w00kie’s ramblings

I missed the Keynote because I'm sick like a dog (went rafting/canyoning this weekend in a 7ºC mountain river) and couldn't bear to stay up until 3 A.M., but today I'm telling my boss I'm taking a day off on July 11th.

Update: link to the official Softbank press release.

2 weeks ago I went to Hiroshima for the weekend with my girlfriend. We had dinner (and innumerable drinks) with a friend of hers on Saturday night in the 本通 area at what must be the restaurant with the most perfect レバー焼き鳥 I've ever tasted.

Anyways, I received as omiyage the following which made me laugh a lot:

It's a set of senbei rice-crackers inscribed with examples of 広島弁, the local Hiroshima dialect. Whenever we're in Hiroshima, my girlfriend reverts to her roots and drops the Tokyo accent she acquired, especially when she's with her high-school friends. I'm usually totally lost...

The results for the 日本語能力試験, more commonly known as JLPT 2008, should be getting in everyone's mailbox in the imminently and it shows:

Visits to my blog post of receiving the results last year have been spiking in the past week.

Good news: a colleague of mine got it in the mail this morning before coming to work, so most people in Japan should have it tonight or tomorrow.

Bad news: the people at the JLPT organization are mail nazis (not delivering the papers if your name is not on your mailbox, imposing crazy processes to let them know you changed address) and since I moved just before taking the test there is a pretty good chance that I will never receive the damn results.

Today, February 3rd, is the day of Setsubun in Japan. As we live in a new place, my girlfriends mother told her we had to start on the right foot and follow the good old traditions to bring us luck.

On this day, which marks the turning point between winter and spring, you have to kick the 鬼 or demons out your house and bring the 福 or good fortune in. This is done by having someone dress up as an 鬼 and throwing 福豆 at them while chanting 「鬼は外！福は内！」 which is a whole bunch of fun.

Then you put a 厄よけ out your door to ward off any evil spirits that would like to come back in. It's some sort of mistletoe-like bouquet on which you stick fish heads, the smell of which is supposed to scare demons.

I'm back home, in Paris, for Christmas week. It's the 1st time I come home since I left for Japan 2 years ago (I had an 18 hour stopover once in early 2006 on my way to a business trip in Czech Republic but it doesn't really count).

It really feels strange to be back in the motherland. First there's the obvious culture shock: I wasn't even off the plane when the pilot announces over the PA system that there are abandoned luggage near our gate's conveyor and we'd have to wait 15-20min for the police to "secure the premises"...

So we were 35min early, no biggy still 20min ahead of schedule when this hurdle clears up. We're finally let off the plane, but then right before getting to immigration, a security gate blocks us for no obvious reasons. Again we wait, 15 minutes, no information from any airport staff, and when finally we're let through I check the time and it's exactly the time we were supposed to land. I guess it would've looked bad on the record to let people out early.

Anyways, enough with tales of the great efficiency of Paris' Charles de Gaulles international airport. Worse than that for me is walking on the streets of Paris or taking the Metro and listening to all the meaningless conversations around me. It irritates me to unfathomable levels.

I can't help it: living in Japan, you develop a superhuman capacity to spot your own language from great distances (kind of like Spiderman's danger detection spider-sense). But when I'm back home, this ability backlashes and I go into sensory-overload, unable to tune-out or ignore the dullest dribbles of conversations in my vicinity.

It's hell on earth, and I find myself seeking the soothing sound of Japanese tourists' high-pitched 「すてき！！！」 and other exclamations in front of Notre-Dame...

I was in Kagura Saturday for a my second day snowboard of the season. We left at 5:30AM to get there by 7AM, get dressed and catch the first ropeway car up the mountain. I was snowing big flakes the whole day, no wind. Deep powder everywhere, leg-deep out in the forest where we spent the whole day, almost Hokkaido-good.

The station reported 80cm of fresh snowfall over the weekend. It really looks like the start of a great season!

Sunday December 2nd is for many of us in Japan the dreaded day of 日本語能力試験 - also known as JLPT or Japanese Language Proficiency Test. But this weekend is also the start of what looks like the best ski season I've seen since I've come to Japan.

Trying out my new snowboard gear on 130cm of snow in Kagura or studying for the ２級. It's a tough call...

Sunday as I was going to the old apartment to give back the keys, I had the nice surprise to find both my JLPT convocation and my Flying Blue VISA credit card. Nice surprise since I was rejected twice by the Japanese VISA company and I was starting to lose hope. The situation was getting critical as I am now paid exclusively in Yen on my Japanese bank account and all my French credit cards will turn up dry soon.

As with a lot of things here, VISA and Mastercard credit cards are not handled by their global mother companies. They are a separate entities that barely have ties with the rest of the world. A good example is trying to use your overseas Mastercard in a Japanese ATM, even though it has the Mastercard logo which should indicate compatibility, it will not give you any money unless you use give it a real Japanese Mastercard. A subtlety that has left countless tourist sleeping under a Tokyo bridge...

In the same way, foreigner have a great deal of problems obtaining a credit card in Japan. I've seen many a story of people with very good situations getting rejected dozens of times by these companies while the average Japanese has 6-7 cards in his wallet. They fall victim to this apparent fear that the gaijin is always here for fun, temporarily, and will definitely accumulate mounds of debts and leave the country without word in 6 months.

Anyways, now I'm safe, I can give in to Japanese consumerism and buy tons of gadgets, all the while accumulating Air France mileage to fly away from this godforsaken country, leaving all my debts behind me like the white-faced barbarian that I am...

As my moving in date approaches I'm getting all the preparations done, canceling utilities contracts and setting up new ones, packing, etc; all of this stuff is racing around my head 24/7 and lately I started having really weird dreams.

I remember one vividly from last week. I was showing off my new apartment to my friends. Inside, it was the same really cool apartment as the one I'm moving into in real life, with the same price, but the dream one was not out in the boondocks, 20min into Saitama from Ikebukuro: this one was in 松濤, a very cool neighborhood just behind Shibuya where 2 of my very rich expatriate friends live. The problem is, a 60m2 apartment in a brand new building over there is nowhere near ¥140.000 a month, I guess it would be more around ¥600.000 and that would still be cheap.

So how could I find such an apartment for such a dirt cheap price? Well that's what I start explaining to my friends when we get there (I'm still in the dream here) and I tell them that there is no front door and that we have to come in through the windows...

After waiting a week for an answer from the owner to the real-estate agent, we finally called him up yesterday and were told the apartment was ours.

Now all I've got to do is have my company sign all the papers and we can set a date to move-in, hopefully by the beginning of November. I will be living in a 60m² 2LDK apartment on the 6th floor of a brand new building 2-minutes from Shiki station on the Tobu Tojo line. That's 20minutes from Ikebukuro by express and 37 minutes from where I take the company's bus in the morning to get to my office.