Little Greg goes to Kyoto

Imperial Palace, Kyoto

cable car up to Mt. Hiei

one of the temples up Mt. Hiei

Mosquito tally III

HA! make that four.

But, this last one had actually bitten me TWICE! and it was full of my blood when it died...it popped like a little bloody balloon.

DEATH!!!

'Dance Party 2007' - TIEC

...I like it when they do parties here, and this one was particularly swanky. From our dance floor there was a wall of glass which overlooked the Odaiba skyline, as a melody of lights danced across the ceiling and into the night. The Big illuminated Ferris wheel was a lovely backdrop to some deafening dance music.

I was pleasantly surprised by the turn out. But then again, we were all loudly reminded through the dorm PA system that there was a massive party going on tonight... and all the posters and RA's (residential assistants)constantly reminding you, meant that it would be pretty hard to forget.

A huge projector beamed very well timed and choreographed pictures, adding to the atmosphere...there were some very cool looking tables to perch against and put your drinks on, which looked like upturned cones, with lights in the center... very trendy.

The RA run bar was set up in a much better way than the last party, looked far more professional... some people had really put a lot of effort into the night, and I have to say the venue (in the Hesei Plaza) was a much better choice than the ground floor halls in B block that they used for the last big event. Drinks were their usual cheapness of 200 yen for a standard drink... and 300yen if you want a 'special cocktail' mixed for just you.

Best of all it's all free...

Getting home was not an issue...which is also very nice, for a change.

Ode to a Sadistic Bouldering Wall...

Our university has a very convenient sports hall and gym, known as Gotenshita Memorial Arena [御殿下記念館], not only does it hold a swimming pool, as small roped climbing wall, but in the gym; with all the running machines, exercise bikes, yoga balls, horse-riding simulators (yeah, I know, sounds a little obscure, but it's very popular in Japan, free-weights, training equipment, there lies a small bouldering wall. Oh yeah, and the whole complex lies underground. In particular, under a football field (soccer or サッカー).

Now, the Gotenshita is very good value for money. You can either pay a day ticket; 500 yen (if you're a student of Todai [東大] OR, get your arse down to a photo booth, then go to the office and buy a one year pass for 8000 yen, or a half year pass (the price of which escapes me for economic reasons). So, your 40quid gives you the equivalent to unlimited access to the gym, sports halls, showers, swimming pool, climbing walls (IF you're trained to use them - or in my case, just chat to people who are allowed to use them and have key access and get in anyway), and training sessions in a variety of activities, such as: Yoga, TaiChi, Savat, Aerobic Kickboxing, Pool Aerobics....the timetable is pretty packed, and I can't really remember any more off the top of my head. Anyway, it's a great facility even if it's a little dusty and the architect had an obsession with concrete...but hey! I doubt I can get access to these kind of facilities anywhere else, for that price.

Enough about that. What I really wanted to talk about was the evil little bouldering wall in the gym room. When I first arrived and I enrolled to use the bouldering wall, I had a little play during the entirely Japanese induction, and the easiest few routes were a piece of piss... so, I'd usually warm up on the slope then head to the over-hanging part and play with that. Some really interesting problems. After a few months, for some unknown reason, the routes seemed to be getting harder. Odd, i thought. I've been climbing pretty regularly, AND my technique is getting worse?!....ahhhh crap!

Found out that periodically they change the angle of inclination of the wall. bastards. There's a rather innocent looking winch to the right wall of the bouldering wall, and a suspicious inclination marker taped onto the side of the wall. For the past 4 months or so it had been on105 degrees. which was not too bad, as the less-over-hanging side of the wall was definitely still do-able, and the over-hang was just more challenging.

I come back after several months of not bouldering, and try a few things I know I should be able to do, and fail a bit. Weeeeell....haven't been climbing for a while... that's why....errrr NO! I was more suspicious, when I tried climbing the routes I knew were easy, and they were really strained too. WHAT?!?!??! SO, I had a peek at the inclinometer thingy. 115degrees. 10 degrees extra was killing me!

I'm SOOoooooo going to have to practice my over-hang technique.

...what is Yakitori!?

Okay... it's occurred to me that I haven't exactly explained what Yakitori is.

Basically, it's various bits of chicken meat on skewers, barbequed over glowing charcoals. Much like satay, but without the sweet sauce brushed over them whilst cooking. I think the meat is usually marinated before cooking, not during. The main flavours are:

Shio [塩 - しお] - salt,
Tare [たれ] - a sweeter soya sauce marinate...very nice, and
Miso [みそ] - just like the soup, also based on soya.

Sometimes vegetables are skewered between the chicken, sometimes it's just different parts of the chicken; thigh [momo - もも], heart, skin [kawa - かわ]... and so on.

Despite Yakitori, meaning grilled/barbequed chicken. It's not always chicken. Last night we had a Nabe; a kind of Japanese hotpot, there are many variations within Japan alone. There was also, pork, skewered and barbecued.

Yakitori [焼鶏]

Oh. My. GOD!

I have been to, possibly *the* best Yakitori [焼鶏] restaurant EVER!!!!

My Japanese friend, Koya, is leaving for America next Thursday, for ten months. So we were having a little goodbye party, close to Hongo Campus. It was a truly international gathering: Japanese, American, a Japanese that had lived in a lot of different places in American, Chinese, French, and British. The food was excellent, and it just kept coming. Of course, it being a student gathering, it was Nomihodai [飲みほうだい] (all you can drink). But that wasn’t the thing which made this particular Yakitori fanTABulous! It was the absolutely awesome waiter, called Kojima [小島]. Who, had a rather high pitched voice. It was Awwwwwesome! I really couldn’t tell if he was putting it on or it was actually his real voice. He was the *best* waiter EVER! Super-duper nice too. I could have taken him home and wrapped him up.

But then, we also noticed that all the other waiters seemed to have high pitched voices too. However, NONE of them were as good as Kojima’s [小島]!!! He RULES!

We spent most of the night planning how to excuse Koya’s ‘surfing’ into a civil engineering related research topic. I was all for correlating the amount of surfing that Koya does to reduction in Global Warming…I could tell that people were a bit sceptical at first, but I’m sure they’ll come around…

Another visit of this Yakitori is definitely in order.

Aaahhhhhhhhhh! AND! Not only did we have an awesome waiter, but they taught me a new Japanese ‘thing’. A way of sending people off, or saying ‘goodbye’: involves rhythmic clapping. Can only really be demonstrated. I shall endeavour to recreate it for you. I’m going to bring it to the UK with force! It will be Amazing!

Kurobe Dam - Day 2

...That night there was another bug... this time it was one I actually recognised... a nice yellow centipede. Which was pretty damned fast, and really wanted to go to my bedroom (BAD!). We spent a while trying to bat it to go downstairs and hopefully outside, but it managed to squirrel itself into the stairs and refused to go outdoors.... Anyhow, it was better than being in my room....

Mr. Centipede

We were reasonably free in the morning, so we had a little wonder around looking at more engineering stuff (or if you were Greg...the pretty scenery, while laughing at the engineers taking photos of very dull looking things)

A heavily engineered river bank...

A waterfall, also highly engineered; ie. it was so constrained the river was in a pipe....

A steel-arch type bridge thingy....

Then we grabbed a quick lunch in town and met up with the rest of our group at the train station to make our way up to the main dam...We took a special little train up the valley, it was tiny and powered by a orange diesel engine at the front.

A cunningly disguised water control tower...looking suspiciously like a western castle...

Our little train making it's way up the single track...

The final stop ended up in a tunnel, and then a big metal door and no more train tracks....We got off the train and the train headed back to the main station back at the bottom of the valley. The big doors turned out to be some huge industrial lift...which took us up a good few hurndred meters. Getting out of the lift there was a second train waiting...we could fit about 6 of us in a carriage and we sat in it for a good while no seeing anything out of the windows but concrete...

inside the lift

Just outside of the lift....and Yamada-san 山田さん (assistant technician) looking particularly unimpressed...

Inside the tunnel train...taking us further up the valley...

the train eventually emerged from the tunnels onto a chunky looking steel bridge, to the right was a small concrete dam...but it was mainly nice to see the sun again....We definitely weren't taking the normal tourist route...it was the workers entrance.


We then got into a shoddy looking counter-weight cable car...which went up some vicious gradient...

View up the shaft which the counter-weight cable car was trying to get us up...

We had a bit of a walk through some tunnels before we reached a gated entrance to the control center of the dam. We were eventually let in and led to a huge board room with a scale model of the Kurobe Valley and the dam catchment area. It was an awesome model with also opened out to show you a cross-section of the dam too :D

We were also taken down to the turbine rooms, which was noisy (much the same as the dam I saw in Greece), but still cool, have a video of it somewhere....

The Turbine hall...the turbines with lights on are working....obviously, the number of turbines they operate depends on consumer demand...

sexy photo of the turbine blades...

At some point we must have emerged into daylight again....after wandering around in dark and cool tunnels for a while, and we ended up at the top of the dam. And it was drizzling...

mmmmmm.....concrete....

I have to say that Greg has more photos of the trip than I do....but I think you've seen enough concrete for now...

Kurobe Dam - Day 1

Okay...it's taken me a while to post *this* one! I was just browsing through my DRAFTS....and it's been here for yonks...so just a quick summary of the photos that we took when we went on the Lab Field trip to Kurobe Dam 黒部ダム which I think was some time back in September...but i'm a bit hazy about it all now...Greg was definitely on his One Month 'Holiday' in Japan at the time....and it was still damned hot an humid in Japan...

We'd left from outside our Department quite early in the morning, and sat on the bus for the majority of the day...making the odd stop at service stations...we eventually got to our Ryokan 旅館 in the early afternoon, we off loaded and got our rooms sorted...

In the only girls room we found a lovely grasshopper thing...which everyone stared at for a good few minutes, before I deftly swept it out of the window (mainly because nobody else, including the boys who wondered into the room wondering what the squealing was about, would touch it...)

It was quite large...honest...

After pissing about in our rooms for a bit, we all decided to have a little walk around the Ryokan, to see what the area was like....it was very peaceful...majestic mountains and quite a large river flowing by...


What looked like a nice little 'beach' on the side of the river....the mass of metal is some sculpture type thing which makes up a view point along the river...we crossed a nice bridge to get to it...

A close up of the view point...

View down stream....from said view point.

On our wanders around town we came across a free foot spa...

...Greg soon realised that he was hanging out with a lot of engineering geeks, we'd stop and take photos of very weird things... usually walls holding back soil...and every bridge that we came across...on the other hand we just found it strange that he was taking pictures of 'scenery'.....

yay! more bridge....

mmmm......concreeeeteeeeee, aren't abutments exciting?

Anyway, we did eventually drag ourselves away from the dam (much to some peoples dissappointment - they'd wanted to go have a better look at the dam...) and head back to the ryokan for a big dinner with all the students and professors... some people proceeded to get very, very drunk on sake....several ppl were later found rather inebriated lying beside the foot spa in town...

Hurray for my frog!!!!

I am very very happy for my かえる!!!!

Mosquito tally II

... make that 3.

one just died after some serious contact with a pile of sand and my murderous, gloved, hands...
mwhahaha!

Mosquito tally...

2 down.

A small victory.
But considering many of their friends have been sipping my blood merrily...I think they are winning...

FINALLY ! Strain Gauges Arrive

I ordered these strain gauges over TWO months ago, well in advance of my stint on the shaking table, 40 of the little cretins arrived a month ago [3m cords]...I was a bit confused because I'd ordered 120 of the buggers, and to receive a small box of only 40 left me a bit bemused. Apparently, the rest would arrive 'later'...errr...how much later? 'a few weeks, I suppose'.

A few weeks MY ARSE!

I specifically ordered 'OFF-THE-SHELF' models, on the account that they would be quicker. A month MAX... and that was meant to be for the bespoke gauges, with the fancy coatings, full water-proofing, invisible force fields and all that jazz. 'OFF-THE-SHELF', 'Off-The-SHELF', 'Off the SHELF'. How hard can it possibly be to find something off a shelf, solder on lead wires (of standard length) and then post the bastards to me?!?! 2 months of pure and unadulterated Japanese inefficiency...fucking A! Well done.

The last 80 (with the more sensible and practical, 5m lead wires) arrived this very afternoon, into my grubby little paws. After, might I add, I'd just finished setting all my existing instrumentation into place in my last...yes last experiment of the current run. The next run starts after I return from Malaysia. In which time, I need to have pasted all 80 gauges on to their respective pipes, calibrated them, setup the logging files, analysed my data from the tests which I have just performed, written a short conference paper for the JGS... and all before HRH gets here.

On the bright-side, I'm busy. Which, I'm loving. I'm getting physical exercise from moving all the sand into and out of my box. I'm getting data. This is all fantabulous.

Right. I need to go to bed. stuff to do.

Procrastination

...must...tear self...away...from...interrrrrnet...

must...commence...preparations...for the ALMIGHTY one....(aka: mum)

mmmmm....bath scrubbing. Fun.

Plant Update

You'll be glad to hear that some of my plants are still alive, despite the killer summer heat. My pepper plants are in fact soldiering on and making me lots of tiny peppers.


I've even added to the colony, Mr. Tomato Plant and Miss. Cherry Tomato (no relation) have also been doing well. Maybe one day they will have their own babies for me to devour. Mwhahahaha!

Monster Apples

Following from the Green Market thing I wrote about a while (OK! so it was ages ago...) I would like to bring you: MONSTER apples.

No ordinary apples could be *this* big...they must be from Mars...possibly Pluto (but that isn't even considered a planet anymore is it?)

I feel it only fitting to sacrifice these monstrosities to some kind of God of Desserts, by slowly removing their skin with a strange, but specially designed instrument of vegetable and fruit torture. Then when I've removed all their skin, they shall be hacked into pieces mixed with spices and sugar. Their raw and spicy flesh shall then be buried under some kind of flour, solidified vegetable oil, sugar mix. THEN, only then, shall they be heated indirectly in some metal box of an inferno. After a couple hours of that, I'll eat them. HA! 'Ha' I say....