A Great Day To Be Outdoors

Every time we walk there, I thank God that we live in a part of Japan that has such a big park as Showa-no-Mori. At any time of the year there are so many beautiful things to see.

This fall, the trees are singing at the top of their lungs and the open fields and fresh air are constantly inviting us out for a walk. And this morning, I brought the camera.

Recent Pictures

We've been up to lots of things lately. I have been trying to learn more CSS so I can personalize the blog template to my liking, so hopefully soon some changes will happen.

Other than that, we went to Kamakura last Sunday and decided to climb Mt. Takao on Monday. Originally we'd planned on a 2 day getaway in Kamakura, but we tired ourselves out climbing the Ten'en Hiking Course from Zuisenji to Kenchoji (I'll retroactively post some of that later), so the 2 days in Kamakura turned into 1 day in Kamakura and 1 day in Western Tokyo. And I must say we were impressed enough to want to come back and climb it again.

Mt. Takao is one of the more accessible "mountains" in the Kanto region. It's about an hour or so from Shinjuku station, which is perhaps an hour and a half from where we live. So in just around 3 hours, we found ourselves at a nice place for a hike. Here are a few pictures.

Mt. Takao is popular because it only takes an hour and a half to climb, and if you don't feel like doing the steep part, you can take either a ski lift or Japan's steepest cable car to about the mid-point, and from there the rest is a cinch. Also, Takao-san has some really nice views of Tokyo and Mt. Fuji, and there's a neat Temple on it known for it's Tengu. Here are some pics.

Season Shot

From the "wish it were possible, wish it were true" department. Click on the image below for the link.

What's Bin Did And What's Bin Hid

So, it's been too hot here to do anything except wag my tongue and wish it was winter. That and play online games when things cool off towards evening. This one's a no-brainer but very addicting. Don't let the Japanese writing put you off. Simply click the top line to start and after that, just choose where you want to start the explosions. The goal is to keep the explosions going for as long as you can.

"Chaos Theory" (My pitiful high score is 142)

During cooler, more cerebral times, I used to play thinking-games like these:

"3D Logic" (I beat all the levels, ha!)

"Blueprint" (I beat all but 2)

Bug Photo

We found this little guy on a walk the other morning just before 7 a.m. He turned colors when I used a flash on him (sort of a translucent opal kind of look) but then he was nice enough to pose for this shot.



The coolest part is I didn't have to do any tweaking--the photo just turned out really good (IMHO).

Fireworks in Chiba 千葉みなと公園の花火

We decided to try going to the fireworks this year. First we stopped in Chiba City and bought our yukata at Uniqlo. The people were nice enough to help Christine and Laurie with tying the obi and making sure they were wearing everything right.



Then we bought some food to take with us and took the monorail to Chiba Minato. Once there, we walked towards the park and found ourselves a spot to watch fireworks from. It was really nice to see so many people dressed festively and enjoying the day.





The fireworks went from 7:30 until 8:45. The brochure said there were 4 themes (flowers, sports, international-something, and I forget what else), but for the most part I couldn't tell the difference. Except some of the fireworks really did look like flowers, and during the sports part there was a baseball one. I forget when, but there was also a smiley face firework that I hadn't seen before.



We caught a few minutes on film too.



When it was all over and everyone started for home, we began to realize the number of people who showed up was really high. From Chiba Minato all the way to Chiba Station, the streets were packed with people. We guessed tens or hundreds of thousands, if not a million people were there, but truthfully we couldn't tell.

Now That's "Convenience"

Everybody talks about what we'll do when we run out of fossil fuels in 20 years, but how many people do you know who have asked the more important question: "What are we going to do when the oxygen runs out?"

The wise and future-thinking people at our local 7-Eleven have come up with their answer: Oxygen in cans.



If you look closely, you'll see that it's available in grapefruit and strong-mint flavors.

Interesting fact: There are 11,069 7-Eleven stores in Japan. You can find out interesting trivia from their website if you look here.

Critters of Late

We walked from Togane to the beach a few weekends back, and on the way encountered a plethora of creatures, including (but not limited to) several varieties of spiders, a snake, and other odd looking bugs. This first one looked alot like a flying spider when we first came upon it, but judging by the photo, I'm now more inclined to think of it as a bee. So we settled upon calling it a Spider-Bee due to its possible eight legs (not to be confused with Spelling Bee - haha).

The caterpillar was cute. Probably it will decimate some entire species of plant this year, along with its mates.

This spider is the freakiest. If you want to go to bed with a case of the willies, click on the picture to enlarge it, and see it in all its fuzzy, wooly glory. Its body was easily the size of a good shot-glass, which is big, for spiders.

Another spider with a sort of mummified-skeleton-with-two-fangs look, sporting this year's fashionable yellow and white stripes. I see this kind a lot.


This last spider was caught making dinner, so the picture isn't as clear as the others, but you should be grateful for that. It's speed and the way it manipulated its victim were enough to creep me out. Just be happy I'm not posting the video.


...And then just this morning, we went for a walk through Showa-no-Mori down to Konakaike Park and around the rice paddies there, during which time we encountered some really tiny frogs.







...and a beetle. I'm not sure of the name for this kind, but I know you can buy them in stores for pets. They're also popular in a video game called ムシキング, or King of Beetles, which is a hyper-simplified fighting game (think Street Fighter II but with less buttons!) that kids love to play.

See By The Moonlight Half Past Midnight Time To Be Home An Hour Ago

Went to a going away party for several Chiba ALTs last night. It started at a club in Togane called "Replica" which used to be known for the band (comprised of the owner and his family) that played Beatles covers there.



After that, we moved on to a Karaoke club, Mankeki-Neko until two in the morning (ugh). Tony & Louise let us crash at their place until this morning, and that was that.

While My *Ukelele* Gently Weeps...and Screams, and Curses, and Casts Spells...

The artist's name is Jake Shimabukuro, I am told.

Funny.

Chuck Norris Facts

On A Sunny Day

The local Bon Maison shop has a giant pot filled with rain water, tadpoles, and in summertime, lotus flowers. The color really was so bright I had to squint just to look at them.

Trial and error

Lately I have been perusing the various methods of sharing pictures on this blog. While uploading hi-definition stills is always a safe bet, I wanted to take a look at slideshows, perhaps to up my readership (who knows?).

So the previous entries used RockYou (or is it YouRock? I can't remember) and this one is from Bubbleshare.

Around The World in 80 Minutes

Our last day in Kinugawa Onsen was very rainy, so we couldn't go river-rafting as we'd planned. Instead, we took a short taxi ride to Tobu World Square and enjoyed unmatched views of the world's greatest architecture. It took about 80 minutes to get through it all, and all of the exhibits were really cool. According to the brochure, the models are 1/25 replicas of the originals, and in most cases, artists and/or architects actually went to the original sites and made measurements and stuff.

At Kinugawa Onsen

The Wisconsin-ALT Mid Year Recontracting Conference is a nice big way to say it, but it's more like a small workers' retreat, since the number of ALTs on the Wisconsin-Chiba program are a handful (this year there are only four of us) and the locations chosen for our get-togethers are usually nice spots for tourism outside of Chiba prefecture. Last year we ventured west to Yamanashi Prefecture and stayed at a ryokan on lake Kawaguchi, which is in the Fuji 5 Lakes Region and has a splendid view of Mt. Fuji; this year, we went north to Tochigi Prefecture and stayed in a cozy little hotel in the resort town of Kinugawa Onsen.

We took a private train from Asakusa in Tokyo and chatted for 3 hours as the landscape changed from urban sprawl to countryside. After changing trains only once, we ended up at Kinugawa Onsen Station, and from there it was about a 10 minute walk to our conference site: the quaint, if a bit run-down Hotel New Sakura. Once we found our rooms and divvied up the beds, we all gathered together for our conference meeting.

I think it lasted an hour, tops.

The rest of the time was spent partaking in intercultural-awareness activities (i.e. touring famous places, eating Japanese cuisine, and enjoying the hot-spring spas).

The hotel is situated along one side of the Kinu river. I got up early on Thursday to walk around and see what there is to see and found that Kinugawa has 5 bridges, and the three that I covered had little stamp stations on them, so of course I got out my trusty notebook and stamped. I asked the front desk workers at the hotel when I got back and they gave me a map with the Kinugawa Bridge Stamp Challenge on it. The brochure said that if I mailed it in to somewhere they'd send me a neat-o little plastic charm, so I resolved to obtain all 5 stamps the next chance I got. I found out Friday morning, while braving the torrential downpours on my noble quest, that the stamp stations don't exist anymore (except on the bridges I'd already been to) and that the Bridge Stamp Challenge was finished who knows how many years ago.

Aside from the Bridge Stamp Fiasco, the town is a nice place to walk. Basically you go up one side of the river gorge and down the other side, crossing bridges whenever the mood strikes. A very scenic place, and I can see how it'd feel even more cozy in the wintertime.

Of course I took pictures.

Random Scenes From Japanese Life

Every so often we go walking around from place to place, and see interesting things. The first one is common enough. A farmer plowing his rice field.



The next one is of a 24 hour rice vending machine. The funniest part is that ATMs in Japan close at 7 or 8 p.m, so if you need quick cash some weekend whilst out on the town, you're out of luck; yet if you suffer late night hunger pains for a steamy bowl of sticky-rice, help is just around the corner!



This last one is cute. But at twenty bucks a picture was enough for me.

All Aboard the X-ray Bus!

Yup, it's that time of year again. Gather 'round and get your number, because the X-ray Bus is comin' to school.

-Actually, this was approx. 2 weeks ago, but I didn't want let it get lost in the shuffle.

I also got to take a pee test, but I'll spare you the pictures of that one. And they wouldn't let me sign up for the poo test because I was too young, but I figured I'd try to sign up for all these tests while I still can, seeing as we pay for health insurance each month. Anyway, the pictures...

Popularity

After garnering rave reviews here for my work here, the famous "snif" picture was brought up (see comments on the former link above). While not Japan-related, it merits posting because I have one of the few extant copies left of the famous picture.

Said to be done during his Shiftwork Period, Dad's "Snif" conveys a message of harmony and universal understanding through juxtaposition of class-conscious, bourgeoise meta-norms (personified in the angular geometry of two dogs meeting for the first time) with a mundane, relativistic narrative of power-struggle and information-exchange symbolised via the spatial relationship of dynamic forms wrought by the force of the artist's deft penstrokes. The fine draftsmanship of the work belies the primal ruggedness of its overall message while slyly obfuscating the almost too obvious normative approach to pen-and-ink drawings taken by the artist to this theme (an approach said to be definitive of his style during that period).

More Recently

This week, the weather stopped flirting with Spring and made it official: from here on in (until the rainy season) it'll be warm and getting warmer. So to celebrate, all the flowers are blooming. These tulips were donated to Toke H.S. by the Takeyama's, the same people who dressed Laurie in kimono when they had us over for a nice Christmas dinner.



We recently walked to Togane from our apartment (it was a Saturday or two ago, actually) and got to see the rice fields beginning to turn green.



Even more recently, we took the train to Togane and walked from there to the ocean (an 8km jaunt for anyone keeping track). The wind was chilly, so we stayed long enough to browse for shells (didn't bring a comb) and have a picnic of onigiri and bottled tea before heading back.



Most recently, the Koi-Nobori were hung up in Showa-no-Mori. Koi-Nobori are windsocks that look like giant, colorful goldfish. The largest ones are probably 12 feet long or so. If I could figure out where to buy the big ones I'd for sure send some home so Dad could hang them up with his flag collection.

Does it work like an ugly stick?

I almost bought a pack just to see what they'd do if I hit someone with them.