Yes it's true!! March 30th was my one year anniversary and on that day I woke up sick. Actually I woke up sick on March 29th which is why it has taken me so long to get these pictures posted. Most of these pictures are from the bike trip I posted about earlier (except for the ones that are obviously from Canada)
Long time no see eh? Wow I had no idea it had been 10 days since my last post. Hopefully people other than just my other significant other are still checking up on this site. I'll try to post more often-I think I've just been in a bit of a rut lately.
Today's beautiful weather inspired me to stay inside all day and clean my room. Well not quite. I did get out for a bike ride in the afternoon to the next station over to take some pictures of some of the sakura in the local park. Maybe I'll post some pictures tomorrow if I get some time. I decided that it was time to switch around the furniture in the bedroom and the living room-spice things up a bit. And I washed about a month's worth of laundry so that kept me going for a long time too.
Jared got stopped by the police again yesterday so all day today he has been the biggest $*%&$# all sullen and angry. I like him a lot more when he's loud and angry. Fortunately he's finally managed to get the cork out of the wine bottle so hopefully that will chill him out a little.
Back to my bike ride. I almost capsized on my bicyle a couple of times because of dust in my eyes. Those of you who actually believe that Tokyo is a modern metropolis will be surprised to learn that the entire city is actually 95% dirt. I don't know how, but somehow they manage to fit 12 million people into only 50% of the actual land area inside city limits. The rest of the area is taken up by NOVA schools and fields. Yes that's right. In a city where they sell land by the square inch, your nextdoor neighbour is, more likely than not, a cabbage. Anyways the soil makeup is a very fine grain, probably only a few steps above sand and on windy days like today there's really no point to even stepping outside your door.
Tomorrow morning I'm going to go back to the 7th Circle of Hell, or as Dante sometimes refers to it, the Japanese Immigration Office. I'm not sure if I vented about this the last time I went (tomorrow will be my third) so I'll do it before I forget. Last time I went, I had all my forms in order went up to the counter and the lady checked them over and gave me a number and told me to sit down. There were about 15 numbers before mine and it took at least 25 minutes for the first number to go!! Is it because the forms are so complicated that it takes a long time? No, it's because the lady who is processing the forms is the same lady who has to check over the forms the first time and then give you your number!! She's so busy with people just walking up to the counter that she never has time to deal with the people who have already received their numbers and are waiting.
Now this in itself is maddening enough but when you consider that this is a country that hires useless people to do useless jobs it makes it even worse. I felt like screaming, "You hire old men to direct cars out of out of the supermarket parking lot onto the street but you can't hire one single person to stand at the door and check over forms and hand out numbers! IN CANADA WE CAN DRIVE OUT OF THE PARKING LOTS ALL BY OURSELVES!! IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!"
Well I feel better now. Hopefully I don't need to vent again after tomorrow.
Just so you know it's 15 degrees and relatively sunny here. I see that it's -1 with a 40% chance of flurries tonight in Toronto. Just so you know...
I figure that in about a week we'll be back into full on into spring weather and the cherry blossoms will only be a few days more after that. I kind of missed them last year ( I was here but I didn't really get a chance to go out and see them) so this year I'll definitely hit the major parks with my camera and try to get you guys some nice pictures.
My first Sunday off since probably some time in....August perhaps. I was going to go out and do something but I think instead I will post things on the internet, play videogames and maybe even shower-ahh the life of an english teacher!
Japan has a bit of a bad rap among english teachers concerning...xenophobia? I'm not sure if that's exactly how I would describe it. Japanese people seem fascinated with foreigners-just not as neighbours. What I'm really reffering to is official government policy regarding foreigners which is pretty draconian. Apparently according to a new law that Koizumi is putting forth, all foreigners will now have to be fingerprinted when entering the country. I've read lots of stories about police officers asking for ID (ie "gaijin" alien registration card) for absolutely no reason whatsoever. If you believe what you read on the internet then apparently this kind of discrimination is rampant. I, on the other hand have never experienced any of this. Although I always carry my gaijin card with me wherever I go, I can honestly say that I've never felt that I've been a victim of any kind of discrimination whatsoever.
My roommate Jared on the other hand can not. He has been asked three or four times by police officers to show ID and everytime he comes to me crying 'racial profiling.' He's been in a bit of culture shock for the past couple of weeks, feeling some real hate for Japan because of the last incident. One night he went out to rent a movie and on the way to the video store he saw a fire burning in a field and it was getting dangerously close to a house. So when he got to the video store he told them (in pretty darned fluent Japanese) that there was a fire and they needed to call the police. Apparently they looked at him like he was crazy so he biked 5 minutes out of his way to the koban (police box) to tell the police directly. When he got there and explained his story, he was shocked when they asked him if he had any weapons and if they could look in his bag and apparently they even patted him down! They didn't even care about the fact that he was there to report a fire. I don't think he's had a nice thing to say about Japan since.
The Japanese media can be a fascinating read even if there's nothing interesting going on:
Snoring prof ejected from university exam
A male assistant professor at Tohoku University's medical faculty medical science department fell asleep while proctoring the department's second-stage entrance exam Sunday and was told to leave the room by other proctors after an examinee complained about his snoring.
The faculty issued a strict oral warning to him for disturbing the examinees.
The exam was conducted without further disruption, and the university will not adjust the test scores, it said.
According to the university's exam section, when the English paper test began at 1 p.m., the assistant professor, who was sitting on a chair near the back row of desks in the room, fell asleep. An examinee near him complained to another proctor. The other two proctors in the room woke the assistant professor and asked him to leave the room. The exam continued, supervised by the other two proctors.
and not to be undone (these articles are on page 2 by the way):
Newspaper salesman nabbed over molestationNorihiro Naruse of Yokohama allegedly grabbed and touched the body of the 19-year-old student when he called on her Tama Ward, Kawasaki, apartment to solicit a newspaper subscription on Sept. 25 last year. She called the police when Naruse, a salesman at a company selling subscriptions to The Yomiuri Shimbun, visited her apartment again late Sunday afternoon.
"It was very regrettable that an employee of a company dealing with The Yomiuri Shimbun committed such a crime," the newspaper's public relations department said. "The Yomiuri Shimbun will strongly urge the company to warn its staff not to commit such crimes again."
Gah! Only a few more days and nothing yet purchased!! Basically it's the equivalent of Valentines Day only it's for women! (Us men got Valentines Day!) What hassle and bother!! Fortunately it only occurs anually!
In other news, the clandestine nature of this blog has been compromised by my significant other so there will be no further posts about my dalliances with attractive pre-undergraduate students. Sorry Andrew.
And yes that does have something to do with the level of language that is now being utilized for this blog. English will now have to be our Morse code for you and I.
A couple things that I noticed in my trip back to Canada-things that you might not notice when you first come here but are very clear when you go back.
I think Jared must have paid me one of the best compliments I have ever received the other day. That evening he said to me, 'You have got to be the peanut-butter eating-est, videogame playing-est person I have ever met!'
My first real post since my return to the land of the rising sun. The previous post wasn't really anything, I just needed to upload some pictures so that I could post them on other websites. Anyways I've been relatively busy this week and I formated my computer twice so I haven't had much opportunity to write. I finally got back into Japan Tuesday evening just before gold medal winner figure skater Arakawa Shizuka came back. I came out of customs only to see hundreds of Japanese people standing behind the gates with cell phones and cameras in hand. I had to laugh and thought 'it's so typically Japanese-everyone waiting to take a picture of their loved ones coming off the plane.' Then I saw the TV cameras and reporters and realized that there must be some famous people arriving in Japan.
On March 3rd I did something 'crazy' and lined up at 8 o'clock in the morning to buy a Nintendo DS Lite. I'm sure you can see the line up in the previous pictures. It was crazy! But anyways that wasn't even the begining of the day. I left early and took the expres train into Tokyo. That was the first time I ever took a train into Tokyo that early on a weekday morning. The express trains in the middle of the day are pretty busy but at 8 in the morning they are CRAZY!! The platform at my station was absolutely packed with people and when the train pulled up it looked practically full already-standing room full I mean. Anyways somehow everyone managed to get on. I was literally pressed up against the door on the other side of the train. I couldn't even move my arm. I remember thinking to myself 'jeez this is the most packed I've ever seen this train and I've come home on some busy ones at night!'
Then, to my shock and horror, the train stopped at another station half way into Ikebukero. The line ups for each door were about 3 columns across and they basically stretched out across the width of the platform. The doors opened up and I was amazed to see that a couple of people at the front of the line actually were going to try and squeeze on. And then, just like that, a surge came from the back of the line and the entire group somehow poured into the train like a title wave. I was swept from the doors right back until I was on the other side of the train! And believe me I really couldn't move then! I was amazed how the Japanese could find space for 20 people for each door of the train when I doubted that the entire train could accomodate even three more people. I'm sure if that happened in Toronto, people would just shrug and wait for the next subway train to come.
I got into Ikebukero a little after 8am and headed to my local Bic Camera. I don't know what I was thinking but I think I maybe had this little delusion that because practically everyone in Japan already owns a Nintendo DS, the line-up for the Nintendo DS Lite probably wouldn't be too bad. The length of the line-up two hours before the store even ended certainly crushed that little delusion. I'm guessing that the lineup was about 150 metres long and was three columns across. That particular Bic Camera (one of the four that are outside Ikebukero station) apparently had 600 DS's so there must have been at least 600 people in line.
After about 3 hours of waiting in line I was able to grab one and I was quite pleased at being able to participate in one of those things that you only ever saw the crazy Japanese do when the newspaper published a picture of the latest console release.
