Picture bonanza!

My apologies to everyone with dial-up. I went out last weekend on a boat tour down the main river in Tokyo and since it was sunny, I walked through central Tokyo. These are some snaps that I managed to take. If you want to and your internet connection can handle it, you can click on the pictures for a (much) larger version.

I bet you wouldn't expect Tokyo Station to look like this!



Most of these are of the area immediately outside the Imperial Gardens in central Tokyo.










I thought this picture was funny-who in their right mind would set up a tent on a 3-foot wide strip of grass with a busy highway on one side and a 10-foot drop to the moat below on the other?



Fairly typical Japanese highschool. This one is the newest I've seen though. Most of them look like they've been converted from WWII-era factories. And the playgrounds are almost always crushed stone rather than concrete. It's summer vacation but it looks like the highschool baseball team is still practicing hard.



















I thought this sign was funny. It's posted at a corner in a tunnel where there obviously must be a lot of collisions. They seem to be worried about the potential for people "clashing."













The homeless have some pretty impressive housing around here. It wouldn't suprise me if they had their own mayors. Ever see the movie Tokyo Godfathers (you should-it's great anime)? It's pretty much like the movie says it is.




Anyways that's it for now. Sorry about the huge backlog of pictures. I'll try to intersperse it a little so there's always a few pictures here and there rather than a ridiculous amount in one go.

let me get to sleep

Hell a.k.a. Northern Ontario

I don't know if any of you have ever been tree planting or have thought of tree planting, but there was an excellent article about it in the Toronto Star the other day (thanks for the heads up again Mom.)

If you'd like to read a little about it then just click on this link.
If you can't be bothered to read but would like to get an idea of what it's like to plant in Northern Ontario then check out these short movies (Quicktime required.)

Link to movie page.


You may or may not need a free registration with the Star website to view those links.

May the Force be with you.

So I finally saw Star Wars the other night. It has only been out for about a month over here in Japan and the movies are prohibitively expensive so I passed on it when it first came out. Then I found out that the first day of every month is only 1000 yen so last night I rushed out after work at 9pm and headed to the next station to go to the movies. What a brilliant brilliant movie. Sure it still has some horribly corny lines and bad acting but the action and the story more than make up for it. Anyways the movie let out at 12:15 am so I ran all the way back to the station so as to not miss the last train. I saw a couple of interesting things on the way home that told me that I don't stay out late nearly enough.

I was waiting on the station platform when the train pulled up. As the doors opened and I stepped onto the train I was almost knocked on my butt by the overwhelming reek of alcohol that wafted through the train carriage. The train wasn't packed but all the seats were taken. I then realized to my great amusement that practically everybody on the train had been out drinking all night in Tokyo and were now taking the last train home. I'd bet money that the other 7 or 8 cars were exactly the same. I was riding home with 300 drunk people.

I was walking home when an oncoming car was approaching and and I heard the whine of a scooter behind me. I stepped off the road and the scooter roared past almost crashing head on with the car. It was being piloted by a young woman with a helmet so far back on her head that it offered absolutely no protection whatsoever. She dodged the car and then paused at the red light before deciding to dash through the interesection into the 7-Eleven parking lot on the other side. It was then that I realized that she too was probably a little innebriated. When I caught up to her she was awkwardly trying to set up the kickstand of the scooter. She was actually a pretty fine looking girl and she was dressed to the nines. She took off her helmet and set it on the seat where it immediately proceeded to fall to the ground. She just stood there staring at it for a couple seconds, probably trying to decide if she had enough functioning motor skill remaining to bend over and pick it up. In the end she decided against it and simply kicked it under her scooter with her highheels. I just laughed and kept on walking.

My new pad...

...is almost exactly the same as my old one. In fact it is the exact same. It's even got the exact same coordinates as the last, only this one is 15 feet closer to the core of the Earth. My roommate moved out a couple days ago so I just spent all day moving all my stuff over to the good bedroom and cleaning the rest of the apartment. I was thinking of waiting until my company sent the cleaners tomorrow but they're a bunch of worthless handicaps anyways and I wanted to get moved into my new room immediately. The living room looks a little bit sparse in terms of furniture-that's because I comandeered the TV and the sofa for my bedroom.

Mom keeps bugging me to tell a little about my roommates so I guess I will. I don't have any! Hah! This is what happened with the apartment situation. I decided that I wanted out of this apartment so I gave my 30 day notice. After several weeks of searching, I found out how hard it is for a gaijin to find an apartment, especially if he wants to stay in one of the smaller communities. So I called back my company only to find that our lease had been cancelled. So my roommate ended up having to move as well. Because it seemed like everyone was leaving, the girl below us decided that she was also going to leave. So her and my roommate Adam got a place in Ikebukero and I got a call from my company saying that there was now a free apartment in the apartment below mine (the girl who just moved out.) So anyways to make a long story short I decided to grab that one. I didn't succeed in finding a cheaper place but for now at least I'm living in a three bedroom apartment all by myself. We'll see how long that lasts.

Click on pictures for larger image