What it is?

Today's photo is a mystery photo. I will leave it to your imagination as to what it is. If you feel so inclined you can let me know what you think it might be.

Still in Limbo

As I continue to languish here in Canada, (perhaps languish is much too strong a word to be used when the sojourn is in such a beautiful, green, and treeful country, while in close proximity to many of my closest friends and relatives) but nevertheless as I continue to await the finely grinding gears of the Japanese governmental Visa machinery, it is definitely feeling like a "much-too-long-a-time" to be away from my wife of four and half months. I suppose the length of the Visa application process should not surprise me given the number of times I've experienced the clanky and clunky workings of various arms of federal government mechanisms, but I was led to believe that less than three months would not be unreasonable to pin my hopes on.
Alas, the latest news is that "it shouldn't be much longer".
I'm not sure if that is an official governmental term or if that is just the way it interprets from Japanese into English. And I'm not sure if there was a form to be filled out in order to get such detailed information, or if that is the result of a very competent and verbose public servant on the other end of the blower.
Either way I'd better go stock up on deodorant.

Doh!

From the archives...

Cough cough hack ack boku ack phlegm sputter snort me wheeze harumn. How do you work this thing? Why doesn't anything happen?!? What does this say? Why oh why did I buy a Japanese kamera? C'mon. Oops tee hee hee, there we go. Now if only I can do that again!

It's Running Rampant!

Cough Hack Micah Hack Sniffle Sneeze Wilson Hack Phlegm Cough.
I repeat it is not a toy! It is a serious piece of journalistic equipment. It should only be used by authorized personnel!

Incompetence?

Some missionaries are smart, some are funny, and some are strange. Then there is this feller. Some people you just cannot categorize. I will refrain from mentioning his name since I do not want to embarrass him. Cough Aaron hack hack cough wheeze DeLion wheeze harack hack.
He seemed like a capable fellow and all when I first met and got to know him, but then I found this 'self portrait' on my camera. I may have to revise my earlier impressions. I must confess that my camera is a small Sony and people are sometimes intrigued by it, but I am unconvinced if that was the case this time. I get the impression from this shot that Aaron (sniffle cough hack) was just fiddling around, accidentally and maybe even unknowingly snapping a shot of himself. I would say it is quite obvious from his pixel captured expression. It is one of stunned surprise, one that seems to say; How do you work this newfangled thang? What does this button do? Oops! Well I caught you playing with my sophisticated piece of equipment, mister!

Life imitating art or art imitating life?

A short time before I came to Canada, I was watching television. The program was demonstrating how a satellite could hit and blow up a meteor in space. It looked like news, (it seems that no matter what country and language, the news shows always have a 'look' to them). I thought to myself, "That's pretty cool". I was intrigued, but because I can not read or understand Japanese (other than a few useful sentences such as "I hit my head on the toilet door") I could not be sure. The detail of what I gleaned from the foreign TV screen was sketchy at best. I was at a loss as to what was going on. Was there a comet hurtling toward earth? Was this some kind of stop gap measure to keep the earth from being destroyed? Were we being attacked by an other worldly race of tiny green men (or more plausibly a race of dark, supersized yet muscular, armour bearing and batleth wielding beings with bumps on their foreheads)? Or maybe it was a rogue faction of the former Soviet Union with a spectacular 'star wars' type secret weapon of mass destruction, attacking the rest of the world looking to prove that Karl Marx wasn't all bad. I did not know what was happening and to be honest with you my imagination can be pretty active at times.
After I returned to Canada, I was talking with a good friend of mine and he was telling me about this thing NASA was doing, sending an interceptor to a meteor and blowing it up. It is the stuff of Hollywood. As we chatted, I connected the dots with what I had seen at that time and was able to put it all together. It seems there was a plausible explanation after all.

Samarai Will

A couple of weeks ago, I visited Osaka Castle in my full Samarai garb. I was hip.

Shock

Whenever one has been immersed in culture for a period of time, there is usually a culture shock of some sort that smacks you. Last year when I flew back to Canada after living in Japan for three months, it was the people, (or lack thereof). I wandered around for the first few days trying to figure out where everybody was. It was a little disconcerting, was everyone hiding? On vaction? The feeling went away.
This time, it was the silence. Living in Osaka is a constant barrage of noise, noise that never ceases, (especially with the windows open to let in the cool night air). As I went to sleep the first night in Canada, the lack of noise was very tangible, it was a palpable quiet. All I could hear was a whine in my ears.

Jetlagged

I am trying to recover from jetlag. But, I am not very good at recovering from jetlag. I have not figured out if it is my technique, my physique or my metabolism.

Aloft

As we were zoomin along... I played with the map function on the monitor.
We had a 100 km/h tailwind, and I thought hmmm, if I was on my bicycle I'd really be cookin. We were cruisin at almost 600 km/h, and I thought wew, I like going fast.
We were over 11 kms above the surface of the earth, and I thought, well pondered would be a better way of putting it. I pondered the dynamics of lift and how they applied to my situation, and I pondered how much physical mass (weight) there was in the airplane. And I pondered the momentum of the mass in comparison to the amount of lift, and realized that a lot of lift is required and also that if there was suddenly no more lift, how much like a stone we would be. I pondered God's common grace keeping us aloft, and further God's common grace that keeps the forces of chaos at bay.
I had over 12 hours to ponder such things, but I watched four movies back to back to back to back instead.

Patience is a Virtue I'm told.

My Visa is about to expire. I applied for a newer and longer visa, but I have not been awarded the visa yet. I will be leaving for Canada at 5:55pm on the tenth of July and after traveling for about twenty hours, will arrive on the same day in Canada.
The wonders of flying across the international dateline. I will have to wait in Canada for the Visa, and hopefully not too long.

Coffee House

The day before yesterday, (asatte in Japanese, which seems more convenient to me) we held a coffee house with our short termers. The idea is to invite Japanese students to an open house sorta deal, to establish contact and hopefully develop relationships. All of the girls who came were already contacts though. Two of them have previously gone through the Alpha program and the other two are contacts through Kayti. (She is the funny looking New Yorker with her eyes closed.) We had a good time fellowshipping though.

Picking up the Culture

I am trying to learn the Japanese culture as much I can...

But I have not yet figured out how to sleep while standing up on a packed subway train which has no constant motion but accelerates and slows down, stops every five minutes or so, and wake up just at my stop.

I don't expect to be able to do that any time soon either.

Lost again.

It is amazing how many nooks and crannies there are in Osaka. I teach an english class which is near a major train junction. There are about nine different lines running in and out of the station. I know that there is a closer station to where I teach, and each week on my way home I have been trying to find it. I go in the direction I think I am supposed to be going in, and follow the train line, arrive at the station I think I am supposed to be getting on my train at, which turned out to be the wrong one.
I tried three different stations, and ended up going back to Tennoji.

Tanabata

Fridays, I usually attend a community center in my area that offers a couple of hours of Japanese teaching (for foreigners only). It is quite pricy at 300 yen for six months. (That's about 3.50 Cdn). This past week, instead of class they held a Tanabata party for all the attendees. Traditionally, one writes a wish on a piece of paper and then hangs it on a bamboo tree that is set up just for the purpose. I think we could liken it to the whole Santa Claus and Christmas tree thing we do in North America, minus the true meaning of Christmas.
We expressed our appreciation to the teachers and helpers with a song written by one of the students, and then enjoyed snacks and some light language learning fun.

Short Termers

For the next couple of weeks we have a couple of short term workers here from the US. Eileen is a Korean American from New York and Alana is from Indiana. They are keeping us long termers quite busy with various different things.

Getting on my Feet.

I have found that since I have been living in Japan I have gotten good at getting to my feet from sitting on the floor.

While living in NA it is not something I did all that often, and I can remember on the few occasions I would be sitting on the floor, (I honestly cannot think of a good reason I was doing such a thing just now) when it was time to get up I would roll around for a while, then carefully stick out a leg or maybe a hand, trying for some leverage or maybe some momentum, straining as the leverage and/or momentum was incorrectly applied, add to all of that effort some hefting and heaving, and I would arrive on my feet, still teetering and tottering with a little huffing and puffing but usually able to stay upright.

Now I deftly place a hand , give a little shot of umpmfh and voila! I am not only firmly upright but already striding in my intended direction.

I am still not used to sitting on the floor the way Japanese do though. They have this ability to squat on their heels comfortably for long periods of time. I can only manage to sit cross-legged at the kotatsu table, and usually not for an entire meal. I find the need to move my legs to a straight out position, which is usually OK since everyone else is pretty good at sitting "normally".

Aukje's Adventure

My wife came home this morning after going to the tax office and a couple of banks to run a few errands. She had to go to pay some bills at the bank, cash a money order and get her name changed on two bank accounts and at the ward office. The bank wanted 2500 yen (that is a little less than thirty Canadian dollars) to process the money order. The name change at the tax office took 45 minutes. It took the bank twenty minutes to figure out that it would cost 2500 yen to process the money order. During that time she wanted to work on the name change and/or pay the bills, but that was not possible. When the bank finally figured out that it would cost 2500 yen they made Aukje go to the back of the line in order to pay her bills. She was vexed (in her words) and immediately upon her arrival in the door, I heard all about the friendly folks at the bank.

Rock-a-bye-baby

Late last night the garbage truck came to empty the bin from the pizza joint in our building. I have never noticed how often this happens, but last night the smell invaded our little abode sneaking in our open apartment windows and the assault was successful enough to make us hold our noses.
Early in the morning, I am not sure what time these things happened but it was always dark out, I was awakened more than once by the same residual smells wafting around the apartment. I can only assume the sickly sweet yet rank odour to still be coming from the pizza garbage storage facility. And yet later in the morning I was awakened by a couple in their apartment, in the building across the street. Their apartment at the same general height as ours, as they continued their weekend long row, very noisily arguing, tipping big items over, tossing stuff around their apartment.
As I awoke from my fitful slumber this morning I felt short changed on my sleep allotment, but didn't know who to complain to about it.

A cultural observation

It is interesting to so how a culture deals situations. In Japan it is the sunshine and the heat. As the march toward summer continues I have noted certain things. The sun umbrellas (aka parasols) are out, but only women use them. A sun umbrella is different from a rain umbrella. In Japan, beauty is seen in the whiteness of the skin, rather than the tanned ideal in North America. To that end parasols are employed to keep the sun off one's face. There are many other precautions to be taken as well. Make sure all your skin is covered (with either long sleeves or long gloves and long pants). It is best that everything is black so that it soaks up the sun rather than reflects those evil damaging rays toward a sensitive patch of exposed skin. The umbrella however can be white, so it can reflect those rays upward before they get anywhere near a person.
It is not manly to be carrying a parasol so no men ever do. However I have observed one or two using an umbrella to ward off the sun. I think the key is to use a rain umbrella, that way everyone can see that this is a one time occurrence and that you don't usually engage in such feminine acts of comfort.