Kyoto

Kyoto I hardly knew thee...

Nagasaki

thanks for the memories Nagasaki... and the pain in my left leg  :-(

More info to come later...

West Coast swing...

Little less than 4 hours from now I start my Journey across Japan. Bullet train,  3 actually and a few more locals later I shall be in nagasaki.  Luckily i am going to crash at a friends house who lives there and from there i make small steps to come back east till i am back in Yokohama.  Will keep you updated...

Begining to look like Christmas....

During my child hood Christmas of course was  the most look forwarded day of the year. My mother ensured it came with plenty of gifts and many happy moments. Spending time with family in upstate new york was always enjoyable because i would get to see my older cousins and play, for the time being i would have brothers and people to admire until it was back to being a sickly single child.  I don't complain about being only child,  but it is a  bit lonely at times i wonder what its like to have some one to either follow or to lead in such a relationship.  Of course I digress, Christmas now that i have become older and more mature is not  especially big for me anymore.  Yes i do enjoy seeing family but It doesn' t have to be Christmas for that and it shouldn't be just Christmas either.  With that said, it is the day before Thanksgiving and I am away from home for the first time.  I do indeed miss being home and family, but i find myself pre-occupied making plans to travel and and trying to keep busy.

Lately I have been feeling a bit of homesickness , but not everyone has the means nor the time to do what i am doing so i would like to enjoy it too the full while i am in the moment.  As I walk around Yokohama and japan, Christmas decorations are in full force.  As far as i know here  X-mas is more of a passing admiration.  It is not practiced, there is no day off, and more or less is just about a reason just to put lights up and make the city pretty.  Presents are not exchanged for x-mas but for new years in a separate more Japanese holiday.


For Christmas, if all goes right,  i will be in the northern Island of Hokkaido staying in a home stay and experiencing a Japanese x-mas and new year.  Not sure what to expect but the more new things to experience the better...

Excuse the dust....

Hello,

お久しぶりねえええ！！！　　I have no excuse, other than being sick;  but there should have been a post here somewhere that i could have put up.  Anyway  a few updates, School is going nice I technically have another month but i am going to skip out early and start the last leg of my travels here soon.   I have a west coast swing planned for this week. Dec 7, around after my test I have trip to Korea to look around a bit. When i return I move to Sapporo,  a city in the northern island of Japan. Close to Russia,  so i will be freezing a bit but I will see if i can get some snow boarding in.  Feel free to donate some money to the cause if you so wish.   My money is indeed dissappearing.. bar hoping especially is not prodcutive but you do what you need to for entertainment.

I'll drop a few random pictures here and maybe today or tommorow another post...scratch that.. blogger is having a few issue and wont upload my pics... so i will try again in few hours....

Just set up flicker account....

Do the Japanese know how to welcome you into their country or do they?

I stumbled across this as I am currently sick in my bed with nothing to do.  I was reading a Japanese foreigner website called Gaijin Spot looking for interesting stories and potential things to do. When the title caught my eye...in pure interest i of course had to read on and view the video.

In the video we see a half dress women in what is hard to quantify...the skirt is about 100 -115% normal for what Japanese women wear in real life, they get shorter than that as well.  The top; my god she is showing her navel, shoulders and chest. She must be getting paid a lot of money to do that because that's to embarrassing to do on ones own. What I find out is that it is actually lingerie by the company of the flag she proudly displays.  Specially designed lingerie to welcome visitors of japan at travel destinations.  The goal in essence is to help boost tourism in Japan. All due respect to the gentlemen who thought this up, but this idea doesn't work with Japanese women. I suspect you need to sell this franchise to Brazil and ask for a cut of the proceeding profits.

Starting from around 0:20 seconds to 0:35  she explains that the Top is also able to talk. When you push the center three buttons it says '  よこそう日本’  welcome to Japan, in Chinese, Korean, and English. At about here I must pause for a bit because I fear I have lost some of you at this point if not already. You may ask why doesn't she just memorize the 3 phrases. I have to just re-iterate... your not getting the point.  My only question was...Who pushes the button? Me or her?    At 0:36 seconds　the interviewer Says  "面白いですね’ (interesting,isn't it) and i couldn't help  but think  おじーさん面白いだけ考えた？ and with the awkward laugh the lingerie  maiden gave in reply I feel she felt the same.

Later she shows the skirt accessory which is actually a map. How convenient,  I get lost quite often, if every women had a map attached to her skirt I cant imagine I would get lost less though. Further on describes the spots like onsens and various potential stations for the outfit to be used at. Her speech is very polite and sort of cutey as to be expected.  At one point she mentions Haneda International airport and I quickly realize that my trip to Korea will be through said airport. Whether this will be put in place by the time I do my trip I do not quite know.

And at the end there is the cross leg wave that actually is not bad.  I highly doubt this will go into place as it is just a stunt by the lingerie company. I think japan thinks to much of its image to have these outfits on girls at all there highly honored areas. So the danger is just about at nil... However if on my way back from Korea,  I do happen across said outfit, I wonder if I can press it twice... I am coming from Korea after all.

日本拳法 Nihon Kempo

In school they offered an "open class" which is a subject different from strictly Japanese that will be offered. We had many options but class space was limited so on the paper we had to pick our top 3 and and one of the three would be your class.   If i remember correctly i chose JLPT practice class, Kendo(which is what i thought it to be at the time) and i think history of auto racing.  The JLPT class is self explanatory, practice for the real test, format and what ever.  Kendo option I had assumed we would watch some professionals or some practice.  Movie on technique or whatever , and the auto race thing also was movies.

All in all i had not taken much interest in it as I assumed since i put JLPT as my first option.  Well when the classes got posted I essentially just looked for my name and saw a nihon(japan) in the class name and just assumed it was the test.  Well Wednesday came and the first class arrived. The paper had said the class was in the gym and once again I was none the aware of what awaited me.  When i entered,  I saw A black belt martial artist fooling around with padding and a helmet..."oh shit this is kendo..." i thought to myself,  o well I'll sit in the corner and watch and take a nap.  Much to my sadness I learned I was actually going to participate in practice, not only was it not kendo, it was kempo and requires a bunch of punching and kicking and risk of my death to be quite honest.


We lined up and was taught basic stance, how to punch, and kick in roughly an hour.  I suspect if i had paid for that lesson would be any where around 30 -100 dollars.  We practice each for about 5 minutes each... so around 5 minutes of throwing nothing but punches in continuum Kicks, step forward, step back etc.   However the kicker was the initial set up.. we had to learn to bow, and prostrate. I don't  mind but to prostrate we had to sit in  a manner called seiza. Seiza essentially is the worst way to sit... and your body tells you this by the amount of pain in pumps through you as you attempt to do this.  So as i want to be a good Gaijin i attempted and followed along and struggled and dealt with the pain as the teacher went through his explanation.  You prostrate 3 times, once for the teacher(Sensei), once for the students, and lastly for the Dojo. Takes about a minute but if the Sensei is speaking it can become much longer.

Rest of the time was stretching and activity broken up in the middle by an interesting sparring match of the School's Principal who is a black belt I believe and two of the sensei's.   Both sensei ha don white belts so I assume they was learning along with us. The principal took delight in going a bit rough on both teachers and at one point got the first teacher on the ground and in an arm lock(arm bar?).  He tried the same with the second teacher but this teacher fought out of the hold before it was locked in.  It was quite entertaining and worth the show.

Pictures are of Principal and final teachers spare...

Things are not made like they use to be...

Hello all,

I am writing to your from a Internet cafe. Why you may ask, well it has most certainly been an interesting day. Yesterday my PC broke, not broke as in smashed or irreversible damage, its that it wont charge anymore.  So Today (yesterday if you want to be technical) I woke up a bit early and took an early train to Yokohama Station and went to big electronics store called Yodobashi Camera. I guess Yodobashi is like a Japanese Best Buy and it is more or less the biggest Japanese e-store along with another one called Bic Camera.  Well getting back to my PC and much to my sadness it turns out Yodobashi was not able to do anything, they didn't even take the time to check if it was the cable or the PC.  In hindsight i should have insisted the repair guy at least whip out a cable and check that at least but it was early i was half awake and worried i would be late for class.  Its a bit of an annoyance having to do stuff like this in a foreign language. Especially Technical things like electronics require sort of Jargon and know how and in a secondary language it is difficult to understand all the details.

While Yodobashi didn`t really take the effort to look  at my PC they did give me info to find Sony,the maker of my laptop; which was not far away from my dorm and school.  After school I took a good 20 min walk to get to Sony and was seen right away as there was no one buy me and the technicians.  The gentlemen who helped me first checked to see if it was the cable or the PC. He brought out from underneath the table another set of cables and plugged it into my PC and much to my relief all i need is a new set of cables. Perhaps the Japanese electricity shorted out my old ones but at least it didn't damage my PC. I can only imagine the price it would cost to fix something internal. Long story short he gave me the model number and told me yodobashi sells it for 12,000 yen and Sony themselves do not have any to sell.   He even made a map for me on how to get to Yodobashi from the Sony shop. I only wish the service in America was this good.

From the Sony shop I actually went home to check the price and see if  i could buy the Adapter online. 120 dollars seems a bit steep for a outlet plug but then again companies like Sony always charge heeps of money for replacement parts.  I had dinner and decided to take a leisurely bike rider to Yodobashi which is two stops away by train.  In Japan at night when riding a bike you are suppose to have a light of some sort on your bike. However mine does not have one at the moment.  Aware of this a few of the Chinese friends alerted me that the police might stop me.  However my theory is the police have better things to do than to make sure my bike has a light on it.  My theory so far is working nice as the rest of my story will attest to this.

As I begin to tell you about my bike ride I have to admit to having little to no sense of directions. With that said, I started off in the right directions but inevitably I had to stop a police officer to get directions.  I must have received directions from at least 6 police officers thought the night as the route from Kannai To Yokohama station crosses over a river and a set of highways that i could not figure out how to get around a number of times. Each time the police officer was helpful and kind and my lack of a light was not mentioned or notice.

I got to Yodobashi and found what could be a match for around 5000 yen, which is way better than the aforementioned 12,000.  However my PC being American and everything in japan being Japaneses,the store worker did not know for sure if it was a match and we agreed i would come back tomorrow with the pc and they would check it for me．So now for the 100th time i am asking for directions from a police officer on how to get home. As he did not have a map on him he took me to the police station where several cops took the time to look at the map and give me precise directions. Of course my bike not having a light once again didn`t seem to bother no one. So now on my way I start to cross the bridge that separates Yokohama station where yodobashi is located, from my part of town.  Much to my luck as i am peddling up the bridge. I try and change to a higher gear to peddle a little easier. The chain comes off the gears and now i am left with a immobile bike that I can push but cant peddle.

I push the bike to local koban (Police Station)where the police officer takes about 15 Min's to try and fix it on my behalf. Sadly This begins my journey of pushing my bike home. Along the way several other cops take a crack at it.
Even  a cab driver tinkered with it as half way i tried to give up and take a taxi home. But i could not get my bike to fold and ended up giving up because he was saying stuff I didn`t understand.

So what should have been a small adventure and purchased wound up being a 3 hour long walk. So now, i sit in a cafe trying to relax as it has been a long day and the Internet is always a nice thing to use to get your mind off your problems.  Unless your writing them of course...

Do you know these people?

I am curious as to how they got on Japanese most wanted list... Japan is so docile I  cant imagine it was anything to violent... Maybe they forgot to signal.

 The 4 guys on the right, you can get 1,000,000 Yen for catching (10,000 dollars*)  2,000,000  yen for the guy on the left.   Alas.. the guy for 20 million yen has already been caught.  That would have been some nice pocket change... >_<

She gets her own poster and a hefty 8 million yen bounty...and they say Chivalry is dead.

Maybe the orange is suppose to match their jump suits when they get caught.  Do Japanese prisoners wear orange?  I don't know... Not something i need to know either i suppose.

Halloween...!!

For Halloween I went to Kawasaki to see the parade, and the plan was to go to a few parties after that.  However for the past week I have been hampered with a a pain in my left shin that pretty much hampers my walking.  It's been a a real problem and has kept me out of school for a few days.   However I would not let it keep me from at least seeing some costumes and looking around Kawasaki for the first time.  The day prior I was suppose to meet some friends in Shinjuku for the Shinjuku parade but it rained heavily on Saturday due to a typhoon hitting the Tokyo area , so that sort of hampered my plans as well as the leg.

First off, Kawasaki at a glance is much like every other Japanese hub,  has its area by the JR station where all the shops and restaurants are.  The JR station is pretty big and has a few train lines going through it and has a pretty big main building with a few sit down restaurants, Krispy Kreme, Konbini's etc.  I didn't do much because of the leg so we walked to the parade route which we did not know where it was.  Sort of stumbled across it by dumb luck and by the sheer number of people in that area.


We waded through the massive sea of humanity till we found a decent spot, where i could sort of put my phone up and catch some decent photos. Before we found out sport we wandered down the parade route where we got a look at all the restaurants in the plaza and some of the clubs awaiting the people to come and play in the after hours. It was nice but relatively short. I imagine because of the forecast for further rain due to the typhoon which was still moving. 4 waves of about 200 or 300 costumers, Still is not bad i don't think.





Costumes ranged from a dude with a plastic bag on his head. To like really professional looking Victorian dresses and Japanese Sci-Fi Power Rangers/ Villains.  I don't really have many pics because of the fast movement of the parade, all the pictures sort of turned out blurry due to the crappyness of my phone.

Other than the parade people not much others was dressed up, neither was many children. As the Japanese don't actually trick or treat, it is more of a party and costume holiday. The adults club and the kids dress up for the heck of it, but don't reap the rewards of a massive candy haul.  I bet they don't get as many cavities either, so maybe it works out in the end.

Afterwards Sat down with my friend in a  nice restaurant and due to the leg called a day, bid my farewell afterwards and went back to the dorm to nap.  Other than the nagging shin not a bad day,  would have liked to play more but, It is what it is Weather and my leg would not allow.