Congratulations, Linsey & Grant

I'm excited and happy for you both
And also a little freaked out that my little sister is engaged :)
Love you.

Skiing

So the past couple months I've gone skiing at three different places in Japan. First, one Sunday I went to Echigo Yuzawa about 1hr 15min from Tokyo on the shinkansen. I was supposed to go with three friends Andy, Florent, and Jeff, but there was no way I could get up in enough time to make the 6 AM train, meaning I would have to get up at 4:30 AM, on a Sunday, then ski all day. Well I eventually made the 9 AM train and made my way to Echigo Yuzawa. I thought there was just one ski area near the station but turns out, there were about six. So I tried to phone my friends but did not get through so I ended up asking for a suggestion from a worker at the station then went skiing by myself all day. It seems like the entire youth of Japan is learning how to snowboard. The runs are narrower than I'm used to in Colorado and there were a lot of people. Still, skiing for the first time in five years was fun. And the shinkansen ride was fun, too. I was on a double-decker type train and sitting on the top, so the view was nice and the ride was peaceful and quiet. As opposed to the ski lifts on the mountain which were blaring American hip hop and Japanese pop music. I got my groove on though.

Two weeks later I went with a large group of 32 people to Hakkoda in northern Honshu. It was about half people from work, the rest being girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, and friends. We flew into Aomori airport and then took a bus for a couple hours to Hakkoda. The mountain has been open to skiing for only seven years or so. It's not really a ski resort, just a mountain with a gondola. When the crowds are thick, you have to wait in line for about 45 minutes and the gondola ride itself takes about 15 minutes. Quite a different experience. The mountain is beautiful though. The top of the mountain is covered in snow, even the tall pine trees are almost completely buried and covered in snow, so much so that they refer to them as snow monsters. The hotel had an onsen, which is the Japanese style public bath. There are separate rooms for guys and girls, and you sit on a little stool about 1 foot off the ground and bathe yourself, then sit in some steamy hot water fed from a hot spring. There are all sorts of etiquette rules to follow while you're in the onsen, you only have a little towel to cover yourself, I thought it was a wash rag, and you're not supposed to put any towels in the spring water, so you just sit there butt naked with all the other dudes and fold the towel on your head. At first I wore the regular-sized towel into the onsen, not knowing I was only supposed to take the small one, but hey every gaijin is allowed mistakes.

Two weeks later I went to Kagura Mitsumata on the IT ski trip with a group from work. It is near the same station I went to the first time I went skiing. The snow was quite icey but the weather was sunny and clear, I got a nice burn on both of my cheeks that has peeled away now. We stayed at a Japanese ryokan, which is just a traditional Japanese inn type of place, which basically means they have no beds or towels. Our rooms were tatami mats and we slept on futons, just a cushion on the floor. In the middle of the rooms they have little tables covered with blankets, that are heated underneath, I think they're called kotatsu, which sounds very similar to tonkatsu, which means pork. So the running joke was "hey come put your legs in the hot pork".

Hanami time is approaching, when all the cherry blossoms bloom. The weather has warmed a bit and I can already feel my allergies acting up. Soon there'll be lots of people walking in the streets with surgical masks on to block the pollen and whatnot. It's just something they do here. It's quite funny. Another interesting note is that after WWII they planted a ton of trees near Tokyo and every springtime they create lots of gunk in the air. Just have to deal with it.

Chinese New Year in Yokohama

I'm 30 y'all

HookED 'Em!

Texas 41 - USC 38

Sayonara '05

My time in Tokyo for 2005 is coming to a close. I'll be going back to TX for the holidays and returning here in January. The end of the year brings a lot of busy time at work. The end of the fiscal year is Nov 30 and in addition there is the end of the calendar year on Dec 31. Two Wednesdays ago, we had our company-wide year-end party at the Grand Ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Tokyo. It was a circus theme, with clowns and a lady walking on stilts and a guy balancing on chairs stacked up to the ceiling. There was a prize lottery where employess won a digital camera, a 60GB iPod, a steak dinner, a weekend stay at the Grand Hyatt, a trip for two to Kyoto, and a trip for two to Seoul, South Korea. Needless to say, I won none of those. But the party was fun. And then this past Wednesday, we had our team year-end party at Hard Rock Cafe and karaoke afterwards. Additionally, I have started a new project and have tried to complete as much as possible before I leave for the holidays so that I can relax. I'm really looking forward to being home for two weeks and seeing family and friends. This has been a crazy year for me, going from NY to Tokyo to TX to NY and back to Tokyo and settling into my new job and looking for an apartment in Tokyo and making new friends in Tokyo and learning Japanese and all the while working harder and longer hours. I'm taking my camera home, so look out for pics from the holidays in TX.

私はテキサスにかえります。おつかれさまでした。

（；_・）

Yesterday was Labour Thanksgiving Day in Japan and we had the day off. Today is not a holiday here, but they are serving a Thanksgiving buffet at the cafe in our office. I just had my sad little cafe Thanksgiving dinner at my desk. They were worried that they'd run out of turkey, so they're giving half turkey, half pepper chicken. Rip. And the mashed potatoes look like mashed potato pellets. And there's no dressing. Missing home just a little today.

Hong Kong

Discover Hong Kong - this web site shows areas of Hong Kong where most of my pictures were taken.

My friend, Lynne, from NYC was in Tokyo last week on a business trip for the Tokyo Motor Show. We had a pretty good time, I showed her around my part of town a bit and she also wandered around by herself on the days that I was working. We had dinner in Shibuya one night with one of her colleagues who was also here on business. Thursday night we went out with some of my coworkers to a free sushi and sake work dinner party thingy. All the while I was following my Astros through the playoffs, trying to listen to Milo Hamilton and Alan Ashby online in the morning while at work. It's hard to catch American sports live in Asia, because the times are such that you're either at work or you cannot find any places open early enough to show them. Argh! On Saturday, Lynne next went to Hong Kong on her business trip and I joined her. We got there Saturday night and I stayed until Tuesday, she until Wednesday. The first two games of the World Series were on at like 7:00 AM and we did not catch them, but checked up on the games online.

Anyway, Hong Kong was pretty cool. It's a much more international city than Tokyo I think. Where Tokyo is mostly Japanese with a small foreign population (Korean, Chinese, Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, Yanks, etc.), Hong Kong seems to have a more diverse population from all over Asia and the West. It was warmer than Tokyo, probably in the high 70s/low 80s. There are expats everywhere. English and Chinese both are official languages of Hong Kong, so mostly everything is in both languages and most people speak English, which makes it easier to get around. Also it's much cheaper than Tokyo and there's no sales tax, which is probably why there's so much shopping. On Sunday Lynne and I just walked around everywhere, taking the tram, walking the streets of Central, getting lost and finding our way. I ended up getting a pretty stellar long black wool coat with a Chinese cut and with fur on the inside of the collar that's removable. Plus they gave me a free Chinese style shirt. Lynne had a business meeting on Monday, so I mostly just walked around by myself in the Kowloon district, on the mainland China side. It was so crowded and there were little markets strung about everywhere I went. There was a flower market, jade market, goldfish market, camera market, Chinese goods market, Western goods market, and so on. If I had found more time, I would have gone to see the Giant Buddha on Lantau Island near the airport, but first you have to get there and then it's a couple hour roundtrip walk up and down the mountain. Lynne and I met up later and went to take the Peak Tram up to Victoria Peak, which is a high mountain right on the edge of the city. In the old colonial days, the only people who took the train up the peak were the wealthy people who lived up there and the few Chinese workers who worked for them. The ride up was freakier than I expected. It's on a 45 degree angle and goes really slow, like that first hill of the Texas Cyclone but about 10 times higher. And it stopped halfway up to let some people off! You ride alongside buildings that look crooked because you're at such an incline. But once you get to the top the view is really amazing. We were told to go at night and hopefully get lucky that there would be no haze or fog, and we lucked out. There is a walkway that goes almost entirely around the top of the peak. And there are some huge homes up there. We had dinner at a place overlooking the city and sat outside on the balcony.

The only thing I noticed about Hong Kong is that the air was pretty grimey and hazey, it's no place for a sensitive nose. I came down with some kind of allergies on my last day in Hong Kong and was coughing up a storm. But I bought some medicine in the Hong Kong airport and am slowly recovering. So then I arrived back into Tokyo sick and had to go back to work and miss the next two games of the World Series, but alas the Astros returned to their familiar form in getting you all riled up and excited and pooping out at the end. Swept in the series. I need time to contemplate this and get over it. I'm still proud that they got so far having come from where they came from in the middle of the season. Still, it hurts.

Hiroshima & Miyajima

This past week we had off Monday and Friday for Japanese holidays (Respect for the Aged Day and Autumnal Equinox Day, respectively). Thursday evening I flew with a colleague to Hiroshima and nearby Miyajima island for a couple days vacation. It was really nice to get out of Tokyo for a bit and see some other areas of Japan. I plan to go to Kyoto, the old ancient capital, sometime in the fall and also skiing somewhere in Honshu or Hokkaido in the winter. Being in Hiroshima was strange, being in an area where an atomic bomb was dropped. I learned a lot at the Peace Memorial Museum. Like how the bomb was designed and why and why it eventually dropped on Hiroshima. I didn't know that Albert Einstein was involved either. Some German-descended physicists in the US knew that the fission reaction was discovered in Germany in 1939 and they convinced Einstein to sign a letter to FDR to propel the research and design of a bomb for the protection of the US. $2 billion dollars were spent on its design. In early 1945, Japan was being bombarded daily from US airplanes. They had originally intended on dropping the bomb on Germany, but later decided on Japan because they believed Germany could gather more information on developing the bomb if it had been dropped on them instead. Also the US was trying to lessen the influence of the growing Soviet Union and believed that dropping it on a weakened Japan would keep it from going to war with the USSR and eventually being overtaken by the Soviets. During the Allied bombing of Japan in 1945, a few cities were left untouched in order to properly measure the full impact of the atomic bomb. Out of the five cities on the list, Hiroshima was a military center, an education center, had a population of more than 200,000, and there were no known Allied POW camps in the city. So the decision was made to drop it on Hiroshima.

The island of Miyajima is really gorgeous and peaceful. It is an ancient sacred island in Japan, where no one is allowed be born or die, there are no hospitals or cemeteries on it. The island has shrines, the floating torii, a five-storied pagoda, an old town village, etc. You can also take a tram to the top of the mountain on the island, but we ran out of time to do that. In all, it was a nice trip.

While I was on vacation, I was trying to keep in touch with my parents in Houston via text messaging as Hurricane Rita was approaching. Luckily, they avoided the brunt of the storm, as it hit more in the Port Arthur and Beaumont areas, about 100 miles away from Houston. The only news I could get in Hiroshima was the coverage on BBC.

Nothing much else to report from Tokyo right now.

Been Away

Man, have I been busy. Moving, getting set up at new apartment, work, work events, my teammate at work was out for nearly 3 weeks, blah, blah, blah. What has changed. Hurricane Katrina hit and wiped out Southern Louisiana and Mississippi. Some friends of friends and their families living in New Orleans lost everything. Lots of people evacuated and will probably end up staying in Houston for good. Supreme Court Justice Rehnquist passed away.

While all of this was going on, I was busy moving into my new apartment. The first four days the air conditioning didn't work and I was sleeping in a pool of sweat with my windows open. After the first 14 days in my new place, I get a gas bill for nearly $64. Yesterday I finally received my shipment from the US after living in hotels since March. The first thing I did was test out my stereo and guitar amp. Whew, all is well. And I finally got internet service yesterday, too. As my friend Jennifer put it, "ahh, furniture and email". My friend Brent had his annual Lukarita party, which I was sorry to miss. My sister got a teaching job for this school year in Denver, so she was excited about that. She had a birthday a couple weeks ago, but I still have not been able to get in touch with her (Linsey, dadgummit!! :) This past weekend I ran a 5K/10K charity race at the Japan Imperial Palace. My company got 1st place in both the men's and women's 5K (no, it wasn't me). Later that same day, we had a BBQ for the IT group of my company at a park near Tamagawa River. I got slightly sunburned from being outside all day and today it's peeling away. I went to get money out of the ATM a couple weeks ago and, as my mind was so drained and occupied, I forgot to get the 10,000 yen out of the machine and didn't realize it until a few hours later. Idiot! But then this weekend as I was leaving the charity race, what did I find but 10,000 yen on the ground in the park with nobody in sight. Karma! Or else God is really bored and just messing with me.

Now I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to catch the Texas vs. Ohio State game this Sunday morning at 9 AM, because no sports bars I've found in Tokyo are open at that time. Gotta find a webcast or something. Any ideas, please email me.