Summer Vacation and two weeks of normal life
Hi!
Only a month left of the trip, and I've hardly noticed time passing. I think a big part of it is because of how evenly my weeks float by here - it's been over three years since I had this steady weekly schedule for this long. (Last time was when I drove a taxi 60h a week before starting my studies.) On top of that, everything has been running pretty smoothly after the the initial sick days and after getting used to the apartment and daily life in it.
Speaking of which, I think I've yet to describe the looks of the apartment in any way! I'm aftraid though that house tour in the apartments current state is impossible, because of, well, the carnage that are my living conditions when let go unchecked by anyone else. I do set things in order about once in a week, but it's just too easy to get comfortable with things in inconvenient places with so little possessions and so much space. Because space there is, just a bit too much. It's only a one room apartment with a kitchen corner right next to the entrance, but the one room is like a void for me, as I don't have almost any possessions with me. There would basically be space for a nice sofa and a coffee table, but as I don't have any reason to get anything like that just for three months, I end up with a room with the bed on one wall and a small table and a tiny chair on the opposite one, with , like, 6m² of space in total in the middle. It feels like a lot even after almost two months, and also means that it takes a bit of time and a lot of throwing dirty clothes on the floor before you run out of space, realize how messy it is, and rearrange everything on the loose. At least it's just me suffering from it.
Luckily, after all that digression, I'm happy to remember that I did take pictures of the apartment right after when I moved in, so I do have something I'm able to show! I'll have a string of pictures of the apartment at the end of the post with all the others, to give some feel to how this place is. (Short, non-picture-led version: it's pretty nice.)
There's almost been a whooping three weeks, It's really late, and I've got a pretty early Saturday morning in front of me, but I do want to write it all out now, otherwise I will forget the last of it before I once again manage to gather myself up to write things down. So, let's see what happened in the last three weeks of A Finnish Guy Living In Japan!
The week after last post was only four days long, and actually quite easy on the workload. Because of the summer week being that bit shorter, the tasks for the week were a little bit less time consuming that normally. So little work there actually was, that on one day I even got the permission to leave an hour early, which I was told that can happen, but which I did still not see coming in this very work heavy culture. Even if work might've run out early, though, I still enjoy it very much.
Little work did give me more time to think about the upcoming vacation. I had a few plans, two of which them were proper tourism in Japan: climbing Mount Fuji, and biking to a local hot springs hotel, both of which I was yet to experience. Unfortunately, as the vacation began, and it was time to start executing the plans, some difficulties arose. Or, rather, I realized that I was lacking both the equipment to take on a trek to conquer a 3700m volcano, and the funds to stay in a nice, traditional hot springs hotel I had planned during the high season of Japanese summer vacations. There might've been chances to downsize the plans, but instead I just forgot about 'em, and did other things, that were partly touristy, and partly quite the opposite.
To cover the touristy part, I managed to do a whopping two day trips inside Shizuoka with a bike I had in loan from a colleague. After the 10km I rode it the first time, I realized that any trip longer than that, like the almost 70km trip up to the mountains to the hot springs, would have been quite impossible, as the bike was so small I had practically no hope of getting my knees to an angle less than 90 degrees and be able to pedal properly. But the two trips I did manage to pedal through were worth it.
The first one led me to a shrine on top of a small mountain, accessible by 3700 ancient stone steps, and a rope car I learned to exist after climbing to the top. The shrine had been pointed out to me by the colleague who gave me a lift to Tokyo some weeks earlier, but before I got there, I didn't know or remember it's significance. This was actually a shrine built next to the tomb of one of Japans most famous and important historical figures, Tokugawa Ieyasu, some 400 years ago. Ieyasu was one of the three people that played important parts in Japan becoming a unified country, being referenced in a leaflet as the three unifiers. This was the man that moved the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo and became the first shōgun of the Tokugawa shogunate, beginning the last shogunate in Japan and the Edo period, a historically very long period of peace and economic growth in Japan that lasted for more than 200 years. History is always more complicated than one person, but stories are always built by their main characters, and Tokugawa Ieyasu sure was a notable one. History enthusiast I am, I got an idea to go check out the grave of the other two unifiers, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, but we'll see if I have time or real itnerest to travel all the way to Kyoto for that. This one experience was already quite a good dosage of Japanese history.
The other trip I managed was not as historical, but very enjoyable anyway. I biked about another 10 kilometers to a coastal part of Shizuoka, where there was a great seaside park and a very local looking fishing port. The highlight of the day however was when I gathered up my courage, looked up a small, well rater local izakaya, and went in all by myself. To my great luck, one of the servers did speak somewhat good English, AND there was an English menu, so I didn't have to pick completely by random and/or by recommendations. I enjoyed a meal of some 5 different, small seafood dishes, and even though I've forgotten most of them by now, I did make a mental note how the 4.7/5 rating on the place was spot on. The staff even served me two small extra dishes on the house, a generosity and show of hospitality I have not experienced yet. I would say they don't get much foreign customers, but then again, they had the English menu on the ready... So it just goes to show how great the place is. (Before I forget, and to get it written down somewhere, it was this restaurant). Too bad I ended the whole visit with realizing I had too little money, and had to pedal through two convenience stores before I found an ATM that accepted foreign cards.
While these two trips were both very enjoyable, they were also probably pretty important for my health in general...as they ended up being the only times in nine days when I was outside for more than five minutes, the time it takes to walk to the convenience store or to the closest eatery. This is because the majority of my vacation I ended up spending on my computer, either by doing work for my job back at home, participating in two different online game creation events (called Game Jams) with some of my Finnish friends, playing video games or spending time with my girlfriend. While I think I really could've at least a bit broken away from the normal week of sitting for 9 hours at work and then sitting some more at home, I must still say that I really enjoyed the vacation. I've been dying to properly participate in the project my team in Finland is dealing with and that I left behind by coming here, it was great to be able to spent really proper amounts of time with Jutta and hang out, and I haven't been able to play games for long periods of time for ages, even though it's something I really miss from the now distant feeling teenage years. I also really enjoyed the Game Jams, but from that there seemed to be a very visible side effect.
The thing was that the game jams were team efforts, and two thirds of both jam's teams were my friends, who were both in Finland, and it's time zone that's 6 hours apart from the one in Japan. This meant that, to be able to properly fit our timetables together, I did my best to switch my time zone to the Finnish one. This meant that, because the first Game Jam was during the first weekend of the vacation (vacation being 10 days from Friday to Sunday), I switched to Finnish time right at the beginning, and didn't bother really reverting until the second weekend, when the other Game Jam was held. This of course meant, that I ended up doing a hasty change of timetable during Sunday, messing myself up really well - and basically ending jetllagged on my first day at work after vacation. It must've looked to have been a really relaxing vacation to my colleagues...!
Despite the drowsiness and possible dozing off in a meeting that was virtually all in Japanese (yes, I do sit through those as well, just because), the work week was all good and fun, and I keep enjoying it - I even got to decide on a technology to choose in patching up a part of the program we work on. I guess the only mention worthy thing is that I did manage to do some yoga, if not any running, to try to do something to shape up. Which is nice - I'm starting to notice that my diet of meaty, Japanese food is not treating me that well. 😅 You might be thinking that Japanese food is all about fresh sushi and stuff that just naturally keeps you slim, but, boy do they also have their pork cutlets, beef bowls and whole restaurants that only serve deep fried food. Yyep.
Anyway, that all about last three weeks...excluding this weekend, of course. This weekend I went to meet the host family from my first week, and there was so much we went to see and do, I'll just leave it all to a coming post. Other thing is, I've now fallen asleep twice next to my laptop trying to complete this post that's nearing a hefty 2,000 words (spot the person who hasn't written a thesis and thinks this is a lot), so it might do well to this time quit early, not delay the post any more, and head to sleep relatively early.
Take care all, let's hope next time is sooner than we expect. With this speed, we would only have time for two or so posts for this trip, but I'll do my best and try make it to a four. Might give some more specificity to the events.
See ya!
-Ilmari
Only a month left of the trip, and I've hardly noticed time passing. I think a big part of it is because of how evenly my weeks float by here - it's been over three years since I had this steady weekly schedule for this long. (Last time was when I drove a taxi 60h a week before starting my studies.) On top of that, everything has been running pretty smoothly after the the initial sick days and after getting used to the apartment and daily life in it.
Speaking of which, I think I've yet to describe the looks of the apartment in any way! I'm aftraid though that house tour in the apartments current state is impossible, because of, well, the carnage that are my living conditions when let go unchecked by anyone else. I do set things in order about once in a week, but it's just too easy to get comfortable with things in inconvenient places with so little possessions and so much space. Because space there is, just a bit too much. It's only a one room apartment with a kitchen corner right next to the entrance, but the one room is like a void for me, as I don't have almost any possessions with me. There would basically be space for a nice sofa and a coffee table, but as I don't have any reason to get anything like that just for three months, I end up with a room with the bed on one wall and a small table and a tiny chair on the opposite one, with , like, 6m² of space in total in the middle. It feels like a lot even after almost two months, and also means that it takes a bit of time and a lot of throwing dirty clothes on the floor before you run out of space, realize how messy it is, and rearrange everything on the loose. At least it's just me suffering from it.
Luckily, after all that digression, I'm happy to remember that I did take pictures of the apartment right after when I moved in, so I do have something I'm able to show! I'll have a string of pictures of the apartment at the end of the post with all the others, to give some feel to how this place is. (Short, non-picture-led version: it's pretty nice.)
There's almost been a whooping three weeks, It's really late, and I've got a pretty early Saturday morning in front of me, but I do want to write it all out now, otherwise I will forget the last of it before I once again manage to gather myself up to write things down. So, let's see what happened in the last three weeks of A Finnish Guy Living In Japan!
The week after last post was only four days long, and actually quite easy on the workload. Because of the summer week being that bit shorter, the tasks for the week were a little bit less time consuming that normally. So little work there actually was, that on one day I even got the permission to leave an hour early, which I was told that can happen, but which I did still not see coming in this very work heavy culture. Even if work might've run out early, though, I still enjoy it very much.
Little work did give me more time to think about the upcoming vacation. I had a few plans, two of which them were proper tourism in Japan: climbing Mount Fuji, and biking to a local hot springs hotel, both of which I was yet to experience. Unfortunately, as the vacation began, and it was time to start executing the plans, some difficulties arose. Or, rather, I realized that I was lacking both the equipment to take on a trek to conquer a 3700m volcano, and the funds to stay in a nice, traditional hot springs hotel I had planned during the high season of Japanese summer vacations. There might've been chances to downsize the plans, but instead I just forgot about 'em, and did other things, that were partly touristy, and partly quite the opposite.
To cover the touristy part, I managed to do a whopping two day trips inside Shizuoka with a bike I had in loan from a colleague. After the 10km I rode it the first time, I realized that any trip longer than that, like the almost 70km trip up to the mountains to the hot springs, would have been quite impossible, as the bike was so small I had practically no hope of getting my knees to an angle less than 90 degrees and be able to pedal properly. But the two trips I did manage to pedal through were worth it.
The first one led me to a shrine on top of a small mountain, accessible by 3700 ancient stone steps, and a rope car I learned to exist after climbing to the top. The shrine had been pointed out to me by the colleague who gave me a lift to Tokyo some weeks earlier, but before I got there, I didn't know or remember it's significance. This was actually a shrine built next to the tomb of one of Japans most famous and important historical figures, Tokugawa Ieyasu, some 400 years ago. Ieyasu was one of the three people that played important parts in Japan becoming a unified country, being referenced in a leaflet as the three unifiers. This was the man that moved the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo and became the first shōgun of the Tokugawa shogunate, beginning the last shogunate in Japan and the Edo period, a historically very long period of peace and economic growth in Japan that lasted for more than 200 years. History is always more complicated than one person, but stories are always built by their main characters, and Tokugawa Ieyasu sure was a notable one. History enthusiast I am, I got an idea to go check out the grave of the other two unifiers, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, but we'll see if I have time or real itnerest to travel all the way to Kyoto for that. This one experience was already quite a good dosage of Japanese history.
The other trip I managed was not as historical, but very enjoyable anyway. I biked about another 10 kilometers to a coastal part of Shizuoka, where there was a great seaside park and a very local looking fishing port. The highlight of the day however was when I gathered up my courage, looked up a small, well rater local izakaya, and went in all by myself. To my great luck, one of the servers did speak somewhat good English, AND there was an English menu, so I didn't have to pick completely by random and/or by recommendations. I enjoyed a meal of some 5 different, small seafood dishes, and even though I've forgotten most of them by now, I did make a mental note how the 4.7/5 rating on the place was spot on. The staff even served me two small extra dishes on the house, a generosity and show of hospitality I have not experienced yet. I would say they don't get much foreign customers, but then again, they had the English menu on the ready... So it just goes to show how great the place is. (Before I forget, and to get it written down somewhere, it was this restaurant). Too bad I ended the whole visit with realizing I had too little money, and had to pedal through two convenience stores before I found an ATM that accepted foreign cards.
While these two trips were both very enjoyable, they were also probably pretty important for my health in general...as they ended up being the only times in nine days when I was outside for more than five minutes, the time it takes to walk to the convenience store or to the closest eatery. This is because the majority of my vacation I ended up spending on my computer, either by doing work for my job back at home, participating in two different online game creation events (called Game Jams) with some of my Finnish friends, playing video games or spending time with my girlfriend. While I think I really could've at least a bit broken away from the normal week of sitting for 9 hours at work and then sitting some more at home, I must still say that I really enjoyed the vacation. I've been dying to properly participate in the project my team in Finland is dealing with and that I left behind by coming here, it was great to be able to spent really proper amounts of time with Jutta and hang out, and I haven't been able to play games for long periods of time for ages, even though it's something I really miss from the now distant feeling teenage years. I also really enjoyed the Game Jams, but from that there seemed to be a very visible side effect.
The thing was that the game jams were team efforts, and two thirds of both jam's teams were my friends, who were both in Finland, and it's time zone that's 6 hours apart from the one in Japan. This meant that, to be able to properly fit our timetables together, I did my best to switch my time zone to the Finnish one. This meant that, because the first Game Jam was during the first weekend of the vacation (vacation being 10 days from Friday to Sunday), I switched to Finnish time right at the beginning, and didn't bother really reverting until the second weekend, when the other Game Jam was held. This of course meant, that I ended up doing a hasty change of timetable during Sunday, messing myself up really well - and basically ending jetllagged on my first day at work after vacation. It must've looked to have been a really relaxing vacation to my colleagues...!
Despite the drowsiness and possible dozing off in a meeting that was virtually all in Japanese (yes, I do sit through those as well, just because), the work week was all good and fun, and I keep enjoying it - I even got to decide on a technology to choose in patching up a part of the program we work on. I guess the only mention worthy thing is that I did manage to do some yoga, if not any running, to try to do something to shape up. Which is nice - I'm starting to notice that my diet of meaty, Japanese food is not treating me that well. 😅 You might be thinking that Japanese food is all about fresh sushi and stuff that just naturally keeps you slim, but, boy do they also have their pork cutlets, beef bowls and whole restaurants that only serve deep fried food. Yyep.
Anyway, that all about last three weeks...excluding this weekend, of course. This weekend I went to meet the host family from my first week, and there was so much we went to see and do, I'll just leave it all to a coming post. Other thing is, I've now fallen asleep twice next to my laptop trying to complete this post that's nearing a hefty 2,000 words (spot the person who hasn't written a thesis and thinks this is a lot), so it might do well to this time quit early, not delay the post any more, and head to sleep relatively early.
Take care all, let's hope next time is sooner than we expect. With this speed, we would only have time for two or so posts for this trip, but I'll do my best and try make it to a four. Might give some more specificity to the events.
See ya!
-Ilmari
Grave of Tokugawa Ieyasu
A Fishing Port in Shizuoka
My apartment. The front door, that goes straight outside, is behind me here.
The kitchen is really small, the only handling area for ingredients I have is when I position the cutting board I bought later over the sink.
The bath, as people who know how tall I am, is a tad too small for me, and I have yet to bother using it.
This view is on left on entering, so on left side of the first picture.
Under the bed is lots of storage space for my travel bag.
AC works well, window door behind curtains opens up to some space for hanging clothes to dry (this is the first floor), and a student cap and a bottle of souvenir gin can be spotted.
At this point I still didn't have a trash can, I ordered one from Amazon later, so trash is in the bag hanging from the door. Also, not all clothes fit in the cupboard, so same have to be on it.
Luckily, the mirror is big enough to show me whole.
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