Re: Virginia Tech

Hey everyone, I just wanted to express my sorrow for what happened at Virginia Tech. Attending UF, it was just something I took for granted that my safety was assured. Hearing about this maniac just attacking engineering students and faculty, I thought about that happening at the MEB and the Marston Science Library at UF, and it just couldn't click. I tend to think of a college campus as a safe haven for ideas and young adults looking for their way. Seeing someone destroy that is pretty rough.

On the other hand, though, South Koreans should have nothing to fear. Nor should they be ashamed. This was obviously an isolated case, and every country has its share of nutcases. I'm suspicious of loner sociopaths, not South Koreans.

Them's my two cents.

Osaka Highlights

Okay guys, here's brief highlights from the Osaka trip - this doesn't really do the trip justice, but if I tried to do that, I would be here all night. So here goes.

Day 1 - wandering

To get to Osaka this time, we took advantage of the "Juu-hachi kippu," which is a deal offered by Japan Rail every so often to encourage young people on a budget to see the country. Basically, it gives you five unlimited days of use for all JR surface trains, and that doesn't include the bullet train. So going that way, it was very cheap, but very tiring. It took us 14 hours each way, with a lot of stops. Not terribly fun times, and we were pretty exhausted our first night there. But full day 1 was cool - we just wandered the city from south to north, hitting some of the highlights. One of the big ones was Dotonbori, which was a big shopping/nightlife district very near our hotel.

The main street.

We also hit the Umeda Sky building, which I hit last time I was in Osaka, and is always a hit. I saw it during the day this time, which I didn't last time.

Brigg got exposed to nuclear waste and grew until his torso took up the entire atrium of the building. Either that or I played silly buggers with the camera angle. I can't quite remember.

Here's something I couldn't see last time - in the middle of the photo is the view of Osaka castle from the Umeda Sky building. It was a little hazy that day, but it was still fairly spectacular.

In the evening of day 1, we found this great Mexican restraunt near Dotonbori, and met one of the waitresses - a drummer in a local band, whose English was passable. Too bad she was married, I might still be in Osaka now if she wasn't. So she invited us to a show on day 3, which was pretty rockin. We also went to a live show on our own on the evening of day 1, and another on day 5. We spent a fair amount of the time this trip checking out the local rock music scene of Osaka, which was a lot of fun.

Day 2 - Osaka Castle, Science Museum

We got up early and hit it hard on day 2, and were happy we did. Osaka castle was spectacular. We were there during the Sakura season, which just set everything off.

Here's the castle. There's a big museum inside, multi-level, that explains a lot about the castle and Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of the Edo period. This was his headquarters, won from the Toyotomi family. It also explains how the castle fell during the summer war. Here's a link to a site about the castle, reading material if you're bored.

http://www.tracyanddale.50megs.com/Japan/html%20files/osakac.html

I tried to find a site that detailed the screen that was painted to depict the fall of Osaka castle, it's really stunning, but I came up empty-handed. Feel free to search yourself, if you find it it'll be worth the effort.

The top floor of the castle is an observation deck. I'm a sucker for high places.

Crud, something just came up and I have to cut this short. I'll try to pick it up again on Thursday, but it may have to wait until the weekend. I'll do my best! Take care, everyone.

Catch-up

Hey again everyone! O-hisashiburi desu ne? (It's been a while, ain't it?) I'm back from Osaka, I've had a nice, restful couple of days, and I'm getting ready to hit it hard for school again tomorrow. I'm going to be rapid-fire posting for a few day, I think, rather than try to fit everything into one post. These posts are intended to just be a brief recap of some of my adventures over the last couple of weeks, but mainly I want to get out some thoughts that I've had about Japan in general. You can see photos of Japan any-old-where, just check out some tourist sites, but the reason you come to my blog is to get my take on Japan. So I'm gonna provide just that.

But first, the recap, with highlights. Once again, forgive my lack of camera flash functionality.

Saturday the 24th - Brigg and I hit the Tokyo International Anime Fair at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center. It's the biggest convention in the world, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. Yes, this makes me a colossal nerd, but that shouldn't be any real news to those of you who know me. It was everything I thought it would be.

An imposing venue



Booths galore






Fighting robots and pretty girls






Wall to wall collectables








And a few oddities. This is not made up, or photoshopped in any way. This is a poster for an upcoming anime series. Samuel L. Jackson provides the voice for the main character - AFRO SAMURAI. He's a hardass. Brigg and I laughed for five minutes straight.






Sunday the 25th - checking out sakura (cherry blossoms) in Ueno, and also seeing the Ueno Park Zoo. The sakura was not at its peak, and it was raining on and off, so it wasn't the BEST time to check out the sights, but we weren't about to let that discourage us.



Here is Minako, a friend I went with. Also some of the flock of people gathered around any tree that was decently in bloom.

The sakura itself. I believe that early in the season, the paler blossoms come out, and the more bright pink blossoms are a bit later on. Maybe this week, in fact.

In Ueno park zoo - mostly, the animals look as animals tend to do. This was noteworthy, though - the classic Japanese crane. Its head is about chest height on me.

This hornbill was also noteworthy. Most of the animals in the park were pretty shy and retiring, hard to get a photo of, but this guy was perched right up front, in full grandeur, staring people down. He's all like: "Be sure to get my good side."


Well, I'll call that a post, but I will definitely give a short recap of my Osaka trip in the next day or two. Watch this space.

Lack of Content

Hey yall. So I've really got not much new to share, and a fairly incredible concentration of fairly incredible events is coming up over the next couple of weeks (trip to Ueno for sakura viewing, trip to Tokyo Convention Center for the Tokyo International Anime Fair, trip to Osaka and the surrounding area over Spring holiday), so I'll have a lot of things to share before too long, so this week I'm'a just chill. Be patient, new stuff will be forthcoming in a couple of weeks. Maybe at the end of the break. Basically, whenever I get around to it. Keep watching this space. Thanks for your understanding. Peace, out.

Snowboarding

Hello again all! Glad to hear I have some new readers out there. Keep looking, maybe if I get enough hits, I can make it to the featured blogs section of Blogger! Then, I can get enough visibility to attract advertising, which means I can quit my day job, and just travel around Japan and update my blog full-time! See? It's in the interest of everybody.

So here's the skinny on my snowboarding trip to Mt. Naeba. Naeba is about an hour and a half away from me, up in the mountains at the border of Gunma and Niigata prefectures. It's a really scenic drive, I highly recommend it. That is, if you have a decent car, which I lack. It made it through okay, and it never really showed any indications where I might have to walk, but the engine was racing for a bit, and so was my heart.

Once we got into town, it was quite pretty.

It was just a small skiing town, but the locals were all right, and it was very scenic. There was a bar/restraunt called the Snowdeck where we hung out all the time, it had a pretty cool deck outside that was made of metal mesh, so the snow fell through it rather than piling up on it, so you can sit on the deck even in the snow. Hence the name. Really cold, though. They had a heater outside, but there's only so much you can do. The place really catered to foreigners, which I liked.

This is not the hotel we stayed in, we stayed in a little tatami-matted hole in the wall (whaddya want when the whole trip costs 150 bucks), but it indicates the popularity of the place. There were many such hotels around. There was one called the Prince hotel that was just absurd. Here's a link, you can check it out for yourself. It apparently has 1,298 guest rooms.

http://www.princehotels.co.jp/naeba-e/snow/index.html

This is Carey, with a friend she made outside the rental place. The rentals were a bit of an ordeal, and expensive, but worth it - I spent a lot of time in the snow, and without snow pants, it would not have been a fun day.

Here's my friends I hung with that day - from left to right, John, Macy, and Justin. A few people from Shibukawa were there too, but I got separated from them. I still had a good time though, so no worries. This is as we were getting ready to head out. It's worth noting that everyone else in the group had skis - I was the only loser there with a snowboard. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of snowboards on the slopes, I would guess about 50-60%, but I took the snowboard option on the advice of my friend, who said that snowboards would probably constitute about 90% of the traffic. I figured I would feel self-conscious being on skis, so I went with the snowboard, which was extremely difficult. Now, I might have gone with the snowboard anyway, I was up in the air, but my decision was solidified by what turned out to be incorrect intelligence. Anyway, whatever, I had a pretty good time with the snowboard, but I might have spent less time on my butt if I had skis. Yes, I would like some cheese with that whine.

There were many mountains.

This is what the hills looked like when we got out there. It hadn't snowed in a couple of days, so the snow was really packed. I stuck strictly to the green slopes, of course.

There was a nice little frozen lake off to one side. This is as close as I got - with my level of control coupled with Murphy's law, I took it as a given that if I was closer than 100 yards, I would end up in the water.

The big 4-person lifts were noteworthy in that just after you get scooped up, a big canopy swings down over your heads completely without warning. It's like you're being eaten by the lift. There may have been warning, but none of us understood it if there was. All the announcements and everything over the intercom were in Japanese, of course. I'm sure that was a safety hazard, but whatever. John took the lift separately from the rest of us, and he said that the canopy actually knocked the ski poles out of his hand, and he had to skim down the hill without poles to retrieve them. He said it wasn't as difficult as it sounds.

Here's me on the ground. You can see I have about the same skill level as the 4-year old girl on the left. With the disadvantage that no one was going to help my ass up.

Here's me looking cool in my getup.

It's a shame I couldn't get a white outfit - it would have been really fun to go all snow ninja on the slopes of Japan. However, given my skill level, I probably should have been wearing bright orange to make it easier for the ski patrol to find my body.

At one point, we took a big gondola to the neighboring mountain, about a 15 minute ride away. The gondola was called the "Dragondola," and apparently it was the second longest such gondola in Japan. The Japanese have a habit of ranking everything. This is a view from the window, heading down one of the mountains. At more than one point, it just drops off steeply, and if you're facing that way, it looks like you're falling. Macy had a few bouts of vertigo, she was not having fun. She faced the other way very deliberately on the way back. I hated to say it at the time, but I was having a blast. I love high places.

Me on the Dragondola.

This is a very beautiful lake that we were able to see from the Dragondola. I don't know what makes it such a striking color, if anyone knows, clue me in.

Yeah, this part was difficult for me. To get back to the entrance to the Dragondola, you have to come this way - the entrance is just at the bottom of a very steep slope. This picture doesn't really do it justice, from the top it looks very intimidating. And this is at the end of the day, when everyone is just exhausted. This slope is easily the steepest I faced all day, and I still hadn't gotten the hang of steering. If I just pointed my snowboard down the hill and went, there are two ways it could have gone: 1) I fall halfway down at about 40 miles an hour, and seriously injure myself, or 2) I collide with the crowd at the bottom of the hill at about 60 miles an hour, and seriously injure myself and several others. I ended up going down it on my butt with the board perpendicular to the slope. Several people were doing the 'perpendicular to the slope' thing, but I was the only one I saw that had to add the 'on my butt' element. It's noteworthy that I seemed just about the only one faced with this conundrum - most people, even the 8 year olds on skis, glided down it fairly effortlessly. Ah, whatever. Injured pride beats cracked ribs anyday.

Well, that was about it. My butt is still sore, but I got some great memories out of it! On the whole, it could have been a whole lot worse. And next time I go (and there WILL be a next time) I'll be more prepared. So, take care everyone, hit Mt. Naeba if you have the chance, and watch this space for further adventures!

Smorgasbord

Hey all! Long time no see! Wow, do I have a lot to tell you guys. My ski trip went pretty well, as I will detail below, I was very tired for about 4 days there but I seem to be fully recovered right now (though my butt is still too sore to do sit-ups. Insert random 'pain in the ass' wisecrack here). The first thing I want to do, though, is complete the chronicle of my Tokyo trip with Brigg, as started in my last real post.

So. We left off at the Meiji Jingu shrine, a masterpiece of its type. Here are some more details of it.

This is inside the main temple complex, looking at the main temple itself. There is a big courtyard in the center of the complex, about 100 yards square. It takes a while to get across on the best of days, but today, since it was raining, the pristine marble of the courtyard became a slipping hazard. Hydroplaning in boots is not fun.

This was the ornate entrance to the main temple complex. I thought it was pretty cool. Just a note - some temples have really elaborate carvings under the eaves of their temples, and some of these have been colonized by birds, which causes damage and unsightly staining. So to prevent that from happening, the temples put a really fine wire mesh over the carvings THAT YOU CAN BARELY SEE THROUGH. So the end result is that we basically have to believe that there is some very historic carvings under this wire mesh. I wonder how many people take photos of the wire.

After the trip to Meiji Jingu, we hit Harajuku. I had never been there, and didn't really know what to expect - it's basically the biggest "high-fashion" area of Tokyo, and it's where all the goths and Lolita fashion enthusiasts come out to play. For those who have not heard of Lolita, here's the Wiki.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita_fashion

Since it was raining and cold, I think the enthusiasm wasn't there for the street fashion fanatics that day. Brigg and I went people-watching on the main street, and did see a couple of noteworthy outfits (didn't take pics, I forget why. Maybe I didn't want to risk water damage. Sorry), but it was not the fashion show I had anticipated. Meh. There were some interesting shops, though. Also, behind the big Gap store, there was a Mexican restraunt. This was one of the highlights of the trip. It wasn't great, but they did a fairly decent nachos, and if you know how often I eat nachos in America and can imagine how hard it is to find Mexican food in Japan, you'll know how much that meant. We even had a couple of Dos Equises (Dos Equies? Dos Equii?) there. Not too shabby.

The next stop that day was Akihabara - I shouldn't need to describe it. Those who would care about such things already know of its grandeur, and those who don't know of it probably wouldn't care anyway. It's basically an electronics lover's paradise. And an Epileptic's nightmare.

Here's me among the goodness.

Day 2, we started out by hitting some of the bigger shopping districts. This is the main intersection in Shibuya, which was congested as usual and pretty cool. It was fun to people-watch here. As you can see, people pile up ten or so deep on the corners waiting for the lights to change, and then all the traffic clears and the pedestrian lights all go at once, and it's just a sea of people across the entire intersection. During one of these mass crossings, we noticed a group of gaijin doing something interesting - there were four guys, and they split up so that two were on each opposite corner of the intersection. Then, one got on another's shoulders in each pair just before the light turned, and they surfed the sea of people toward each other, high-fived in the middle, and continued on to the opposite corners. Looked pretty goofy, but it must have been cool to do. If you've ever seen "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," this is also the intersection where two street racers drifted into the middle of a huge crowd, and the crowd just parted to let the cars come barrelling through. Until you see the crowd in person, you can't really appreciate just how improbable that is. The buildings on all sides of this square also had huge TV screens, there must have been about 10 visible. I'm amazed they don't get many car accidents with all the distractions.

This is the main drag in Ginza, another big, fashionable shopping district. That's Brigg in the foreground.

The next stop of the day was the Kabuki-za, to catch our first Kabuki show ever! It was pretty cool, there were two performances that we saw. The first was four dances, to compliment the four seasons of the year. Apparently, that's a traditional theme for just after new year's, when we were there. I liked the Summer dance the best - it had three men in kimono that looked like sparrow's wings and one man who looked like a samurai retainer, dancing in front of a screen with bamboo designs, and there was a story about how the samurai was wandering among the bamboo and watching the sparrows in flight among the bamboo. Some of the motions looked just like sparrows, it was great! The second performance was an actual play, about some criminal courtiers from Kyoto who have been exiled on a deserted island for many years, and how they are rescued. I won't go into the whole plot, that would take an hour. There were some pretty interesting prop and stage effects, and the acting was great in the Kabuki style. It all would have been incomprehensible without the English translation headset, a steal at 500 yen. Best 500 yen I spent all trip.

This is the entrance to the Kabuki-za.

I stopped to take this picture as we were crossing the street. Probably illegal, but I thought it was worth it. I just wanted to illustrate how dramatic the Kabuki-za looks against its surroundings. You're driving along a major metropolitan street, and suddenly there's this ancient castle-shrine-theater thing! It definitely causes a double-take.

The group in front of the theater. That's Brigg's girlfriend, Tomami, on the left. She'd joined us by this point. The stacks on the left side of the theater entrance are barrels of sake. I think they're lucky for the new year or something. I wondered if they were actually full.

The last thing we did on the trip was go about an hour and a half out of our way to check out an Ellegarden show (punk rock band) that turned out to be sold out. Kind of a cruddy way to end the trip, but the rest of it more than made up for that little disappointment.

Well, chronicling this stuff took longer than I had anticipated. I'm going to bed. I'll post more tomorrow about my ski trip and everything, I promise!

Weekend plans

Hey all. Yeah, further postings on the Tokyo trip didn't happen, I was busier this week than I expected to be. Honestly, Sunday's post probably won't happen either. However, in mitigation, I will be making some excellent memories this weekend to share with all you fine peeps in the future. There is a big ALT ski weekend going on tomorrow and Sunday at a place called Naeba, in the Niigata prefecture. I'm on it like white on snow. I've never been skiing before, I'll probably break a leg or something. That will likely give me a chance to catch up on my blogging. So I will take plenty of pictures, and post them at a later date. No promises yet as to how late that date will be, though. Have a good weekend!

-Jeff