w00kie’s ramblings

So as I told you, last weekend I went to stay the night at an onsen resort and I'm having mixed feelings on this little trip.

I went to the Plaza Hotel in 鬼怒川温泉. The hotel was celebrating the 1st anniversary of its renewal, so we were hoping for something really nice. And the photos on the website were true, the hotel was totally new, the rooms looked great... well all the rooms except for 2 floors out of 12... our room being located in one of these unlucky floors...

So instead of a cool, modern, zen style room, we got the old, dusty, mom-and-pop's ryokan room. What a let-down...

Anyways, apart from that the food was excellent (as you can see in the photo below) and the private open-air onsen in little wooden houses up a trail in the mountain was beautiful.

The next day, we considered going straight back to Tokyo since it was raining so bad, but just when we arrived at the station the rain stopped miraculously. So we went to visit 日光 as planned. It was my second time but a first for Aiko and she really liked it. However we missed the last bus to the waterfall and a thick fog fell on the mountain so I still haven't seen it...

Momiji - 紅葉 - is the name of the Japanese maple tree, but it can also be read Kouyou, which is the color the leaves of trees take in autumn. Watching nature around this time of year is a huge event in Japan, almost as big as the cherry blossoms in spring.

So last Saturday I went to a park in the north of Tokyo to see a lightup, an event where they light up the best looking trees around the park at night so you can sit under them drinking 抹茶. The park was full of young couples, old women, and of course photo otakus with all their best gear on hand.

If you want to go see it, the park is open every night until December 7th. It's in the 六義園 close to Komagome station on the Yamanote. All the info is on this website.

Next weekend is a 4-day weekend (well, it is if you take two days of since my company doesn't care about official holidays). My girlfriend and I wanted to make a little trip, so we did what any japanese would do, buy a travel magazine, most of which selling you a one-night trip to an onsen.

You see, heaven for a japanese is a nice view, good food and a hot bath; and anyone who's come to Japan and tried an onsen knows it ain't a bad ideal. So all those magazines come out every month full of hundreds of onsen hotels where you can spend a night (rarely more, as prices are prohibitively high) soaking in your private bath watching the stars, eat traditional food (usually fish) and sleep in a nice futon.

It'll be a first for me, sleeping at the onsen, so I'll be sure to make a detailed report of my experience when I come back.

I just received an email this instant from Amazon. Here's what it says:

『Wii』 予約受付日のお知らせ！

11/17（金）より、予約を開始いたします。購入ページへのリンクは、受付予定日（時間は未定です）にゲームストア にて表示されますので、ご確認ください。
注文数が確保できる商品数を上回った場合は、注文のキャンセルをさせていただく場合があります。その際はＥメールでご連絡いたします。

Which basically means that Amazon opens their pre-orders for the Wii tomorrow (no info about the exact time though). Now I'm torn between waiting in-line in the cold at BicCamera on the day of launch, Saturday December 2, or getting it on internet and running the risk of getting it one week late (I'll probably be in China on a business trip the week just after launch and will not be able to receive the box from Pelican Delivery).

ああっ、どうしようかなぁっ！

This weekend they changed the ticket vending machines in my station and it makes me feel a little bit closer to Tokyo when I buy my ticket every morning.

On the left, the old busted early 80's style machine with old-school orange monochrome screen. On the right, the new model they installed, exactly the same as any Tokyo Metro station (well, the older models they have there). Except we're not on Tokyo Metro, we're on the frickin' Tobu Tojo line, 55 minutes away from Ikebukuro... I really need to move out of this hole...

Sometimes you see really weird cars around where I live. And it being the official "uncool" capital of Japan, you usually get a pretty good laugh. Here's a perfect example:

It was parked yesterday in front of my office in the plant where I work at.

Today, I was checking out the daily comment spams that are caught by my trusty Spam Karma 2 filter and I encountered the king of spam comments, the one that trumps them all. It single-handedly boosted my average spam karma tenfold.

Spam Karma: -546053
-2.5: Encrypted payload valid: IP not matching.
-10: Fake Javascript Payload.
-9.9: 1 blacklist match. (442 = 81.177.22.243 [x1])
-546030.28: Comment contains: 0 linked URLs and 1011 unlinked URLs: total link coef: 758 >= threshold (2). Non-URL text size: 29790 chars.

Of course I will not paste the content of the spam here, it would defeat the purpose of my spam filter, but the sheer number of URLs in the body of the comment, 1011 all of them in plain text and all on the same domain, is by itself impressive.

Today was my 1st anniversary of coming to Japan. It's been a great year for me, I really feel like I've accomplished a lot of things and it makes me feel great. I met a lot of great people here, had a lot of fun and learned a lot.

One regret I have is that I haven't had the time (and the financial resources) to travel around Japan as much as I would've liked. My "new year resolution" will be to correct that and visit the country outside of the Tokyo area. I'm already starting by planning a trip to the onsen in Izu with the girlfriend in the coming weeks. More about it will come soon...

So here's to 1 year in Japan, hoping for a lot more to come.

I've added a new show to my weekly rotation. It's named Dexter and it's just the kind of show I like in a Nip/tuck kind of way.

Dexter, played by Michael C. Hall from Six Feet Under, is a blood splatter specialist for Miami PD. But that's only his day job, at night he sheds his fake identity and goes back to his real self, ie. being a serial killer.

The show is totally politically incorrect. Dexter spends his days being nice to everyone, all the while narrating about his feelings (or lack thereof). There is a new serial killer in town and his job is to help the police to find him, but in fact he's really competing with him.

I highly recommend this show if you're not already overflooded like me...