One of These Things...

...is not like the other. Yesterday I went out with a few friends to try my hand at DiscGolf (golf with frisbees) and we ran into a wandering troupe of youth who came up to us and wanted to know what our favourite food was. Field research, I suppose. I managed to jump in and get a photo. Finally, a picture of me with students that aren't mine. Yay!

But having to go on a school trip on a Sunday? Dude. I think that maybe they were actually a goup of kids at a day camp of some sort. Nearby, a youth baseball game was going on and the whole community was out in droves to check it out. They love their baseball in this country. Here are some other snapshots of frisbee golf for you to enjoy:

Wakayama Weekend

So Golden Week has come and gone. The trains have returned to their usual level of crowdedness and I've been able to find a seat here and there in my travels. At the end of the Golden Week holiday I went to visit Wakayama, which is closer to central Japan than where I live here in Himeji. It's just south of the Nara area. A few of my friends and I drove down there to camp out in a log cabin in the mountains. The old couple that runs the place actually built the place, including the bath (which was carved out of a single piece of wood!) and the dining shelter which had four grills staggered across the room in little fire pits. We did all of our own cooking and it was really reasonable. The bath was a private outdoor bath that couples can enjoy and it looked out over the valley beneath our area. The following morning, after a night of glorious feasting, I woke up suddenly at 7 a.m. to the sound of a gentle rain and went outside to sit on the small porch. A fog had crept in along the valley floor obscuring the village save for a few houses that were built on the mountainside above the fogline. The rain was a light drizzle and I sat cross-legged in silence for an hour before going back to bed. The whole experience was like being sent back in time 400 years. I listened to the sound of nature in a country where I'm always under the barrage of urban noise like buzzing lights and rumbling cars. I was back in nature and it was awesome. Unfortunately, my camera battery had died the night before so I couldn't snap any pictures of the scene, but in a way it's nice to have had that little moment to myself. What pictures I was able to take I've posted above. Enjoy.

The next day on the return trip home we stopped in at a small family run restaurant just outside of Wakayama and they had this huge crab (probably about a metre wide, from claw to claw) living in a pond that was built into the floor of the place. Right in the middle of the dining area. A few times an ambitious leg would slip over the side of the stone wall keeping the prisoner from taking off. I've never seen a crab that big in my life, and shudder to think at what a bad-tempered crab like that might be capable of should he managed to escape from the saltwater prison they were holding him in. His living mates were starfish, abalone and fugu, the famous blowfish that nearly killed Homer Simpson. I think it would probably cost about $250 to order that bigass crab, and I expect that they've probably grown somewhat attached to the guy.

Well, it was back to work this past week, and I'll be in the office all of this week hoping that my coworkers don't decide to call in sick and force me to go and cover at their schools. I simply must finish the Dark Tower books before they drive me insane.

Well, I'm off to have Chinese tea at a Korean restaurant with a Japanese friend. I love Asia.

Yes! It's finally here! The winter is over and Japan is warming up! And in about 3 weeks, it will be unbearably hot and humid! Hooray for warmth! Hooray for humidity! Hooray for defying gravity in the shadow of one of the world's most epic castles! Hooray for Jacob Goldfarb's camera that can take 16 frames in about one second and capture this leap of joy! Hooray for leaps of joy! Hooray for superfluous use of an exclamation point! Hooray for short blog entries and late nights and for avoiding sleep on a work night! Hooray for two blog posts in two days! Hooray for Neil Young and his new CD! Hooray for "hurrah" and its variants! Hooray for legs! Hooray for you and for me!

SUVs - ExxposeExxon - Thoughts from Within - Thank You, Stephen Colbert

And what of March? And what of April?

I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry. But things got out-of-hand-busy for awhile and the computer was giving me a lot of problems. Much has happened, including a long-overdue thaw of Japan's Cruel Winter of 2005. The cherry blossoms have come and gone and yet I remain. I'm working in different roles all of the time and trying to accumulate the money I'll need to embark on my Asian adventure. But I realized with a heavy heart that it was time to update this thing. I'll spare you further excuses. Just to mix things up, we'll use capital letters in this post. e.e. cummings can deal with it.

Well, I've been bad at keeping myself together. How about I post a few pictures and caption them with anecdotes?

I get along quite well with most of my students, and these three are no exception. I think one of them managed to wrestle my phone from my pocket so I used it as an opportunity to snap a shot of them. The technology of Japanese cellular phones (called keitais) is nearly unrivaled in the rest of the world. I don't know if it's the same now, but in October of 2004 when I was planning to come out here I was told that the keitais were about 18 months ahead in technology compared to North American phones. You can watch T.V. conference video call and take movies with most of the phones here, and they're not even top-of-the-line. My friend David's phone has three-point fingerprint recognition to prevent a would-be thief from accessing his emails or personal detail. Man. That's security.
Oh, and by the way, all eight of the photos posted above were taken with my keitai and I've only just now purchased a memory card that allows me to take them off of the phone and onto my laptop for the purposes of public consumption. Thank you for your continued patience

I had such high hopes for the Canadian men's hockey team this year that I would get all geared up to watch the games. I fell off the wagon pretty early and dedicated every appearance of the hockey jersey to the women's team. Yay! We won! Away goes the jersey, at least until the World Juniors tournament.

All the kids in Japan wear identical hats when out on a schooltrip for easy surveillance. I was just lucky and happened to have my camera with me when I saw this yellow tsunami of young'ins racing up the stairs. They were all so well-behaved. It's cute to see, especially when you see them walking two by two and holding hands with their partner, chatting away.

Some other treats for you to enjoy:


I miss all of you guys. Please write to me. I'm only feigning being busy. Really I'm spending most of my time reading Stephen King's DARK TOWER series, which is a 7-novel epic. I've been reading them at a pace of a book a week, save for part 5 which has taken me a lot longer than usual because I was entertaining guests on Golden Week (Jacob and Keiko came down to visit from Shizuoka and my friend Ai Miura returned from Vancouver to visit friends). (n.b.: If anyone has read all seven of the Dark Tower books and wants to chew the fat about them, email me. I'll even call you with Skype and we an get all into it. Those of you hoping to talk to me about Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, need not attempt a dialogue. I know nothing of the game and you'd be wasting your time.)

So yeah... Canada, America, Europe (not to mention DENMARK where my long-lost brother James is stationed) and the rest of the globe: contact me. It took my childhood best-friend Andrew Yap a few years to get around to it, but I recently even received a nice little note from him. He found me.
That's that for now. A bunch of pictures from Mt. Shosha and Osaka (where Jacob and I went on Golden Week) are still to come. But I'll try to get them up soon.

And before I forget: Happy 30th(!) Anniversary, Mom & Dad.