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Last Friday I got off work fairly early, and with so much extra time on my hands I decided I’d go to Ito Yokado, pick up some groceries, and make dinner. Everything was going fine until I got home, and went to turn the washing machine on. Something was weird…no water was coming out! I go and check my bathroom sink. Nope. No water. Kitchen also gave a negative. Water was out. Did I mess up somehow? Not pay a bill? It was the 3rd, and indeed I had a bill that was due on the 1st. Being Japan though, I’ve been late on bills a LOT. Mainly because there isn’t any penalty for being late on your bills. Panicked, I walked to the 7-11 and paid my water bill. As I rode the elevator back up to my room, I hoped that the system was advanced enough that if my water was shut off for non-payment, it would immediately be re-activated upon payment. Still, no water.

What in the world was I going to do at 8AM the next morning when I have to shower and go to work? Next step was to call the water company and see what the deal was. Again, being Japan, there isn’t really any such thing as 24 hour customer service lines. Every line I called had a recording that said they were only open until like 6 or maybe even 8PM. Finally, I was able to find a local service station that actually had someone working. I found out that 4 other people in my building had reported the problem, and it wasn’t my bill or even the water company’s problem. The building’s water pump was broken, so the most I could do was call my landlord. I e-mailed my new co-worker who lives in the same building as me, on the off chance that his water used a different pump than mine. Perhaps I’d have to borrow a shower. Unfortunately, his water was off as well. I got my landlord’s number from my manager at AEON, and of course that place was closed too. I was totally boned.

I went to grab some dinner at Matsuya, since I couldn’t make dinner without water. Also I had to take a leak really bad and my toilet didn’t work either. Cell e-mailing with my manager, who was probably in more a panic than I was, I found out that there is a public bath (銭湯) a taxi ride away from my place. That wouldn’t really do anything for me the next morning, since I have to be at work by 9:45 and that place doesn’t even open until 9. Kind of cutting it close. I knew there was a 24-hour public bath at the next station, Yawatajuku, so I thought I might give that a try if I wake up early. Last resort could be an internet cafe like Popeye in Chiba where they have shower facilities.

Went to sleep around 2, woke up at 7. It was a very rough sleep since I kept waking up in the middle of the night to walk to the kitchen sink to check if the water happened to come back. No deal. When I finally got up to my alarm, still no water. Headed to the station with hopes of checking out the place in Yawatajuku, which was also like a sauna or something. 24-hours is written in neon on the building, yet when I got there, the guy said the baths were closed for cleaning or something, and wouldn’t be open until 9. Great. I was pissed. Headed up to Chiba to shower in the internet cafe, which was actually really nice and huge. But anyway, got back home and got dressed properly and headed to work just barely making it in time. With the walking and the heat outside it didn’t feel super pleasant, but at least I had showered. I think my co-worker had used bottled water to shampoo his hair.

At work they called the landlord and they said it would be done that day. Indeed, it was taken care of when I went home during my break to check. Thank goodness the water was back. Life is hard without running water.

I had probably one of the most productive days in decent memory last Monday, which is impressive because my days off usually involve waking up around 12, watching TV and surfing the net all afternoon, then, if I’m feeling ambitious, going out at night.

I had quite a few things to do in Chiba, so after getting home on Sunday night around 12:30, I started doing some prep and things like that. On my list of things to do were applying for my visa renewal and also deciding on my vacation plans. Once deciding, mainly through internet research, where I’m going to go for Obon vacation, I was going to hit up H.I.S. Travel to get tickets and stuff. I was going to do all kinds of reading and internet research to get ready, even considering an all nighter just to make it to Chiba when the Immigration Office opens. I didn’t want to have to get there during a busy period and have to wait for hours like last time. I got a decent amount of stuff done, and was pretty sure on going to Seoul, since it’s close, cheap, and seems interesting. Also because I love Korean BBQ.

Of course, I fell asleep in my chair around 4:30AM only to be waken up painfully by my 7AM alarm. Somehow managed to shower and gather my paperwork to leave for Chiba at 8ish. Made it to the Immigration Office’s station (市役所前 on the Chiba Monorail line) right at 9, opening time. They should just be opening their doors, right? Apparently not, because I got there and it seemed like they had been open for hours. I got my ticket and was number 28, which I guess isn’t that terrible but also made me wonder what time these 27 other people actually got here. All said and done, I filled out my paperwork, got my 印紙 currency stamp, and waited just a little bit. Only about an hour in and out this time; much better than my last visit to the Immigration Office. My new visa should be ready near the end of the month, and it will be good for at least another year.

After submitting my visa renewal, I walked down to the Yamada Denki to pick up a DS case, since the Nikka Whiskey pouch doesn’t seem to be protecting my DS as well as I’d like it to. Took care of that and by 10:30 I was feeling pretty tired. Went back to Chiba and decided to get some breakfast. This was opposed to the other idea of going back home and sleeping, which would surely ruin the rest of the day’s plans. After eating, tried out the new Popeye internet cafe, which was actually pretty nice. Did about 2 and a half hours there finishing up reading about Korea and stuff like that. I also enjoyed the massage chair, and am pretty sure I fell asleep in the net cafe for at least an hour of my time there. Anyways, by that time it was time to get my next job done.

Went to the Yodobashi building, did some shopping around. Checked out the Mitsukoshi department store, which I’d never been to before. It reminded me of what a 1950’s department store must have been like, and the elevator and staff seemed like they’d been there as long. Went to HIS and got some prices for Seoul. A bit more expensive than I had thought I saw on the internet, but with the taxes and fuel charges, etc, it seemed about right. Definitely cheaper than going somewhere else. Took a lunch break to think it over and check with a few other places. Had some katsudon with Brian, who was on lunch break. Did some shopping in Sogo, and even bought some books with practice tests for the JLPT (日本語能力試験), which I’ll hopefully take in December. ２級. Went to JTB Travel Agency about 5 minutes before they closed, but their prices seemed about the same as HIS, which was open til 8. Went there and booked some tickets. This second agent that I talked to was better than the first, since she was able to get different flight times and also saved me a bit of money. Anyways, I’m set for my trip. Friday Aug 10 to Monday Aug 13, I’ll be in Seoul, South Korea.

Having accomplished so much all day, it was almost time to head home. Decided if I went to sleep at like 9, I’d get up early and have a messed up sleep schedule all week, so I waited for Brian to get off work and had dinner at Skylark or something, I don’t remember since I was so out of it by then. But, I got everything accomplished and had the longest Monday in a long time.

Of course the most important decision at the moment is where in the world I’m going to work and live after my AEON gig finishes at the end of September. I do quite literally mean where in the world, since right now I’m deciding between Japan and someplace in the US. Recently I’ve been thinking more about the US, but I really don’t know. It’s hard to believe I haven’t set foot in the US in over 10 months. While life in Japan is great, there are small things about the US that I miss also. Things like shopping at Target, driving around in a car, eating real pizza for cheap, watching Mama’s Family at 5AM, etc. If any of you out there have any rich relatives who own companies, let them know I am seeking a job. More than willing to relocate.

Before that, I have to also decide where I’m going on my vacation in a few weeks. Yes, I just had a Hong Kong vacation in June, but it’s time for another one! These last few weeks of working at AEON have been/are going to be so easy with all these vacations. Most of Japan is off for about a week in August thanks to this holiday called Obon. I took 2 days off before this vacation, and then combined with my usual Sunday and Monday off, I have somehow managed myself an 11-day holiday. Hells yes. Going back to the US is quite pricey in August, and since I’ll likely go back in September after AEON (either just for vacation or moving back), I think I’m going to spend Obon vacation traveling in Asia. Where in the world should I go though? Doing some research with the discount travel agencies, and due to the approximate 120 yen to 1 US dollar rate, here are my current options and approximate airfare costs in USD for your convenience. If anyone has any opinions, advice, warnings, etc, please feel let me know.

• Seoul – $340
• Beijing – $665
• Shanghai – $388
• Hong Kong – $495
• Bangkok – $440
• Singapore – $460
• LA – $958
• Taipei – $360

Right now my top choice is Seoul, since it’s the cheapest and closest to Japan. Also since I’ve got China and Japan in my passport, having Korea would give me the 3rd of the major Asian countries. I’m not exactly sure what I would do in Korea, except eat tons of chigae, kimchi, and deface every likeness of Pe Yonjun in Korea. Just kidding about the last one, since that would take much longer than 11 days. Hopefully I can decide my vacation plans by the end of this week. Vacation starts on August 5th so I need to get a move on.

On a side note, I’ve watched almost nothing but Seinfeld for the past few days. I forget sometimes how awesome this show is.

Two natural disasters in one weekend; pretty impressive even for Japan. Around Wednesday or Thursday we began hearing about Typhoon number 4 which was heading up the country from south near Okinawa, due for a Kanto area touchdown on Sunday. On Saturday we got some pretty hard rain storms in the afternoon and evening, but overall nothing big. Sunday in the morning it seemed pretty fine outside, but the storm was definitely on the way. I headed out to 7-11 near my apartment to stock up on supplies for the impending storm. That and I decided I would stay in my apartment all day and finish my resume, which I have been putting off for like the past month. While the storm came and the rain and wind was pretty fierce, it didn’t really seem to be typhoon quality. A bit disappointed there. At the very least, I finished my resume and have started trying to find a new job. First stage is just using the internet and a bunch of sites like GaijinPot and Monster to see if I get any responses with the easy click-and-send resume system. It was pretty pathetic actually getting to work on the resume, because I was in super procrastination mood all day. Reminded me exactly of back in college when I would have a paper or something to do. I somehow found tons of things to distract me as I slowly began the process or totally revamping my resume. I think I watched half a season of Seinfeld, napped a few times, ate lunch and dinner from my 7-11 rations, and even busted out the old Pokemon game on DS. But I finally finished it, and am pretty happy.

This morning, Monday, I awoke around 10:15AM to a strange feeling, as if I was on some kind of boat. Actually it was an earthquake, shaking the ground back and forth for a few minutes from side to side. I also noticed that a shirt I had hanging up and my belts were swaying back and forth like pendulums. It was actually kind of cool. I’ve gotten quite used to earthquakes by now, although there is always the slight fear in the back of my head that it’s going to get a lot worse and the building is going to come crashing down on me. The earthquake was really weak at my place, maybe a 3 on the Japanese quake scale, but at the epicenter up in Niigata it was around 6.6. I think it was quite bad up there, maybe with some casualties. But that was about all the earthquake action for me here in Chiba.

Headed to Soga in the afternoon and saw the new Harry Potter movie, Order of the Phoenix (Japanese title: 不死鳥の騎士団). Overall pretty good, although they have to cut out so much stuff from the books. It’s also funny how old the actors are all getting. Harry Potter looks like he could pass as a businessman in his early 30’s, yet he’s supposed to be 17 years old. Then Ron’s twin brothers look about 40 years old. I was thinking, it’s a good thing that all the teachers and other adults in the Harry Potter world are super old, otherwise it would be pretty obvious how strangely old the “kids” look.

Also, today was a holiday here in Japan, which means nothing as far as days off, since it’s another Monday holiday meaning I get ripped off. Bogus, AEON. Anyway, it was 海の日, or Ocean Day. I’m not quite sure what you’re supposed to do on Ocean Day, but oh well.

It’s 梅雨 (tsuyu) here in Japan, the rainy season which usually lasts for about a month from sometime in June to July. This year it started up later than usual, so it will likely last until late July. I’m just assuming so; I’m not Al Gore. Japanese summers are terrible because it’s either raining or super balls hot. And yes sometimes it will also be both. It’s also humid most of the summer, meaning that walking outside for 15 minutes will make you want to go home and take a shower. This also makes riding the trains pleasant, as the usual crowd of evening-migrating salarymen have an entire day of sweat and B.O. in addition to their usual cigarette butt and stale beer aroma. I’m quite thankful that I don’t have to ride the train to work, and when I do ride the trains it’s not usually at rush hour so I don’t have to endure the torture that is being crammed into a train full of sweaty stinky old men. One of my co-workers said that foreigners are more sensitive to body odors and stinky people, which I believe because Japanese people have probably had their sense of smell rendered useless from years of sweaty summertime salarymen.

Summer in Japan brings with it a whole special batch of complaints that are only applicable in these moist and hot months. The sad thing that this is roughly my… maybe, what, 5th or 6th summer that I’ve experienced in Japan, so you’d think I would be over it by now. Ha. Most annoying is the lack of central air conditioning, or sometimes lack of any air conditioning at all. This can be a pain during other times of the year, especially winter without central heat, but in the summer it’s most painful. Generally, Japan relies on room-specific AC units with no real air ventilation or filtration system. It’s pretty much like the window units that they have in motels or in college dorm rooms for kids who have allergies (or at least a note from the doctor faking that they have allergies). At night, you don’t want to leave the AC on all night because you’ll catch a cold from it being too cold and running all night, and also because electricity bills can get pricey if you run the AC all day. Luckily, ACs here have remotes and sleep timers, so you can set the AC to shut off an hour or two after you fall asleep. Unfortunately, this means that about 30 or 40 minutes after the AC auto-shuts off, you wake up sweaty and thirsty. Thus you turn the AC on with another hour or so on the timer. Next thing you know you’ve woken up 4 times in the night and finally wake up with your pillow feeling like it had just taken a swim in Tokyo Bay.

I’m glad that I don’t have to walk very far to get to work. As soon as I get to AEON, my routine is to turn on my classroom’s AC unit so that I don’t pass out in class. Like many puzzling aspects of this ghetto-fabulous technologically advanced country, central air conditioning in Japan is a dream that will likely not be realized in my lifetime.

I made the mistake this evening of turning on the TV. As I was flipping through the channels, I landed on NHK, the national public station. NHK is a lot different from traditional PBS stuff we see in the US, primarily because people actually watch it. There are, however, a lot of trash programs on the station, including educational ones. I think I’ve complained before about my intense hate for the English educational shows on Japanese TV. Tonight may have been the worst I’ve seen, primarily because of this mega flamboyant possibly transvestite foreign teacher:

Yikes is right. I’ve uploaded some poor-res video clips of this show on Youtube. Links are at the end of this post. You can probably imagine how freakishly strange this “guy” sounds, but it’s even worse than that. Please listen for yourself. Although he looks like Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, his voice is much, much higher.

The show is part of the Koukou Kouza series (NHK高校講座), which seems to have all kinds of lessons in different subjects targeted at high school students. I guess this show is actually for retarded high school students, because they have a teacher who speaks around 1 word a minute, and has to resort to extreme body and facial movements to keep your attention as he tries to get a full sentence out. Speaking of retarded high school students, check out the third video I uploaded from this show; not only do the kids speak English like they have speech impediments, but the conversation has no real logical flow either. The entire show is sentence repetition and basic conversations, which all in all isn’t that bad. My main beef with the show was the foreign host, who acts more like a clown that a teacher and doesn’t sound natural at all. If you spoke like that to a real native speaker, they’d laugh at you and walk away.

Of course I understand that you have to speak slowly and clearly for learners of English to understand you; I do it on a daily basis. However, this guy takes it over the top and deserves to be punched in the face for the way he acts. Most high school students don’t need to be spoken to this slowly. The students on the show, for example, spoke a lot faster and don’t need him breaking up every word into its own galaxy. Stop patronizing these people. I worry when I think about people actually watching these shows and thinking they’re going to learn how to speak English from someone like Mimi on TV here.

This guy’s name is Brian Wistner. After doing some hardcore research, by which I mean 1 page of Google search results, it seems as if this guy teaches English at some Christian college in Tokyo, and has also co-authored a book on taking TOEIC. Let’s hope for the sake of his customers and students that his on-camera persona is some kind of self-degrading joke, and he doesn’t really act, speak, or write like he does on the show. Something tells me that’s not the case though. I still can’t stand how pretty much every foreign co-host of these English shows on Japanese TV is a major toolbag. Yes, I said co-host, because I have yet to see a program that is hosted by a lone foreigner. There’s almost always a Japanese person there to lead the action, and that Japanese person usually speaks perfect English without acting like a high-school drama club reject. Hey NHK, here’s an idea: ditch the crap foreigners and just let these Japanese people host the shows.

Here are some clips of tonight’s show, in case you’re curious as to why this stuff annoys me so bad. I used my camera to take video off the TV, then posted them to YouTube, so obviously the quality is terrible. You can still watch them though.

• Clip 1 – Watch Mimi-sensei spell out a sentence as if he were teaching a dog how to drive a Jeep.
• Clip 2 – Another one!? Now he goes and talks to some Australian woman. This is the most awkward conversation using What’s up ever recorded on camera.
• Clip 3 – Since the program was so awful, the kids didn’t learn anything. She’s hungry. Heading home now. Pork chop sandwiches? Duuuuuur.