I am lazy.

Either I'm lazy, or I haven't figured out the best way to get my pictures off of my phone yet. And if it's the second, I'm too ashamed to admit it so I'm going to go with me just being lazy.

There's actually a whole series of pictures I want to do, mostly involving bad chinglish. So I definitely have to start getting those pictures up.

Nothing else is exceedingly exciting right now. Hockey is going on strong. We've now won 2 in a row! Of course, I was in Japan for one of them. And Tai Chi is right now at the part that I find really interesting. It's starting to get to the point where it requires strength and flexibility as we're doing things standing on one leg, and basically doing leg extensions and turning on them and stuff.

After the last lesson, I went for dinner with Darmita, the tai chi teacher and the tai chi teaching assistant. We went for hotpot, and it was really good. The soup base was super spicy and I have pictures of it for when I figure out how to get pictures off my camers get off my lazy ass and upload them. The base had chilis floating around in the soup, and so much chili oil that my bowl i was eating in was filled with congealed oil after it cooled off. And that's from not even taking any soup.

It was good though. It gave me an excuse to have a beer and Darmita informed me that it was actually healthy to drink beer. I'm going to have to remember that one. See, I wasn't lying when I told you about the barley theory mom!

Japan is, er, interesting.

I flew out from Hong Kong on last Saturday for my first work trip based out of Hong Kong. Yay for getting busy finally. The work itself was fairly boring, but that's how things should be when the job is going well.

Before I left HK, I had looked at the weather report (after much prompting by Darmita) and it confirmed my guess that it would be about 10C in Tokyo and Sendai where I would be working. I packed appropriate clothes but the suitcase I had was a little bit too big, so I added in some bulkier clothes just to take up space in the suitcase. Good thing I did.

When I get to Tokyo, the weather was okay, if a little cold. But the next day when we took the train up to Ichinoseki, we got out of the train and it started snowing. So much for 10C. On the plus side, I was able to take some nifty pictures with my new phone, so I can see how they turned out. And if I figure out how to post pictures to blogspot, you can too!

Of course, this was an indication of how the whole trip would go. Keep in mind that mill shutdowns in Japan mean the entire mill is shutdown. This includes the power boiler, so where you'd normally have steam keeping the mill warm, when it is zero degrees outside during a shutdown, it's zero degrees inside the machine room too. Three days of this in Ichinoseki, where we were working with setting up computers and wiring and such was not the most fun thing. Trying to do precise work with mostly numb fingers is not fun.

After Ichinoseki, I went further north to Ishinomaki, which is where I went on my very first trip to Japan, for only one day of work. And as Kumagai-san said to me, it snowed the last time I was there too. Maybe Darmita's assertion that I bring bad weather is true.

After we finished up in Ishinomaki, we started to drive to Sendai, only to slow down in dismay at the big flashing X on the approach to the highway indicating the highway was closed (due to the blowing snow). Luckily, when we got closer, we realized that it was for the OTHER direction that the highway went, so we were able to get to Sendai okay.

On the way there, Kumagai-san said that he would like to go out for karaoke, so I said sure. Then he goes, karaoke with beautiful girls, and i said, um, okay. We get to Sendai, check into the hotel and go to our rooms to get cleaned up a bit, as we had been working in a coating kitchen, which meant we were covered in crusty powder.

When I come back downstairs, I see him flipping through a nightclub brochure for Sendai, and he tells me he has decided where we will go. With that, we walk over to the train station to buy my train ticket to Tokyo the next day. We eat the local specialty which was cow tongue grilled and served spiced depending on the restaurant. This wasn't that good, or the pieces I had were bad or something, because it was supposed to be soft and tender, and mine was very chewy. I imagine it was probably a not so good restaurant since we were eating inside the train station.

After we finish dinner, we go to catch a cab to the karaoke bar where we go upstairs and he shows me into the bar where I look around and realize that this probably isn't my definition of a karaoke bar. Girls sitting around in slinky dresses, and I realize that he has brought me to a hostess bar instead. I think Kumagai-san notices the puzzled look on my face and he goes, "sorry, no karaoke here!"

We sat down, two girls came to sit with us to pour our drinks and engage in conversation, but perhaps my enjoyment of the whole experience was lessened since neither of them could speak english very well. I ended up sitting there for most of the night watching Kumagai-san mack on some random women while I drank myself into a half-stupor. Since I didn't want to get particularly drunk in that sort of area. On the plus side, I got to try out Sujo, which I was told is a Korean rice liquor, or maybe it is also popular in Korea as well as Japan. As I said earlier, there were some pretty serious communication problems.

It was interesting, if a bit depressing. I guess that's a cultural bias coming through, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It just felt wrong to be paying for people to sit there and talk with you. Well, that and the fact that the girls there didn't look so much pretty or attractive to me, but bored - no, that's not the word for it. More weary, or something. I don't really know how to explain it. They didn't appear genuine I guess. Anyways, it wasn't particularly endearing, and I don't think I'd want to repeat the experience if it was offered again.

I did find it particularly amusing that one of the girls that sat down with us at one point introduced herself to us as "Aho". I guess it is wrong of me to be giggling about that, but there you go.

At the end of the night, Kumagai-san asked me if my girlfriend would be angry, and I was like, I dunno... we'll find out! I'll probably be sleeping on the floor when I get home.

A big win!

My hockey team won it's first game last night. 4-3. With their 3 goals being scored (2 of them) and set up (the other one) by someone that seems to play in every game, because I've played against Frankie in the last 3 weeks. It's kind of weird being part of such a small hockey circle that you see the same people every week, but I suppose it's not a particularly bad thing. It makes me feel kind of bad when I start getting a little greasy in front of the net or give guys little shots after the whistle for digging at our goalie.

It's also really weird getting adjusted to different people and their styles of play. I haven't had a steady defensive partner so far, and you have to get used to the little things that each player does. Who will just ring it around the boards, who will hang back and give you support when you're rushing the puck, not to mention which forwards will stay low for an easy outlet, which ones will help cover defensively, look out for their pointman or help out with the center.

Apart from the hockey, I've got my new computer and managed to run cables through the wall to give myself the interweb. I felt very geeky as I crimped the RJ45 cable back together after I had cut it to fit the wire through the small hole in the wall. Geeky in a good way. Like how I imagine some people feel when they use power tools.

And I got me some new geeky toys too. I got an iPod Touch, which is basically the same thing as an iPhone minus the phone. A 16GB 3.5" widescreen iPod, with motion sensing so it detects which way you're holding it and makes the text the correct way. The cool thing is it's pretty easy to load in the videos, which is the main reason I wanted it. It's a super small form factor video player for me right now, which comes in especially handy when I'm travelling. Now I just have to find a nice dvd ripper program so I can avoid having the big "evaluation version" watermark in the middle of everything that I rip.

And I also got my new phone. If you want the number, get ahold of me on MSN, because it should also always be on MSN. I got one of those fancy data access plans so I can send MSN messages from the phone, which means it should always be fairly easy to get ahold of me. At any rate, it should save on some of the long distance if I'm not at home. And it's got a GPS, which hasn't seemed to manage to find itself yet, but I haven't left it on for very long for the most part. I'll leave it on for a while tonight and see if it can start working better.

I'm heading out to Japan on Saturday, to go visit three mills. One of them is to help out with the installation and start up of some new equipment and the other two are to help out with some troubleshooting. I'll have a Saturday free in Tokyo though, so I need to figure out what sort of goodies I need to pick up for people.

And no, before you ask, I'm not visiting one of those vending machines for you.

Hong Kong > Batman

It's pretty big news in Hong Kong, but I'm not sure how it plays out in Vancouver. Anyways, they're filming part of the next batman series in hong kong right now. Apparently they were supposed to have a scene where batman jumps out of a plane into the harbour.

Well, apparently batman is a whee girly man, because they decided that pollution was too bad in the harbour for them to carry on with that scene. Wuss.

Rubbin's racing!

I really wish I was into Nascar so I could give a reason why I agree with that slogan. Unfortunately, I think nascar is stupid, so it's not a good excuse for me. Because yes, you guessed it, I've started driving in Hong Kong. If you're here, go ahead and get all the get off the sidewalk jokes out of the way now.

You'd think that after 16 years of driving that it wouldn't be hard, but it feels very, very, very different to drive on the left hand side of the road. All of the habits that you have suddenly become wrong. You reach for the gear shift in the wrong location, you can't find the handbrake. It's like the first time you drive an automatic after a long time of driving a stick-shift and how you frantically try to find the clutch. Except ten times worse.

And it doesn't help that you're driving along, you turn onto the main road off the side street and the first thing that happens is you get pulled over by a cop. Yes. That sucked. Sitting there for 5 minutes while they peer at every single page in my passport, and look at my canadian driver's license was kind of nerve wracking. I was glad I knew what he was talking about when he poked his head into the car and asked in broken english what the class 5 and 6 on my driver's license meant.

So with that fun encounter behind us, we continued on into town, did our shopping and went home. Keep in mind that I had Darmita beside me telling me that I was going to have to pay a penalty for everytime I hit the curb, because that is something that she claims all North American drivers do when they move to HK, and of course, I told her that I wouldn't.

And I made it right to about 100m from home, on the tiny little sidestreet when we're cruising along and there's that raspberry of the car wheel rubbing up against the curb. Darnit. Oh well. Maybe next time, Gadget. Next time.