Status Update: Missed Flight

I missed my flight. I'm accessing the Internet from a free terminal that's set up by Domestic Arrivals at Kansai International Airport. I have the beginnings of a nice set of blisters from carrying my luggage around, as a bonus.
So, for the "WTF HOW?":
- I underestimated the amount of time it would take to get everything moved out of my apartment and packed, etcetera. Even with the massive - and I don't want you to think I'm overstating that - amounts of help I got from QB, Yanavy, Angela, and Cassie, I ended up leaving nearly an hour later than I had planned to.
- In an effort to avoid spending massive amounts of money on sending a bunch of books to the US by mail, I picked up a surplus duffle bag and shoved all the books in it and a bunch of clothes. I then stuffed it and my decent-quality duffle bag (with wheels!) until they were at the the weight limit, 23kg or 50 pounds, and preceded to attempt to lug these around on the train system. Now, I think what got me here is that I somehow was thinking 23 pounds when I was thinking about how much the whole thing would weigh. But that's 50 pounds times two is 100 pounds, plus a further 15kg (35 pounds) of backpack, camera, etc, and I'm hauling 140 pounds of crap around, and 50 pounds of it is in a completely static sack - i.e., a duffel bag.
That wasn't so bad, but what is usually a five-minute transfer became a thirty-minute ordeal with rest breaks at each flight of stairs.

Packing

It's 9:40AM. I last slept yesterday around 8AM. Well, unless you count the thirty-second-to-a-minute period during which I fell asleep and chatted with people at random from my offline contacts list. For the most part, I've been packing and organizing since early yesterday, minus a gyouza party.

It's 9:43AM. I'm about to go to the post office to drop off the first of the packages to go out by boat. It will arrive three months from now, but doesn't have anything perishable in it.

I'm going to go broke by postage, I think. We'll see.

It's still 9:43AM, and I am one tired puppy.

Wakame? Not Quite.

Yesterday (Tuesday) was our last day of actual classes. Today, we have the 別れ会 wakare-kai ("farewell party"), which I really need to get off my ass and cook for.

So sleepy.

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! - 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.

No More Kitten...

Well, I saw Jes off at the airport today. We ended up eating out a lot and doing a lot of sightseeing and travel and stuff, and on my way back to Kyoto today, I noticed I was down to using the $20 I keep in reserve, and that I should go pull some cash. And then I realized that I don't really have money left in the bank.

I'm usually fairly careful with money, so it was kind of strange to realize that I was running so close to the line... for the third time since I got here. Fortunately, the reason I'm low on cash is because I did all that Jes-is-visiting stuff on top of paying my phone bills up to date and buying a new bag of rice, so I'm fine in terms of food and whatnot. I should also have some money coming in from the people I share my Internet connection with, which will really help.

I'm really behind on posting stuff about all these travels and whatnot, and I'm hoping to get some of that stuff through post-processing and get some of it posted here. Probably tomorrow. Certainly not now, as it's nearly 4AM.

My screen isn't usually thisi blurry...

Accidental Cleaning

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

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

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

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

Workin' on a Post

I'm detailing what's gone on the past few days that has kept me so busy, but it's late and I have class in the morning, so I'll see about getting posted tomorrow (Monday). That'll help me procrastinate on studying for the big test on Tuesday!

Today

Today has been... rainy.

So I donned my rain gear and crossed town to go to club, finished up a bit before five and headed home, donning my rain gear once again.

I found a small mom and pop meat shop on the way back, and they were selling コロケ for cheap, so I got two of them, and I fully expect they both took a year off of my life, looking at the oil they were fried in. But they were pretty decent and I'm always in favor of deep frying things.

Got home, studied a little, watched a little anime, and jogged to the store to get some groceries: Kagome, tofu, more Kagome, a few bars of chocolate, and nearly a kilogram of strawberry jam that was on sale for $2. Used my small umbrella on the way back and have been lounging about studying and watching anime. I'm most of the way done with the grammar, but I'd like to put half an hour or so into practicing kanji before I go to bed as well, so the sooner I finish going through the grammar, the better. Tomorrow, I'll practice the kanji some more and read through some of the compositions if time permits.

Anyway.

Today has been... rainy.

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.

Oops, Sleep.

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

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

Why Always Me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... Not!

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

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

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

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

I never got to sleep last night...

Can't Sleep...

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

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

Erm...

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

Well, Yesterday, Actually

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

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

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

Return.

I'm back, finally1 I got lots of pictures today. I took about 512 in total, though I was spamming pretty hard, and I'd be lucky for a hit:miss ratio of 1:5. Computer's processing the pictures right now, so I can't upload them. It's 12:30AM and I need some sleep so I'll get them up tomorrow after a my second set of post-processings.

I need sleep.

It's possible to get a brain freeze from cold water, by the way. One way to do this is by having very nearly frozen water in a jug, then chugging half a liter of it.

Sleep for me, pictures first thing in the morning, I promise.

Trains

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

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

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

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!

My First Karaoke Experience

Yesterday was originally going to be a barbecue, as I mentioned, but it was changed to an indoor party-shaped thing.
Ended up going to karaoke instead of bowling, because bowling is apparently $15 an hour. Plus shoe rental. Karaoke is $8 a person for however long we wanted to be there, I think. Seems pretty pricey, but they gave us a room about bigger than one of the living rooms at the Chamith house, so that's not too amazing.
Well, and there were 17 of us.

So, my thoughts on karaoke: it blew.

Room that size, three or four people started chain smoking, with another three or four lighting up at various times. I stayed for an hour, but gave up after I sampled some nice, breathable outside air.

The karaoke itself actually looked pretty fun, but people kept standing up in front of screen and seemed to not know they were doing it, so the people singing would just stand there and wait for them to move out of the way. I can see such a get-together being fun with friends, but with almost 20 people I don't know... not so much.

I won't base my evaluation of karaoke in general on this experience, because I recognize that it is very likely extraordinarily bad.

[Edit: Apparently it's not clear that I didn't sing. I don't sing, as many of you know, and I didn't yesterday, either.]

Judo Club, Day 2

This is going to be a little disjointed, as I’m a little rattled from overexerting myself and being tossed around and whatnot. By the way, eating a pound of ramen a half hour before physical exercise is bad plan. Just so you know.

Tonight was my second practice with this judo club. I had to sit out for a while ‘cause I was starting to get a little faint (目が回る = “eyes are spinning”). These guys are pretty hardcore. As in, the girls that weigh half as much as I do are about as strong as I am in the upper body. I may not be musclebound, but I consider myself fairly average for someone my size.

Tonight, I found out why I haven’t gotten a single throw to execute on any one of them without them very obviously giving it to me. I should start at the beginning, though.

Now, my luggage was overweight to begin with, so there’s no way I could’ve packed the amazingly heavy gi into my luggage, even if I had one. So I came here, and they’ve got a box full of various sizes of gi for visitors (and new members who haven’t yet bought their own) to use. All the belts are old black belts, so I’ve been wearing a black belt during practices, which is sort of embarrassing, but you have to have a belt. I figured this was normal, and pretty much everybody was just wearing a black belt ‘cause it’s what was lying around.

Ha. Ha. F-hah.

Turns out that the people there have, on average, been practicing judo for ten years. One of the girls has only been doing it for two years, but she’s apparently good enough that she’s a probationary black belt and I think she’s the youngest, judo-wise, by at least five years.

I’m not sure that got the point across.

TEN YEARS.

Let me remind you (or inform those that don’t know) that I practiced judo almost ten years ago for a little under two years. Against my will. (Don’t worry, it’s fun now)

Needless to say, the only thing I’ve been able to successfully do is stuff that I am probably only getting away with because I’m a gaijin. I gi-choked someone into tapping out once, got an armbar on someone else, and managed to pin one guy once, but that’s all matwork, which is sort of my specialty, and with that said, I was still only succeeding at stuff they’re not used to defending against. Don’t worry, everything I did was legal, even within the pansy American rules.

Now, all of that said, I’ve been pinned twice myself, and I would’ve lost to time one other time, but I’d say that’s pretty damned good, given the opponents. Oh, and a I sat on one guy. Totally BS’d a technique out of nowhere, picked ‘em straight up off the ground, and sat down.

Did I mention I weigh about 50% more than the heavier guys in there?

Anyway, it was fun. They said I can take pictures next time, so you can look forward to them my Thursday, which is America’s Wednesday.

I wanted to get that off my chest, so thanks for listening, assuming you got this far.

Zzzzz….

Jet Lag, part I

Well, I'm in the hotel now. Have been for about an hour. I'm pretty tired, so I think I'll hit the hay.

Mom sent me an email, though, that reminded me: my first thought when I got off the plane and stepped into the terminal was "Eck, they ionize the air here. Or it could be the humidity." And my first real action while there was to go to the bathroom. I don't know if there's any significance to that, but I thought it was funny.

I'll get out and take more pictures tomorrow. I'm exhausted.

08-03-26 0605WST 2210JST - ウィル