple メロンパン, which was yummy.

Friday, we give presentations and do some random stuff, and take a break. Halfway through the second period of Basic Japanese, I get a call from a teacher at the school who wants me to teach English for him because he has a television appearance that came up suddenly. We'll call him Jay:
Jay: How'd you like $100? Are you busy tomorrow afternoon?
Me: Not anymore, I'm not.
Jay: You want to teach some English?
Me: I'd love to!
Jay: There will be little kids.
Me: ... [through only slightly gritted teeth] I'd... love to!
Jay: Cool, come on by, then, and I'll show you what to do.

So I come back to class after answering my phone - I wouldn't normally, but I figure if someone's calling me twice in immediate succession, they probably have a good reason.

Class was largely uneventful after that, but I did manage to get a good picture of Valentina. Or at least, I think it's good. She doesn't, but her boyfriend in Italy does, so we've got her outvoted. Ha!
This could've been improved with a a hair light high left, I think, but I'm not about to start setting up light stands in the middle of class.

[Edit: Apparently, I like this picture so much that I've used in two posts... I didn't notice before, but I used it in the previous post as well.]

And then...

Paid my phone bill, tried to find some information, called Jay again to actually have the rest of the conversation transcribed above, and about 2PM finally ate something. Screwed around for about ten minutes, then got ready for work.

Work was... Money? It was work-ish. When you're in a room where there are 30 people and two of them are married teachers, there's one other guy your age, and the remaining 90% are attractive, largely eligible women who want to talk to you, work can only be so bad.

Friday night, I did something until midnight, but I don't know what it was.

Saturday, I got up around 8AM, got prepared for the tea ceremony thing and the work that was to ensue, but was worried about time, and not only at one juncture.

See, I left to get to the tea ceremony place around 11AM, and I was supposed to be there at 11:30AM. I originally had planned to get there ten minutes early, but then I looked at a map one last time and realized that it would take quite a bit more than half an hour if I didn't hurry, and that short a time only if I didn't get lost once and could find the place. Half an hour later, I get there right on time, out of breath, covered in a nice layer of sweat, with the sleeves of my T-shirt rolled up to my shoulders. The greeter, with his suit and tie, did not look particularly impressed, but told me exactly what I should do with my bike and indicated that he didn't think I understood.

So I came back, now wearing a button shirt with a collar and sans one bucket of sweat, and go in.

We went in and sat for a while, bowing every so often to people I couldn't see. After maybe ten minutes, they brought out some little candies, which were pretty good, but there was, unfortunately, only one for each of us.

The woman at left in the purple is the one that [verb]ed my tea. Replace "[verb]" with whatever you verb you use for combining hot water with a powder, and proceeding to whip it with a bamboo whisk. "Made" might be an option.

After everybody had their tea, we were allowed to go (and I got these two ladies at right to pose for me) and they gave us some candy and a free admission ticket to a museum that nobody in my group of friends was able to find.

I'm trying to brief with these, but I still haven't gotten the box of underwear from my parents... By the way, pretty much all clothes are expensive here.

I got a lot of pictures like this one of the chick in the pink kimono. She never served anybody near me tea, so all the pictures of her are either while she's walking - and there was too little light to take pictures while they were walking without getting serious motion blur - or of her butt because she's sitting in seiza, which is when you fold your legs straight under you.

The older lady in the next picture (left) gave a little talk while the tea and candy were being distributed. She was definitely American, but I couldn't place her accent well. I'd guess midwest or Pacific northwest, though, given that.

These two ladies (right) were just kind of milling around in front of the place the tea ceremony was held in, rather disturbingly like characters in an RPG. Just kind of wandering back and forth, not for any apparent reason.

This lady (left) was doing pretty much the same thing in a temple right next to the place where I was taking pictures, so I asked for her picture.

She couldn't decide whether or not to include the umbrella, which I think is funny. I have a picture that came out better in terms of lighting and composition, but her expression is weird, so... しょうがない

The temple entrance at right is one of my favorite temple pictures, and I was happy that I got the road and other stuff out of the shot. I guess I didn't quite get that bush at low-right out, though. In case you're wondering, this is the temple that the other pictures were taken in, not a different one. The tea ceremony was in a nont-temple-related building next door.

Another shot inside the temple. Just me playing with my flash. I drained my rechargables trying to get this shot, so I felt I had to do something with it.

And last is a random picture I got while heading to work. I asked her permission first, and she seemed pleasantly surprised.

I got some more pictures, and I hope to get them up soon, but the test tomorrow may prevent that.

And that's what happened weekend-ish.

People Pictures

We had presentations today and I thought I would take some pictures. You can see that, as usual, my 50mm lens just makes everything good. That combined with some rather blunt digital darkroom business and you get these. Nothing amazing, but I think these are pretty decent. More importantly, these aren't just the good ones, but some of them. Only two pictures out of this set of 20 or so didn't come out well, both due to subject motion, something completely outside of my control.

At least, until I buy a Tazer. But that's neither here nor there, given Japanese weapon laws.

At left is Sara, my class's token Australian. She, of course, has a really cool accent. She also is very studious and very rarely comes to class unprepared.

At right you can see Kilik (right) and the teacher I call 元気先生 genki-sensei because I don't know his name. He's our only male teacher and always seems really excited, which is kind of cool. He's really supportive and his explanations generally make sense, though I have some difficulty with his accent.
You can see here that he's wearing a dress shirt with a tie and whatnot, but what you can't see is the slippers he's wearing. So I took the second shot (inside right) which is one of the couple different pairs of slippers he wears to class. I'm not sure what the story is behind them, but I think it has something to do with the uncomfortability of dress shoes. Maybe.

The guy on the left is "Mun-jii-san" called with the title for an old man because he's, like, 27 or something. He's the 2nd oldest of the study-abroad students that I know.

He's pretty cool, and he's studied in some kind of martial art, though I can't tell which and he doesn't talk about it.

He's Korean, in case you're wondering.

I got two pictures of Kilik that I just couldn't help picking because I really like both of them. Sometimes, I really like my camera. Most of the time. I worry about it a little when it's rainy, but it lets me take pictures like these that just wouldn't look quite the same from a point and shoot, even if the composition were the exact same.

Kilik is from Peru and is the one that drew me looking like Bill Gates.

Hopefully these pictures will line up the way I want them to, or this will look a little weird.

Here are the other two Koreans in our class: Seu Jeung Park (left, standing) and "Minji" (left- sitting). Seu Jeung organizes most of the parties and reads almost as poorly as I do, while Minji never says a word unless called on, but can read pretty much everything. I've only heard her miss one kanji thus far semester.

The last two people I took pictures of - and whose pictures I will post now - are Valentina Mazzeo and Ai Nishizaki.

Valentina is very nice and is one of those people that is always smiling. She's studying Japanese and Chinese right now, but has very passable English and natively speaks Italian. She's very supportive and kind, and helpful to boot. One of the things I like most about her is that she's engaged, and she doesn't drink alcohol or smoke anything. Her only vice as far as I know, is coffee...

She never quite looks herself in pictures, somehow. I don't really get it.

Okay, last picture before I try to go to sleep some more!

Ai Nishizaki (left, with the mic) is a student from the class I work with. Her English is so-so, but I think she's a Chinese major. She's kinda cute, I think, and has a strange something in her voice that I haven't heard anywhere else before.

Just fell asleep sitting here, so it's time for bed.
...
Zzzz...

It Doesn't Go?

From the party last night. I'm still recovering and don't have much to say about it.
Mun is holding the flash off in the distance, which is how that nova happened.

Kilik... Strikes Back?

Kilik and I were assigned each other for a little interview thing, and we were supposed to draw the other person or take their picture. I, of course, wanted to take pictures, but everybody else wanted to draw, so we did. My drawing of Kilik is a circle with two lines for eyes and a dot of a mouth. It's like a stick-figure face.

Well, Kilik is an art major, and I spent as long posing as I did answering questions, but I'm glad to have a drawing of me by someone as good as he is. He knocked this out in about two minutes in class on a piece of scratch paper the teacher gave us, and a lot of detail was lost when it was copied, as well as some when I used my "scanner" (ie, my camera) to digitize it. Them's the breaks.

Eh, I like it anyway, even if it makes me look like Bill Gates.

Playing with Myself

I went out today in my black jacket, and happened to grab my hat and gloves, so I was being scary again today, though Chise says I wasn't. And that my hat smells bad. I dunno. Anyway, I took nearly 50 pictures of myself, and it was kind of fun. I'd much rather have someone else posing and be able to actually compose the pictures, but until I have enough spare money to pay people to model for me... Beggars can't be choosers, they say.

In any case, I thought I would show that I'm doing my part to give Americans a bad name. I wouldn't want anybody to think I'm slacking in that department. At right is the best shot I got, evil-wise.
I made no major alterations, though I did cool it down a little to add the extra zombie feeling to my face.

I'm totally not posting any of the full resolution ones, but - as much as I detest it when people use GIFs like this - here's a little GIF showing all of the ones I didn't just delete out of hand.
Examples of those are shots of just the curtain, or where you can't see anything 'cause I pressed the button without realizing, and then fiddled with something on the camera, blocking everything.

Rice Cooker, Translated

I don't know why I never did this post before and I feel a little silly just getting around to it now, but I put the diagrams together over the past hour so. I think spent half the time playing around with fonts and stuff, and trying to figure out how to label all the stuff and make everything fit, with the remaining time devoted to looking up kanji and actually positioning the labels.

I finally decided on using two separate pictures, as I can't realistically fit all the labels on one picture unless I overlap with the labels themselves, which would defeat the purpose of the entire thing.

First up is the buttons, since they're the most important. Everything should be pretty self-explanatory.Second are the translations for all the various labels. No, I've never used most of the modes. I just use timer-cook and the start button. It'll start on its own though if you leave it alone for about two minutes after setting a timer.
I've also never made okayu.

Flash

One of the biggest steps you can take to allow yourself a wider range of options photographically is to get an external flash for your camera. Very high-end or prosumer digital cameras will usually allow you to do this (eg: Canon G Series - >$300 used) and I have never seen an SLR or DSLR that doesn't at least have a hotshoe. High-end SLRs will have a PC Sync port (at right), as well.

External flashes will usually allow you to tilt the flash head itself, which gives you the ability to bounce your flash off of the ceiling or walls. It really helps to alleviate the whole "This is a picture" feeling that direct, on-camera flash (at left) gives. It tends to give much more natural-feeling light due to the fact that we, as humans, are use to light coming from above us. The sun, most room lights, etc, are all above our heads, so we spend our whole lives accustomed to lighting from above. When you take a picture and use the on-camera flash your main light is now on the camera. How often do you have lights behind your retinas? "Retinae"?

Further, an external flash can be used with all sorts of lighting gear, such as remote triggers, umbrellas, snoots, grids... people... With a flash and a remote trigger (eg: PocketWizard - ~$400/pair), you're able to hand your flash to someone (preferably a friend, so they don't run off with it) and use them as an emergency tripod. This setup is sometimes referred to as using a "Voice Activated Tripod". "Fred, turn left, would you?", and such. You're then much more likely to get what you see at the right.

And then there's the downside to doing all of this on the cheap: it's all manual. You're not using any i-TTL, or CLS, or anything like that. You're directly controlling the flash power (Full, 1/2, 1/4, etc) and the exposure. You can leave the exposure on auto sometimes, but the camera doesn't know what the flash is doing, so it usually won't work right.

At left is an example why you don't let the camera figure exposure when you use off-camera lighting. There are other and better reasons, but those are a topic for a blog of their own.

Thanks to Kilik for unknowingly providing me with examples.

Oreo Wafers?

I have a new partner at work now, apparently. I don't really know anything about her except that she speaks Chinese natively, speaks Japanese far better than I do, and has a decent command of English on top of that.

We were sitting around, waiting for the students to take a test and we somehow started talking about cookies I guess. She totally thought Oreos were made by a Chinese company, so I pulled my usual Wikipedia trick and was victorious. (There's not really a trick, it's just that people are really shocked when I have an article about something up within seconds of them mentioning it.)

So she gave me one of the packages (above) of Oreos that she had brought with her since she was on her way to a party. You can see that it is not what you might normally think of as an Oreo.

If you've ever bought those really, really cheap wafer snacks at Safeway that come in a pack of about 30 for $1, you're on the right track. Now take normal Oreo filling, minus 1/3 of the sugar, and coat the whole thing in chocolate. That's the Chinese version of an Oreo cookie.

I don't recall seeing any kanji-ish business on the wrapper, though, which seems weird because I understand that she bought them in China. I'm somewhat worried about whether or not they're a dairy product, but not so much.

Results

Well, I did say that it was a small DIY project. Here's a picture of the final product.

It's basically a big, sticky version of the little Velcro cable ties from the dollar store.

It's a... Good... Too Good... Day?

Today has gone scarily well. I'm not kidding.

To start with, I woke up early. That's a good thing, by the way.

Then, I made breakfast and it just, you know, worked. It was delicious, the texture was nice, and it actually looked appealing. The seasoning worked well, and all the flavors blended nicely. Rare indeed for my cooking.

Did I mention that my school has the day off due to some freaky PE festival that we don't have to go to? I should mention that. It means I basically get my very own holiday, but without the crowds that ruin holidays here.

Next, I was helping Jes get some stuff set up on her computer, so she was actually talking to me. Problems that popped up promptly vanished for no known reason and without us really doing anything. I had solutions for most of them, but it was really nice to be overprepared for once.

So then I start reading about some DIY stuff and I'm in a particularly good mood from talking to Jes, so I exercise a little, grab a shower, and head down to the mall. Well, I went to the cycle shop I go to all the time, and he was more than happy to give me an old bike tube. In fact, he asked "Are you sure you only want one?" and we chatted for a few minutes. On my way out, I filled up my front bike tire, so the rest of the time riding around was extra comfy and easy.

So I deposit the tube at my bike and go into the mall to get some tasty treats. Because no trip to the mall is complete without tasty treats, right? Right! I ask for one tsubuan, which is kind of a shorthand way of saying that I want a two pieces of mochi (gelatinized rice) wrapped around a filling of tsubuan (red bean paste with a little bean texture left) and fried. When I tried to give her money to pay for it, she refused and said. "That's not necessary, you come here all the time. Go on, now." I checked once more and thanked her, happily on my way.

A few feet away is another shop that sells a different kind of mochi and I tried a new flavor of mochi that I honestly have no clue what it was supposed to be. That store always has issues with spelling, but even I can't figure out what flavor "Seeqester" is. It was frozen, so I couldn't eat it right away. Eh.

I head down to the hardware store to get some majikku teepu ("Velcro"). It's kind of pricey at $4.50 for a matched set of hook and loop sides that are each about 2"x3". I found it in bulk and asked someone who works there to help me figure out how much would cost how much. As it turned out, I was able to get about twice as much for two-thirds the cost that way, and it was the perfect size for what I wanted it for.
To top it off, I found some non-slip pads that I've been looking for and some glue that together were less than $2, so I have a second project for a little later. All told, I got out of there for less than $5.
How cool is that?

So I'm on my way home and I discover a new bakery that has pretty much just the stuff I like, and a bunch of new things I've never seen before - "leaf pie", for example, is some kind of thin strudel-like thing sprinkled with sugar in the shape of a piece of pizza. On top of that, they're all really, really cheap. Most bakeries here charge between $1.30 and $2.50 for their various bits. The most expensive thing I saw here was a new kind of fluffy クリームパン kuriimu pan ("delicious") and that was $1.16, which I of course bought. It was extra delicious.

So I'm about to get started on my little project. Here's what I got on my outing, minus the food, which I kind of... consumed.
The reason that today is scarily good is because things going this smoothly makes me worry about what's going to happen tomorrow.

But... I can't do anything about that, so on to hacking together some pieces!

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!

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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。。。

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.

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.]

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?

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.

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.

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...

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.

Kobe!

Today was my first time going to Kobe. I went with Bryden, my neighbor, and we wandered around aimlessly for four or five hours. It was hot and muggy, which I'm growing familiar with, though I don't think I'll ever be used to it.

The most interesting thing we saw while we were there is a shrine whose name I didn't catch. It had a bunch of little torii (the red, upside-down-U-shaped gates) and three different sets of koinu (part-dog guard statues that scare off evil spirits) that I found. The one at right is a rather slim kind that I haven't seen anywhere else, while the two at left are the more standard form.

Now, this may be a strange thing to notice, but I was a little bit perturbed to see that one of them (to the left of this paragraph) actually has a penis. His partner doesn't, so I have to wonder if the sculptor just did it to see if he could get away with it, or if that's for scaring off evil spirits, too.

Maybe I haven't noticed it before and it's really common on statues or something. This boar also had one, though I didn't notice until I was picking which pictures to post and which to toss. There was some English just out of the frame on the bottom, but we were in a bit of a rush by this point, I think, so I didn't stop to get that.

We did our best to figure out what this sign was for, but we were completely defeated. The windows of the shop were very small, so we didn't get a good look at what was on the inside, either. It's English, though, so at least it's cool, even if it doesn't make any sense. Right?

In other news, we saw an old woman wearing a shirt that read "too blessedness". Bryden thinks maybe it was supposed to be a toast like "to blessedness", but I pointed out that there are plenty of shirts that just say "SEXY" in the largest letters possible, so it's I think the standard humility doesn't apply because a lot of people don't understand. Maybe. Or something. We were on the subway, so no picture. Sara and Bethany are convinced my camera makes people think I'm a terrorist or something.

We found some other Engrish, though, as you can see at right. The text reads

READY STUDY GO
FAVORITE THINGS
MYSTERIOUS FRIGHT TO ORIGINAL
DEPTH OF ANYTHINGS
BY PROGRAMING MASTERS

During this time of year, when you're wandering around, people will be wearing yukata (summerweight kimono) because they are very cool and breezy. Here's a token yukata girl. Don't worry, there'll be more with the fireworks pictures I'm putting up later.

We went to a ramen shop for lunch, and it was pretty decent. I got yakisoba and gyouza (meat dumplings, I guess?) and he got a fried rice set. After this, it was 3:30 or so, so we had to rush back so I could meet up with Ana to go to Fireworks. Also had to get a picture of Bryden for his mom, since she wanted to see his shaved head.

Yes, he even shaved his eyebrows.

No context?

Here's a bonus picture I wanted to put up, but couldn't really think of any context for. It's from the night before our trip to Arashiyama/Matsuo, I think, and we were on our way back from getting some food down by the station. When Hamid took this picture, Antonia (the girl in red) commented "Charlie's Angels... and... Charlie?" in Italian.

Matsuo Taisha, Episode Three - But Mostly Arashiyama

I went to Arashiyama again, this time with Hamid and Alessandra. We wandered around the shops a little bit and took random pictures. Pictures like the one at right are, I'm sure, pretty much required by everybody who ever goes to Arashiyama.
Saw the shoes at left while we were there. Hamid pointed them out and I had taken the picture before he had finished his "Wow, look at those shoes!"-like sentence. I have to wonder if they're any more difficult to walk in than normal high-heeled shoes, or pretty much the same. I guess it's possible they'd be easier, since the sole is at least more regular.
These Hello Kitty cups were pretty cool, too. Almost bought one for Jes on accident.
Wandered up to a spot where we always go swimming at night and discovered that it there are lots of fishes and frogs in the water. I had a staring contest with a frog, but completely lost. I walked off and came back five minutes later and he still hadn't looked anywhere else but where I had been standing. This frog picture is from a different day, but I like it because it has a tadpole of bigness.
I also found a 毛虫 ("hair bug") up there. You might recall these from Super Mario World for the SNES. I was very surprised to learn the things actually exist. They dangle from trees by a string and have very long hairs, presumably to get caught on things and travel.
And speaking of bugs, it's worth mentioning that the mosquitoes here are not to be ignored. Or rather, you're going to have to try very hard if you intend to ignore them. You can see poor Alessandra's ankle in this picture at left.
I don't scratch mine nearly as much, but I have four bites on one side of my right ankle, and four on my left hand, in addition to random bites in other places. I've recently been taking more precautions, but it's too hot to wear anything with sleeves and even jeans are pretty uncomfortable.
Hamid wanted to play with my camera, so I got this shot at far left, along with about 20 more that are the exact same or very nearly so.

I convinced her to pose with me a little more, saying that my parents get sad if I don't show them I'm hanging out with cute girls at least once in a while. Here we posed to illustrate our difference in size, and I think you can see it pretty clearly at right. Notice also that I'm wearing sandals and have one of my legs bent so I'm standing up straight instead of sloping sideways.
She's usually pretty shy, but Hamid seems to have rubbed off on her a little, 'cause she actually asked us to take pictures of her.

A little later, we actually got around to going to Matsuo Taisha and stopped in to get some Mitarashii dango (prounced "meet-ah-rah-she dahn-goh", if that makes sense), which the shop is famous for. You can see both the dango and Hamid's reaction to their slimy mess at left.
That brown sauce is a kind of sweet soy-based goo, while the dango themselves are a basically a ball of rice cake. The whole thing is a dessert.
Between the dango and the sauce, you have to drink about a glass of water for each kebab of 'em that you eat.
Once we were done, I convinced two of the girls working there to pose with my friends, and they got all giggly, as Japanese girls tend to do when you ask to take pictures of them.


I've been threatening to upload a nice, high-resolution panorama composite for months now, and I'm finally making good on that. If you click on the picture, you'll see the nice, sane, 120KB JPG version. Should load decently quickly, even on 56k. Anyway, this is the downstairs part of a shop we went into. If this shop doesn't yell "Tourist trap!" or "Leavenworth!" to you, then... Well, it should, in any case.And then there's the ridiculously high-resolution version (33MB PNG), which will take a while even on a fast connection. It's something like 10,000 pixels horizontally.

In the Ofuro

I tried to post this from my cell phone, but was unable. I found an ad in the lobby and had my cell phone with me, so I snapped this picture.
The text reads "Japanese women are beautiful".

Hamid's Last Katsuragawa Party

We had another party up on Katsuragawa tonight, and we actually planned to have a fire from the beginner and were much more prepared. Bryden and I go there about 45 minutes before everybody else, so we explored a little and gathered up some firewood.
Once Hamid and everybody else got there, it got a lot more fun and we put some food on the fire to cook. We cooked up some sausages, but didn't have anything to put them on to put them in the fire, so I sharpened a piece of bamboo a little bit and used that.
Here's mostly everybody sitting around the fire at right. starting with the two people who are standing and working counterclockwise, we have Bryden, Soujong (crouching in green shirt), Robert, some guy, Hamid, Alessandra, Melinda, Martin (blue shirt), Rafael, and Aaron Poulliot.

I didn't start taking pictures until pretty late, but here you can see Sara trying to not get in the frame while I'm taking this picture and catching the flash at half power in the face from four feet away. Teach her to try and give me chocolate!
Tasty chocolate, by the way.

Apparently, Valeria will be singing in a band when she gets back to Italy. The obligatory stardom jokes were swapped, and you've got this, which is a pretty decent picture of the two of them. Actually, with my night vision gone due to looking at the LCD and whatnot, I had no idea they were posing. Last I could tell, they were facing the other direction. I imagine I looked pretty funny when I looked at this picture.

Not too long after this, people starting getting ready to go, and you can see them (very) slowly working their way towards that end here at right.

On the way back, I gave Melinda a ride back on the back of my bike. I didn't know she was there until about when we left, and I don't really have any good pictures of her face. Here's this, though, 'cause it's what I've got. Left <-- If you take a look at the picture at the right, you can see the waviness of a favorite of people's clothing caused by the temperature differentials in the air above the fire. When I first saw this, I was thinking my camera was being weird, but then I realized what it was.

I just spelled realized with two Ls and a W, so I'm going to bed. It's way past my... Zzz...

[Edit: This post is more coherent than I thought it would be, given that I was asleep when I wrote the last three paragraphs.]

Sandy the Pink and the Teleswap

Sandy, a year-long study-abroad student from the semester before me, left on Tuesday around 5PM, following about three solid days of saying goodbye to various people. Sandy and I think we met once in line for a Super Smash Brothers Melee tournament at Sakura-con two years previously, but we have no proof either way.
Sandy has been organizing a large portion of the get-togethers, parties, and most things with more than one person this semester, and acted as a mutual friend for almost every study abroad student. Aaron Poulliot, of my Central Washington University, came up with the idea of putting together a scrapbook for him, to which I was invited to contribute. I don't know if he liked my page or not, but I had fun making it.

We agreed that his empty room wouldn't make good use of his 24"-ish TV, and that my 13" would suffice just fine, so I talked to my manager, who happily let me borrow one of the Paradole dollies and I wheeled my 13" over. This was the embarrassing part, since the dolly and the TV weighed no more than 20 pounds.
But on the way back, I was sure glad for that dolly. You can see my fairly new TV sitting on the bed in the picture at right, on the left.
That same day, the manager came and fixed my lights, one of which had begun to flicker. So naturally, he just replaced all of them. With the stuff that was going on, my room became a bit of a mess, as you can see. Most of the mess is at the far end and looks smaller in this picture do to distortion correction, but it looked pretty bad.

"Jeff"

There's a prof at 京都外国語大学 (my school) who has, as far as anybody can tell, entirely too much cash. Whether or not that's the case, I have no idea. Maybe he's just very frugal.
In any case, he invited all of the foreigners to his place for an end-of-semester party that was pretty cool. We had nice company, good food, and I think everybody had a good time.

House is huge, 180 tatami mats, if memory serves. And beautiful: old-style paper doors, some of which have sumi-e on them. It dates from the Edo period, I think he said.

Oh, and it has its own alley.

It's kind of designed for... Japanese people, so the stairs are a little dangerous if you're over 5'6", but he has a nice view of the river and Gion. We did the whole party out on his veranda that's on the Kamogawa river (the main river in Kyoto), where the wind kept us nicely cool. As it would turn out, they take down the outer veranda every year at the end of summer, then put it back up at the beginning. This somehow makes it slighlty less illegal, I guess. In any case, it's the norm for the houses along the river, if I got what he said right.

As an added bonus, there was another party going on next door, and we got to see some maiko (apprentice geisha), which was pretty cool. They even posed for me! It's hard to get them to let you take their picture, but as you can see, three posed in this one! And they look kind of cute, even, which rare among geisha.
The teacher managed to accidentally make some new contacts, and by "some new contacts", I mean three Japanese men who all looked pretty well-to-do themselves. This happening was what confirmed my suspicions: diplomacy.

That's his secret, as far as I can tell. He's probably the most diplomatic person I have ever met. When people talk to him, they always walk away smiling or laughing, and he does a very good job of playing up his foreign-ness when it will help, and downplaying it at other times. It's... impressive, to say the least.

As a note, I toted a Japanese girl for a picture, but someone else took it, so I don't have the shot.
Here's an example of how to completely miss your focus, though.

Also, I got my first shot of a Japanese policeman. Normally, they get flustered and run away when I try to take a picture, but this guy was really excited. I took a couple, but his vest combined with me using onboard flash kind of completely blew out, as you can see.
Notice the glow on his vest?

Gion Matsuri Pictures - Finally!

The Gallery

I finally got some time last night - well, this morning - and finished sorting through the bulk of the Gion festival pictures. This morning (after some sleep) I went through and captioned them, did some final processing, and now they're up in the gallery. Maybe not the best selection if you just care about the festival, but I was excited by the festival as I was by all the gear people were using.

Most of the pictures make sense, but these two require a little explanation. These bizarre things at left are used to make sure the float stays floating forward. It allows a guy on each side to turn the float ever so slightly so that the float doesn't end up driving off into a building or something. I originally thought that it was so the wheels wouldn't fall off or something, but it's nothing quite so stupid.

These girls were part of the three kids' floats that I swear were chasing Aaron and I around. At first, we got a little lost, heard drums, and decided to see what was going on. So we saw them, got some pictures, and left.
Then, we got where we were trying to go, and right as we were about to go into the store, we heard them come around the corner.
When we came out of that store, they were back. Going into another store, they were still stomping around.
We come out of that store half an hour later and they come around the corner again. Creepy stalker munchkins.

Anyway, the festival was decently fun, and I got some mango ice cream.
In other news, the point of the festival is to protect the citizens of Kyoto from some disease that was rather endemic at the time. Some of the floats have spear-shaped things on top, and this is theoretically to kill the evil spirits, I think. We got all the history and stuff about a week ago, and I was really only interested in taking pictures. I need not worry, though, as I think 80% of the population of Kyoto was taking pictures.
Anyway, the festival itself is a week-long event, but the parade is sort of the climax. I was too busy with school stuff to go to any of it, except this, which they canceled school for.

Anyway, check out the gallery for a bunch of pictures.

相棒

I have a part-time job a few hours a week helping people with pronunciation. It's a class with English and Chinese, so I have a Chinese-speaking counterpart. She dressed up in yukata (light cotton summer kimono) and when I asked her to send me a picture she was showing me, she demanded to send the rest.



So, here they are.



The two on the right are examples of what the Japanese call purikura ("picture club"), which is a popular thing that girls make guys do, regardless of whether they're going out - these two are, by the way.



It's a testament to my unpopularity that I haven't done any, but you won't see me complaining! I think all of you know which side of the lens I prefer to be on.



Guesses on her age and nationality?

Gion Matsuri, with an Oops

So I took quite a few pictures today. 627 to be precise.
Well, 628 if you really want to be precise, but the bowl of peanut butter and jelly rice doesn't really relate to the rest of what happened today. Today was the parade for Gion Matsuri, and it's a pretty big affair. There's about a week of lead-up to it where random people from around town build the floats out of various bits of stuff. There are around 30 different floats, and the parade lasts from around 9AM to well after noon. The floats are pretty, if not exactly to my taste. And I'll admit I was a little creeped out by the plastic people mounted in all but the lead float. But! It's pretty neat as parades go and everybody takes lots and lots of pictures.

I'm still working on translating some stuff for my last class tomorrow, so I haven't had time to sort through the pictures, but I think I got some pretty good shots...

...

... at 3200 ISO.

[seppuku noises (whatever those are)]

Here's the story of how it happened:
So last night I was demonstrating to Aaron what difference ISO makes and why it is that you would never want to take pictures you care about at 3200 ISO. The noise reduction required to get a vaguely decent picture completely drains all the color out of it, and all the detail is sort of smudgy. If you use RAWs or turn off noise reduction, you just have a very, very noisy picture.
If you open up that picture, you'll see it looks very much as if I took it with my cell phone. Except my cell phone doesn't let you change settings like this, so you can't screw up in quite this fashion.
[Edit: It would seem you can't see the noise itself very well, as the picture was downsized to 1600 pixels in width, which is about 1/3 of how big it was to begin with.]

Ahem.

I have 627 very, very noisy pictures using six more stops of ISO than was necessary, given the lighting conditions.
I had been wondering why it was that my camera seemed to be over-exposing things and using tiny, tiny apertures. "Gee, 1/4000th of a second is odd in this light..." is something I thought a number of times, but I never thought to check my ISO setting. As much as I want to say something like "Man, what an amateur mistake!" it would be entirely too accurate.
But as long as I learn from it, it's a good thing, right? Right! I mean, at least I've made this mistake during something that happens annually. Imagine this at a wedding!

Next time, I'll be sure to check my WB and ISO settings in addition to physical checks and cleaning.

So, here's today's lesson for everybody:

If you're going to show someone what not to do,
make sure to not do it yourself.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time, redux

So I have rice. I have about 5 kilos of rice on my floor by the rice cooker.
However! I have not a single slice of bread. Goes bad too quickly, you know?
But, I have peanut butter. Source of protein!

What happened? Well, as it would turn out, peanut butter works pretty decently as butter.

That is, in fact, peanut butter and jelly rice.

Finally, the Bike Post

I bought my bike last week, but somehow I totally didn't mention it here on the blog. It's too bad, 'cause last weekend was pretty slow and it would've been a great time for it.

Anyway, this is my old bike (at left), which I'm letting Bethany use until she goes. Not certain what to do with it after that, though. I might be able to sell it back to the cycle shop i got it from, but I don't have a lot of hope for that. Besides, it'd be nice if I could keep it. You never know when a second bike might be handy.
Actually, there's a place by Part One that might work well... The biggest set of differences is in the ass-end, so I took a close-up of the back end, where you can clearly see the drum brake, the downward kickstand (you got a better name for it?), the lock, and... the little plastic guards to keep your skirt from getting caught in the spokes.

Yeah, I'm excited to have a new bike.

Here it is,alone and straight-on at right, and with my old one for comparison at left.

To review, I picked out my new bike because it has pretty much all the features I want in a bike here, about which I learned a great deal through my mamachari - "mama's bike" (actually "mama's chariot", a reference to the shape) - that was a $62.50 used deal.

My new bike - scratch that. It needs a name. "My new bike" just doesn't work. It's temporary name will be nueji ("new bike" - you see a lot of creative names like that in Japanese).

Anyway! Nueji has the following features that I want in a bike:

• Bike - That is, it means I don't have to walk. Walking is so frustrating after riding around town. I average 10-12 miles an hour through town if I pay attention to lights, while I average about 3 miles an hour.
  
• Twin caliper brakes - Caliper brakes are standard in the States, but most brakes here are of the drum type. This means they start to squeak after about a month, even when they are completely dry. It's a noise you quickly get used to, and you end up using your rear brakes as a way of warning people that you're behind them.
  That said, I can fix caliper brakes. Nothin' doin' with drum brakes.
• Basket shape - If you take a close look at the diagram at left, you'll see the difference. Nueji's basket is the one outlined in purple. I'm too lazy to take a top-down view, but it's squared off more from that perspective, as well, which makes it infinitely more useful than the more narrow, curvy basket of my old bike.
• Gears - Nueji has 6 gears, from which I've found myself generally using 3-5 and occasionally 6, if I'm trying to keep up with cars. The others might be useful if I were going up a steep hill, but I'd probably as soon walk.
• Magnetically-driven light - Many bikes use a cog that rubs against the tire to drive a flywheel which powers a light. These have to be switched on and require a noticable amount of work to drive, in addition to being loud and - this surprised* me when it happened - I've had them completely not work when my tires were very wet.
  Nueji's light is driven by a magnet mounted on the axle of the front tire that passes another and works as a very simple electric motor, just in reverse. I understand speedometers often work in this fashion.
  
• Shape - It's not a mamachari. I feel silly enough about having a basket on the bike, but the bent-back girls' handlebars and the I'm-wearing-a-long-skirt super-low frame just rubbed salt in the wound. Besides that, the frame is unsturdy when you start putting any decent amount of weight on the back rack.
• New tires - Old bike's tires were pretty worn down, and skidding took very little effort. In addition, the tubes had been patched too many times and needed to be replaced, so they had to be pumped up about once a week or they would be dangerously low. If you've ever tried to ride a bike or drive a car on rims, you know what I'm talking about. There are a lot of little imperfections in the road that you don't notice until your tires slide into every single one of them.

So, I got a new bike, and after a week, the only thing I don't like is that the bell rings very quietly every time you go over any decent bump. Easily solved by placing my hands closer to the center of the handlebars, though.

Thanks to my dad, who financed this. Thanks!

*Original word here was shocked, but I thought that might convey the wrong meaning. I turn the light on and off with my foot anyway, so that would take quite some doing. Insulated, waterproof boots don't conduct electricity so good, you know?

Slow Week, part two

I did some wandering on Sunday and got these two pictures, of which type you'll probably be seeing a lot of in the next few days.

At left is a float under construction. As you can see, they don't so much build the float as much as bondage half a forest. Very Japanese, I think.

At right are some women who, after some tittering and debating among themselves, agreed to pose for me.

Also, I had some sushi, which was pretty normal for the most part. Saw a couple new dishes, such as black sesame pudding and somem kind of coleslaw sushi.

But what really took the cake* was the hamburger sushi. You can see it at right. The sign in the background has the name of the store, then under that, hanbaagu which is "hamburger" in Japanese.

Traffic... Laws? With Bonus Takoyaki

On the way back from the school today, I unintentionally joked a rather true observation: Japan doesn't seem to have traffic laws. It's much more like they have traffic suggestions. I don't know if it's the case in other large cities (Kyoto is 1.4 million. I consider that to be pretty big), but the lights here turn red, and people keep going through. Pedestrians wait at crosswalks about anywhere from 50% to 95% of the time, and this number varies on the width of the street the walk crosses, with streets 20m (60 feet) across usually not crossed unless it's green.
I've seen plenty of instances where motorbikes have been puttering along on the sidewalk or in a bicycle parking lot.
One of the weirdest things is that the areas with big, six-foot-tall signs that say "Don't park your bike here!" - and have large pictures in addition - these are the places where you will find the most bikes parked. They will theoretically impound your bike and charge you a $20-40 fee (varies on location) if you do, but these areas usually have a pile of bikes neatly lined up near them.

I had Sandy pose while parking his bike right behind the sign, as you can see here. I don't know why they even bother with the signs.

I picked up some takoyaki (octopus dumplings) at a place by the school for dinner, as they're cheap and pretty filling.

They don't look real appetizing in the picture, but a 10-minute ride over bumpy road in a sealed container covered in sauce doesn't make much of anything look attractive. But they were pretty tasty and at just the right temperature when I ate them.

One of the hardest parts about eating takoyaki is that they very quickly go from "Ohgodthefireextinguishernow!" hot to "That's some slimy... goober-balls you've got there" cold. There's a shop near the school that probably makes a killing in the winter selling these things for lunch.

Slacking Weekend and new HDD setup

This is our last weekend before school's out for the summer, so my time for a large part of the rest of today is probably going to be working on presentations and papers. I've got a presentation tomorrow, a big one on Friday, a paper due on Wednesday (in English, strangely enough), and... Gion Festival is on Thursday, so I'm making plans for that.

In other news, I've got a new drive setup that's a little bit less jackassed than the last one. I can't find the receipt for my previous SATA-USB adapter, so I'm going to have to call that a $20 learning experience. Also, don't cover the breather ports on the hard drive. Apparently, you can suffocate them, and they implode. Or something. Especially when the ambient temperature hovers at 85 degrees with high humitidity. Oh, and the drive has no active cooling. Sort of a series of stupid mistakes on my part.

Anyway.
The new setup! I actually got this going Friday morning at 2AM, but... S'okay, I think I did alright on the test that morning. Talking to Dean and mom kept me up till 3AM, but I studied that morning for about twenty minutes anyway.

Here's what my desk looks like now.

Yeah, it actually stays almost that clean. I threw away a folded-up paper towel from this morning's breakfast, though. I think the desk lamp's light on the wal looks cool for some reason...

Artist's Rendition

Here's an artists rendition of me doing judo:
Actually, it's something Gabe did for a book, pulled almost-but-not-quite shamelessly.

Saturday everything: Hiking around

So after being up until 4AM and not having made any preparations whatsoever, I somehow woke up at 8AM the next day - a half hour before the first alarm I had set. So I threw my stuff together, got a shower, and headed off. I knew at this point only that I had to cross a river, and not the one to my west.
So I did.

Then I called for help.

After that, you can pretty much follow the pictures... at the gallery!

I have to get going, so none of those even have captions. The girls are Ana (dark hair) and Simone (blonde).

Vanity, I guess?

I was cleaning out my pants pockets and found one of my flash drives in them. What's on here, I wonder? I wondered.
I recall now that I used it to get some pictures from Bryden (my neighbor), who's been picture-swapping rather more than I have. Here are some of them.

This first on the left is obviously from before Anna left. It's at the okonomiyaki place down the street. Alessandra, the girl on the right, is in some of my classes, but she's leaving in about two weeks. She's pretty cute, and nothing ever happened, unfortunately.

Here at right is either right before or right after I got on the ball of death. With a normal merry-go-round, you can jump off if it gets too intense; with this, you're stuck. Hamid got me spinning at a good clip right as everybody was leaving. Nice of him, yeah? Oh, then he left.
He was just playing around, though. We're actually pretty good friends.

This last one is a bunch of people playing the drinking game "I've never..." Of course, I'm far too boring to participate in such a game, but everyone had a great time. They were also up until way too late. I got up at 5:30 or so the next morning, so...
Anyway, from left to right are [someone's leg], Hamid, Sara, Catherine, Aaron, me, Angela, and... some guy whose name I don't know.

And here's Tanaka, our coolest teacher. Out of the 15 or so teachers I have, I have five male teachers, and this one guy is two of them.

Friday night: "Sam and Dave's"

After writing that far-too-long post about the Gaidai summer gala, this will be shorter than it otherwise might be. But I'm lazy, so it's going to be short.

After an hour of sitting around and shooting the breeze with Aaron Dean, he, Monique, and myself all headed down to the station to meet up with everybody else. The three of us were probably the 10th/11th/12th people there, but as we waited, more people came. In groups of three or four, we eventually had a mob consisting of about fifty people.

So gathered, we headed east, to Sam and Dave's.

Once we got there, we all stood outside for a bit to wait for the others, and there was a shallow stream that runs by the street. Naturally, I was wearing my Danner 453 GTX boots (the short brown ones that are oh-so-soft), so, naturally, I stood in the stream and took some pictures.

Aaron at right is wearing my fuzzy green shirt, which appears to actually fit him. My shoulders are a little too wide now, but I still wear it sometimes because it's one of my favorite shirts. Got it from my grandparents, too.

So, we were about to go in.

Now, I should warn you that this was first time going to a club. Not just, "first time going to a club in Japan" or something like that. I'd never been to a club before. The reasoning for this is as follows:

• Clubs are places where you dance.
• Clubs are places where you drink.
• Clubs are expensive.

I can't dance, I don't drink, and I'm not rich, so it really doesn't seem like something I would like.
That said, I wanted to go just so I can have gone to one. In the end, it was a two-story bar with a dance floor a little smaller than our two Chamith house's living rooms combined.

So, we went in. There was rather steep $20 entrance fee with one drink* for men, $10 for women. I spent most of the time wandering around, just kind of watching people. Used my drink ticket to get a glass of mango juice, and later paid $5 (!) for a ginger-ale and mango juice blend that the bartender thought would be silly. It was tasty.

*I understand that it's usually a much better deal, as there's a student discount if you make it before midnight, so it's normally free for women and $10 with two drinks for men.

Umm...

I played some pool, and that started everybody else playing pool, which was kind of cool.
Here, Roy (the enviously attractive and well-built guy with the pool cue) just made a double-bounce shot, but I think it was n accident.

After a few more rounds of pool, everyone started dancing.
I tried to take pictures, but between the flash-nuking and the dancing it all just came out as a lot people in weird poses. I did get to see some salsa action, though, as Sandy and Melissa sort-of started doing salsa. Sandy's only been doing it for a few weeks, but he's pretty good. Melissa's got actual dance shoes, which I think says everything.

I discovered this poster, and loved it. If you look in the middle, it says "The woman who comes in yukata or bikini is free".

I took this picture on the way out. Apparently, the foreigner registration card has glow in the dark lettering on it. I would've never known if it weren't for the fact that they stamp your hand with a UV-sensitive stamp. Because of that, there are black lights at the entrance and in other areas at random.

The card isn't really that color at all, but I did what I could to bring out the glowing text, which reads "gaikokujin touroku shoumeisho" in katakana.

From here, it's about a3.5km walk home, which took me about an hour.

I'll gallery the rest of Saturday's stuff later, I guess. This wasn't nearly as short as I was expecting it to be.

Friday evening: "Gaidai Summer Gala"

Light-ish warning: My jury-rigged hard drive is a little too jury-rigged, it would seem, and it's being fritzy. Because of that, I didn't process these pictures at all, and they're the massive, 10.2MP 2.xMB JPGs my camera spits out. In sum: they will probably load slowly. Especially for you, Wash. I''m hoping to take care of this today, but I'm not sure I can fix my drive and write the other two blog posts in addition.
Maybe I'll just put one up as a gallery...
When I went to this, I figured I would take pictures and be bored pretty much the entire time. "So... why'd you go?" you might ask. I mean, you just might.
In large part because it was the largest gathering of study-abroad students in one place, and I didn't want to miss out on cool stuff.

That there was free food and drinks may have been what clinched it for me, but I'll never tell.

Aaron Poulliot (sp?) did some juggling stuff on stage. He dropped stuff a couple of times, but I thought he was really good. The fact that handled the drops so well only made it better, I think.

You can see him at left, dancing with his juggling clubs, or at right with his recipe for disaster that he likes to call "eggs". I understand he almost threw one into a speaker, but I didn't see it first-hand.


The school had at least two photographers there (not counting me, 'cause I don't get the cool armband), plus a three-person camera crew (at right). And I think every Japanese person has at least one camera. And there about 250 people. So there are plenty of pictures of this event.

From a photographic standpoint, I don't think I had a lot of options, so I used the very high-level, pros-only (sarcasm!) "Nuke 'em till they glow" flash method and turned my flash up to full power for every shot. Went from 80% charge to 30% charge in about 70 pictures, so you can see the drain of the flash on the battery, which can give me 400 pictures on the same amount if I don't use a flash. I had a spare with me, of course.

Here are two of the school's photographers. I call the girl on the left "Canon chick" because, well, she uses a Canon (whose model I can't recall right now) and she's kinda cute.
The guy at right is... I forgot his name, he's the guy that helped me check over my Japanese camera terminology stuff. We took pictures of each other whenever we saw each other, working especially to catch the other by surprise. He's an Olympus shooter, probably a 410, but I didn't get a close look.

This is Asano (at left), one of people who works in the international exchange office, which is what keeps us alive and out of jail here in Japan. They help us with banking, paying bills, laws, and all sorts of things. Her English is pretty good.

At right is Kumada (in the purple), who deals mostly with people who are not yet in country, but she also helps us a lot. She also works in the international office. The thing that surprises me the most is that she's able to pull off so many different fashions, and do a pretty good job of 'em.

About halfway through the gala, I ran into a student from the dual-language class I TA (?) in. I wish my Japanese was as good as her English, but it's nowhere near. Her friend took a picture of us, and here it is. My camera seems to do strange exposures whenever other people take pictures with it, but I don't know why.
I just press the shutter button; they just press the shutter button. Where's the difference?

After they kicked everybody outside, I met up with Bryen, who wanted an action shot. He was trying to flirt with this girl, but she was completely and skillfully cold-shouldering him. "Well played!" is what I kept thinking. We had her take a picture of us in "action poses", and you're all probably familiar with my silly basic stance, but here's another picture, just in case you aren't.

Don't worry, I'm almost out of decent, relevant pictures. I'll finish up in just a couple more paragraphs. Hopefully.

Ran into Chise, my student assistant a couple of times. She is looking good, as she is wont to do.
I'm trying to get her to introduce me to her boyfriend, 'cause he's a gamer , but he's apparently hard to pull away from his many hobbies. Or something.

I met a British guy who will be here for another two weeks, and some of his friends. He was pretty cool and we got along very well. We talked largely about accents and comedy; in particular, Dane Cook and Eddie Izzard. He snuck off at some point and I haven't seen him since.

This is Catherine, one of the Swiss girls I mentioned a few posts back. She's in kyuudo, which kind of like archery, but only in that involves both a bow and an arrow. The similarities end there, and I'm not really joking. She works in IT back in her home country and is 24.

Here's a portraiture tip: apparent nose length/size in a picture has very little to do with actual length or size. The key that makes or breaks (ouch.) noses in pictures is whether or not they break the line made by the cheek behind them. You can see her nose is inside her cheek-line (above-right picture), as opposed to breaking it at left.

Surprising difference, isn't it?

Her nose is just fine, by the way.


Well, that wraps up the gala. I think I may have spent more time writing this post than I did actual time there, though.

"Birthday Box"

Just got another box o' candy from thots about stuff. I was pretty surprised when I went to pick it up, 'cause I didn't think it would weigh ten pounds. Here's why it weighs ten pounds.Or at least, there's most of it. I had already stowed the spices and one more thing of chocolates by the time I realized I should take a picture.

[Edit: I'd like to point out that I picked this up from the post office well after 10PM. The post office here is 24-hour for sending and receiving packages. You can also pay your national healthcare and various other bills there, but that sort of thing is only open until 4 or 5PM. I picked this up on the way back to the apartment]

Ramen Shop and Train

Went and took some pictures tonight. Had my 18-55mm on first, then went to my 50mm 'cause it just doesn't get any use here.

Despite the title of this post, the train crossing is up first, 'cause that's what I was taking pictures of first. All of these were taken with my 18-55mm.

You can see in the warmer picture that I tried to get a picture of myself. Then I realized that my remote only has a working range of about ten feet in this kind of weather. If I had held completely still for long enough, I could've just exposed myself into the picture anyway, but I didn't think of that at the time. I was counting on the flash to go off while I was standing there, and the flash set to rear sync goes off at the end of the shutter. To trigger the shutter to close again, I had to move from where I was to closer to the camera.
Weird problem, but hey, lesson learned.

Here's a ramen shop near my apartment building. The ramen isn't that great, but their gyouza is pretty passable and they have a spicy sauce that I haven't seen or tasted anywhere else that's pretty good. Some kind of chili... goo.
I got some more today since the owner put up with me. He thought there was lightning, 'cause I was using my flash as a way of knowing when the camera was opening and closing it's shutter.
The one I'm posing in at right was taken with my 50mm, while the one at left was taken with my 18-55mm at... 35mm.

Honestly, these were taken mostly just because I wanted to take a picture of something else on this walk.

Japanese and English Camera Terminology Equivalents

Alright, it's been bothering me for a while now, but I can't find any resources online that have Japanese camera terminology. So... while I was down buying my camera bag, I questioned one of the employees until long enough after closing time that they had to reopen to let me out. This list is hardly exhaustive, but it should be a good starting place for anybody having problems with this kind of thing.
If you don't know what the word is, it's probably just the English word, said very slowly. As examples, if you take the first four words, they are pronounced kamera, lenz, frash, and maunto, respectively. Creative, right?

In Kanji (漢字で)	Reading (読み方)	English meaning (英語で)
	カメラ	camera
	レンズ	lens
	フラッシュ	flash
	マウント	mount (する verb)
大きくする	【おおきくする】	to zoom in (lit: to make bigger)
広くする	【ひろくする】	to zoom out (lit: to make wider)
レンズを付ける	【つける】	to attach a lens
明るいレンズ	【あかるいレンズ】	fast lens
露出	【ろしゅつ】	exposure (する verb)
露出不足	【ろしゅつぶそく】	underexposure
望遠	【ぼうえん】	telephoto (する verb)
広角	【こうかく】	wide-angle (する verb)
絞り	【しぼり】	aperture
絞る	【しぼる】	to stop down aperture
半押し	【はんおし】	to half-press the shutter button
立て位置	【たていち】	portrait (vertical) orientation
横位置	【よこいち】	landscape (horizontal) orientation
	ピンぼけ	out of focus, off the point
	ぶれ	camera shake, picture blur
	てぶれ	hand shakiness

This is the fourth post in about four hours, so I'm going to call it a night and let you guys catch up.
[Edit: Thanks to thots about stuff for pointing out a typo.
I'm going to print this out and have a couple pros at the school check over it, if they're willing, so hopefully I can get some more feedback and more terms.]
[Another edit: This guy that's accidentally posing at right checked through the list for me and put up my Japanese for almost an hour. Good man.]

Camera Bag

Finally, an actual picture!

I love my Tamrac Velocity 7x 5767 sling pack, but it's a little too big to bring with me everywhere, and I can't very well carry my camera in the open where it will be exposed to rain and shock (being dropped). And, for some reason, I can't quite convince myself that I should spend $200 on a pocket camera (donations, anybody? Heh...) but I've been thinking about it for a few days.

The solution I came up with is simply to make my uber-cam more portable, so I picked up the Lowepro... "Topload Zoom Mini Camera Bag".
I forgot to include something for scale, but it's basically a foam case for my camera. I'm not sure it's even big enough to keep my telephoto lens attached. It's that small.

But!
But, it has a belt loop, which means one less thing I'm strapping onto my shoulders. In the summer heat and humidity, you really start to notice that kind of stuff, and between my camera bag and three or four other things I might have over my shoulders, it starts to really suck.
No, not in a good way.

Short, but finally a picture

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

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

Camera Economics

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

Heian Jingu, kind of

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

Ah, Engrish.

Osaka with Yasuko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now for homework!

Okayama Field Trip, day 1

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

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

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

Ew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and breakfast the next day.

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

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

[eloquent segue]

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

Arashiyama

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

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

Maybe just disturbing.

Keys

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

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

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

Josh, hush.

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

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

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

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

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

And with a nose that phallic, could she really resist the second pose?
I didn't think so either. My camera was at 100 ISO for these shots, so it was trying to expose indoor lighting and decided to give me crappy shutter speed. They're a touch blurry, but if you wanted to professional photos, you'd be reading a different blog.
She looks pretty decent for having been up all night and not having showered in two days, I think.