a Reflection

This canal is about a five-minute bike ride from our apartment.  Yesterday i was chatting with my dad and he found our apartment on google earth.  If anyone reading this is a google earth buff, you can look up our coordinates at  34 53'32.16" N, 136 59'48.41" E .  

Google earth is really strange.  If they make satellite images of the entire globe available to every joe on the street, then what information do they have about us?  And i mean they as in 'they'.  THE  'they'.  Capital A 'they'.  

Who's to say they don't have live images of the entire world straight into their offices?  

Anyway, i don't worry too much about this particular question.  It's just not worth the time.  I have too many surveillance cameras to appear on, never mind the satellite cameras.  So much to do. 

The other day, Mandy and i were riding our bikes along this canal on our way to the Hekinan library (where we are now patrons), and we stopped to look into the water.  It was filthy!  I was slightly appalled, but mostly i was reminded of this Japanese cartoon i saw that was about how the environment is getting mucked up.  

I don't understand much about Japanese religious beliefs; most have to do with good luck, from what i have heard.  But a Shinto belief is that everything has a spirit, and in the cartoon, this river spirit goes to a bath house to get clean, and eventually it does, and all the gunk that comes out of it reminded me of the canal water a little bit.  

We were just about to leave, but then i saw something moving in the water, and behold, some sort of ray!  Not as big as a Manta Ray, not as dangerous as a Stingray, but a smaller kind of ray.  Still very nice to catch a glimpse before it swam beneath the murk.  It's nice to know that things can still live in there.

How ya doing?

Welcome to Japan

Mrs. Mandy and i have arrived at our temporary destination and are (we guess) over the jet-lag.  It wasn't actually very debilitating at all.  We found ourselves wide awake at 5:30am the first couple of mornings, but now we can happily sleep until 8 if we want to.  

We were issued bicycles to use during our stay here, so that's a bonus.  Every bicycle in Hekinan is exactly the same, so you have to memorize rust spots or kick stand style, or serial number if you want to find it in a crowded bike-park.  Mandy said she will tie a ribbon on her bike.  I thought that was a good idea.

We are into our work schedules already, but as observers.  Next week we will finally move into our new digs and begin work for real.  Actually, i have a problem calling it "work".  We have it pretty easy, teaching our mother tongue.  Our foreseeable challenges will be

A) to go slowly enough, and B) to make it fun.  The poor students go to school seven days a week and usually they are tired and over-stressed.   

We were quite lucky to witness a geisha girl performance one night.  She is from Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan.  It was performed for a crowd of beer-swilling small town folk who very much enjoyed the show.  What a collision of ancient and modern. That's a common thought of mine here.  You have the slow, quiet, "Zen" traditions of ancient Japan, and then there's the chaos of crowded subways, department stores and over-stimulating video arcades.  Everybody's playing games on their phones all the time, or texting, or whatever.  We have to get phones too.  

Within a 10 minute bike ride from our apartment ("man-shon" in Japanese--not the most fitting word to appropriate into Japanese to refer to tiny, crowded quarters) is a Home Expo (a mini Home Depot), a batting cage, several restaurants of all types, a few 

supermarkets (these usually include upstairs department stores, dollar stores and video arcades), electronics stores, a library with a few shelves of books we can read, a train station and the Hekinan ACC office. 

Mandy has been offered a fork on a couple of occasions, but she's getting the hang of these things.  

ACC has around eight schools in the district.  Mandy and i each work at three of them, but never on the same day as each other.  We can bike to two of them, and i'll be driving to the one in Kariya, which is about 30 minutes by car.  The school has two servile econo-boxes that staff can use to get to work, and Mr. Adachi (the boss) even lets his teachers use the cars on weekend outings sometimes.  

This is a public toilet.  Not all of them are like this, but it sure is a nice treat 

when you sit down and the seat is oh-so-warm.  Notice the spray pressure is at half.  ...you gotta work your way up to full pressure. 

                                                                              

More to come!