cycling biwako trip!

Below is a map of our trip we are going to take next week. I am heading off to Nagoya tonight by car with a few friends, and meeting up with Tom there.



After nagoya we will go by train to kytoto, spend two days there and then start riding towards the lake. we are in no rush (gotta love the 9 day holiday of golden week) so we havent made too many plans about where and when we will be at any particular time. the only plan is that we need to be in Gifu on Saturday night. At that rate we shouldnt need to ride more than 50 kms a day so lots of time for sightseeing.

I will probably be offline for all of those days so talk to you all again when i get back to Mito on the 7th May!

a very hot appointment

on thursday i was asked to help do some more interpreting for a Rotary GSE team from Turkey who was visiting Ibaraki. I had been with one of them to the Hitachinaka Port last week and this week it was off to the steel works of Sumitomo Metal Industries in Kashima, about a 1.5 hour drive from Mito.

I dont know if i was much help in the interpreting because there were too many technical words and numbers (i hate numbers in japanese) but i dont think the GSE people knew much about it anyway so i was able to bluff my way through it a bit.

However, the tour we were taken on was pretty cool. i have never been anywhere like that before. We were not allowed to take photos, but i found a similar shot on their website. Isnt it cool? or should i say hot? I think the temperature is about 1200 degrees celcius. You could feel the heat from about 30 metres away, where we were standing.

first a vase, and now a glass!

i must be in an arty mood or something. first i get my vase back from its trip to sydeny, and now i have a new glass that i made myself at a glass blowing studio in Northern Ibaraki.

We headed up there early on sunday morning last week (on the 7.30am train!) and got to work straight away. actually it only took about 20 mins to make the glass but there were a lot of us and we wanted to be finished in time for lunch so that we could go hiking in the arvo.

i decided to make a "baileys" glass and i am prety happy with how it worked out. but i wish i could have done more than just that. yeah we got to do the blowing of the glass and shaping of it, but under heavy instruction. i would love to be able to go back and learn a lot more about why we had to do certain things and how to do them myself. yeah i did make a glass, but its not really all mine. the person who was directing us did most of it... however, it will be very nice to drink baileys out of when i get it back on May 10th. You have to leave it for a few days to dry at a certain temperature, otehrwise it will crack. we have a big ALT meeting on May 10th so we will all get them back in one go to save on postage. hopefully this one wont end up in sydney again...



after the glass blowing, we headed up the mountain a bit for a hike to the summit of hanazono. cool views and great waterfalls to look at.



check out the rest of my photos on photobucket.

my vase!

it has only taken 6 months, but i finally got my vase that i made at Kasama back! and its really cool!

Normally it takes 3 months to dry, fire and glase the pottery, but mine accidently went on a bit of a holiday to sydney before making it back to mito, only 20kms away from its starting place.

here is the finished product. its a lot smaller than i imagined it would be. i should have taken that into consideration when i was making it i guess. i can probably only fit about one flowere in it at a time...

new baby "Suri"for tomkat

According to the Age today, Tom cruise and katie holmes named their baby "Suri" which has its origins in Hebrew, meaning "princess", or Persian, meaning "red rose".

I wonder if they thought about what this name could mean in other languages...

In Japanese, "suri" means "pickpocket".
maybe they have her career planned out already...

cycling at last! and some golf news

i finally got out on a real bike ride this weekend. out of the blue i got an email from someone i met a few months ago at a bike shop in mito. i was looking for a cycling group and they recognized me from the radio interview i had done fo IBS when i handed over my business card with my email address on it.

the group is run out of a bike shop called "Nemoto" and is pretty serious. but like most groups, no women and mainly middle aged men. but they were all nice people and they didnt leave me behind on the hills. in fact i was keeping up even though i havent ridden seriously for many many months.

we rode up some country road out the back of mito and up towards where all the golf courses are. we actually rode very close to the course that tom and i play at!

in the end it was around 70km and i was home by 2pm. the weather was really bad, but the rain didnt pour down so it was bearable. it was just really really cold. i heard on the news that there was snow in some areas of japan overnight it was so cold.

i better get some more practice in before Tom and i go to lake biwa in a few weeks. he is worried now that i am going to leave him behind cause he has no chance to practice while he is off on the golf tour.

btw, brendan jones, the guy he caddies for, came 2nd is yesterday's final in gifu so we are all pretty happy. lets hope he can go one better this week in hyogo!

it was funny, when i turned on the tv on saturday arvo to watch some of the coverage of the tournament, the first thing i saw was tom's face filling the screen! but on sunday they hardley showed his group at all, even though he came second. apparently it could have been because of the big scene brendan cause on the 17th hole on saturady by throwing his clubs around in the mud...

useful information for cycling in japan

if you need to ever send your bicycle somewhere in the mail (japanese train companies are not so happy about people taking their bike with them when they travel), takyubin or "door to door deliver serice" is the answer.

Although there are many takyubin companies in japan, but only one deals with bicycles to give them a special price. i was quoted over $100 from one company and thought they must be joking.

the company to go with is "Kuro-neko Yamato". but before you can use their bike service you must apply for a special tag to hang on the bag you pack it in.
You can do this from the Japan Cycling Association.

Just send 1000 yen in a special cash envelope (you get it from the post office for 20 yen) to:
Cycling Tag Application
Japan Cycling Association
Japan Bicycle Building No3
1-9-3 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo
107-0052

〒107-0052
東京都港区赤坂1-9-3
日本自転車会館３号館
(財)日本サイクリング協会
「サイクリングタッグ申込係」

When you get the tag, pack your bike up in a "Rinko bag" and hang the tag on it. You can not use this service with a bike box. it must be in a bag.

You might want to print out the following page so that the Takyubin people know what you want. Most drivers have never delt with this service before so you may need to remind them
http://www.j-cycling.org/yamatobin/index.html

I am going to try it out this golden week. so i will report back if it is successful or not.

It shouldnt cost more than 2000 yen to send when you do it this way, a saving of nearly $80!

the famous building i work in

last night i watched the TV drama that is being shot in my building. it was really strange to watch the characters walk down the same corridors that i do, look out the same windows i do.

its also funny to see that all the signs that said "ibaraki prefectural office" now say "university hospital" when you see it on TV.

i think i figured out which scene they were filming when we were standing in the foyer waiting to be able to start our movie seminar the other week. they shot it like 20 times and it was a short 5 second shot in the finished product. would have been cool to be able to see us standing on the side, but alas, they didnt put us in.....

the show is called "Iryu" or in english, "team medical dragon" and is on every thursday night at 9pm on channel 8. it is apparently based on a comic book, like most japanese TV shows

and like all japanese dramas, it is completely overacted and unrealistic. but thats why we love them :)

photos and recent update

New Photos of things i have been up to recently. most of them involve cherry blossoms as it is that time of the year.

- Birthday bbq in the park
- cherry blossom viewing party
- town festival
- cherry blossoms at my work

This is Domo-kun, my favourite japanese TV character. I got a photo with him at the festival. he is suppose to look like a TV...

. . . jerrold in toronto: Strange Katakana

While looking for some cool trivia questions about japan, i found this list of strange katakana-english words on an ex-iabaraki jet' blog.

Enjoy the confusion!

Sometimes Katakana English doesn't quite jive with English. Sometimes it corresponds in interesting ways. Here are some examples of such Japanese words taken from English:

torampu = playing cards (from “trump”)
wan wan = bow wow (a dog’s bark)
shaapen = mechanical pencil (from “sharp pencil”?)
coora = air conditioner (from “cooler”)
forubaru = a walk in baseball (from “four balls”)
herusumeeta = a bathroom scale (from “health meter”)
gasustando = gas station (from “gas stand”)
noto = notebook (from “note”)
manshyan = small apartment (from “mansion”)
dedobaru = a beanball in baseball (from “dead ball”)
furontogurasu = a car windshield (from “front glass”)
jipan = jeans (from “jean pants”)
handoru = a car steering wheel (from “handle”)
patocaa = police car (from “patrol car”)
hochikisu = a stapler (from “Hotchkiss” the inventor)
opincaa = convertible (from “open car”)
sumaato = slender person (from “smart”)

I woke up today and was shocked by what my health meter read. I'm not looking so smart these days. I then left my mansion in my open car. I passed a patrol car on my way to a gas stand where I refueled. The attendant was wearing jean pants and cleaned my front glass. While I waited, I used my sharp pencil to jot some notes in my note. I needed to remind myself to replace my broken Hotchkiss and buy a new deck of trump for my upcoming poker game.