13km walk..

Went for an .. extended.. walk, looking for discount ticket shops. Unfortunately, one shop was closed and another didn't have the discount JR Seishun 18 Kippu I was looking for. At least asking for directions was quite fun in Japanese ;-)

Hopefully I find shop that sells it tomorrow, or things get depressing (I have to pay bit more). Oh well. Studying seems still fun enough, we'll see if it's still fun 6 weeks from now.

I found today 中上級　日本語 (Chuujoukyuu Nihongo) book too, which I'll be using for my private lessons' grammar stuff, and I still use Intermediate Kanji Book 2 + G55 for the assorted kanji study. Another fun observation - I have yet to see queue in shops with more than 2 people - typically other salespeople man empty posts if more than 2 people are in row (compared to my home, where average is like 5 minutes.. :p)

Study, study, study..

I have now spent almost two days in row studying (either in class or doing homework). Today had finally some time to do something else (22+), and I went surfing random links I saw on IRC. This one amused me quite a lot - notes of a english teacher in japan. Fun, in strange kind of way.

In addition to that I'm mostly studying the weekdays, and planning for weekend - new shopping center in Nagoya on Friday (probably), some studying+sightseeing somewhere on Saturday, and finally Comic City 53 in Osaka on Sunday (link's in japanese so not very useful to non-serious readers ;->).

Sakura (cherry trees) will be blossoming sometime next week, it seems; interesting to see how the city looks with them in bloom.

Friday fun

First week of study at Yamasa is over. So far quite fun, although exhausting at times due to 6-7 hours of lessons per day and exercies+kanji practise on top of that (2-5 hours). Today, however, we went to Toyota's car factory, and did lots of sightseeing there. Quite interesting place, really. Surprisingly large, loud and organized.

After I split up with my fellow students, I headed to Tokugawa Ieyasu museum, which had number of interesting old items and tolerable garden. The most striking part about the old items were very old (13th century) swords, that were more than equal of the ones that were done in Europe in 16th and 17th century. Also, Hina Matsuri's doll collection was impressive; there
were even miniature Go/Shogi boards of different sizes for dolls..

After the museum closed, I walked halfway to Nagoya station (half of the 6-7km), saw some cherry blossoms in bloom (see attached picture), and then finally took subway the rest of the way (it was cold - today it actually snowed for a bit, although the air temperature was above zero so it melted very soon after).

Shopping excursion was very fun also, bought a Canon Wordtank G55 electronic dictionary (released today), as well as 1 manga book (Elfen Lied 2.. Now I have in 'pending' stack some Meitantei Conan, XXX-Holic and Inu Yasha in addition to that.. already read 2 manga books here though, good kanji practise).

Random shot from streets of Nagoya. 

At least something's blooming already :) 

Toyota's vision of the future hydrogen-based cars.. fairly impressive. 

Funny how different weather can be..

Yesterday I went skiing to Takasu Snow Park (about 160km north of Okazaki). The traffic was terrible, bus was delayed both ways (going, 40 minutes, coming back, 150 minutes). So it took total of about 9 hours of travelling to ski for maybe 4 and half hours. Still, the Takasu was roughly on par with northern Finland's slopes, and still quite nice in end of March. No pictures, it's the typical 'bunch of snow covered mountains' (can see everywhere) and 'bunch of people' (can see everywhere in Japan).

Interestingly enough, the beginner routes were full, intermediate routes were okay, and the advanced routes were almost empty. It was very fun to ski in the forest/advanced slopes with almost nobody in sight - something you can seldom do in Finland even if you go to the north.

On the way back they showed news in the bus - Kyuushuu earthquake videos were scary, especially one where every window of a skyscraper fell down on to the street. At least at that point, the numbers (1 death, 381 wounded) sounded fairly low considering how close the 7.0 Richter earthquake was to Fukuoka (not exactly small city, quake only 20km to the sea).

Today, however, after yesterday's subzero (up in the mountains, at 1km base height and about 1.6km peak) and snow the weather forecast promises 15 degrees and clear skies - unfortunately I need to study most of the day. :p Haven't studied excessively yet, and I need to write an essay about myself, listen to some text chapter, do some exercises, refresh my memory about some grammar rules.. and as hobby project, I should continue my kanji studies for the exam in Finland back in June. How fun.

Road home is _very_ wide, it's especially fun in the dark with homicidal car drivers coming up.. unfortunately fence prevents getting home so I can't walk on the walkway. 

I'm reminded of America.. sports club where people went by bus/own cars (note number of buses owned by club itself). 

And number of churches with marriage ceremony arrangement shops nicely close by :) 

Also found shop that specialized mostly in Hello Kitty stuff.. 

Hanami (cherry flower viewing) had it's own section in the shop for the must-have accessories :-) 

Even further outside view (new apartment building being built, the way in is via the scaffoldings :p) 

Outside view.. 

My spacious home (maybe 8 square meters total :>) 

Finally at the destination

The joy of screwing your connecting trains on first leg is something to behold, I missed Narita Express by 4 minutes, and in the end got to my destination 2.5 hours later than I would have. And being delayed when you behave like zombie (I don't sleep in the plane usually) isn't fun. I napped some of the way between Tokyo and Toyohashi on the Shinkansen.

It was amusing to note that even the slowest Kodama class shinkansen (Kodama < Hikari < Nozomi) now use the second-fastest publicly available train model - although my journey took long time due to many stops, the train regularly went 270km/h. Even Nozomi's train doesn't go much beyond 300km/h. At Tokyo, JR Railways had amazing PR video of the new shinkansen
prototype which has record speed of 583km/h currently. Unfortunately, I do not believe it will be adpoted for use any time soon due to noise concerns.

Funnily enough, I found amusing error in the guidebook of Okazaki - right and left were mixed (english translation). I got quite few laughs at reception of Yamasa when I noted it. Also on the way I saw a gang ofpriests/monks, who looked like right out of some movie.. don't think I have
ever seen any on the loose before.

First thing to do once I had settled stuff in my suitcases, was to buy network cable. Bedsheets et al have WAY lower priority ^_^. After that, I spent hour deciding between bad and lousy alternatives for futon-coverings, as I didn't like lack of pillowcase + white covers I had to start
with. Eventually, I picked one.

After that, I spent most of the remaining evening wandering around trying to figure what to eat. However, in the end I settled on some wannabe-western+japanese place (Denny's), which had surprisingly good food + dessert (mm, strawberry parfeit) for reasonable price.

The temperature is 'nice' (12-ish degrees in the shade and VERY warm sun), and other people seem reasonable - interesting to see how the studying works out. No pictures yet, too lazy to boot to Windows (in ironic twist, my laptop (Dell X200) has working suspend in Linux but not in Windows).

Jigsaw show

Journey preparation (everything except the plant and speaker and sofa will be packed! :->). To top it off, I actually have only one huge suitcase and Finnair's braindead 20kg weight limitation..

Itinerary

15.3. Helsinki -> Narita
16.3. Narita -> Okazaki (400km of quality time with trains)
.. two months of studying, roughly, at Yamasa..
12.5. Okazaki -> (pending)
.. two weeks of wandering quality time using JR Rail Pass ..
25.5. -> Narita
25.5. Narita -> Helsinki

Testing 1-2-3..

I have always despised bloggers. But, as always, life isn't as simple as it might be. Once upon a time (2000 or so) I traveled around the world for over half a year, and during that sent assorted diary-like mails and picture collections to all my relatives and people who wanted to know. Sharing a blog URL seems simpler, so here we go, I'm doing what I never particularly liked..

Interesting to see if this system is worth using, we shall see shortly. The Picasa integration for easy photo blogging sounds promising, at least.

(For those who don't know, I'm heading to Japan tomorrow for 2.5 months of study + fun => should be interesting. We shall see.)