December 2006 Archives

A small fish kept trying to nibble on my ear today. To be more exact he was trying to clean it out. I was slightly freaked out by it all, and thought that something horrible was happening to my ears. Anyways, I survived the first Open Water Dive and will be doing another couple tomorrow. The good news is my camera takes some decent pictures under water, the bad news is visability isn't really that good this week. Oh well. I guess I'll have to come back some other time...

FACT: SCUBA is fun.
FACT: People who SCUBA are cool.
FACT: Chuck Norris once round house kicked several objects into space.

I spent a good chunk of my morning under water, if only in a swimming pool. I am still alive. Go figure. Tomorrow I'll be out in the open water, and hopefully I'll see some interesting fish as well as take some fun photos. Koh Tao is a great island and I'm really happy that I have a chance to spend a full week here. The three of us are doing quite well, though Theresa seems to be over doing the mango fruit shakes a bit...

On that note I think I'll get one for myself....

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

So I leave for Thailand in the morning, and for some reason I'm up late doing some last minute changes to my iPod playlists. You gotta have some in flight entertainment. Things seem to be shaping up well for me, and I just wanted to let everyone know I've not screwed anything up. Yet.

So while I'm basking in the sun, you can spend your days in the cold enjoying some new movie trailers. Like the new TMNT trailer that just came out, and the oh so fun Transformers trailer. Watch it in HD. Yeah. I know. Retro love fest.

While you're enjoying the Christmas season, also enjoy this religious mystery unfolding right now in Italy. I'd like to see someone make a movie about this.

TTFN. Have fun everyone. Be back on the 7th.

So I'm mostly all ready to go to Thailand this Friday, but as my day was a bit dull I decided to make a break for it and go to Kobe. Yeah. The reason I went to Kobe was to see the Kobe Luminarie, a light festival of sorts. Its done every year at the end of December in memory of the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995, which killed over 6,000 people. I wanted to go last year but ran out of time, and I completely spaced on it this year until I saw a sign on the train Monday. It seemed like a good use of time, and the train ride was only an hour each way. Plus I had the added bonus of being able to eat at the Wendy's near the station!

As I had no idea what was going on I wondered around downtown Kobe hoping someone would point me in the right direction. Which was a bad thing. I soon found that a massive long line, marked out by police and crowd control fences, weaved a path through the downtown area. After waiting around a half hour, after backtracking quite a ways just to find the entrance, I came to the main gateway. There, along with several thousand Japanese people, I took a lot of pictures. Quite a beautiful sight. Every year the city changed the design and layout. Quite nice. After making my way through the gateways I found the main area situated in a park. I was tempted to buy some of the fun smelling fair food that was present, but held back, as I was still content with my Wendy's meal. After spending time looking at the lights, taking pictures, taking pictures of people for them, and scaring small children I decided I should return home. And I lived happily ever after.

No really. I have nothing else. Go away. I'll see you when I get back from Thailand and Cambodia.

Christmas is coming up soon and I'm looking forward to having blue Christmas. Blue as in the color of the water I'll be swimming in on Christmas day. Japan is in full Christmas swing these days. Japan truly grasps the the modern view on Christmas that many other places lack. An embrace of pure materialism. Japanese Christmas has absolutely nothing to do with religion and everything to do with gift buying and lots of fun lights (which to be honest is what it means to the vast majority of people in the rest of the world). Japanese Christmas traditions I personally enjoy include: The Japanese Christmas Cake. Lights in department stores! Clerks wearing funny hats! And the general saying "Christmas is for lovers." The other night I rode through the Fukuyama Castle park and found a wonderful display of lights. Too bad theres no snow (ha!) to help enhance the mood.

My parents sent me a wonderful package full of fun Christmas gifts. Though as usual, mostly just clothing (a theme which has persisted since I was a small child). I've included some action shots of me opening the gifts, while ignoring the "Don't Open Until Christmas" notes, and the joy that it brought me.

If I had some more cash I'd splurge on some "self" Christmas gifts. Like upgrading my iPod Shuffle to the new version, and getting a little USB adaptor to use it at work. I do love the new Shuffle, which could possibly be the best MP3 player out there. Something I've wanted to buy, or make, for a long time is a digital picture frame. They're finally coming down in price now to the point where making one isn't worth the effort. Maybe next year. Plus I've almost completely decided to buy a Nintendo Wii sometime in the new year. The only thing holding me back was the lack of region freeness, which will apparently be fixed through third party sources. Ahhh to dream of new gadgets....

Speaking of gadgets, I'd like it to be known that my sister has finally gotten herself a nice little Macbook for school. Though the downside of this will be her urge to video chat with me at odd hours of the day, and that I'll have to communicate through use of robot action figure puppets. Yeah, I'm a stinker. (Plus I totally want to buy a Macbook for myself....)

I am slowly adding more pictures to my photoblog, which I've been working on since this summer. Things seem to be working now and I've been adding quite a few interesting things from my back log of Japan pictures. Now that I have the process streamlines I'll probably delete the old album collection and change the webpage links. Please feel free to comment on pictures

This video has been circulating around net for a week or so now. A Japanese business that will wake you up in interesting ways.

Japanese Batman is rather funny.

Though I find Japanese Spider-man to be a lot more funny.

I should get working on packing for my trip to Thailand. I think I have all my supplies, like my new underwater camera case and 2 GB SD card, but I always seem to forget something in the end. Hmmm.... so much to do, so little motivation.

It finally happened. Last Thursday it was cold and raining quite hard, so I figured I would go all illegal and use an umbrella while ridding my bike home from work. As I cross the first street I look left and see a cop car at the stop light, and soon after I get a nice big squawk from the megaphone. Luckily they didn't seem to care enough to ticket me. This time.

Saturday was the annual Fukuyama City Hall Christmas party thing, which I went to last year as well. The highlights included Bill once again in a Santa outfit, ginger bread cookies, and fried chicken from Moss Burger. Its a fun old time in Fukuyama when ginger bread cookies are involved.

As I plan on going SCUBA diving in Thailand over Christmas I decided that I needed to buy an underwater camera. One of those cheap little one time use guys. But those are no fun, which is why I ended up buying an underwater case for my existing digital camera, which takes really good pictures. Its rated for 40 meters. Yeah. Nice. Hopefully I'll get a lot of use out of it over xmas and have lots of fun photos to show off. Mmmmmm gadgets....

Saturday night left my apartment a mess and all my dishes dirty. Thats the last time I host a Tandori Chicken Dinner Party! Though really its all just an excuse for me to make chicken and have some drinks with my friends. I do love tandori chicken way too much for my own good. Especially now that I can buy the mix for it on my way home from work.

It took me around six months but I finally got my Vietnam pictures online. You know. That trip I took. In the summer. Sigh... I'll work on getting more photo albums up this week. I'd hate to think of putting some of this stuff off another six months.

I found that my state health insurance cover getting my back pampered for the low low price of 400¥ a visit. Yeah, $3.50. Guess where I'm going every week. The only downside is all the old people who wish to make small talk in English and Japanese. Curse them and their willingness to communicate!

I finally made all the arrange for my trip to Thailand after spending two different days for three hours at a time (each) at a travel agent trying to get internal tickets. I almost resorted to the "throw money at the agent and cry", but wasn't quite stressed enough to give it a try. I'll be leaving December 22nd and getting back on the 6th. Unless for some reason I decide to stay, in which case someone will need to come over and water my... oh wait. I don't own plants. I think I'll be fine.

I know the Nintendo Wii came out in Japan on Saturday. Yes I would like to buy one. No I will not be buying one any time soon. When someone hacks a Wii to make it region free then I'll get one. Until then I'll be just fine with my Dreamcast and the extra money I'll be saving.

My neighbor, fellow JET, occasional cook, and always good friend Julia turned 24 today. Some of us went out last night and had some food and a bit of fun. Some funny pictures were taken of me, to which I won't be showing because of how stupid I look. Not as if that has ever stopped me before.

Seems the Japanese media is ticked off that youtube.com contains way too much Japanese media. To be honest, some days youtube seems to be the world's largest collection of anime, Japanese talk shows, video games, and hard gay freak outs. I don't see why they're complaining, its just fueling demand for Japanese media in the western world. Come on people, its free advertising! フウー！

So Japanese education is a bit on the odd side. Forget everything you may have heard about how good the education system is, and how much better the students are here. Sure, some of it is better in some ways, but in other ways (like the low qualities of the school facilities in my area) just confuse me. One of the oddest thing is how the Japanese education system has taken the term "compulsory education" to a weird extreme. As in every child must have an education at any cost no matter what the child does or wants. The biggest example of this is bullying in the schools. From what I've heard from other ALTs (which is by no means a completely reliable source), if a kid is being bullied the usual option is to move the kid to another school. Not deal with the bully. If a kid is acting up in class you can't kick him out, because you'd be denying him an education. Even if that kid is disrupting the class for everyone else. These problems have gotten so bad lately that the nation teachers association has had several meeting dealing with the subject of teen suaside. Something that has been on the rise in recent years. The group of us in my city see this bad behavior happen quite a bit at certain schools and we've always wondered why no one has brought up the idea of just expelling the kids from class or from school. Seems that they legally couldn't, until now. A teacher showed me an article in English the other day saying how some official body had just give the ok to expel students from class. In the last couple of weeks students have been arrested for bullying kids at a couple of schools in the area. Its about time.

It also seems as if theres been a lot of murders in my area as well. In the 'bingo' area there have been 7 murders in the past two weeks. I've been warned several times to 'be careful.' As a tall white man, who is generally credited for scaring old women and small children on a daily biases, I think I'm probably fairly safe. But if I do die, burry me with my Dreamcast and a copy of Chu Chu Rockets.

While at the local museum a few weekends ago I saw a series of maps showing the history of land expansion in Fukuyama City. Interestingly enough most of what I think of as 'Fukuyama' is man made. Quite a lot of it, starting back around 500 years ago. I found it most interesting that a hill near one of my schools isn't a hill, but an island that has been swallowed up during land expansion. Poor little island.

The Japanese people are a rather polite and nice group of people. The random kindness of strangers in big cities is always surprising, and you'd be hard pressed to find people like this anywhere else in the world. Which is why I'm so befuddled as to why the Japanese can't que worth a damn. Trains, buses, stores, elevators. When people show up to one of these places an orderly line forms naturally, but as soon as the opportunity to move presents itself, the line becomes a mob. Pushing and clawing its way into a small space. Its not just one demographic that does that, all age groups and genders are to blame. I was highly confused for quite a while as to what to do in such a mad rush. But now I know. Just be crazy.

Anyhow, thats all I got. Now leave me alone.