w00kie’s ramblings

Since my girlfriend is in town and I have tons of vacations to take before the end of my contract, I organized a special night out in Tokyo with her last week. I'm such a romantic guy...

First we went for drinks and dinner at her favorite restaurant: T.Y. Harbor Brewery in 天王洲アイル. It's a Californian cuisine restaurant in a sort of hangar (not the old crummy ones, the cool ones that they transform in loft apartments and hype designer offices) right on the canals of Shinagawa. The place also brews it's own beer in big vats behind the bar. Dinner is a bit expensive at 5-8,000￥ per person but the food is really delicious and the portions are big.

Then we headed to our hotel: the Park Hotel Tokyo in 汐留メディアタワー. I had booked a room with a special plan guaranteeing a window facing straight on the Tokyo Tower. We had a little scare as we came in the room at 12:05am and as I opened the curtains I couldn't find the tower: they had turned off the lights! I was really pissed... As my girlfriend had forgotten some cosmectics at home, we headed down to the combini at B2 level and as we came back we had the good surprise to see the Tokyo Tower had been lit back on. I took some cool shots of the view, check them out on my flickr page.

This Saturday, my girlfriend arrived in Tokyo to look for a job, pass some interviews, etc. She'll be staying at my place for 2 weeks or so, hopefully enough to get a good feel of the current job market.

So this Sunday, we went to Kawagoe to scout out the place and see what kind of apartments we can find over there. It's a big town, 300K inhabitants, very lively and only 30min from Tokyo. I'd be happy to live there. But after talking with a real estate agency, we were told it will be hard to find a newish apartment close to the station there and we'd better check out Fujimino for this.

Fujimino is one station down the line, 5min closer to Tokyo on the express train. I had never stopped there before, but always saw the tall apartment buildings, 20+ floors, all around the station. We came out and walked a little bit around, and apart from a couple of conbinis, a McDonald and a little 24/7 mini-market around the station, the town barely has a dozen shops.

The town is so dead and empty that, as I came out of the station in the village I live in, I thought it was really lively (something that would never have crossed my mind the day before). The real estate agent said it well: Fujimino is これから, the question is "will I be there to see it?".

Next weekend, I'm going back to Kawagoe to really see some apartments. I'm hoping I'll find an older mansion that had a renewal not so long ago. You can follow my search on a custom Google Map that I will update with the apartments I visit.

Last week I took a day off work to go apply for my visa renewal in Shinagawa (hoping for 3 years this time). I love spending, every year, 2 1/2 hours listening to kids shout and cry, waiting for my number to come up, and 5 minutes of effective work with the immigration officer.

After that was done, I headed out to Jimbocho / Ochanomizu to meet my friend Germain who was going to help me out buying my first snowboard and related accessories. There is a street there that is lined with snowboard, ski and surf shops. I love this place...

View Larger Map

Here's what I ended up buying:

• Snowboard from K2
• Flow bindings
• Boots from Burton
• Big snowboard bag with wheels for taking the plane to Hokkaido

All of that from last year's collection and between 50% and 65% off. ¥75.000 well spent, now I'll probably be on the slopes every weekend this season to make it worth my while...

This morning, after almost 2 weeks of negociations between HR, my boss and I, I signed my employment contract at Valeo Thermal Systems Japan.

I'm hired for 3 years in a position slightly higher than I had before. I'm staying on the same project and on the same team but I'll drop all the basely technical stuff and focus entirely on functional definitions and architecture of the application we manage.

It's a big relief for me as I will not have that pending visa expiration constantly nagging me and I can start thinking of my longterm life here in Japan.

It also means I'm gonna start paying taxes... It sucks... I guess the universe has to balance itself, to each action a reaction.

Yesterday I went to Tokyo to buy back the sunglasses I had lost on a snowboarding trip some time back. On the way to Omotesando, I dropped by the Swatch store in Shibuya to get my watch bracelet widened - something about drinking too much beer and putting on weight...

So I show my watch to the chick at the counter, tell her it's too small and pull out the extra pieces I had brought with me. She takes the watch and starts disassembling the battery and checking the charge, showing me it's good. I think "ok, this must be standard practice" and watch her as she struggles to put back the battery, scraping the shit out of it with a mini-screwdriver. Once it's back together, she shows me the ticker that is not ticking any more and tells me proudly that it's broken and she can't repair it so I should buy a new one...

WTF? I start telling her that she fucked up, it was moving before, she broke it. After making a big ruckus, the store manager comes out and I have to explain again with my broken japanese. The girl is almost crying, the guy finally understand what happened and start apologizing profusely. Apparently, the chick didn't unserstand what I had asked her and thought I came because something was already wrong with the watch.

He ended up calling all the Swatch stores in Tokyo to find me the same watch, but since it would take at least a week to get there, I finally chose a new one on the spot and left with it for free with all the staff bowing and seeing me out with a few dozen 申し訳ございません.

And sometimes it ends up being pretty freakin' good... Gotta satisfy my french food craves.

I had the worst dream ever yesterday night. To put it back in context, the rainy season just started here and it's becoming unbearably hot and humid, 蒸し暑い as they say it here, but I hadn't turn on my aircon in hope of pushing back the inevitable surge in my electricity spendings.

So the dream started with me killing a colleague of mine around 6 months ago and repressing the memory. But as people around me start asking questions: "Where did he go? No-one heard of him for months?". Memories begin to rush back. That's when I woke up tossing and turning in my sweaty sheets.

But the problem when you wake up in the middle of the night because it's too hot is that you're still half-asleep. So I couldn't shake off the dream and as much as I tried telling myself none of it was true, I kept asking myself what if it was real? The police would come sniffing around. Did I hide the body well enough? I should go back to check the grave. But no! The police might already be following me! I'm gonna end up in jail and get the noose!!! (they hang killers in Japan)

I barely slept 2 hours that night. Now I don't care about the bills, I'm turning on my aircon tonight...

I've got a new hobby. One of my friends with whom I went snowboarding in Hokkaido this winter lives in 湘南 in a cool house 300m from the beach, right in front of 江ノ島.

Since the last month I go surfing there almost every weekend. I can check the weather / wave size on Yahoo! Weather and hop on a train. I got my mother to send me my wetsuit from France by mail, so all I have to pay is the ¥3,150 daily rental fee for a longboard and off I go riding the Pacific's waves.

You never see a photo taken with the flash on in my flickr photostream. That's because I hate flashes, and my GR Digital's flash in particular: it burns everything.

So yesterday, as I was on a day-off and had nothing else to do than watching season 2 of House M.D. and browsing flickr, I got to contemplating buying an external flash like the ones you pt on big SLRs. My camera has a shoe for it and it would let me swivel the flash up to bounce on the roof for a softer effect.

I got my eyes set on a SIGMA EF-500 DG ST as is recommended by my camera's manual. It goes for ¥16,000 on kakaku. I've talked with a friend of mine though, he pointed out that the flash with batteries would weigh around 500g, considerably more than the 200g of my GR.

I can't really visualize like that what it would feel like to have such a bulky contraption sitting on top of my slim camera. I'll try to drop by a shop in Akihabara or Shinjuku and find a nice salesperson to let me have a try...

Last week I received a flickr mail from a woman of Nokia Japan who wanted to have me come over to their headquarters to talk about my usage of flickr, my keitai and other web2.0 apps. I wanted to take a day-off from work anyway so I said "why not" and accepted the invitation.

Friday I headed for the Arco Tower in Meguro in early afternoon and had a 1h30 chat with the Nokia girl who happened to come from Hiroshima and be married to a french guy... What a coincidence!

She asked me a lot of questions about my usage of flickr, twitter, wordpress and how I use them to stay in touch with my friends. She took videos of how I use my keitai, and she also showed me some Nokia prototypes which I'm not at liberty to describe, having signed an NDA.

All in all, it was a fun experience.