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Wheee! I finally bought that SLR camera I've been hankering for. Say hello to my new baby, a Sigma 18-200 DC lens with image stabilization, mounted on the compact Nikon D40 body (being spruiked by Kimura Takuya, no less ^^):
No, I'm not giving it a name, just in case you're wondering.
I had originally wanted to hunt down a second-hand model, but since Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara was nice enough to mark down the price of the body and outfit me with a suitable lens protector and fast 2GB memcard I decided, what the hey, let's go for a new set. Everything came very comfortably within my budget, and they even threw in a nice camera bag with the deal. The point card system they had at the shop also meant I used whatever points I got off the purchase to score me a couple of video games for free. Sweet as.
I still haven't quite gotten used to a heavy camera yet, but what pictures I did take after playing around with the controls looks so much better than what I could get on my compact digital camera. To put it in perspective (and focus, shutter speed and exposure), I'm now able to take stuff at 11x zoom as opposed to the 2x zoom on my digital compact.
I'm going to try some of the tips on this site and see what I get. I'm told that the lens I bought isn't as clear as the proprietary model, and that it's kinda slow on maximum telephoto mode, but because I don't know what it's like to use a SLR I doubt I'll really notice the difference. ^^
I do solemnly swear not to use my zoom lens for any mischief whatsoever. Yeah right. XD
When I visited Tokyo and Kyoto several years ago, I had hoped to be able to see cherry blossoms since they were supposed to be in season at the time. Unfortunately, it rained heavily in Tokyo the week before I arrived and all the flowers had been washed away. The only blooming cherry tree I saw was in Disneyland in front of the Toontown ride, which is hardly an arboreally picturesque location in any sense.
This time round I was hoping against hope that the wave of cherry blossoms sweeping northwards throughout the country wouldn't arrive in my town until I returned from Australia. Luckily for me, there was apparently a cold snap while I was gone, and one day in March where there was a freak snowfall, which helped to delay the sakura until shortly after I came back.
Contrary to what I was told, the flowers don't just burst onto the scene all of a sudden. It actually took about a week or so for them to fully bloom, and it was really nice to see the fluffy pink clusters gradually creep up upon the branches. As I write this the flowers are just about to hit full bloom, and everywhere in my town you can see trees completely draped in pale pink standing stark against their greener cousins.
One of the best places to take a walk under the cherry blossoms in my town is the Midorigaoka Park, a nice patch of green in the middle of the city, complete with pavilions, bridges, a small river and even a lake for people to fish in. The last time I took a walk there was in winter, when I wanted to see what it looked like before spring repopulated the place with leaves and flowers.
Cold and colourless, or quiet and peaceful, whichever way you look at it. The river in the picture is actually flanked by cherry trees on both sides which means it's quite a sight to behold in April.
The locals see this every year, so they're probably used to it, but it's totally different for someone who's only ever seen them in films or anime and never seen the real thing up close. The pictures here don't do the actual place justice; seeing an entire stretch of road swathed in pink really takes your breath away.
Plum is in season too, and there was a whole section of the park devoted to plum trees. Plum blossoms come in many different shapes and colours as compared to sakura, but it's the cherry blossoms that hog the limelight since the plum blossoms aren't as transient.
In celebration, the local town council put up lanterns on the trees, though you can't see it clearly, each lantern also has the name of a sponsor or company written on it, which is a pretty good source of revenue for the town as a whole. There were also festival stalls about selling all that delicious festival food I love so much, to feed the picnickers who've brought their mats and baskets to hold their hanami parties and get drunk on beer and cherry blossom petals.
They talk about the concept of "iyashii" here, which literally means "healing", in the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" sense. There might actually be something to it, because it was somehow really uplifting to walk around the park taking in the fresh, lightly scented air, and boughs upon boughs of fluffy pink.
And just in case looking at the trees isn't enough, there's a whole industry involved in sakura based products, from sakura scented perfume, candles, apparel and for sakura otaku, sweets made with real sakura petals and a salty tea made of preserved whole blossoms.
Mmmm... salty. Don't think I like it.
I'm told that the peony garden next door holds some of the most beautiful flowers of the season, so I'm waiting with bated breath for them to show me what they've got. Hopefully I'll get that SLR camera soon and finally capture some decent images for a change. Here's hoping.
If you've noticed my pics of school lunch, you probably have seen the daily ration of fresh dairy milk (from local cows, goodness knows where they are in the prefecture), packed in glass bottles with old fashioned paper lids. One of my elementary schools has switched to paper cartons though, claiming that the manufacturer has abandoned the glass system for ease of transport and recyclability. So now the students spend 5 minutes after lunch peeling the cartons open by hand, rinsing them in buckets and letting them dry before putting them in recycling bins. It's fairly fiddly to take the cartons apart, but I think they'll get it eventually.
In most cases I'd laud the effort to go green, but I've learned that what consumers do with their waste is just a tiny part of the whole recycling process. So here's my analysis of the whole glass bottle versus paper carton thing that might spread to all the other schools in my town.
Glass bottles are heavy and fragile, and make transport and handling difficult or dangerous at times. That being said, I've never seen a single student, even in elementary school, break a milk bottle, full or empty, so the safety issue is a bit moot. The weight of the bottles factors in the transport, since you need more fuel to truck heavy things around. The bottles are reused, so the cleaning process has to be really thorough since milk is one of the most perishable and easily contaminated foods out there. So there's a water and infrastructure cost as well.
When packed in cartons, any beverage becomes easier to transport, not only because of handling issues, but because more of a consignment is actual product by weight. So you save money on fuel and truck hire since you can deliver more beverage for your buck. Having the consumer take on the responsibility for cleaning and recycling the packaging also relieves the financial and ecological burden on the manufacturer. I reckon the trade off is that the concept of the cold chain becomes way more important since paper is a poorer insulator than glass. Ever notice how a stubby keeps it's cool really well? Same concept here. Refrigerated transport costs a lot, not only in terms of energy but in environmentally suspect coolant and insulating material too.
Sure you might say that the fact that the cartons are recycled makes the change worthwhile. However this is only the case if the cartons are really recycled instead of being burnt at the dump. It's generally taken for granted that the recycling process goes on as planned after the garbage trucks pick up the sorted rubbish, but I'll believe it when I see for myself, instead of walking around in the smell of soot after every designated combustible rubbish day. The thing about paper cartons too is that they generally always have some new pulp from freshly felled trees added in their manufacture, and that since they're not directly reused, there's an ongoing manufacturing and resource cost to keep the supply of new cartons up.
Communal rinsing of cartons presents its own can of worms too. Having the kids dip their hands in the same bucket of water that contains traces of a very rich microbial medium is just asking for trouble, at least in the eyes of a former lab scientist. This is particularly important in places where the kiddies may not have practiced washing their hands well enough yet. See my previous posts on catching nasty colds from elementary school kids for more perspective.
The reason I make an issue out of this is that the move to paper cartons is being marketed as an ecological advancement, when a deeper analysis reveals that the main motivation is financial streamlining more than any greater desire to save the planet. In the wider sense, I reckon the lesson here is that just because something has a green label on it, doesn't mean that it's ultimately better for the environment. We've got to consider as many factors in the whole process as possible and judge if a change from what was a pretty good system in this case to one which may ultimately do more harm than good. Transparency, dialogue and education are so much more important than we give them credit for, but it's just all too easy to take things for granted and believe whatever hype is put out there so that manufacturers can increase their margins, or take advantage of well-meaning consumers.
Think green, by all means, but do think, and think really hard.
Up until now I've lived in cities where access to airports has never been a serious logistical issue. Living in the sticks has changed all that. 200km from any destination would sound like a relaxing 2-hour drive in Australia given the speed limits on Aussie roads, but here it takes a lot of planning to get from the international airport in Narita to my apartment.
The highway bus is probably the most economical way to go, but if you're pressed for time like I was on my way out of the country (bloody JR buses and their massively stuffed up bus schedules) the bullet train is the faster, more comfortable and more unreasonably expensive option.
Considering all the transfers from the suburbs of Melbourne through to Tullamarine Airport, to Narita, the journey to the nearest bullet train stop in Koriyama then the local train back to my town and the taxi ride to my apartment, I now kinda miss staying in Sydney 15 minutes away from Kingsford-Smith by taxi. Even though I started out on what was one of the earliest flights out of Melbourne, I only just managed to catch the last train of the day back to my town, and only because I totally disregarded the JR ticketmaster's itinerary which would have seen me get off the bullet train south of my town without backtracking from Koriyama, which is just slightly further north. If there's one thing I've learned from commuting in Japan, it's that you should first ask for directions, then ignore them and trust your own judgement.
This is not to say the system doesn't work; it does, only if you either know your way around really well, or are completely fluent in the language. Otherwise it's just better to ask someone else to book your stuff for you. On the whole though, the public transport system, at least in major cities, is clean, efficient and quite pleasant to travel on. And where else would you see cleaning staff meticulously tidy up the interior of some of the fastest trains in the world, equipped with mechanized seats so they'll automatically turn to face the right direction for the next trip?
I gotta get me that SLR. My idiot-proof digital compact is getting a little too small for this particular idiot.
It probably seems like ages since my last update, but that only because it's really been ages since my last update. Right after the last day of school, I packed my bags and took the flying kangaroo to Melbourne for a well earned vacation. And in the spirit of vacation time, I've been too lazy to write anything for the last 3 weeks ^^
No excuse now though, since I'm back in Japan and have actually been through a week of ankle-biting elementary school goodness. So here's a whittled down version of my couple of weeks back in the wide brown land (and it was a *really* wide, brown land).
First of all, I had my first camping experience in the bush the same day I landed. Thankfully mosquitoes weren't in season, and the weather was cloudy to fair, which made for a nice few days in the wilderness, far from civilization, electricity and modern plumbing. This is not to say we lacked creature comforts. Have bush oven will travel, they say, though in our case we had gourmet bush tucker, complete with a side of rare grilled kangaroo, courtesy of a camping buddy who was a very good cook.
Just in case the lot of us got lonely, we were accompanied by a koala in the tree next door to us. It was mostly asleep during the day time, and I kinda wondered if it might fall out of the tree by accident. If it did I'd be able to tell the kiddies about the dangers of dropbears, but alas, nature's design won out and it remained firmly attached to the top branches of the gum tree beside us.
If you look carefully you can see it in the middle of the pic. It's there, honest!
I didn't spend all my time out in the wild though; I managed to catch the Game On exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. I wasn't allowed to take photos inside the place, but I was able to walk around and try out classics like Pong and Space Invaders as well as relatively new fangled Wii games. Relatively I say, because I live in Japan after all and the cutting edge stuff is available at the local denkiya-san. Nice to see that gaming is big enough to warrant a retrospective exhibition of it's own though.
Being a geek (gah, I admit it), I also took a look at Scienceworks which was just 20 minutes away from the city. Back in Sydney, the closest place that was even remotely similar was Questacon in Canberra, and I don't quite fancy driving 2 1/2 hours to a hole in the middle of nowhere just for a science museum. The one in Melbourne was fun though, with exhibits on household science, the environment. sports medicine, the universe and the old Melbourne sewage pump. The best part was the planetarium show about the possibility of life on other planets (narrated by Han Solo ^^), a very abridged version of the stuff in the History Channel's "The Universe" series.
A not so random road trip to Adelaide means I've officially visited 4 out of the 7 states of Australia (5 out of 8 if you count the administrative capital... zzzzz...) Lovely city, Adelaide, kinda reminds me of the area around Tokyo station, probably because all the buildings look like they were built in the 60s. The highlight was of course visiting Rundle Mall and playing with the mall's balls:
The most spectacular part of the trip was on the way back via the Great Ocean Road. Trying to get good pictures while avoiding the crowds of snap happy tourists is no mean feat, especially at major attractions like the Twelve Apostles (The Beatles, Abba, Simon and Garfunkel, Hendrix and Joplin with Elvis as the one true King, whoo!):
The salty sea air was good for the soul, though I prolly should have slopped on some sunscreen. It's probably the exposure to too much sun that inspires great things from Australian people, such as these monuments to randomness:
I should say that the lobster wasn't originally meant to be so big. According to the information panel next to it, its specs were in feet and inches but for some reason it was built in metric, so it's three times bigger than it should have been. *sigh* Oh well. ^^
We also passed by the Giant Olive, but declined to stop and take pictures because after you're faced with a stone koala several storeys high, a 5 metre tall olive just doesn't cut it anymore.
Now I want to go see the Big Merino, Banana and Pineapple, just to round out the lot of them. Maybe strike a few more states off my list, eh? Aussies are very strange people indeed. Good sense of humour though.
Lovely place, shame about the name.
