Location, Location, Location?

Coming back from a 2 week holiday in Japan I've had quite alot to reflect on; more specifically on what makes a good vacation.

I've had the desire to goto Japan and luckily enough managed to achieve this; however I know it would not have been the same experience if I went solo. What I have learnt as a person is that no matter how great or fantastic any location is everyone will have a differing opinion and at times when people want to hang around in a group, it just doesn't work. On one hand you'll have someone who may want to rush through, tick boxes to say "been there, done that" while on the other hand you'll have someone genuinely interested in a specific topic that they have just discovered.

What this boils down to is, sometimes people just need time alone, even if it is on holiday in some fantastic location. This might not hold true for all but for me, I enjoyed just having a quiet hour or two wandering about Akihabara or being able to spend an evening alone at the Inn to just reflect on where I am and what I have seen and what I may get to see. This doesn't mean I'm not sociable; I had a fantastic time out in Shibuya with Otaku, Lee and Koji-san and having a nice farewell meal at Marios. Hell I'd do it all again tomorrow if I could.

The Japan trip was fantastic in itself and it also showed another side to myself I had yet to discover; I can be a shopping whore, a stupid idiotic socialite and a loner..and all at the same time. HAH!

It's best if I sign off saying that even though there were "tricky" moments in the holiday, I wouldn't change a thing about it good or bad. :)

The JDM Story Continues....

Just a brief blog update: I'll be putting all my Japanese holiday experiences at Otaku-Yakuza Blog; it's a shared blog with my friend "Otaku".

This blog will remain personal to me and may include bits about the trip to Japan but it'll be more centric on things that either made me happy or angry or sad etc.

This blog isn't dead and neither is my other blog, the fictional story writing one. I just haven't had the time to really concentrate on that. Right now I am trying to plan a trip back to Japan in April/May 2010 and work on a project called "Project: Rinko Fantastic".

Today's biggest hurdle is that I have absolutely no money...that's a lie. I have £22 with Road Tax due the end of the month as well as MOT, fuel, food, leccy bill and water bill. As you can EASILY imagine... £22 doesn't cover that so...credit card it is...as much as I hate to actually have money oweing to the credit card company over more than a month...it's my only method of salvation.

I need a holiday. :(

The Land of The Rising Sun and more...

So where have I been since August? Well some of it has been lack of news, some of it pure laziness and a chunk of it has been a fantastic, mind blowing trip to Tokyo, Japan. I will eventually blog about it in greater detail with pictures but looking at just 650 ish pictures and thinking I have to look at them, edit them, upload them and so I lose motivational drive...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
...and then I turn on my DS Lite (JDM blue, yo!) and say "Ohayo" to Kobayakawa Rinko, my virtual JDM girlfriend from Love Plus. I have not been so involved in a game since the days of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale but this game is a dating sim that never ends where as the former two are RPGs. Even though I can't read the Kanji and can barely make out what is being said, I am thoroughly enjoying spending time in this game and I hope with time I can learn some Japanese.

So let's rewind a little shall we?

During my trip to Japan, on the very first day my friend "Otaku" purchased an unknown game to me called "Love Plus" which happened to be ranked number 1 in the DS game charts. For the majority of the trip I teased "Otaku" about the game being an ero-ge (erotic game) but slowly I got sucked into it too, from watching on the sidelines to taking an interest in Nene, Rinko and Manaka. Nearing the end of our trip, I decided to look at DS Lites (the DSi is region locked when it comes to the latest games) but with new prices being relatively high I decided not to buy one...yet!

Sitting at the inn, the day before we fly, I flipped a 500 yen coin to decide the fate of buying a DS Lite...it landed on the 500 yen side up which meant the hunt for a DS Lite was back on. I chose to hit the bookstore (lots of second hand books and other assorted goodies such as figurines, games and consoles) and use my 300 yen discount (the story of which will be told when I cna be arsed to get round to typing up my trip). They had a few DS Lites in the store and they even had Love Plus. I purchased both and the rest is history...sort of. The story never ends...feel love 365 days.

Funky Wi-Fi Phone!

Just had to blog about this...my relatively new phone, a Sony Ericsson C905, is AWESOME!!! I have it hooked up to my home network now via Wi-Fi and it's just too cool; it's like a mini (albeit slow) PC. I can move files to and from the phone without faffing about with the data cable or having to buy a bluetooth dongle.



The simple things in life amuse me...although it was hard work getting it hooked up to my home Wi-Fi network. I suffer from a slight case of paranoia so more or less every security measure I have enabled, which meant that for a good hour of head scratching was due to me forgetting one security page on the router/modem.

Also, the phone has survived a few nasty falls and it still works. :) Super phone. :) Only gripe I have is the video recording is naff but then I can't have everything yet...can I?

Ze French...dey are lazy barstards

I survived my trip to France and made it back to the UK. Nimes, France is not a bad place...if you natively speak French or fluent in French...and have your own hire car...all of which we lacked on our lovely 2-day field trip. Well I say 2 days it turned into 4 days but I'll recount the story properly.

Friday, late morning. I get a phone call from the Business Unit Manager. "Go to France now, now, now!!! Go! Go ! Go!" (well not quite like that but you get the idea of urgency.)

We hop on some trains (there is one flight a day to Nimes and we missed it by HOURS) and some many many hours later pull into our hotel at 23:15 local time. Oh before I carry on, the TGV is one AWESOME train system. Talk about fast and smooth. Superb. Ahh forgot to mention, just as we exit the Eurostar, we get a voicemail message from the Business Unit Manager; he was trying to get us back as the Frenchies are already performing the Engine run. We called back and because we were quite far into the trip, told to go to nimes, pick up a piece of paper and go home.

So back to the story we got to our hotel at 23:15. Next morning we get a taxi to the airport (where the engine run was happening)) and my first impression of Nimes in daylight was...what a shit hole. I had no expectations of the place but from what I saw on the journey the place was a mixture of industrial estate and desolate farm lands.

We get to our plane and told the engine run had no happened due to a hydraulic leak. Which is now fixed but now they have a fuel leak. They tried this and that and we suggested a few possible solutions but it didn't cure the leak and by 2pm the Aircraft Technicians said they need a part they do not have in stock and are now going home for the day and work continues on monday. During the day though I spotted one of our previous customers, Cargo Italia. Their DC10 parked up and looking very very lonely. :(



With nothing to do for the rest of Saturday we hit nimes town centre. Second impression of Nimes, this is a pretty smart place! And damn expensive! Everything is twice the price compared with the UK.

So first up the Colosseum where bull fights happen. The guy pictured is the Workshop Manager who went with me to Nimes.



Some more random pictures:











Time for some random dinner! We ordered stuff and had no idea what we ordered though I do know I got the wrong starter...!
Random starter...

Squid main...the rice was utter cack.

Creme Brulee...mmm...I could eat a jar full of this stuff!


We sort of hit the pub afterwards and met up with a random English brummie girl and some random french guys. I wasn't that interested but I took a picture of one french dude and this brummie girl...This was after it started to rain and to prove our britishness we sat out in the rain till every other person ran back into the pub. We were very very soaked!



Sunday was a total waste of a day. Our hotel was situated in amongst the French versions of Ikea and B&Q and even worse...all the shops were shut on a Sunday. So we spent it idyllically sleeping in our nice air conditioned rooms.

Roll on Monday and what do we see out on "the pan"?



Yeah baby! The Royal Netherlands Air Force DC10!!! Must be good to go, right..? Wrong. Still had the fuel leak issue but after 2 or 3 hours of faffing about it somehow fixed itself...I presume some numpty didn't torque up all the bolts correctly. After that they then complained another part was faulty...*sigh* here we go again...however after a quick swap of one component and we are ready to go.



If you are really geeky and want to listen to an Aircraft engine at various speeds click on these video links. If not...just watching one will give you an idea of the next two hours "at work".







After the run was finished we just had to collect our bit of paper and say goodbye to the Royal Netherlands Air Force guys and goodbye to Sabena, our "hosts". The rush home was manic to say the least. Just about made it to the train station in Nimes to catch the next TGV back to Paris (and in time for the last Eurostar home) only to find out...our magical "fully flexible tickets" were infact now "out of date". So we had to buy another pair of tickets home at some astronomical price rush to the platform and jump on the TGV. Next was negotiating the Paris metro to get our connecting ride home on the Eurostar at another train station on the other side of Paris. we follow the metro signs and...it's all closed off! Enter panic mode and speaking to French people in English and we find out there has been a fire in the Metro and it's shut for the time being.

So we now have to run outside queue for a taxi and somehow make it to the Eurostart in the next 40 minutes! You'd think that was plenty of time...20 minutes of that was waiting for a taxi. Everyone who couldn't use the metro was using taxis!!!

Somehow, we made it to the Eurostar in time and I eventually made it home through my door just after 1am this morning.

It was a fun and eventful trip with the bonus being getting paid some stupid amount of money for sitting on my arse! My best guess is an extra £1400 into my wages before tax. Lovely.

Shipped out!!!

Oh joy of joys. I am being told I have to go to France to observe an engine run. In the normal world, this would be fun...being paid money to sit on my butt and watch other people do work. This however is a world whereby money is so scarce there is no hand towels, no printer toner and a ration on paper...which begs the question, why spend money shipping me and one other out to France to watch other people work?

Anyhow, I made my protest though I came across as an obnoxious bar-steward rather than being all pro-company.

So...weekend I am in France, enjoying 32 Deg C sunny weather watching other people do work and all being paid for. Brilliant. :)

Note: I do still want some printer toner and paper so I can actually get on with my day to day job. :rolleyes:

Day 2 of Operation Clean Up the Crap...

...or whatever I called it in my last blog entry.

Anyhow it's day 2. It's been raining. It still is raining. Countdown to house inspection is in a couple of days.





As you can see not a massive amount of progress other than the huge weeds been removed. I have however cleaned the kitchen so other than the sink, it's pretty damn clean. Just the hallway to do tomorrow...no point doing it now, it'll get mucky from us walking about.

Right, time to grab some foodz!


P.S. Terry found out I suggested to hide his favourite shoes. I am....doomed.