As You Gain Experience, You'll Realize That All Logical Questions are Considered Insubordination

So you don't know where you're going but you want to talk
And you feel like you're going where you've been before
You'll tell anyone who will listen but you feel ignored
Nothing's really making any sense at all…

Mondays are difficult. Let me explain:

Imagine you’re 8 years old and your parents are having a dinner party… everyone’s dressed fancy and talking with big complex words and you can’t understand anything. After standing around bored for 2 hours, someone asks you a question, and everyone goes silent and turns to look at you, expecting an intelligent answer…

Or perhaps another example… Imagine being handcuffed to a chair, being forced to watch Ultraviolet in Portuguese, followed immediately by The Horse Whisperer in French.

Anyway, it’s not fun, but unavoidable I guess. 2+ hour meetings, all in Japanese. But it’s better than Friday afternoons… I still can’t tune out that evil evil accordion music.

I’ve been studying lots for Japanese, but while I know the rules, it’s hard to actually put em to use. I’m thinkin a good idea is to get some Japanese Manga (graphic novels) and practice that way, learning sentence structure, etc. I need to work on vocab too. I’ll get better eventually I hope, I still got 9 months to practice.

Work’s been going a bit better though. They have me working with tooth impedance and I feel semi useful. It didn’t take me long to do the work, so I killed some time by making a fancy excel spreadsheet, which got mad at me when I tried to input a formula that was waaay too big for it. I don’t blame it, the formula looked like the Horrendous Space Kablooie. And then I showed my supervisor who thought the numbers it generated were too low, even though I explained to him that I chose example numbers at random since nobody gave me actual values yet. Maybe tomorrow…

Edit: Got the data myself after confusing the guy next to me, and it seems to work in my table. My supervisor thinks there may be a problem with the calculations/data, some of the numbers weren’t what he expected. But they do match my calculations, and I’ve quadruple checked my calculations, so… I was supposed to meet with him to discuss the data, but we all know what happened there.

Oh yeah, apparently the guy who’s been directing my main project quit over a week and a half ago. Which explains why I’ve seen him once in the past three weeks. But it doesn’t explain why I still haven’t been told he quit! What the heck do I do now? Gah!

Hmm… have I described my office yet? There’s lots of buildings at my work, including a sales office, the R&D building (where I am), and various factory buildings where the manufacturing takes place. The cafeteria/main factory building looks kinda like an old firehouse, all red brick. Like a normal Japanese office, everything is quite wide open, no cubicles or anything. Which actually makes it seem way more cluttered; you are able to see papers and binders and files piling up everywhere. I’m in the project area, off to the side a bit, which is nice. But it does mean I can be easily forgotten about. And I’ve already discussed the music in my office o.O.

Pirates are cool.

You lucky bums get to see Dead Man’s Chest two weeks before I do. I’m jealous. The Kraken looks awesome.

I guess I should talk about my weekend at some point… On Friday I had my welcoming party. My section at work went out for Okonomiyaki, it was quite good. Afterwards the younger ones in our party went to a nearby bar where we met up with the some of the other guys from the company. Quite a nice little bar, we had a room at the back to ourselves, where we sat on the floor by a low table of course. I couldn’t understand much of what was going on, but it was still pretty fun. Nice to see my coworkers outside of work, makes me feel I can relate to them a bit more. And I’m very glad about the lack of Karaoke!

Saturday was supposed to be a sleep day, but Vincent, Boon-hau and Tongxin came down to Kyoto for the day, along with Boon-hau’s friend. We went for lunch at Kyoto Station. The actual train station seems to be a tertiary function of the station. The primary function, is of course, shopping. The escalator goes up 11 floors, with nearly everything you could imagine… tons and tons of clothes, a floor just for sweets and gifts, a supermarket in one of the two basements... The top floor is all restaurants. The secondary function is as a tourist attraction. From the top of the station you can see the entire southern half of Kyoto, perhaps the northern half too, I didn’t explore enough, but it’s pretty cool. Next time I’m there I’ll take photos. And then, I guess, it’s also a train station… A fair number of foreigners around Kyoto Station too, but I guess that can be expected.

After lunch we took the bus to the Golden Temple. Quite pretty, but long bus ride. Slow too… for the first half hour we coulda walked faster than the bus. The temple itself is covered in gold leaf, so it’s quite neat. The area around the temple was nice too, lots of trees and a little lake. But the area felt too much like a tourist trap I think, there were nearly more foreigners than Japanese there. I enjoyed Fushimi Inari much more.

We headed towards Silver Temple after that, but unfortunately it was closed when we got there. Tongxin bought 2 cheap flute thingys from a vendor and we toured down Philosopher’s Walk for a little bit. After we went to Gion, and I left the group just before dinner. I was going to meet David at the pub where he hangs out, but I was a bit delayed…

Two minutes after I left the group, an older man (yes, apparently it’s not just Anton with the OMLGP) starts talking to me. He asks where I’m from, how long I’ve been in Japan, then says he’s an English professor, and he’s writing a Japanese-English dictionary. He then gives me a handful of pages of his dictionary and asks me to proofread them… on the street… on a busy street… on a Saturday night… I’m too polite for my own good, I read a few pages, gave him a suggestion or two, then said I had to go, I was running late.

Now, you’re probably thinking this is rather odd (almost on par with some of my other experiences), but I was completely prepared for this, and the coincidence of it nearly made me burst out laughing. Dave had told me earlier that he had had two encounters with the same guy years earlier, who asked him to proofread pages both times. And another past intern at my company has met him too! So Byron, be prepared! He’ll be lurking, waiting for you.

Last night I had the strangest dream…
Where everything was exactly how it seemed…

Before I forget, why not turn my blog into a dream diary! And by that I mean, let’s annoy you all with the insanity that goes on in my head every night. So I was sleeping outside (in my dream), I forgot why, maybe I missed curfew and got locked out. When I woke up I was being eaten by tick beetles (an imaginary bug, think tiny beetles that dig under your skin and give you lime disease). Then I was outside a bar in England battling against O-ren Iishi from Kill Bill. And then I was concerned about the batteries I was chewing on. I thought maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. Then I realized, well, when you eat electronic devices you’re eating the batteries inside them too, and that works fine! So eating the batteries separately should work too, they’ll just join with the electronics in your stomach! That was the justification I remember in my dream.

Ok, take the blue pill and return to the Real World, Link. Don’t worry everyone, I’m ok now… until I go to sleep tonight. Dreams as weird as these are rather common for me, it makes sleeping rather interesting. But some nights the craziness is a bit overwhelming.

I’m surprised how normal it is to me that everyone (including my friends) calls me Link here. I mean, it’s a cool name and all, but the concept of being referred to by your last name takes a little adjusting. Though some of my friends forget that Link is not my first name… " ‘Link Brett Adam’… Adam? That’s a weird last name!" ><.

Oh yeah, Sunday I met up with Vincent and Anton at Kyoto Station. We were gonna go back to the dining bar nearby that I wrote about before, but unfortunately it was closed. So we went to a little ramen shop nearby. It was quite good, a little weird with the music from the 50’s playing…(once again, I was expecting to hear this kinda music in Japan. I really did my research before coming here). We went for dessert at a café, it was quite good as well, mmm aisu kokoa and chocolate cake. Explored Kyoto Station, and then Vincent had to take the bus home… Anton and I returned home as well.

What else can I write about? Hmm, bought a fancy new camera. It is half the width of my old one, and lighter too. Plus the screen is four times bigger and picture quality is much better. So now I have incentive to take more pictures, and Anton will be happy cause I won’t be stealing his all the time. I will also be setting up an album on Picasa, I'll let you know when it's up. So you'll get to see all the pics instead of just the ones on my blog.

My Alien Registration Card is ready, but the ward office closes before I get off work at night, so I gotta find a way to pick it up. Maybe I can make a mad dash during lunch.

I finished phase IV of the kitchen cleanup project. Phase I was the fridge, which had a healthy layer of grime on the inside. II was the garbage can, which we could smell from our dorm rooms. III was the dish drying rack. You’d assume that since clean dishes are going there, that it would be clean, and not have a nasty black coating on the bottom. You’d be wrong. IV was getting rid of the year of grease and miscellaneous foodstuffs on the stove, wall, pipes, shield for the pipes, and everywhere else. Byron owes me one. Maybe he can bring me candy from Canada. Maybe yes…

Reading the news this morning has made me a little bit uneasy. Missile test-fires very close to where I’m living can never be a good thing… I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens.

Anyway, another long blog so I should probably wrap it up…Further blog posts as events warrant. Farewell!

Careful. We Don't Want to Learn From This

It’s 6am Wednesday morning, and I’m currently in Kyoto Japan! Which is very cool. This is my first entry from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Ok, arrived on Monday afternoon after a looong plane flight. It was about 12 and a half hours total flying from Calgary, and it wasn’t overly fun. And Tootsie and Aeon Flux are weird movies to have on a plane in my opinion.

Arriving at the airport, I had to get through customs while knowing very little Japanese, which wasn’t too bad. I met Yamada-san at the airport, she helped me with my luggage and then we took the train to my work in Kyoto… which was a 2h trip itself. At Chujoshima Station I met my general manager, Matoba-bucho, and two of my coworkers, and they showed me to my dorm. I also met with David-san, who was here on an internship a while ago, and is back here working on a contract basis. We then went to dinner (Okonomiyaki), where I met the other intern here, Ly-san. After I talked with David and Ly for a while, took a shower, and went to bed.

Sooo… description time! My dorm is about 120 square feet. I have a bed, a desk, and 2 closets. The bed is hard as a rock, but other than that, my room is pretty good. It’s enough space for me at least. Outside my room there’s a kitchen and laundry room (how handy!) and just down the hall is the bathroom. My dorm has a curfew of 11:45. So far it hasn’t been a problem, I don’t know how weekends are. But I can always find a place to stay if I need to. The showers are… interesting. Communal showers will take some getting used to, is all I can say. Pictures of my dorm room:



Yesterday I woke up at 5am (thanks jetlag), hung around, went to work at 8:30. I met with my many co-workers, who showed me a bit of what I will be working on. They’ll explain more about my project(s) tomorrow. Yamada-san also gave me a tour of the factory, which was quite interesting. She showed me all the different things my company makes, including X-ray machines, intra-oral cameras (my project), dental chairs, root canal tools, and dentist drills. I went for lunch at the cafeteria, then Yamada-san said I may go home for the afternoon.

Ly took me to the supermarket in the evening… 4 floors, with basically everything you need… if only I could read what everything actually was… It’s difficult when you know so little of the language. I fell asleep at 8:30 by accident and woke up at 5 this morning again. Today I’m gonna go exploring on my own, probably to Kyoto Station and Toji Temple, so more pictures will be up soon.