Wordle

Click on the picture below. I made it using all the words in this blog about Japan. As I read through the words I remember different events and parts of my great travels in Japan.

I'm going to print it large and hang it on my wall.

Website Ideas

Create a website to track people sending bottles in the oceans.

Could be all virtual with people having to check nearby shores in a game world.

Or could be about real bottles in the real ocean.

Arrival

Just arrived inVancouver form Narita. I spent the last few days taking everything from the apartment in Yokosuka and getting rid of it. I ended up giving tons of of stuff away. I've slept maybe a 16 hours in the last 4 days. I worked until 11pm the night before. I stayed up until 3am cleaning and then was up again at 7am. I ended up having 5 kilos overweight and they wanted to charge me 700$ to bring my suitcase. So I went aside and stuffed a big pile of papers into the backpack. Turns out I had 6 kilos of papers. I still had to pay 50$ as the regular overweight fee but it's not 700$! The flight back was good, I ordered a kosher meal when booking and it was good food. It looked a lot better than what anyone else got and there was also more food in total. I Had fish with corn and some kind of sauce, big hard crackers, some sort of soft cookie thing, apple compote, chocolate pudding and a potato salad that was 90% green peas (I didn't eat much of that). Breakfast strangely was very similar but without the chocolate pudding and with a fish salad as the main course. I tried to sleep on the plane but I was way too tired. I made friends with the guy who was sitting next to me. We ended up having many empty spaces on the flight so we got to have 3 seats for 2 people, it was nice and roomy. Security was crazy at the entry of Vancouver, there was some big shot visiting while we we entering (maybe the PM?) and he was surrounded by dozens of armed police officers. Now I have to wait from 10am till 7:30pm for my connecting flight. I could go earlier but I was told my check in luggage can't follow me and I'd have to come back and get it. So I'm not going to be able to advance my flight. I'm tempted to leave the airport but I'm not really in the mood to walk around Vancouver and not have a place to sit or use the internet. Vancouver airports internet is great. Free and available everywhere.

Going

Well, after a lot of thinking and debating I've decided to go back to Canada in July. I'll leave the job at GABA and look for work in Calgary. Summer's the only time I'll be able to find a job in Canada. Since there is so little time, I am now running to get everything done before then, airplane tickets, selling furniture, packing things quickly, canceling water, gas and electricity... I'm sad to leave Japan so quickly but there are some things which we must sometimes do. I still have many articles to write and pictures to post, so I'll still be updating this blog for a while.

Alone

WELL Jen is back in Canada now. I'm going to be working 7 days a week from now on. So I won't be posting much anymore but I'll try to keep adding a few updates.

Why you should keep your old printer

WHEN I arrived in Japan I needed to buy a printer to be able to print resumes and lessons for my private students. I ended up getting a slightly used 2009 model at HardOff for 5000yen. It's an EPSON PM900 (North American model RX700) it's a super fancy printer with multiple memory card slots, 6 separate colours and a powerful scanner. It's also big and bulky. However in Japan all printers are very large and bulky. They also seem to cost on average about 20000 to 40000 yen! I was happy with it but recently it started giving me warnings then one day stopped working. I checked online and found out that I would have to take it to Epson to get it fixed and that it was simply a matter of resetting some kind of counter. Epson's new printers have a counter which automatically locks the printer when a certain number of prints have been made, regardless of if it's still able to print it will force a user to go pay money to Epson to have their printer "fixed". So I downloaded the software and did it myself. It worked fine until finally the ink pads were full and I had to clean them. I found the service manual online and set to taking it apart. It took me 4 hours of painstaking work to get to the ink pads. The printer was built on top of them from the bottom up! Then I cleaned the pads, dried them and put it back together. To my satisfaction it worked again! Then a week later it stopped gain... Taking it apart again was not something I wanted to do. Jen found an old Epson P 760C (North American model photo 720) printer at her dorm. It's a 2001 model, very old and seems to have been bought and used last in 2003. It's been sitting in a box for 6 years... So I dusted it off and powered it up in the off hope it might work. I then hacked the drivers for a Japanese windows XP to make it work on the English Windows Vista. To my surprise it seemed a bit squeaky but functional. I gave it a bit of oil and then ran it through a 10 minute head cleaning. And... It works! Amazing! I'm flabbergasted, even the ink is still half full! Thanks to the dry ink clogging the heads, I don't even need to buy ink. The moral of the story is: new stuff is made to break, old stuff is solid.

Japan and summer clothes

IT'S starting to get warm in Japan. Summer is just around the corner. So I thought I'd write a quick post about one of the different habits of Japanese women. In Japan having very light white skin is the only way to go. So during summer, most women will wear long sleeved sweaters, turtlenecks, jackets and arm sleeves to keep the sun away from their faces and arms. Some even wear gloves to keep their hands from tanning. I find it amazing that they can wear such thick clothing when it so hot and humid.