Narrative Disorder… in Japan!!

So, we landed in Sydney at about 8 am local to find ourselves shivering in a 9 degree morning! It was somewhat of a relief though, since planes are always a little stuffy and the Hong Kong airport responds to the 28 degree evenings by having the air con at about 26 degrees (I’m told this is a practice in Japan, too, to avoid chest colds due to extreme temp changes) so it was nice to feel actual cold for the first time in a week. Of course we are prepared for Nagoya to be hotter and wetter after we return as the typhoon season will be hot on our heels!!

I promised pictures of our new digs when we returned but I haven’t yet worked out how to download and edit video from our camera (and I have a feeling my film was frankly dreadful beyond editing) so there will be some more wait on that note. I have, however, managed to download the stills we took so here begins the slide show. I should note though, we were so focused on getting our arrangements made that there wasn’t much tourist time, we have more pictures of furniture we might want to lease than great tourist shots, so call these a down payment on more interesting stuff when we have more time there. 

Nagoya Midland Circle - This is the view from our hotel right on top of Nagoya Station. Had to take this shot as I’d been looking at the similar one that Mike McKinlay took for ages as the first real view of Nagoya that I found.

View of Nagoya from our hotel room - there is a definite haze over the city which is called fog or mist but looks pollution-esque to us. Nevertheless the air is clean and fresh though quite damp at this time of year so perhaps it is moisture.

Zooming in on the same view - Nagoya Castle is beautiful in the afternoon light.

And further in the golden dolphin on the peaks of the roof just visible. Believe it or not, the city you see stretching beyond the castle with it’s multi storey buildings for miles are considered Nagoya’s suburbia - we found it kind of hard to tell when the city ended and suburbia began.

Well, poor Brigie went off to the cattery this afternoon, the suitcase is as packed as it can be before the pre-departure showers, any liquids or gels required on board have been replaced by solid versions or decanted down to under 100ml and I very cleverly didn’t get much sleep last night so I might just be able to sleep tonight - at least until 4:30 am when we have to get up. Not that I’m complaining about the hour - if we were going economy we’d have to BE at the airport then! Cheers once again to anonymous-auto-manufacturing-concern for looking after us so well.

My self-made phrase book is fat with counters and particles and I think we are ready to face the Japanese speaking world - for a week anyway. Our relocation consultant Abigail has sent us our schedule - we land Sunday night and then have Monday to ourselves to explore a little, Tuesday we will view some properties and apparently choose one because on Wednesday we will return to the chosen property and work out our furniture rental needs. On Thursday we will be test driving cars (btw we have been driving the Prius for the last few weeks and I will be posting a review soon - it took some getting used to but if the Harrier proves too large on Thursday I’ll be pushing for a Prius instead.) Friday Superman will be in meeting the new coworkers so I will be out on my own - I’m thinking Shinkansen to Kyoto for the day - unoriginal I know but there’s a reason it’s first stop on the cultural map (also it’s nice and close.)

Watch this space for pics and vids of the new digs though I can’t promise it will be during this week as we aren’t sure whether the connections at the hotel will be upload-friendly. We’re on the overnight flight Saturday 24th and back early Sunday.

Ittekimasu!!!!

So very, very tired… and the move is only just getting underway! On Friday I drove our second car down to Albury (on the Victorian border) to take it to a dealer that my Aunt and I lined up to buy both of our Hondas. Selling them was the practical thing to do considering our upcoming move but, even though I wasn’t able to get my license until I was 30 (5 years ago), I’m a bit of a car-lover so it was sad to say goodbye to what was my first car (a fairy-blue 2003 Jazz)  and my dream car (a sleek, black, 1998 Prelude vti-r, tiptronic transmission with full sports pack, gold badging and tinted windows - they’re classics now, they stopped making them in 01…okay, maybe "closet rev-head" is closer to the truth!)

Here’s my prowler all cleaned up after the long journey and a few minutes before turning her over

I’d barely driven her since coming to Sydney because there simply isn’t anywhere to enjoy driving it because of the traffic, so it seemed a nice idea to get a really good run in her at as close to full throttle as Australian law will allow. And it was nice…even when I got lost trying to cut through the mountains to the Hume… even when I found the Hume and, hoping I’d be well past Canberra was presented with a sign reading: Goulburn Exit 2km … pretty much it was nice till about hour 7 when I should have been well and truly at my Aunt’s house in Beechworth but still had 3 hours to go… The travel-hangover made it a little easier to give her up the next morning lol.

I spent a lovely Saturday with my Aunt shopping in Albury and found a great book for learning Kanji - Kanji ABC by Andreas Foerster & Naoko Tamura! I returned by train on Sunday which was yet another another delayed journey, though only 9 hrs this time, so I am somewhat wrecked at the moment but I have little time to recover as things are really starting to swing into action for the move:

Our visas and "alien registration cards" are well underway, along with our katakana name blocks which are used instead of signing one’s name in Japan. 

On Thursday a consultant is coming to look at our belongings and ask us which of them will be coming to Japan and which will be needing storage - so we need to work that out asap!

I spent a few hours yesterday scouring the Relojapan home search site for properties for our consultant Abigail to show us when we are there. I have been watching one gorgeous little house on the Higashiyama line which looks perfect for us on every level (right price, right location, not too small but not too big, light but still cozy), it became available in march but is not yet let so I’m crossing my fingers it will still be available when we arrive for orientation!  I just know that the few weeks till then will fly by.

As if they knew I was missing my cars, Superman’s company sent an email today asking us to choose a company car with links to websites in Japanese and cars which are only available in Japan! So I have spent a good couple of hours today hunting for reviews/details about the cars in English - luckily a couple of them are marketed under Toyota’s other make so I was able to find

the info I needed. We think we are going to go for  "The Harrier," a mid-sized 4WD which is too low to really go off-road (and therefore will be safer to drive!) but spacious, comfortable and with GPS and apparently power to spare thanks to the V6 engine (which is remarkably fuel efficient at 11.1/100km) for the trips we are planning around the country.

Personally I am looking forward to the vertical take-off feature, it’s not listed on any of the specs I could find but, seriously, they couldn’t name it "The Harrier"  without it, could they?

Actually, now I come to think of it, we’re going pretty well with preparation. Selling the cars was probably the biggest thing we have to do on our own and that’s done so… yay!

‘Course now there’s the matter of the Typhoid and Avian Bird Flu immunizations …

I wanted  to be able to blog happily from Japan during our orientation week and to keep in touch without the fuss of mobile phone "roaming" issues so I pulled out my old tablet PC and have spent the last couple of days giving it a good tune-up.  I bought my tablet back in 2003, giving in to my gadget-girl proclivities and going for the first generation of these marvelous machines. I loved the idea of being able to handwrite my fiction and have no need  for typing it out later. When I was first shown the tablet, the salesman showed my the input panel which could be either an on-screen keyboard which could be pecked at or a space into which one could hand write. I was disappointed - the panel could be docked either at the top of the screen, which meant that one’s hand, wrist & forearm covered any document into which you were trying to write, or it could be docked at the bottom -where there is nowhere to rest your hand and which quickly causes cramping. So the savvy salesman showed me the "write anywhere" feature. I fell in love. One could open up any application and write anywhere on the screen and it had no trouble converting even my odd, psuedo-copperplate handwriting and inserting it as type at the cursor. You could rest your hand wherever it was comfy on the screen so writing without being at a desk was easy. I loved my tablet.

Then came Service Pack 2 and it’s little parasite Windows XP for Tablet PC 2005. In their "wisdom" Microsoft decided to removed the "write anywhere" feature. They replaced it with a small button which would appear under your tablet pen when you hovered it over a cursor for an annoyingly long moment (and only in certain compatible applications). Once the damn thing appeared, you had to tap it to open up a smaller input panel under your hand- seemingly a good replacement accept that the thing disappeared if you lifted your pen too far from the screen or paused for a moment to think.  No number of complaints on the forums could prompt from Microsoft even an acknowledgement that the new feature was not for at least some a satisfactory replacement (to put it politely.)So, my tablet became a $4000 laptop with a 12nd screen and none of the features that that hind of money would get, like an onboard disc-drive let alone a DVD player.  I hooked it up to a full-sized keyboard & mouse and made good use of it, but it wasn’t my dear tablet anymore.

So now I have a  need for a portable computer again, I figured I’d see what the state of play is now. After  literally  hours of updates it seems that very little has changed. The annoying floaty thing is not quite so delicate and stays around long enough to get a good run up an a thought but it still only applies to some applications (this one excluded, I’m afraid) and there is still no return of the original beloved feature. Microsoft, it seems, is  happy for a company called  Evernote to make a fortune providing a plug-in which provides the "write anywhere" feature for which we really should not need to pay. However, as I  hand write this post  on my tablet, on my knee in front of the tv, switching the input panel from the  lower dock to the upper as my hand begins to  cramp, then back again as it becomes too annoying glancing down and having to move my hand to check the conversion every few words - I will no doubt succumb at some point.  Frankly, beyond the satisfaction and creative flow  that handwriting provides, the idea of "populating" my blog’s database, and in  turn the "series of tubes", in longhand is just too delicious.

Well our flights are booked for our first sojourn to Japan! Superman’s company is flying us out to have a week’s orientation in Nagoya after which we will return for about a month before we head off for the long term. We will be met in Nagoya by our relocation consultant who will show us around the city in general but more specifically she will show us rental properties for our stay. She is having trouble finding places which will allow our cat - in Japan many rental properties are "pets negotiable" but the convention is that this means dogs!  Apparently they are considered preferable - exactly the opposite to Australia, who’d have thunk it? I’m a little worried about living in a "pets negotiable" apartment complex if it is filled with yappy pups, I hope the walls are sound proofed!

Brigid doesn’t know it yet but her journey to japan begins on Monday with the first of her round of vaccinations, her international chip implant and pet passport certificate! She did well coming here to Sydney (for a very nervous cat) and she has definitely mellowed a little up here but I have to admit I’m concerned about a 14 hr plane flight for her. Luckily Australia is a rabies-free certified nation so she will only have to stay in quarantine for 12 days instead of 2 months.

We will be flying via Hong Kong and landing in Nagoya airport which, once again courtesy of Mike McKinley at his blog, I am now aware is actually on an island off Nagoya which is man-made for the purpose - this is it on google maps. Very anime futuristic, don’t you think?

It is a 9 hour flight to Hong Kong and then another 5 or so hours to Nagoya so with the one hour stop to stretch on Hong Kong as well as flying business class I’m sure we will arrive at least in as good shape as I did after the 14hr non-stop to LA in ‘05 which really wasn’t so bad at all. What’s more we will be arriving on Sunday evening and so will be able to get a good night’s sleep at the hotel before the week begins. Anonymous-car-manufacturing-concern certainly looks after their people!

I’m looking forward to posting my own pictures from Nagoya but for now here’s another from Mike MacKinlay’s blog taken from above Nagoya Central station. This will be Superman’s station for getting to work and I’m not sure but from the research I’ve done, the shadow cast across the city in this shot may actually be Superman’s building - if not it’s definitely close.

The next few times I write will be from Hollywood which is actually several thousand miles from where I started from (Philly) but it’s the same country … Okay, so I’m a little dizzy with excitement but who wouldn’t be?!
I intend to make the most I can possibly make of this opportunity and I hope my posts will be filled with news of many meetings and goings on (names will be edited out, of course.) I have decided that my main goal will be to gain representation - fairly important when one is living a quarter of the way around the world! I have a couple of meetings already organised: at the Braille Library facilities in Hollywood (for obvious reasons) and an executive producer of a very successful television show has very kindly given me her number to contact her for a chat when I get in (she is the daughter of a friend of my mothers - I’m getting the hang of it already!)

Of course we intend to do some touristy things as well. We have tickets to the Tutankhamun exhibition - something that is not expected to tour downunder so it’s magical that we have the chance. Apparently there are artifacts from the whole 18th Dynasty on display and I am crossing my fingers for something, anything, from Tut’s (assumed) father’s reign - Akhenaten will forever be my favourite (he was my first celebrity crush - strange child that I was!) We will also be taking a weekend to explore the central coast - my mother will be taking us to to Cambria and Big Sur (which I hear is a big forest but I’m not allowed to google it and take the edge of the impact it apparently has) and to a Scandinavian town called Solvang. And, of course, we’re going to explore the Academy Gallery and Library and check out theatre in the area.

So. This is it.

“Come to the edge,” He said. They said, “We are afraid.”
“Come to the edge,” He said.
They came.
He pushed them… and they flew.”
- Guillaume Apollinaire

Cross your fingers for me - I’m jumping.