June 2003

June 29, 2003

The music page is all up and running, and I must say that I'm pretty happy with the way that it's turned out. I've actually put up a sound clip that goes along with Mike's review, so you can actually get a taste of what he's talking about. Mike, I am told, is feverishly working on the next installment, so stay tuned.

In other news, starting Tuesday I will be assuming my new position as the head teacher at my school. As this is my first management position, I have already resolved that I should become drunk on what little power I will have. My first initiative will be to get all of the teachers at my school to address me as 'Sultan', and to begin referring to myself only in the third person. The Sultan has no other initiatives planned as of now.

Laura and the Sultan are anxiously looking forward to their holiday, which is coming up quickly. Woo hoo!

June 21, 2003

I got the new format together for the music page, which is looking substantially better...trouble is that my web host is having some troubles with their servers so I haven't been able to post anything. I scanned in some photos that I had forgotten about, so I'm hoping to put some of those up this weekend...but we'll have to see how that goes.

Two of the most senior teachers at my school are taking off, headed for greener pastures, and it's really starting to set in just how transient the ex-pat community can be over here. After Tracy and Johnny leave the country, there will only be one other guy at the school who's been around longer than me...which is really strange, seeing as I was the new kid for a very long time.

Rainy season persists here in K-town, and we're definitely looking forward to the sun, whenever it comes. The humidity is absolutely deadly, and I thought I was going to keel over dead this morning in Aikido class.

Speaking of Aikido, I've put together a really fun video of my test - all edited and stuff - that I'll be bringing home next month...it's all very high-tech.

June 19, 2003

Sorry to have been so lax on putting anything up on the website lately, but I've been working hard to meet the self-imposed deadline of having the first chapter of my book done before I visit home. As of this morning I'm at 8,219 words, or 18 computer typed pages. My outline calls for just under 25 for the first chapter, so I'm almost there. Everything is going well, though I'm not sure if 'Cedric the Persistent' is the best name for my main character...what do you think? Does he sound valiant enough?

June 16, 2003

I'm going to try and do a little more work on the music page today...we'll see how it goes.

We are fully in the midst of rainy season here in Kyoto. Though we somehow managed to give it a miss last year, it has come back in full force this time around...it's been raining all week.

Tonight I test again in Aikido, which is good news. Though I'm a little nervous to have to do the test in front of about 100 people, I'm still a little excited. Wish me luck!

June 13, 2003

Though it's still a work in progress, the beginnings of the music page is up. It's not really the look I want just yet, but Mike wrote up his first album review and I thought it would be good to get it up right away...so here it is.

There will be more coming, and I'll likely be doing a bit of a redesign on that page, but I hope you enjoy it for now. Thank you, Mike, for getting this going!

June 12, 2003

Time is certainly slipping by without me noticing here...sorry to have not put up a post in a while! This week and last week have been pretty busy, largely because I had to work some overtime and only got a one day weekend...and on that weekend we went to look at an apartment.

Apartment hunting seems to have its own challenges in Japan. All of the listings are in Japanese (of course) but most of all, many apartment owners won't take foreigners as tenants. Regrettably, the ones that will usually own absolute dumps, limiting the foreign population to a particularly dismal selection of places to live. With the apartment we looked at on Monday, the answer to Laura's question "Are there cockroaches in this apartment" was an immediate and unequivocal "Of course." Hmmm. I'm not sold.

The other apartment we know of that's coming up for rent is much worse. Freezing in the winter (nothing but an old kerosene heater), boiling in the summer (no AC) it also boasts a wide variety of local fauna including mice, cockroaches and poisonous centipedes. Not too high on my list, really.

In other news, as predicted, SARS is rapidly slipping from the Japanese collective consciousness. Comments are on the rapid decline, and Laura and my sanity levels are on a reciprocal increase. Hooray!

June 6, 2003

The SARS scare continues to be the flavour of the month here as far as news is concerned, and the topic is becoming somewhat tiresome. Every conversation seems to turn to how dangerous Canada is, and somehow the Japanese seem to believe that things in Toronto are so bad that even the surrounding wildlife must be threatened.

Ironically, another main story on the SARS front over here is about an infected Taiwanese doctor who travelled through this area. Incredibly, though he came into contact with probably hundreds or thousands of people during his visit, no one was infected. This tells one of two things: either a) the Japanese are overestimating the terrors and dangers of SARS to a comical degree, or b) SARS is already here and it's being covered up.

Either way, people here prefer to think of it as a 'foreign disease'. When I try to explain that, in fact, SARS is not rampant in the community in Canada, people's eyes glaze over as if they think I must be hopelessly in denial. Meanwhile, a growing problem around these parts is foreigners being refused service in hotels, restaurants and public baths because of the 'dangers of SARS'.

A student at Laura's school gave a perfect example of this. Laura's student is a Korean studying at a university in Kyoto, and he was furious when he was forced - along with all of the other foreign students - to undergo testing for SARS. Of course, none of his Japanese classmates were tested. And naturally it didn't matter that he had lived in Japan for 6 years, or that he hadn't left Japan in some time, or that he was originally from a country that has no known cases of the disease within its borders.

June 3, 2003

Laura and I had an amazing day yesterday; we did a repeat of the trip down the Hozu River by boat. The weather was beautiful, and the ride was amazing. We finished up by going for dinner in a skewer restaurant in Arashiyama, where they made us 21 different kinds of skewers...yum.

There were posters all over the town warning about something to do with SARS, and when we told people we were from Canada everyone reacted with shock, and muttered about how dangerous Canada was. It's funny, I remember the good old days when saying "I'm from Canada" generally elicited the response "Wow, Canada's a beautiful country." Now the admission has people scrambling for their surgical masks. It's strange having one's country associated with disease.

And one more piece of news that I almost forgot...this month I get to test for my next rank in Aikido. This will be my second test here in Japan. This next one will be in front of a lot of people, so I will have to study hard, I think.

June 1, 2003

We had a little taste of a typhoon yesterday, which was an interesting experience. It didn't rain too much, but we had some pretty severe winds...I woke up to find most of the plants on our balcony horizontal.

Laura and I are really looking forward to our trip home next month, although any mention of Toronto around these parts only gets one gasps of alarm and surprise, with people asking "But isn't that dangerous?" Yes, SARS is the flavour of the month for the media here, which seems to focus on only one story at a time.