My Flickr photo feed

Well if you have not guessed by now I am using flickr to store my photos. I have gone through and uploaded all of my old photos so you can still see those from the ophoto days. Here is a link to my main feed and here is a link to my tags. For people who do not know tags our well tags that I add to all of the photos to make them easier to organise and browse.

The other fun thing about flickr is that it also has rss feeds for the photos so you can use this feature to let you know when I add new photos.

Please fee l free to browse the photos and download any of the ones that you want. Almost all of them have the orginal hi-res versions up there so if you need photos go ahead and use them.

This will probably be the last post from Japan before I come back to America for Christmas and New Year's. I don't think I will post much from the US unless something comes up.

So Merry Chrstmas and Happy New Year.
Andrew

Happy birthday Josh

For those that know the Painter's Birthday Song and have a sense of humor.

Happy Birthday Dirge

For everyone else move along.

TIMEasia Magazine: Mirror, Mirror...

TIMEasia Magazine: Mirror, Mirror...

As Promised here is the link to the time article that talks about men and their makeup, at least in Asia.

Deodorant and Japan

Now with a title like that you are probably wondering what the heck is this blog post about or where are we going with this. Well last weekend I went looking for to buy deodorant because I was almost out and did not think that people in the lab would appreciate me going without deodorant for a couple of weeks. So I went to a drug store to look for deodorant. No dice. I went to another drug store and a supermarket and still no deodorant. The second supermarket did finally have some, however only a roll-on and a spray-on deodorant. For contrast think back to the last time you went to a supermarket and think about how many different varieties that they had for deodorant. Granted the supermarkets in japan are not huge but you could definitely call the second one a small to medium sized supermarket by American standards.

I will admit that I might have missed the deodorant in the other stores because I was looking for in the wrong place or looking for the wrong thing. But still next time you come to Japan and have left the airport you are going to probably have a hard time finding deodorant.

I asked one Japanese member of my lab who had spent 1 year in the US if he knew what deodorant was but he thought of it in terms of perfume. So basically it is not used very often here.

On the contrary you would be surprised by the number of facial creams and hair products for men that you can find here. I should find the Time article about that.

Japan and Thanksgiving

This is one of those kind of similar to the ice cream post, in that a few people have asked me this, does Japan have Thanksgiving?

The answer in my opinion is no. The reason being is that there are some holidays here in japan where they might go to temples to ask for another good year or something along those lines. I am not sure if there is a really a day that they give thanks. Borrowing from tonight's (Sunday's Night's) sermon who are we giving thanks to? In my opinion God. If you look at the origins of the first Thanksgiving (or at least what was taught in school) the pilgrims were giving thanks for a good harvest and good friends. So for this reason I don't think the Japanese do not have what I would call a Thanksgiving.

The Japanese do have a holiday on Nov. 23 that is basically a workers or labor day. So if you see a holiday on the Japanese Calendar that is the one.

I guess I should say what I am thankful for. Several things actually. One was a good turkey dinner (the first turkey I have had since a Turkey Club Sandwich in Korea in June) at Church on Sunday. Pictures below.



Trust me, this made my week.

The leaves finally changing here with color are nice.



To all of the people who comment on this blog and just a new way for me to put stories up of what is happening around me right now. Finally, I am thankful for my family and friends both in the US and in Japan.

Well thats all for me. I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.

Stanely and a Fashion Show

The last installment for this will talk about the fashion show for each of different countries. So with out further adieu I will just begin.



China





Wighuru




India




Pakistan




Nepal




Indoneshia





Bangladesh




Korea




Mongolia




Romania




Vietnam




Russia




Jordan




Japan




Just all of us after the event.

This will be the last post relating the Flat Stanley project. There are even more pictures than are shown at my flickr account. Below is a link to just the photos related to Stanley

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20969726@N00/tags/stanley/

I will be adding more pictures to that over time (there is a 20 meg upload limit and I use that up pretty fast). Those pictures will both be new pictures, pictures from the ophoto account and other random pictures that I never posted before.

I hope people have enjoyed the Flat Stanley project, because I have.

Post 1 of 2 on the Amigo Festival

The first in a series on the Amigo festival. The Amigo festival was held at my dormitory last weekend. The Amigo festival is basically an international festival where people make different foods for their part of the world and then there is a series of skits, songs, dances and a fashion show to showcase all of the different cultures.

For this event I was in charge of the sound mixing.



This meant that the pictures I got were from the side of the stage instead of the center. Also sadly my camera does not do well in low light conditions so the pictures are not that great. The good news is that Flat Stanley was s placed very nicely in the pictures that I took. I also had a friend in the crowd with a tripod so she was able to get some good pictures in the low light conditions.

Onto the show. The first show of the day was a Japanese Drums group. These are quite nice, but very loud. One of the fun things that they did was they had the children come up and play a little. See pictures below.



This picture is a good shot of where Flat Stanley was stuck.

Next was a Napalese dance which is one of those sad cases with most of these photos that to see it was very impressive unfotunatly you can only see the pictures from the event.

Next Up I will post the pictures for the fashion show.

Pictures from the top of my Lab Building

This is the last of the pictures of Flat Stanely before I mailed him back to America. These were taken from the top floor of my building where my lab is to show off some of the scenery around where I am.





This is not the last post for Flat Stanely because I have well over 100 pictures or so to sort through for the International festivile at my Dormatory last weekend.

Sendai soccer Game

So This weekend Flat Stanley along with several friends from church went to a soccer* game. Sendai's (仙台） team is Vegalta (ベガルタ [Pronounced begaruta, this made for some confusion this week when speaking to friends at the lab]). Sorry for that long side bar. So we went to the soccer game and sat in the Sendai Fan section. This meant that we were surrounded by yellow with some blue. In the pictures below you can see some of the opening festivities.




Here are a couple of pictures of action during the game of the fans cheering and of the action on the field.




These flags shown in these pictures are waved around whenever there was a big play or a goal.




Finally here is a picture of the group that I went with to the game in front of a statue of the team's mascot.



Before I forget Sendai won 1 to 0.

*FYI in Japan they also call soccer "soccer." I find this interesting because I was taught in French class in high school that the US was the only country that did not call soccer "football."

A picture in front of a random temple at night

This is a picture that I took last night in front of a temple on my way back to my apartment.


Stanley is leaning against the post to the right of the center door.

The Beginning of the Flat Stanley project

Yesterday in the mail I received Flat Stanley. Below is a quote of the description for Flat Stanley.

This is what the Flat Stanley project is - it is a book that tells the story of a child named Stanley that has a bulletin board hit him. While this may seem tragic it enables him to be mailed in an envelope to places all over the world.

So over the next two weeks or so I will be taking Flat Stanley around with me to the various places I go and take pictures with him. I will post the pictures and descriptions here for people to see.

Hopefully I will get out and do some stuff over the next couple of weeks instead of go to the lab everyday (I probably still will go to the lab everyday).

Below is a picture of Flat Stanley.

Japanese Ice Cream

Well lately I have been thinking to myself that I wanted to post more to the blog but I did not want to just post “crap.” So the other day I was talking to my younger brother and he asked me about some rice covered ice cream here in Japan.

Tonight I was looking at what I think he was talking about with the rice covered ice cream and it hit me (not the ice cream[I sometimes need to correct Japanese students on English grammar {scary thought} so this is to be clear what the it refers to]). If Josh is curious about rice covered ice cream everyone will be so that would make a good post for the blog (and it gives me an excuse to buy some more ice cream[insert sound effects of Homer Simpson for donuts] mmm ice cream[/effects]).

So I went to the local Seiyou (actually owned by Wal-Mart) and picked up a couple of “Japanese” style ice creams. The first is a green tea ice cream and the second was the “rice” covered ice cream, which are shown below before and after taking them out of their packaging.




I only put out a few of the the green tea variety.

For reference I have also added shots of the ice cream after cutting them in half. Sadly things begain to melt because of the time it took me walk back to the apartment.


What you can see for the green tea ice cream is that it has a kind of outer and inner shell. For the rice covered ice cream there is an outer coating around the ice cream middle.

I sampled both varieties and came to this conclusion. The green tea variety was not really an ice cream but rather more of a frozen green tea with sweeteners. The rice covered variety the ice cream in the middle was a good basic vanilla and the outer covering added a nice texture to the whole affair.

The green tea variety I sadly really did not care for. I to drink green tea either hot or cold but this does not do green tea justice. I really think the sweeteners take away from the overall taste.

For the rice covered variety, it was quite good, the vanilla was good and the covering was also nice. I am not sure if the covering is actually rice or made of rice. Maybe during the next week or two I will try to ask someone.

Finally in conclusion there were some more Japanese ice creams that I did not try for a couple of reasons. One very simply was that I was afraid of the flavors. I could not read the boxes and the pictures did not fill me with confidence. The second reason was these were not sold in individual packs so I would need to buy a big box. I do not have a freezer nor the appetite to eat that much ice cream at once (besides, mothers around the world probably frown on that). Below is a picture that I took of the display in the store.

An excuse to test out my calendar

This an excuse to test out the calendar on the side. I copied this from someone else. If anyone wants source code I would be happy to give it to you or you can copy it right out of the html code for this page. I know I probably don't have the colors right but I am not a graphic artist.

In other updates I have added a bunch of buttons all for getting in contact with me so you can take your pick.

That's all for now,

Imoni Party

Imoni means something long the lines of potato. This party is basically like a harvest festival. This party is a relatively local festival in that if you ask people from Tokyo about this they would not know what it is about. The tradition of the festival consists of going down to the river sometime in late September or October and cooking up a few different soups.

So our lab had our Imoni party on Friday. Below is a picture of one of the typical soups that were made.



One thing you will notice is that the soups are made using a big pot over a camp fire. When I was thinking about this coming up this year I wanted to do bring something somewhat American to this event. What I came up with was S'mores. For a change I will not need to explain to you guys what s'mores are which is a change from last week where I had to explain to everyone what they are.

Last weekend I went to the import store and bought the marshmallows and the graham crackers. The chocolate is sold in almost all of the stores (it was not Hersey's chocolate close enough).

After one of the soups finished cooking I got one volunteer (victim) to get started cooking their marshmallow. I realized it is difficult to tell people that you want to cook the marshmallow but be careful not to burn it because it is easy to burn. The other thing I realized is that it would have been nice to have a table to work on but oh well. Finally, I now have more respect for my mother and other people who were in charge of metering out the chocolate and graham crackers because I was trying to keep up with the influx of people with cooked marshmallows.

Below are various pictures of the roasting of the marshmallows.

The cooking


Me trying to keep up with everyone.


And the aftermath.

A story from Argyle

Well this does not have anything to do with Japan except that I am sitting at my desk in Japan to write this.

When, my parents farm began chopping (harvesting) corn this fall one of the tractors basically died. This was not one of your average dieing, this tractor went in a blaze of glory, well maybe not glory but defiantly a blaze. No one was hurt thankfully. The first picture is a picture of the same tractor as we had that I found on the web. The next two are of the tractor after the incident.






This is a shot of the hole that was made in the engine block from the tractor over reving.


More of the burnt out tractor

Basically what happened the governor on the turbo charger for the engine broke. This allowed the engine to get into a runaway condition. Once the engine was in a runaway condition it over heated and one of the pistons in the engine broke which beat the hole in the side of the engine block which you see. From there the tractor caught on fire and they ended up calling the fire department to put the fire out.

One of the surprising outcomes from this is after the fire we thought that it would be difficult to get rid of the tractor but within one week they had four offers for the tractor.

revving
reeving
raving
riving
roving
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An updated photo

Well you might have noticed a new picture in the corner. Someone, who will remain nameless*, thought that I did not look my best in the old photo. To be honest the old photo is over a year old taken within a week or two of arriving in Japan in May of 2004. For completeness here is the old photo.



I have updated the photo and I am not sure if I like it much better. It might be simply that I don't like getting my photo taken because I never know what to do in them. So please feel free to comment on which photo you like better.


* JOSH

Chronicle Careers: 07/08/2005

A fear I had when I started this blog was that it could adveresly affect future job opportunities. This article is a short discussion of this topic.

Chronicle Careers: 07/08/2005

I guess this is a note to self and other fellow bloggers that we should remember that these blogs are public. I think I am going to review my entries at least grammatical errors for a start.

Discrimination against Left Handed People

Ok so I am bias,

Last night at church someone announced a research project that they were looking for native English speakers. Cool, I go and check it and you get paid ichi man en (sorry I slipped into Japanese [10,000 Yen {A little less than $100}]) for like an hour or two test. I checked the requirements and one was to be right handed. That of course from my first post basically counts me out.

Oh well the test required that you be in a MRI and listen to sentences and then push some button depending on something. It sounds like that they are looking at what areas of the brain are activated while listening to English. There research that shows that left handed people use different portions of their brains for different things than right handed people. So the testers are just trying to limit the number of variables in the test.

The last interesting portion of the story was that is that one word that they used in the description was "gratuity" which was used with relation to money and travel expenses. So I guessed it had to do with getting paid but I was not sure. I double checked and here is the definition: something given voluntarily or beyond obligation usually for some service. Ok so I was about right, but the other funny thing was that another person from England was also not sure of the meaning.

I am not sure what all of this means except that I should probably improve my vocab.

A Chinese Meal

Last Sunday I had dinner with some Chinese and one Taiwanese friends from my lab. The primary course for that meal was gioza. The closest thing to gioza that I can think of in America is egg rolls. But those are not even close, really except for the idea that you have some type of dough wrapped around a filling. For the traditional Chinese version these guys are typically boiled, however the tasty version is when you throw them in a frying pan with oil. I think I like that version because I am like my dad with the saying, "When its brown its cooking, when its black its done."

There is a version of these here in Japan also, however they are typically fried, or at least the times that I have bought them at the store.

There was a variety of different dishes that were served along with the gioza. There was some noodles and cucumbers, a weird black hardboiled egg and tofu which was warmed up, pigs ears (i think) along with a couple of other dishes.

All in all it was good meal and I highly recommend that you try gioza if you ever get a chance.

Below are some pictures from the event.



This is a picture of the stuff that goes inside the gioza.


The finished gioza afeter wrapping in dough and boiling.



Xe (pernouced Joh in Japanese and Yay in Chinese) finishing preparing the meal. There are sevral of the dishes on the table.