Japan Rider: The Blog

This took a while to get together finally upload, but here is a short (8 minute) video of the riding through Cambodia… The camera was a gift (Thanks dad and Eileen!), but I was too worried about its durability during the early more rugged portions of the journey, so my footage was on the smoother later sections. Most of the roads we took were really hellish, but exhilarating. It turns out that the camera held on to my helmet and worked fine in every condition, so I missed catching a lot of the journey. I hope to try again someday!

It was a sunny but chilly day, with the high being about 7 Celsius. However, not wanting to hibernate for another weekend, we went for a 10km morning jog, then spent the afternoon shopping at the Gotemba Supremium Outlet Mall.

I’ve mentioned this mall before – a large, sprawling outlet nestled at the foot of Mt. Fuji, about 30 minutes from home, it is rather a tourist attraction and people come from Tokyo and further to shop there, yet we mostly take it for granted. However, Brian’s need for shoes, and my enjoyment of even just window shopping, decided that we’d spend our day in the chilly air of Gotemba.

We shopped for about four hours, including a late-lunch break, and came out with four pairs of shoes (three for Brian, one for me), two large bags of Salt and Vinegar chips (for me), a few little impulse purchases, and a couple of photos of my favourite mountain.

Early Evening at the Outlet Mall

By the time we got back to the car, it had been dark for over an hour  and dinner time had come, so we stopped at a new izakaya on the way home. Good food, friendly service – we’d go there again!

As today is Setusbun, we had a little fun at lunch time at the office throwing beans at the demons.

Always falling on February 3rd (or occasionally 4th), marking the day before spring, Setsubun is not a holiday, but is just a day when kids and even adults do mame-maki – bean throwing ceremony. While throwing the beans, we shout, *oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi*, which means *demons out, happiness in!”.

I, who have been chasing away my demons for ages, was only too happy to grab some beans and fling them at the symbolic devils (embodied by some co-workers).

We also ate some makizushi while facing the ‘good luck’ direction, which is west-south-west this year.

Devils Attacking

Sushi

We received the results of our Nihongo Shiken – the test we wrote in December. And, as we had pretty much expected, neither of us passed.

We are not crushed by any means – we are merely resolved to actually study for the next test, which will be in July.

The JLPT is actually changing a little in July as a new level will be added, called N3. Previously (as when we wrote the test in December), there were four levels – 1 through 4, with four being the easiest and one the toughest. However, there is a large gap between levels three and two, so in this new structure, the N3 is meant to bridge that gap.

Now we have to decide whether to write N3 or N2…

Once again, in order to procrastinate projects in progress, I’ve been playing with a new (for me) website called Shuttercal. Actually, I found this website and created an account ages ago, then promptly forgot about it until I came across it again. It’s a site that is meant for you to upload a photo a day, and the layout is calendar style. It looks quite nice, is free, and easy. I haven’t fully explored it yet, but I spent some time uploading photos for January. I did cheat a bit and upload some scrapbook pages, and, since their creation spanned several days, I put them up in multiple copies!

One good aspect, for those of us who multi-task, is that you can embed photos from the calendar into your blog, so no need to upload a second time if you don’t want to.

You can see my January calendar here:

http://www.shuttercal.com/calendar/tracylee/

After my very relaxing Saturday, we spent Sunday mostly lazing around and working on photo/video projects. But in the afternoon, I decided to go to a small New Year’s Party that I’d heard about which was organized by MIRA, the Mishima International Relations Association.

While I don’t usually participate in any kind of “international” event, I needed to at least warm up my motorcycle engine, and I thought that this would be a good way to meet new people and network a little. So at 1:30 I got on my motorcycle and rode to Mishima.

The party was held in a event hall in a hotel, and I was pleasantly surprised! It was quite a nice party, with a lovely setup, and a wide variety of people from all around the world. I met people from Columbia, Peru, and Iran as well as a few Canadians and Australians.

They even had a cool opening band:

All in all, a nice way to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Yesterday (Friday) marked my 38th birthday. Since my birthday fell on a Friday, I decided to ‘celebrate’ by taking the day off and savouring some ‘me time’, which was wonderful. We then decided to have a quiet evening of pizza and a DVD, saving the real outing for today, when we did one of my favourite things – spending the day at a nice onsen (spa)!

We stayed close to home and went to Cha-me-no-Yu, part of the Gotemba Kogen resort. We arrived there at about 10:30 a.m. Upon arrival and ‘check in’, we were given a yukata set that we would then spend the day wearing around the buildings whenever we were not nakedly bathing in the big, deep, hot baths.

We spent the entire day there, having lunch at the Cha-me-no-Yu restaurant. When taking breaks from the bath, we just relaxed – swinging in hammocks, swinging in swings, sitting in massage chairs, or napping out in the nap room:

In an outdoor hammock after a bath

It's common to put your little towel on your head in an onsen

Afternoon nap in the 'Relax Room'

While Brian merely rested his eyes a little, I totally fell asleep on the heated pad while listening to an audio book on my iPod. When I finally woke up, we took yet another bath before calling it a day and heading home.

NOTE: At the bottom of this post, I’ve also included a “gallery” version of the photos. In comments, please let me know whether you would rather see the larger photos in context, or the gallery (which would be faster-loading). Thank you!

After several days relaxing, swimming and walking along the beach, it was time to make our way to Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor.

We took the night bus from Sihanoukville at 8 p.m. and arrived in Siem Reap at 5 a.m. It was not exactly a comfortable ride, but it wasn’t awful, and for the price ($18 each), it was worth it.

We were, however, very happy to be permitted to check into our hotel immediately, even though the sun still hadn’t risen, and to take a shower and relax before exploring the city. Our hotel, the Ta Prohm, was very conveniently located and more luxurious than we could have anticipated; and, especially after the basic bungalow accommodations on the beach, I was more than impressed with the hard-wood flooring, hot running water and cable TV.

Our Room at the Ta Prohm Hotel

Siem Reap’s main draw are the temples of Angkor, including the most famous Angkor Wat, located just a few kilometers from Siem Reap. After relaxing and having a light lunch in the city, we caught a tuk-tuk to the temples.

We had to stop at the gate to buy a pass, and as we knew one day wouldn’t be enough, we opted for the $40 three-day pass. The temples are not close to each other, and we kept our tuk-tuk driver there to shuttle us from place to place; we then hired the same driver to pick us up at our hotel and to take us to and around all the temples for all three days.

Angkor Wat

Monks at the Temples

Us at a Temple

Our Driver, Tam

Siem Reap is a great city itself, and has more to offer than just the temples. When we got ‘templed out’, we spent some time dining at a variety of restaurants, shopping at the fabulous market with tons of shops, or just watching one of the fifty-two channels on TV in our luxurious hotel. We even took a Cambodian cooking class on our last day in town.

Old Market in Siem Reap

Brian Cooking up a Storm!

Alas, all good things must end. A mere four hours after this class, we had to catch our flight back to Tokyo (via Seoul).

It is that time of year again. We always seem to upgrade or update our PCs right around now, and this year was no different.

The case that housed my desk top PC was a little old, the front headphone jack didn’t work and I was also ready for a change of look. So, I picked up a new case on sale this week, and Brian and I planned to spend a few hours on Saturday just transferring cases before installing Windows 7.

What was going to be a half-day project turned into a one and a half day project in the end, and I still have concerns.

First of all, the case transplant took a little longer than planned, but we didn’t really run into any issues. It just took time. And when it was done, it ran great.

Me swapping PC cases, still in my pajamas...

We then decided to install Windows 7 so I could have a dual-boot with Vista. Well, that’s when we encountered tons of trouble. A usually trouble-free OS, the problems here were hard-ware related. My original  hard drive is most-likely corrupt, as I now remember I had trouble with it last week. So, I couldn’t write any new data to it.

After lots of trial and error, I decided to just nip down the road to buy a new hard drive. This turned into a 3.5 hour errand requiring I go a bit further than just down the road. Thankfully, I got a good deal on a new TB drive, and picked up a cheap motherboard for Brian’s old pc.

We finally (FINALLY!) got the new OS installed on the new drive, but the pc did crash and give me the blue screen of death twice during the install.

Today we focussed on getting the system to recognise Vista, still on a separate (and corrupt) HD and dual boot. We finally managed to get the machine to dual-boot only  by running the OS disk and choosing to repair my computer. By this time it was 11:00 a.m. on Sunday morning!

With the big projects done, we took a break for a run. Coming home, we both got back into the computers: me, to start installing all my software, and Brian to swap out his motherboards before also upgrading his OS.

My concern remains however because my computer totally crashed again today, and I know it is hardware related. However, the only new hardware I’ve installed is the new disk drive…

I’m choosing to ignore the problem for now, because the alternative (another full day or more spent installing and customizing on yet another new hard drive) is not palatable at all!

Another day and a half of riding, one more night spent on the road in the small town of Takeo, and we then found ourselves with time for a lunch break in the resort town of Kampot.

Here’s Brian and Daniel, having a beer before getting a great rack of ribs at a popular restaurant called The Rusty Keyhole:

Lunch at the Rusty Keyhole in Kampot

Aside from being world famous for the pepper, Kampot is a really quaint seaside town with a lot of restaurants and more. However, before we could blink, we were on the road again ready to finish our ride in Sihanoukville.

Once in Sihanoukville, we said good-bye to our bikes and our riding companions, and spent some time at the beach. Fortunately, we were not left totally on our own to find our way as Shiran (the other partner in Stray Dog Adventures) made us a reservation at La Casa beach bungalows on Otres beach, and he and Daniel then took us there on the back of their bikes.

Our Beach Hut at La Casa Bungalows

Sunset

Chillin under palm trees

Preparing for the sun

We spent about five days at the beach before catching the overnight bus to Siem Reap.