Almost Christmas!

So I'm fairly sure Christmas was yesterday, and tomorrow will also be Christmas.

I say this because it's been more than a month and a half since the holidays and yet it feels like minutes have passed.

As a quick recap of the year so far, I was surprisingly ill for a long time, even by my own lofty illness gathering standards.  This spiralled into a few hospital visits where I was brushed off (booooo Japanese healthcare!) towards finding a clinic that I actually think might be halfway decent.  The doctor seemed to care which was nice, and I have hope that I might actually be able to find pain medication now that I'm not simply laughed out of the facility.  Things are looking up!

Now that I've finished with rugby, I've started playing badminton and occasionally fishing.  I've only lost about 7gbp's worth of gear on the three separate occasions fishing has been attempted, which is pretty good in my books.  I've yet to catch anything but rocks, so I'm looking forward to working through shoes, boots and eventually towards shopping trolleys.  At some point next year I expect to get a nibble, then towards the end of this decade I expect a fish might bite.  At my current pace, this is actually the cheapest hobby I've ever partaken in.

I am terrible at badminton.  I cannot play doubles to save my life.  It doesn't help that there's a language barrier (in most other situations a half second pause to consider what to say is acceptable, in a game as fast as badminton that is less acceptable).  What I have found is that I am pretty damned competitive against any of my opponents (they're all either 80, or heavily pregnant) if I just play by myself and ignore my partner.  This is of course bad form, so I only do it when I've stuffed up a dozen previous shots and feel like I need to make amends - or once an hour, whichever comes first.  I am not a team player.

Awa odori festival from a few years ago

A tall building in London, it might be famous or something.  I don't think many people know about it though.  Weird that the tour bus would even drive past it.

I've also bought a scanner, and I'm in the process of digitising all my film.  The eventual aim is to get to my Grandads slides and 35mm, and digitise those before they disintegrate.  At the moment I'm doing mine so I can perfect the process.  If I end up faffing about with his slides and film, there's going to be a fair amount of damage done because some of the slides are fragile to an extent that leads me to suspect he used them to cover roof tiles, or patch up glass in his greenhouse.  Either that, or they're quite old.

I still haven't dialed in the settings for the scanner properly, but I'm getting there.  I'm probably a thousand pictures in at this point so the act of physically loading the pictures is easy enough, but I'm not quite sure of the settings I want to use.  You can scan the pictures to ridiculous sizes with zero increase in quality, to the point where a single picture runs towards 2 gigs.  This is plainly ridiculous, although there are one or two pictures that I really like, that have had this treatment.

I will write a blog post about the process required to ensure as little dust gets into the final picture as possible though, because it is unbelievable how much crap comes through to the end product.

My main monitor isn't colour balanced which is also another problem, because the pictures look completely different on both my monitors, and then when viewed on a phone look completely different again.  It's a tricky situation, so I'm trying to save the pictures with the highest quality, with the most neutral colour balance possible.  This leaves a lot of otherwise good pictures looking quite bland until they are edited.

I've also recieved half a dozen lenses from very old cameras (they still use screw thread mounts, that's how old they are) from a friend, so am in the process of finding adapters for those.  There's a totally radical (dude) 180 degree fisheye that I desperately want to try out, and a crazy 600mm telephoto.  I have no idea of the quality, but they were going in the bin until they found a home here.

Now I've written that, back to studying Japanese.

The Flu is Upon Us, Run for Your Lives

So Flu season is officially underway.

Every year, without fail, the dreaded influenza attacks Japan with devastating effect.

It's particularly virulent here not because they have weak immune systems, nor due to random mutations making their viruses stronger than elsewhere, but (I assume) due to geography and society.

Population density is very high here, especially in Tokyo and the cities.  If one person sneezes on a crowded train, can you hear the other passengers fall?  The answer is yes, because the sneezer can't even raise his hands to cover his mouth, so full are the trains.  This raises some obvious problems in terms of hygiene, and means that a single infected individual may make a great number of other peoples weeks worse.  I assume this isn't a problem in the middle of Siberia, where you're more likely to see a meteorite than other human beings.

The other problem is the people.  No one washes their hands.  Ever.  I've written about this a thousand times before, but it's worth repeating in case you find yourself here.  Don't touch anything, and always bring hand soap/alcohol with you.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I've never seen someone wash their hands in Japan, and I have used public toilets.  They consider rinsing fingertips under tepid water for three tenths of a second 'a thorough wash,' and go about their day as if they're not the reason everyone is always sick all the time.

My speculation on this is that a thousand years ago, when no one knew anything and a splinter could kill you, people ran their hands under water and gave up at that, because the whole thing was a futile attempt at keeping clean and what's the point.  That tradition is still observed outside temples and shrines and whatnot, where literally hundreds of thousands of people will pick up, mess around with, and then drink from the same half a dozen spoon/ladle things.  The water may come from a tap, but it can also be recycled, pumped around a closed loop and topped up with fresh water when it gets low.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

So water is clean, and touching water imbues the toucher with cleanliness, I suppose?

They all wear masks which is a horrible idea to try and stop getting ill (the masks, they do nothing), but is a great idea if you are actually sick and don't want to make anyone else ill.  For whatever reason, they do not cover their mouths when they cough and sneeze, instead preferring to throw their hands back, find the nearest person and cough/sneeze as loud/hard in their victims face as possible.  This is why masks are a great idea, because they can do that to their hearts content while limiting the risk to their victim.  I doubt the masks do much in this instance, but it's got to be better than nothing, right?  Right?

They absolutely learn about cells, viruses, bascteria and transmission in school, I've seen the books and posters telling the kids how to actually wash their hands and not cough in other peoples faces, but absolutely no one takes notice.

And the hospitals here don't have a bonkers death rate after surgery, so the doctors wash their hands.

As a nation, they know about the transmission of disease, but the grand total of shits given is zero.

In thinking about it, I suppose that's similar to our obsession with soccer.  We are absolutely horrible at it, and we'll never be any good, but everyone gets their hopes up like a bunch of idiots and then get angry and start rioting when we lose.

As a nation, we know soccer is a lie and terrible for our national health, but everyone still gets angry.

The Cold! The Cold!

So I've caught a cold.

I hadn't slept in a few days (bar a few hours here and there) so I had to take a day off work yesterday.  I was basically carrying around the typical flu symptoms along with a severe case of zombie, and for some reason random nose bleeds, which led me to the conclusion that 'teaching,' a bunch of kids probably wasn't the best idea.

I managed to get some rest last night which led me being able to work today, which is good because money - but I'm starting to lose the energy I had at the beginning of the day.  Luckily my classes are complete and I only have to do typical busywork like making worksheets and whatnot, so the next couple of hours will pass quickly and I can get back to my sofa.

My fridge is currently a haven for unhealthy goods.  If there were a tax on owning unhealthy things I would be bankrupt with all the goodies I was sent over Christmas.  Yes, I am writing this from a place of smugness, and yes you will be jealous when you see the photograph with all the sweets I have.  But no, I am not giving you any.  They are all from england and good chocolate is rarer than wagyu beef here.

(...  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures on hand, so you will have to imagine the subtle golden halo and hymns that emanate from my open fridge.)

In other news, I tried to make a christmas dinner.

Coming into the endeavour with no experience I expected it to be a complete disaster, so I also made a backup meal of hamburgers.  In keeping with my attempts to make everything as difficult as possible, I bought ground beef and made them myself, topped and bottomed by rolls made from the home bakery.  The burgers were tasty.  Very, very tasty.

My mum sent me over some stuffing for the big occasion which ended up being some of the most delicious I've ever tasted (it's the same stuff we ate with every roast back home) and the chicken.  Well.  Only pictures will suffice in this instance.

Om nom nom.

It turns out that Japanese chickens are about half the size of english chickens, so the stuffing exploded out during cooking.  It didn't matter though, because the whole thing was unbelievably delicious.

If I'm using too many superlatives for your liking, please understand that I am a horrible cook and for a meal to end up edible, let alone tasty, is an accomplishment for the record books.

You might also notice that there aren't any vegetables.  This is because the chicken was more spread out when it was raw, and took up more of the dish, only to curl up when it was cooked.  The picture is also a little deceptive in that the dish itself is actually very small.  If I were to add potatoes and carrots, I would have to wedge them in between the chicken and the dish.  Hardly conducive to good browning I'd say!

Food nobbery(sic) aside, I'm glad I decided against adding veg because this whole endeavour took a bastard long time and was a pain in the backside.  Along with the burgers, ice cream and cake we made (those last two were group efforts) we ended up spending most of the day on the food.

Chocolate, ice cream, roast chicken, chocolate cake and burgers.  Now that's a christmas dinner.

Holy Donkey Balls

As it turns out, it only takes a few days of not sleeping to send a person mad.

I caught the flu from a bar floozy on Saturday night, returning home entirely unawares.  I felt a bit rough on Monday, felt about the same Tuesday and then BAM!  I struggled through work on Wednesday but left after all my classes had finished, a couple of hours early.  Thursday was a trip to the hospital for my scans, with enough energy left over to get home and sit on the sofa, sweating into it.

Friday was a trip to the hospital to get the results of my scans, talk to the doctor, then a road trip to the local county capital city for my visa.  That was a long day.

Saturday was a sit on my ass doing nothing day, as was Sunday.  On Sunday, things got worse.  It felt like I had an ear infection, then the glands under my chin (#EDIT# hahaha, I meant in my neck) swelled to make moving my head impossible, and I had no painkiller to combat it.  Every time I swallowed, it hurt.  Not a little bit either.  I couldn't cough to clear my lungs, or swallow to clear my throat.  It's that which makes it so painful, knowing that you're going to cough a hundred times, and clear your throat (involuntarily) a hundred more.

It really sucked, and I didn't sleep.  This after struggling to sleep the few nights prior, meant I didn't go into work on Monday.

But here I am, on Tuesday, feeling substantially better.  I still ache, my joints still hurt a bit, my neck is sore and my head throbs, but I've crested the hill.  I can eat, I can drink, I can laugh and play.  I am better.

And I have grown as a person:

Never again will I kiss a random floozy at a bar.

Seoul Again

So I thought I would give Seoul another go, as my last attempt was surely not indicative of the city (I reasoned).  Luckily I was correct, and this time around was a lot more fun.

The pictures are low quality, get over it.

This is an electronics mall.  You know we have department stores for clothes, knick-nacks and wares seemingly no-one would need?  They have them for electronics too.  This was taken from floor four of ten, but I missed the opportunity to take a shot illustrating the scale of the place.  It's quite vast, and has some of the most incredible electronics stores I've ever seen.  The whole place is like an indoor market, with each seller having an open booth.  The effect is cool, because you can see from one side of your floor to the other.  There's one floor that houses all the computer based electronics,  and there are guys who sell legacy hardware, I saw graphics cards from ten years ago, it was a cool blast from the past.

A couple of stores had my camera on display, but wouldn't let me touch it.  It's not like Japan at all...

The Saturday was the day of Korea vs Greece, and they had a big screen set up for everyone to watch it on.

Red is the national colour of Korea.

Yeah that's a neon hot air balloon on the ceiling, this place is also an indoor theme park.

This is the cool screen they set up.  The first thing I thought when I saw  this was, 'I wonder if you could hook a PC up to this?'

Then I thought, 'You'd need a dozen graphics cards to power a display of this resolution.'

Yeah I'm a geek.

Bitchin' panda chocolate cake.  I actually ate two cakes while I was there.  This was the tastier of the two however, and is, frankly, an amazingly tasty cake.  As something of a connoisseur of cakes, I can safely say that Korean cake making abilities rank far higher than their other baking abilities.

I did however find a baguette in the shop earlier that is amazing, it's crunchy, soft and delicious, just like the real thing.  It cost 1.50, but for my first taste of real bread in a couple of months, it's worth it I feel.

Here's a bit of free advertising for them; they deserve it for making a couple of extremely delicious cakes.

The people behind the till also deserve a standing ovation, for not laughing when they saw me enter the shop for the second time in one day.





On a side note, I'm extremely ill at the moment.  My fever is extremely high, I can't stop sweating, I have a chesty, infected phlegmtastic cough, and everything aches.  My finger is still broken too.  Stupid girls making me sick.