w00kie’s ramblings

Yesterday we received a Christmas present / New Year's gift from 愛子's father.

Around a Kg of 和牛 - Japanese beef from Yamanashi prefecture. If you're thinking "meh, it's just meat...", stop right there, retail price must be over ¥30.000 (almost 300€).

Straight in the frying pan with some delicious garlic. Look at those beautiful nervings of fat permeating through the meat... *drool*

And a nice bottle of wine to complement the meal. You can't eat meat like this with any little cheap bordeaux from the supermarket downstairs so we picked this up at Isetan Shinjuku.

All set (except the forks and knives, forgot to put them in before the photo...), thanks dad! The taste was incredible and you barely need to chew, it almost melts on your tongue.

PS: so that my parents don't get jealous, I also received a huge pack full of foie gras, paté, rillettes, cassoulet, cuisses de canard confites from them and will post about it when I will eat it.

Christmas dinner at home after a horrible day at work.

It's christmas day and I'm at the office, working...

Actually, it's nothing unusual for Japan where the 25th is a day like any other day. But this year is special: you should know that I work for a big French automotive parts manufacturer, and this is not a very fun time for us.

Car production is down ~30% over all the industry, which means we also must cut our production by 30%. So our manufacturing plants all over the world are shutting down 1 or 2 weeks early for new year vacations.

But then, since part of my job is support, not only for Japan but for all our plants around the world, I have to be there in an empty office in an empty factory on Christmas day in case the phone rings or an email comes in requiring my mad skills...

*crickets chirping*... yeah, right...

Received my self-christmas present this weekend and tried it out over the weekend in a 新宿３丁目 wine bar.

It's the new 50mm f/1.4 lens from Nikon and the bokeh is to die for.

I took the test last Sunday at Surugadai University in Hanno, way out at the feet of the mountains west of Tokyo. Usually I'm assigned to Saitama Daigaku which is 10min of taxi from my new place, but I guess this year they thought I was too close and needed to suffer a bit more than usual... So I took my 1h+ train ride in the freezing cold of this Sunday morning of December a 7:30am to meet my doom: the grammar test...

As usual these past couple of years, the whole test with solutions were out on chinese websites a mere hours after the end of the examination. People in the USA have it easy with the jetlag.

I don't want to check the answers. I'm pretty sure I did the same thing as last year: 60~65% on kanji, 85~90% on listening and utterly failed the reading/grammar part...

See you next time archnemesis!!!

I've been wondering about this for a long time: why are たこ always represented wearing 鉢巻?

I mean, I understand the mouth, but where does the headband come from? Is it because hachimaki is a symbol of hard workers and the tako with its 8 "arms" must be good at multi-tasking?

Photo courtesy of kamoda

This morning, on my way to work, my train stopped one express station after mine. Some accident had happened on the line and the traffic was stopped for 2-3 hours. No way I could get to work, and once the train would start running again there'd be no bus left to bring me from the station to my office (it sucks working in a factory out in the middle of nowhere).

So I startend to head back home. Trains were out, I decided to give the bus a try: no bus connection from this station back to my home. Taxis? The line in front of the taxi stop climbed back up the stairs all the way to the ticket gates... All that's left was to hoof it up along the tracks.

It took me 45 minutes to get back home for a 5 minutes ride of express train. On my way I passed by the place of the accident and caught some shots of the train's broken windshield. There were 5 or 6 TV helicopters circling above.

UPDATE: Jeff, over at JapanProbe.com, fished out the news article related to this accident along with a picture of the K-car that was crushed and the throngs of salarymen walking along the tracks like I did.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don't know if we will see any real difference here with Democrats instead of Republicans at the helm over there. All I know is this made me laugh right after lunch.

A friend of mine who works in a cargo ship brokering firm forwarded me a market report written by another broker:

Following the American erections last week, it is expected that Mr. Obama will decrease the Japanese car import ratios starting next year.
[...]
Thankfully, most Japanese cars exported to America sport an automatic transmission as most Americans are not comfortable holding a stick, according to a poll conducted few hours after the erections.

I spent last weekend, which was a 3-day holiday with 文化の日 on monday, in 軽井沢, which could be compared to the Gstaad or Courchevel of Japan. Of course, it's a pretty far-fetched comparison: the ski-station could barely be called a hill, but anyways that's where all the rich CEO's buy fabulous chalets and come chill out in the weekends playing golf, tennis and splurging on designer clothes at the gigantic outlet mall that sits next to the Shinkansen station. That's the Japanese way...

I was invited by a friend to his company's country house. That's one of the perks of working for a company that makes profits, unlike me and the automotive industry.

We spent the weekend contemplating the 紅葉 (and manically taking pictures) that has started already in the mountains of Nagano prefecture. Pictures are trickling down on my flickr photostream as I get to treat them from the RAW format of my new camera through Aperture. It's a lot tougher than what I'm used to on my Ricoh GR Digital but the result is worth the effort.

I bought a Nikon D60 this weekend for ¥37,000 with a cashback I've got to fill out that'll get me a further ¥5,000 off.

As you can see I'm having a lot of fun with the DSLR, shooting RAW and messing around with Aperture. I'm hoping I'll have tons of cool photos coming to my flickr stream and this blog as I start to get a handle of my new toy.