It seems that I am comfortable now. We just got back from this “fashion store” (think Value Village, except everything is new or close to it) called Shimamura. Rachel has a new futon, so that's 4 total for us – the brown one that came with the room, the brown one we got from Jesse (tallish vegan New Zealand dude, works with Rachel) in exchange for the air mattress, the white-and-flowery one we got from Lacey+Kyle (neighbors on the first floor), and the new green one. Also picked up another comforter, because it's been kinda cold around here for a couple of days, and a couple of food-based pillows. And for me? Sweat pants and actual pajamas, the kind that look like something you'd get in a 3-star hotel. Oh, and because I spend so much time sitting in front of the computer, on a low table you sit cross-legged at, I got a “seat”. It's comfy, it's finally comfy to sit here.
Rachel is sick – started getting a sore throat around Friday, had a fever yesterday, and is in no shape to do anything today (so why are we a little more comfortable...?). Still, she managed to cut my hair before her fever really kicked in, and I look a little more respectable. A little – she did it by reading about it on some website – but she did a good job for having never done something so drastic before. As you can probably tell from my style, I'm beginning to get a bit ill myself. My throat hurts a bit, but that's about it. She'll be able to go to work tomorrow, barely, and I'm starting in on my stash of Rose Hips (she refuses to drink anything but minty tea, which makes things a little difficult).
I've fallen off the AdventureQuest wagon again. I'm weak, so very weak. It's pretty fun – imagine a one-man shareware (flash) World of Warcraft with frequent tongue-in-cheek dialogue, just without the free movement – and not quite as addictive as Star Pirates. Problem is, it requires more in terms of bandwidth. It needs a regular, solid connection to play properly – even dial-up will do fine – so it's a bit hard to really get going here. Still, it only needs a connection before and after scene changes, battles, and such, so I can play around it a bit. Even after getting a new, faster compy (1.3 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) I have to play at the lowest graphics setting, but it's not much of a drop.
Lately, I've rediscovered certain songs. Tokkei Winspector (opening theme song for the 1990 show of the same name) is good, very good. It's sung by Miyauchi Takayuki, and he's got the sort of tenor singing voice I can only dream of having. The opening guitar riff (is that what you call it?) is good enough that I'd happily listen to it looped, and I like any song that makes timely usage of the strings section. Mr. Miyauchi, unfortunately, does not have the sort of stage presence some of his fellow singers in the genre have (Mizuki Ichiro is the king of this, and probably the best-known besides), but because he has such a good voice, no one notices. (See this for him singing it 10 years after the fact, and this for the same video, only on Nicovideo. My compy actually slows down at about 1:14, one of the things that makes Nico awesome... By comparison, the original theme and title sequence.)
Eiyuu, by doa. There are a handful of Tokusatsu shows in which the opening songs contain no reference to the show (ie: no character names, no mecha names...), and Eiyuu is one of them. It was the OP to Ultraman Nexus, a failed attempt to take the franchise a step towards an older audience. The song itself is awesome, and has a music video. For some reason, I hear it and I think of Firefly, the sci-fi western.
And that's about it. G'night.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Woot. Employment.
Well well, what have we here? An actual post? Oooh, golly gumdrops and rainbow razzmatazz. Hm. I should just start saying that, in monotone. I think I'm good at it. Or maybe not.
Anyway. Postpostpostpost... I got the job, the English teacher one. (The bookstore one went well, but when the manager ran it by their head office I got rejected. Oh well.) Paid training starts on the 6th, in Okayama – it's four hours away by regular trains, so they'll be paying for a hotel room. The train fare to Hiroshima might also be cheaper than I originally thought, as a) the trains don't all run to Yoshidaguchi Station (one of those little backyard stations) so it'd be easier to take it from Mukaihara Station (a bit more like what you'd expect a station to look like), and b) I found out during the interview that they would pay out an extra 100 yen per hour to cover commuting costs. 1640 yen round-trip makes more sense, barely. I hope everything works out with it. I still have to get my hair cut for it – that he asked me if I was willing to do so during the interview was a good sign. Also, I have to get a Hiroshima Bank account if I want to get paid, which I need to do soon.
Rachel and I finally went down to Hiroshima together Sunday. I bought 6 booster packs of Metal Hero cards, a set of little 350 yen rubber robots, Kamen Rider Spirits #14, assorted foodstuffs and dinner. Total cost: around 5000 yen. Worth it. Part of my mission was to go and finally have a MOS Burger, something I'd had before on vacation here 10, 15 years ago. It was good. Really good. Worth whatever I paid for it. Then there was the strawberry milkshake at McDonald's – that took me back and erased any homesickness I had (none, actually, so even a bag of miso might do the trick). Dinner, because we stayed later than I expected, was a katsudon with soba noodles (breaded chicken + egg over rice, wheat noodles). It was okay but the taste was missing something – I've never had such a lightly-flavored don before. I got a bottle of Coke with it, which turned out to be an actual bottle with a little cup you might otherwise use to sip an alcoholic beverage from (they wouldn't let me take the bottle home, something about it costing 30 yen extra). It was okay overall.
Of all the things I miss from home, the one thing I can't find no matter where I go is hot dogs, eight in a bag. Sure, the little bakery in the local super sells hot dogs in a wrap with onion sauce/powder, and it's not bad, but it's really not the same. Also, McDonald's. Didn't really think I'd be craving it, but it was the first thing I did when I got to Hiroshima for the interview. They taste exactly the same, by the way. And while I couldn't find what they call a quarter pounder with cheese here, they have Big Macs.
While the free unprotected wi-fi is active, we have to cram around the open balcony door to use it. Our best guess is, it's a neighbor living in the immediate southern building (in this little complex, it's our building and two smaller, 4-room buildings, with our building at the north end). So, we're trying to negotiate with Yahoo BB/SoftBank/AT&T for internets, but they want to come in on the first day of my training. Or wanted to, since they called and we rescheduled, but the letter they sent wasn't updated. Not sure what's going to happen, since they haven't returned my call yet. We have time, I think.
Oh, and I finally found the first and second OSTs to Xabungle. “Walker Gallier” is such a cool song, but there's this weird timpani thing in the right speaker for part of it – nothing wrong with that, since they never actually used it for Walker Gallier itself.
Anyway. Postpostpostpost... I got the job, the English teacher one. (The bookstore one went well, but when the manager ran it by their head office I got rejected. Oh well.) Paid training starts on the 6th, in Okayama – it's four hours away by regular trains, so they'll be paying for a hotel room. The train fare to Hiroshima might also be cheaper than I originally thought, as a) the trains don't all run to Yoshidaguchi Station (one of those little backyard stations) so it'd be easier to take it from Mukaihara Station (a bit more like what you'd expect a station to look like), and b) I found out during the interview that they would pay out an extra 100 yen per hour to cover commuting costs. 1640 yen round-trip makes more sense, barely. I hope everything works out with it. I still have to get my hair cut for it – that he asked me if I was willing to do so during the interview was a good sign. Also, I have to get a Hiroshima Bank account if I want to get paid, which I need to do soon.
Rachel and I finally went down to Hiroshima together Sunday. I bought 6 booster packs of Metal Hero cards, a set of little 350 yen rubber robots, Kamen Rider Spirits #14, assorted foodstuffs and dinner. Total cost: around 5000 yen. Worth it. Part of my mission was to go and finally have a MOS Burger, something I'd had before on vacation here 10, 15 years ago. It was good. Really good. Worth whatever I paid for it. Then there was the strawberry milkshake at McDonald's – that took me back and erased any homesickness I had (none, actually, so even a bag of miso might do the trick). Dinner, because we stayed later than I expected, was a katsudon with soba noodles (breaded chicken + egg over rice, wheat noodles). It was okay but the taste was missing something – I've never had such a lightly-flavored don before. I got a bottle of Coke with it, which turned out to be an actual bottle with a little cup you might otherwise use to sip an alcoholic beverage from (they wouldn't let me take the bottle home, something about it costing 30 yen extra). It was okay overall.
Of all the things I miss from home, the one thing I can't find no matter where I go is hot dogs, eight in a bag. Sure, the little bakery in the local super sells hot dogs in a wrap with onion sauce/powder, and it's not bad, but it's really not the same. Also, McDonald's. Didn't really think I'd be craving it, but it was the first thing I did when I got to Hiroshima for the interview. They taste exactly the same, by the way. And while I couldn't find what they call a quarter pounder with cheese here, they have Big Macs.
While the free unprotected wi-fi is active, we have to cram around the open balcony door to use it. Our best guess is, it's a neighbor living in the immediate southern building (in this little complex, it's our building and two smaller, 4-room buildings, with our building at the north end). So, we're trying to negotiate with Yahoo BB/SoftBank/AT&T for internets, but they want to come in on the first day of my training. Or wanted to, since they called and we rescheduled, but the letter they sent wasn't updated. Not sure what's going to happen, since they haven't returned my call yet. We have time, I think.
Oh, and I finally found the first and second OSTs to Xabungle. “Walker Gallier” is such a cool song, but there's this weird timpani thing in the right speaker for part of it – nothing wrong with that, since they never actually used it for Walker Gallier itself.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
I'm still unemployed, for the moment
(Quick note: I wrote this during a dull moment last weekend, and I'll have more up soon.)
Well. It's been a while since I last tried to post, but here I am. The apartment internet has been very spotty, and they're probably disconnecting the router, so for the most part all I've been able to do is take phone calls. Having a phone makes things much easier, perhaps more annoying as well; I'll put up a picture of it, once I finally get around to dumping my camera's sd card.
This last Sunday (9/7), Rachel and I went to a sports festival at the only middle school she teaches at. We somehow came back home with sunburns on various parts of our bodies. In my case, since I was sitting cross-legged, the inside halves of my knees and shins have been screaming in pain for the better part of the week. The drugstore next door (again, think Bartell's) doesn't sell sunscreen or sunburn lotions, interestingly enough, so we got some at the 100 yen store. And it's not even lotion, either; it's milky, like milk. Think of the consistency curdled milk or really warm yogurt has, and that's pretty much it. You rub it on wherever and your hand comes away wet – not slick, gooey, slimey, or greasy, but wet. Still, it seems to have worked – aside from my still-healing knees, I've come away from it with a tan. And speaking of tans, every freakin' kid at that festival had tanned skin the color of brown sugar.
But I digress. The whole idea of a sports festival (because this is fairly clearly a foreign concept to the states) is to get everyone out and exercising. Maybe it has more to do with the sort of population density in the area – again, lots of rice farming in the area, and the school itself was surrounded by them – or maybe it's more of a cultural thing, but those kids all looked within a healthy body weight, if overall a little on the light side. The games (kinda hard to actually call them sports) themselves went from as simple as a year-based baton relay to something involving the two teams (yellow and blue – each year got split down the middle, so six groups all together) to a song-and-dance routine by each time, to fire up the crowd and themselves. Blue got into a circle facing the audience and did a little dance to some pop music; Yellow had the third-years stand in the middle and start something closer to a stretching exercise, ending with the other years joining in singing (yelling, chanting, whatever you want to call it) along to a more traditional tune with a taiko in the background. They fired themselves up, the watching parents and family, and the Blue team as well, so whether it worked or not...
The Saturday before that (9/6), Rachel and I went to a bamboo festival at one of her elementary schools. Everything was as we expected until they started handing out saws to the kids, not even 10 years old, to cut off logs of bamboo just under the width of my thighs. I was impressed at the cultural gap. There were four sections to the festival – take-tonbo (little bamboo rotors attached to a stick and launched off by rolling it between the palms – means 'bamboo dragonfly'), take-uma (bamboo stalks with pieces of wood tied together around the lowest or second-lowest 'joint' to the ground, and used as stilts – means 'bamboo horse'), squirt guns (a thin piece of bamboo with another stick inside it to suck up and spit out water), and... I don't quite know what to call the last one. Take two logs of bamboo, cut to about 15 cm long, run rope through them, stand on them, pull the string to your feet and start walking.
There were contests towards the end, using each section – Rachel and I entered into the take-tonbo contest, mostly to fill out the tournament numbers. The idea was to fly them off as far as possible – and a well-made one, in the hands of the oldster pro showing everyone how to make them that day, will easily fly up into the rafters. The rotors on mine turned out too thick, despite my best efforts (I've never whittled before, so...), and it wasn't too hard to throw the first match. Rachel, on the other hand, made her rotors too well, and even though she was probably trying harder than me to throw each match, ended up getting the (paper) silver medal. The certificate is up on her wall, but we seem to have run out of yellow-tack to put up the medal as well – another thing you can't find over here, at least not in Akitakata.
The nearest train station to the apartment is 8 kilometers away. See, the area has so many mountains that the towns that make up Akitakata are not within line-of-sight of each other – the neighborhoods, sure, but not the towns. In fact, if you were to get on top of the apartment building and look around in a circle, we are very literally surrounded by mountains. There's space between them, of course – they're not mountains in the sense of the Cascades or the Rockies, but more like islands amongst a sea of rice. Or, if you've seen it, they look like those giant chitinous bugs from Kaze no Tani no Nausica, the Studio Gibli/Miyazaki Hayao flick. So, a train station that GoogleMaps claims is only 1 hour away by foot is really more like 2 hours away – 20 minutes by car, if that. Why do I mention this?
(I wrote this next part up before the interviews. Yeah, not having a steady internet connection sucks.)
I have a job interview on Monday. A real job interview, with an English school in Hiroshima. It pays better than my last job scanning checks (I'm still surprised at how much I was paid to do that), and it's right next to the Hiroshima train station. Also, they put up a monthly commuting stipend for full-timers. The problem is that it costs at least 1900 yen round trip to get there by train, and it takes more than an hour to get there. (Assume something like 110 yen to the dollar.) If I get the job, it doubles our income, but I get to see Rachel only 3 or 4 hours a day during the week. There's a part-time option, at 1500 yen per hour, which would erase a couple of those problems but create a couple more – I'd have to work at least 1:15 or so to make up the transportation costs, and would barely come out ahead. Either one would easily pay for the food costs (which is the very least Rachel is expecting of me – paying half the rent was my idea). I think I'd do fine in the job, but having to spend a few hours in the train every day would be a little annoying – wonder if I could take my computer, write a bit on the way? It'd be a good excuse, but I don't know if the other passengers would appreciate it.
I also have another job interview, on Tuesday. Not quite as real as the school one. It's for a – the best analogy would be a sort of Half-Price Books specializing mostly in Manga and Porno, with video games of all ages and CDs on the side. Oh, and maybe a couple of serious books. It's a 10 minute walk, pays a little above minimum wage, and I'd have to learn the really polite Japanese that everyone else waiting on me seems to use. On the education side, I'm probably overqualified for it. On the human interaction side... well, hm. But, the fact that I can walk there makes it really desirable.
Finally went out for Karaoke this last Friday (9/12), too, with a bunch of other gaijin, to celebrate a coworker's birthday. Stayed up until 2. In my case, being really tired isn't at all different from being really drunk (if I'm sitting at my computer, it's not a problem, but I was singing my heart out). It's funny, though – they all picked English songs (leaning towards rap) and I picked old-school tokusatsu themes. My songs, if they were the Opening Theme, had actual visuals pulled from the shows, too, not just the generic video that played for each English genre. And the really cool thing? They had “Everybody Needs Somebody”, from The Blues Brothers. I've seen that movie enough times to get the feel of Elwood's (Dan Ackroyd's) patter, so I figured I could pull it off. I did. I even tried to do the little dance (because, y'know, I'm a dancer), but there wasn't enough room. They congratulated me all the same. I think we did it differently than the other groups – we sang together when possible (so, not during my songs...).
More soon.
Well. It's been a while since I last tried to post, but here I am. The apartment internet has been very spotty, and they're probably disconnecting the router, so for the most part all I've been able to do is take phone calls. Having a phone makes things much easier, perhaps more annoying as well; I'll put up a picture of it, once I finally get around to dumping my camera's sd card.
This last Sunday (9/7), Rachel and I went to a sports festival at the only middle school she teaches at. We somehow came back home with sunburns on various parts of our bodies. In my case, since I was sitting cross-legged, the inside halves of my knees and shins have been screaming in pain for the better part of the week. The drugstore next door (again, think Bartell's) doesn't sell sunscreen or sunburn lotions, interestingly enough, so we got some at the 100 yen store. And it's not even lotion, either; it's milky, like milk. Think of the consistency curdled milk or really warm yogurt has, and that's pretty much it. You rub it on wherever and your hand comes away wet – not slick, gooey, slimey, or greasy, but wet. Still, it seems to have worked – aside from my still-healing knees, I've come away from it with a tan. And speaking of tans, every freakin' kid at that festival had tanned skin the color of brown sugar.
But I digress. The whole idea of a sports festival (because this is fairly clearly a foreign concept to the states) is to get everyone out and exercising. Maybe it has more to do with the sort of population density in the area – again, lots of rice farming in the area, and the school itself was surrounded by them – or maybe it's more of a cultural thing, but those kids all looked within a healthy body weight, if overall a little on the light side. The games (kinda hard to actually call them sports) themselves went from as simple as a year-based baton relay to something involving the two teams (yellow and blue – each year got split down the middle, so six groups all together) to a song-and-dance routine by each time, to fire up the crowd and themselves. Blue got into a circle facing the audience and did a little dance to some pop music; Yellow had the third-years stand in the middle and start something closer to a stretching exercise, ending with the other years joining in singing (yelling, chanting, whatever you want to call it) along to a more traditional tune with a taiko in the background. They fired themselves up, the watching parents and family, and the Blue team as well, so whether it worked or not...
The Saturday before that (9/6), Rachel and I went to a bamboo festival at one of her elementary schools. Everything was as we expected until they started handing out saws to the kids, not even 10 years old, to cut off logs of bamboo just under the width of my thighs. I was impressed at the cultural gap. There were four sections to the festival – take-tonbo (little bamboo rotors attached to a stick and launched off by rolling it between the palms – means 'bamboo dragonfly'), take-uma (bamboo stalks with pieces of wood tied together around the lowest or second-lowest 'joint' to the ground, and used as stilts – means 'bamboo horse'), squirt guns (a thin piece of bamboo with another stick inside it to suck up and spit out water), and... I don't quite know what to call the last one. Take two logs of bamboo, cut to about 15 cm long, run rope through them, stand on them, pull the string to your feet and start walking.
There were contests towards the end, using each section – Rachel and I entered into the take-tonbo contest, mostly to fill out the tournament numbers. The idea was to fly them off as far as possible – and a well-made one, in the hands of the oldster pro showing everyone how to make them that day, will easily fly up into the rafters. The rotors on mine turned out too thick, despite my best efforts (I've never whittled before, so...), and it wasn't too hard to throw the first match. Rachel, on the other hand, made her rotors too well, and even though she was probably trying harder than me to throw each match, ended up getting the (paper) silver medal. The certificate is up on her wall, but we seem to have run out of yellow-tack to put up the medal as well – another thing you can't find over here, at least not in Akitakata.
The nearest train station to the apartment is 8 kilometers away. See, the area has so many mountains that the towns that make up Akitakata are not within line-of-sight of each other – the neighborhoods, sure, but not the towns. In fact, if you were to get on top of the apartment building and look around in a circle, we are very literally surrounded by mountains. There's space between them, of course – they're not mountains in the sense of the Cascades or the Rockies, but more like islands amongst a sea of rice. Or, if you've seen it, they look like those giant chitinous bugs from Kaze no Tani no Nausica, the Studio Gibli/Miyazaki Hayao flick. So, a train station that GoogleMaps claims is only 1 hour away by foot is really more like 2 hours away – 20 minutes by car, if that. Why do I mention this?
(I wrote this next part up before the interviews. Yeah, not having a steady internet connection sucks.)
I have a job interview on Monday. A real job interview, with an English school in Hiroshima. It pays better than my last job scanning checks (I'm still surprised at how much I was paid to do that), and it's right next to the Hiroshima train station. Also, they put up a monthly commuting stipend for full-timers. The problem is that it costs at least 1900 yen round trip to get there by train, and it takes more than an hour to get there. (Assume something like 110 yen to the dollar.) If I get the job, it doubles our income, but I get to see Rachel only 3 or 4 hours a day during the week. There's a part-time option, at 1500 yen per hour, which would erase a couple of those problems but create a couple more – I'd have to work at least 1:15 or so to make up the transportation costs, and would barely come out ahead. Either one would easily pay for the food costs (which is the very least Rachel is expecting of me – paying half the rent was my idea). I think I'd do fine in the job, but having to spend a few hours in the train every day would be a little annoying – wonder if I could take my computer, write a bit on the way? It'd be a good excuse, but I don't know if the other passengers would appreciate it.
I also have another job interview, on Tuesday. Not quite as real as the school one. It's for a – the best analogy would be a sort of Half-Price Books specializing mostly in Manga and Porno, with video games of all ages and CDs on the side. Oh, and maybe a couple of serious books. It's a 10 minute walk, pays a little above minimum wage, and I'd have to learn the really polite Japanese that everyone else waiting on me seems to use. On the education side, I'm probably overqualified for it. On the human interaction side... well, hm. But, the fact that I can walk there makes it really desirable.
Finally went out for Karaoke this last Friday (9/12), too, with a bunch of other gaijin, to celebrate a coworker's birthday. Stayed up until 2. In my case, being really tired isn't at all different from being really drunk (if I'm sitting at my computer, it's not a problem, but I was singing my heart out). It's funny, though – they all picked English songs (leaning towards rap) and I picked old-school tokusatsu themes. My songs, if they were the Opening Theme, had actual visuals pulled from the shows, too, not just the generic video that played for each English genre. And the really cool thing? They had “Everybody Needs Somebody”, from The Blues Brothers. I've seen that movie enough times to get the feel of Elwood's (Dan Ackroyd's) patter, so I figured I could pull it off. I did. I even tried to do the little dance (because, y'know, I'm a dancer), but there wasn't enough room. They congratulated me all the same. I think we did it differently than the other groups – we sang together when possible (so, not during my songs...).
More soon.
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