More Wanderings Through Asia

The fourth country I will visit this year (so far South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan) will be Thailand!

I must admit I'm a bit undecided about the merits of this country, although my previous visit only lasted a grand total of 3 days. That time I went to Ko Samet, but this time I'll be travelling down to the south and staying on the famously beautiful Ko Phi Phi. Plus the inevitable visit to that unique city Bangkok.

Yahoy!

A Shiny New Camera!

Given my increasing interest in photography, and my desire to continue touring the world, promoting my own brand of "internationalisation", I've decided to invest in a shiny new SLR camera! It's a Nikon D40 SLR, brimming with shinyness, and with much potential for buying hideously expensive lenses in the future if I so decide. Here are a few test shots from todays pool match (more of which below)





The Football Shirt Test








The Turtle Test







The Beatles Test







The Philip Jones Test







The Pool Test

Anyway. The Pool. Today was much like the day Blues lost 7-0 to Liverpool in the FA Cup Quarter Finals- a day best forgot. And so my 9-2 defeat to Phil tonight will thus be recorded here (as will his luck all night, as well as my distraction by other matters), and we will move on.

Matsuyama

Last weekend I went on a round trip to Matsuyama, Shikoku. Me and Miwa drove across into Hiroshima-ken on saturday, down onto Shikoku via several bridges spanning the Inland Sea, then back east on Shikoku and across the Seto-Ohashi on sunday.

Highlights include the most boring museum I have ever been to, the Asakura Towel Museum (so boring that even my ironic fascination at the towel exhibits only lasted five minutes), overly friendly petrol station staff who insisted on cleaning the inside of the car whilst we were in it, and a shiny castle well worth visiting. We also managed to get to Dogo Onsen, the famous building frequented by Japanese literary giant Soseki Natsume, and the setting for his book Botchan, which depicts a new teacher being contracted out to rural "inaka" Japan (a must read for JETs stuck in this situation!).

The return journey saw me finally cross my local bridge, the Seto-Ohashi Hashi, the longest bridge in the world! Or maybe the 3rd longest. But really long and shiny. Hurrah for the Seto-Ohashi Hashi! It was a cloudy day but the stormy 気持ち　added to the ambiance of the final photo (besides, I've seen the Seto Ohashi in sunny weather many many times).

The Pool Just Got Serious

You may or may not have seen a post under this title last night. That post is gone, and a new one will be written to chronicle the madness of what happened on Thursday 14th June. The events were of such psychological importance that they forced my opponent Phil to create an "imaginery press conference to myself on the train home" (see http://firipujonzu.blogspot.com/ for a reasonably balanced appraisal of the game).

Basically, and without going into the detail that Phil's blog does, he started very brightly in a pool match I had to win to level the series at 3-3. He was unlucky to lose the first, made up for it in the second and I took the third to make the score 2-1. From there I managed to stretch my lead to a commanding 5-2 through clever hold-up play and the ability to come back into the game while Phil was frustrated on the black. Needless to say, it's testament to his temparament that he didn't let these could-have-been games affect his confidence, and he powered back into the game to eventually take it 6-5. I missed a couple of absolute sitters that would have given me victory, but now I'm 4 matches to 2 down in the series, and will have to fight all the way to get myself back into it.

How far we have come from a few weeks ago, eh Phil? The monday night meet up started as an idle way to catch up on the weeks events over a few beers and a few games of pool. Yet now not a drop of alcohol is touched, we spend days thinking of strategies to psych each other out, and a deathly silence falls over the later games of every match as beads of sweat roll down our faces (this could just be Japan's ridiculous climate tho). Even the owner of the bar (if you can call it that) will soon be drawn in to referee as the competition heats up (he's on my side though, which is good).

Stay tuned for next mondays showdown, which could see me claw back to 4-3, or go down to a worrying 5-2 deficit.

Random Japanese Lesson

Inspired by a mention of this on my Welsh friends blog, I thought I'd provide a quick Japanese lesson for all you readers...

1. キリン　means "giraffe" in Japanese, and is pronounced (for those who can't read katakana) "kirin".

2. 麒麟 is also pronounced "kirin", however it is written, as you can see, with two of the least used and most difficult kanji that there are. It means mythical magical beer-drinking dragon.

Hai. Lesson over!

Golfing Fun!

Having already tried Japan's first sporting love at Shonan (baseball) I got the chance to try it's second today- golf! It seems that after their youth and energy is sapped by the steady passage of time, Japanese men, staring retirement in the face, take up the sport that we all know isn't really a sport. En mass.

Yoshida sensei (Shonan) seems to play every weekend, and practice several times a week. And today I experienced the thrills of golf firsthand with Sugihara sensei at the driving range. Having already managed to read books, watch videos, surf the net all day and even play Wii sports with another teacher there, I wasn't surprised when we got permission to take off from Seishi High for a couple of hours of golfing fun.

Sugihara sensei is a good golf sensei- at first I was hacking wildly at the ball, but by the end the ball's flight was truly poetry in motion. Except I killed a sparrow! I suppose they usually guess the path of various golf balls quite well, but this guy clearly underestimated the ridiculous angles which I could make it fly off at. Taihen desu ne.

Anyway, yesterdays grudge pool match with Pip was postponed till Thursday, so that's the date of my next sporting challenge...

A Few Extra Pics, This Time From Kobe

As the post title suggests, here are a few pics from the Kobe Conference. First up is Reed jammin' at the Brazilian restaurant we went to on his b'day. It had nine different kinds of meat on skewers! What more could you wish for.

The remaining two pics are some of the Okayama JETs- Bernie and Amy from Oz, and Reed, Dennis and Marshall from the States, plus in the second picture Meghan from Canada.