Superuseless Superpowers
January 25, 2009
Superuseless Superpowers. What a fantastic website! My favorite is “13th Bullet Bulletproof”, the picture tells it all.
More kung fu pictures
January 18, 2009
I got The Woman to join!
I might be late
January 13, 2009
I wrote about the train delay last summer due to a fairly crazy storm that I guess was zapping trains left and right. After commuting from JR Osaka to Shin-Osaka for a year, I can tell you that the well-thought idea that Japanese trains are always on schedule is a big fat lie. I would guess that the train I took to school were late at least once a week.
Of course, when I say late, I usually mean by a couple of minutes, nothing to get worked up about. I have my Ipod, I have my sudoku on my phone, I have enough patience. Once every so often though, the train comes really late. I have learned that when a train comes as late as 55 minutes, and when another train that heads in the same direction is diverted to another platform, it usually means someone killed themselves by jumping in front of a train. It’s actually a fairly common problem in Japan. People, if you must kill yourself, do it in your own home and don’t make a mess – it just inconveniences other people.
When a train does come late, the train stations offer little slips of paper that have the date and how many minutes the train came late. It’s like a note from your parents that you gave to your teacher when you were late or sick for school.
You give this slip to your boss and hope that he doesn’t make you stay until 3am to make up for the lost time. The strange thing though, at Shin-Osaka station, they have baskets of different times: 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. minutes. You can choose how late you want to be. I was about 20 minutes late but for kicks I asked for the 60 minute slip. No problem – the geeky looking dude gave it to me without any strange looks. The strange look came when I tried to take his picture by the baskets though.
Grandmaster Yip Man
January 08, 2009
What a fantastic movie. Donnie Yen kick ass. For a guy who never studied Wing Chun before, he did a fantastic job emulating it. This is by far the best Wing Chun movie I’ve ever seen. Makes me proud to be a WC student.
Even though the movie does a wild job throwing Yip Man on a great pedestal, much like how Wong Fei Hung’s achievements were hugely exaggerated by the hundreds of movies, I couldn’t help feel a great sense of pride in “Uncle Man” while watching the movie. It makes me feel great to be Yip Man’s student’s student’s student (from my first WC teacher). I’m not exactly sure how the lineage works with Sifu Steve because he’s not too sure who his teacher’s teacher was. Don’t worry, none of it ever matters.
Boy, am I ever energized to do more training! Go watch this movie my fellow WCers!
A feast
January 05, 2009
A couple of my classmates cooked up a feast last night for us to celebrate our teacher’s birthday. Both of them work in restaurants to support themselves while they study in Japan. Both of them cook like pros. Most excellent dishes.
Lantern Road
January 02, 2009
A couple weeks ago, I visited Arashiyama again with You-san after the last day of Japanese school. I wanted to visit the hanatouro, or flower lantern road. It’s an annual event where thousands of lanterns are placed in a different location everywhere and lit up at night.
The city of Kyoto started this event in 2003 to promote tourism in March when Kyoto had much less visitors than the city expected. “Hanatouro” or “Hanatoro” literally means “Flower and light road”. They place thousands of lanterns along selected paths in Higashiyama from Sanjo to Gojo. They also exhibit flower arrangements in Maruyama-koen park. Temples and a shrine in this area illuminates their buildings and trees. The period of the event may vary each year, but it was from 12th to 21st, March in 2004.
[My Kind of Kyoto]
I didn’t know that this event changes venue every year – on the official hanatouro website, the next venue for 2009 is up: Higashiyama, from March 13 to 22.
Thankfully there weren’t too many people when we went. It was nice to take a stroll through the crisp winter air of Kyoto but the lanterns weren’t all that spectacular. For one thing, they’re all electric lights – while safer, they really don’t have the appeal of real lanterns. The lantern lit path was a much shorter than I had thought. Walking through the bamboo grove by lantern light was great but walking past coffee shops and souvenir stores wasn’t.
Still, it was something to do. After living here for several years – one must find things to do!
