San and You

I found these statues down at the corner of a busy intersection in Minami-Kagoshima. San-chan and You-chan, a pair of mascots for Sanyou Housing Co.

They could use a touch-up.

Gigantic Loans

Tetsujin #28 asks "Can I interest you in a loan today?"



"Trust me."

Weird Keystrap

Hundreds of students buy tons of UFO Catcher backpack hangers, and capsule ball cellphone straps all the time, so it's not all that unusual to occasionally find something lying on the ground that broke loose from someone's backpack without them noticing. And, occasionally those things are still in fairly decent condition. But, in this case, I have no idea what character this is supposed to be. It's pretty bizarre.



Whatever it is, the strap is a flat rubber-like plastic, and not all that scratched or rusted. I'm going to find an appropriate place to leave it, and see how long it takes for someone else to claim it.

Wicky Nyan Fest

You can see what kind of a backlog I have for blog articles. This is for the Nyan Fest at Wicky's House live bar and restaurant. It's a music theme night, but I can't quite imagine what kind of music cats would make. Wicky had mentioned that they make their own posters, and this one is pretty good.

Amu Christmas Market, Dec. 16

(Santa (one of the foreign English teachers from somewhere) made an appearance Sunday night to pose for photos and hand out little hard candies to the kids.)

Not one of the best weekends. Nothing really going on Friday, and I had to work most of Saturday. The weather Saturday was nice for once - clear skies, but a little cool. I did have a 1-hour break in the middle of the lessons, but I'd still needed to get milk for the week, so I spent the break walking to the grocery store from the school, bringing the milk home, putting the cartons in the fridge, washing dishes from breafast, and then walking back to the school. When I got out at 7 PM, I just returned home, had dinner and worked on the computer for the night.



One of the more unfortunate events last week was that something, somehow, managed to put an inch-long scratch in one of the lenses of my glasses. I've gone through 2 pairs of frames since coming back to Japan, while keeping the same lenses during all those years (they were reshaped once to fit the first, smaller replacement frames). Because of my online work and teaching schedule I wasn't able to get to a glasses shop until Sunday, which kind of meant that I had to miss the first 3 live music performances at Amu mid-day. I'd been hoping to just have the lenses measured to pull off the old prescription and get new lenses quick that way, but the clerk gave me a complete check-up, then cut the new lenses to fit my current frames. Overall, everything took 90 minutes, and a phonecall home to get interpreter services in the middle when I had trouble understanding what the clerk was telling me (that he needed to keep my frames until all the work was done). At the end, the new lenses are almost 75% thinner and lighter than my old ones, and because I had a 20% discount coupon for that shop, the total for everything came to 15,000 yen (about $140 USD). One reason I waited so long to get new glasses is that in the U.S., the stores always made me buy new frames everytime, and that would set me back $300-$400. Eyeglasses are one of the few things that are a real bargain here, compared to the States.



The weather turned bad on Sunday, with moderately heavy rain all day. That prevented me from trying to test shoot the film camera (I got a new roll of ISO400 film, too). So, I just went to Amu at 5 PM, when I got done with the glasses shop, and the Kagoshima University a capella group was singing again. I went inside, did some shopping, and came back out at 5:30, when the stage crew were busy moving in chairs for the JSB Orchestra. The audience area is pretty cramped anyway, with all of the shops and picnic tables there, but as it got closer to 6 PM, more people arrived and things got fairly insane. To kill the time, I went back in to visit Kinokuniya to look for new manga (Attack on Titan #27 just came out, but I'll get that later at Junkudo, where I have a points card), then returned to the plaza a little after 6 PM.



I stayed on the second floor balcony to get a couple photos and check out the music. From the name, I'd thought they were associated with Johann Sebastian Bach, but they were playing something more jazz-like, so maybe they were from Josei High School (Josei = "woman"), and it was the Josei School Band. Either way, I couldn't get a good position to watch them from, and the music wasn't all that great, so I headed to Tenmonkan for more shopping, and then home for dinner.



Dinner finished at 7:45, and I took the opportuity to go back to Amu for the last performance of the night - a repeat of the Kagoshima University a capella group. One of the other Japanese guys I know was in the audience, and he kept complaining about how the singers were all too sharp, and how the sound mixer guy was doing a poor job trying to fit the voices to the event space. After a few minutes, both of us gave up and went our separate ways. I got home again, and spent the rest of the night processing photos and writing up blog entries.

On the plus side, I like the new lenses, but they are going to take a while to get used to. I've got a fairly heavy teaching schedule this week, but starting with next Sunday I'll have a 2-week break from the main school. Bon DX is playing in Tenmonkan on Saturday, but I'll miss that unless my 6 PM lesson cancels at the last minute. Fortunately, Bon is playing again at Amu on the 23rd and 24th at 6 PM, and I'm really hoping to catch one, if not both performances then. After that, I've got no other plans. We'll see what happens.

Berg Christmas Village

I was walking through Tenmonkan on my way to the English school on Friday, when I reached the open area in front of Lotteria and the Yamakataya department store. Workers were in the middle of setting up Santa's cabin, the display tables, and food booths.



Everything's built from scratch every year.





I came back on Saturday, and all the work was done, and the tenants moved in.



One of the tables had a traditional-like powdered sugar Christmas cake. These things always look better than they taste, so I'm not going to buy one.



"Santa's Home."



Come in, buy something, and stick around for a while.

Self-Loading Loader

This really should be a Small Adventure story. You know those Facebook or youtube videos of "trade professionals acting like professionals?" Such as with one forklift picking up a second forklift to load a large crate into a big semi trailer? Well, I was walking along Streetcar Street, when I saw this little scoop loader driving along the sidewalk on the other side of the street, heading away from a building demolition site. I was thinking, "That looks cute," but I declined to take my camera out for photos of it. The next thing I know, the loader is lining up with the back of the flatbed truck, and the operator is lowering the scoop down onto the bed of the truck to the point where the front end of the loader starts lifting up. At this point, it's too late to pull out the camera, and I just stop where I am to watch this.

The operator continues to lift the front end of the loader up so that the front of the treads sit on the open trailer door, and he scoots himself forward a bit to prop himself in place. He swivels the cab 180 degrees to face down the other direction, and the loader looks to be a little too precarious - I was afraid that it was going to roll over and go full-turtle on him. But he got the arm leveraged forward enough so that when he pushed the scoop down on the street, he succeeded in lifting the other end of the treads up level with the flatbed, and neatly drove into his final position in the middle of the back of the truck, before using the scoop to pull the trailer door up and closed. Very sweet, very neat.

And I'll probably never get a chance to see something like this happen again in my lifetime.