Japan Rider: The Blog

Today is the start of the Golden Week holiday for most people -   a nation-wide ‘long vacation’, when a cluster of National Holidays fall consecutively to form nearly a full week off. This year, the actual, official Golden Week is April 29th, and then May 3rd through 5th. People get the 29th off -a National Holiday to recognize the vernal equinox -, work on Friday, and then, for those who do not work weekends, they can enjoy a nice, five-day weekend.For Brian and I, our holiday actually began on Thursday and will continue for the next week.

Travel during the peak holiday times (Golden Week in early May, Obon in August, and the New Year holidays) is nightmarishly crowded and freakishly expensive. However, we, like millions of Japanese, often use this time to travel somewhere, either near or abroad. Last year, though, we stayed close to home to complete our motorcycle license school. And this year, the holidays rather snuck up on us, leaving us with no plans and no reservations.

This is not a terrible fate, however, as we are enjoying just being. We’ve been lounging in the warm sunshine in the mountains, doing some shopping and catching up on some much needed rest.

And – being the travel aficionados we are – I am sure I’ll be able to get us a reservation at a minshuku in Izu for a night or two, which will motivate us to get out our motorcycles and embrace the still-cool spring air.

Recently it seems that we’ve barely been blogging; and then we occasionally blog to excuse lack of blogging. The truth is, we’ve been spending lots of time running or working out, and lots of other time just working.

And, frankly, the weather this year has been horrendous. It’s been grey and rainy most days, leaving me feeling unmotivated and discouraged. I’ve been spending lots of hours just laying around, watching TV or reading trashy novels. Not only is my physical condition turning soft and mushy, but my brain is quickly following!

Brian’s been more productive, listening to challenging, non-fiction audio books and completing projects (such as knife construction!). He also found a good, orthopedic hospital and has had his foot X-rayed to rule out bone deformities or injuries. Those indeed being ruled out, his next step is an MRI to check for nerve damage (which is what he’s certain it is). After the MRI confirms this, hopefully new medical science is available that can treat the problem without surgery. Failing this, minor surgery may be required. I’ll update more on this when we know more.

Our spring has been cooler than usual for this time of year, so our team trained under ideal conditions. Surprisingly, though, race day warmed and sun grew strong for the exact duration of the running. Whew!

For this run we formed a team of 7 racers, from our company and a client’s staff; the decided theme was the rainbow, so each of us was attired in a specific and unique color. This was harder to arrange than envisioned,  but we largely succeeded. Two ran the 10km, and five of us the half-marathon. Here we are after the running (with our ‘ghost runner’):

Tracy ran the 21km from start to finish, but I slowed and limped/hopped for a large section in the middle. The thought of quitting was strong as my foot rejected the switch to new footwear, but when the pain became constant instead of step-dependent, I could continue forward progress. (This pain had flaired before, and seemed to depend not on how far I ran, but how long I wore the shoes. This new pair was wider and I hoped a safer choice.) Here is a great video demonstrating the source of the pain:

I’m looking into options, as I want to keep running, and am looking forward to my next chance to race!

When I was visiting my mother back in February/March, I spent some time going through a big box of old photos. There were photos from way back at the turn of the century from my father’s family, to a lot of photos from the 70s and up on my mother’s side.

I noticed that there were far fewer older photos, and they had been clearly labeled for the most part so I know who is in the photo and when the photos were taken. As cameras became more accessible, and everyone became a photographer, the photo collection grew, and most photos are not labeled at all. Luckily, my mother remembered a lot of the people in the photos, and I will eventually try to label them.

It made me realize that even with digital collections, we should label or tag the photos with the who and where, while hopefully the metadata of the ‘when’ stays intact.

Anyway, I selected a few of the older or more nostalgic pics to bring back to Japan with me, and have finally had a chance to start scanning them.

Here are old photos from my father’s side of the family:

Paternal Grandmother and her sister, circa 1906

Paternal Great Grandfather

Though I made a few minor tweaks (Curves, Fade Correction), I haven’t yet begun to do any restoration. Some of the other photos that I have would benefit from more work.

The weather this spring has been unseasonably chilly, even with a record late-snowfall in Tokyo. However, today saw a break from the rain and cold, and gave us a sunny, warm day to run 21km (which is a half-marathon!) in Sagami-Hara, a city not too far from Tokyo.

The run was hosted on the American Army Base in the city, and the terrain was mainly flat, which should have made for an easy run. However, Brian experienced extreme pain in his foot, resulting in some forced walking, and I experienced some fatigue, resulting in some optional walking!

We are tired now, post-run, but agree that we really did enjoy the experience, especially the social aspect. The complaints that I have are mainly that I feel the race was not well enough managed – our run started at 1 p.m., an hour later than scheduled; there was no food (bananas, oranges, etc) available at the water stations, and there were only a very few food stalls (which ran out of food!) around the race area.

Again, these complaints are minor. We ran with a group of friends, and had pre-arranged to each run in a different ‘rainbow’ colour. I chose orange, while Brian went with green, and our friends went with pink, blue, yellow, and red. Our friends got some pics of us all together, which I hope I can post soon, but for now, here is a shot Brian got of me (taken with his awesome iPhone!) after I crossed the finish line:

Crossing the Finish Line

We had a great run, and went out for dinner at a cute African restaurant afterward. Nothing like a cold beer and spicy Jollof rice after running a half-marathon!

The weather, though slow to warm up, was still pleasant this weekend, and we made sure to be out getting the best of it. We spent a few hours enjoying the last of the sakura (cherry blossoms) on Saturday at Sunpu Koen in Shizuoka City.

At Sunpu Koen in Shizoka

I took the train, since I had an engagement a couldn’t risk being late for after ward, but Brian took his motorcycle. He says that the wind and noise as he was raging along the freeway was barely bearable, but lots of fun.

In the evening, we went out for dinner at our favourite yaki-tori shop, Tori-ichi in Susono. On the way there, Brian took this photo of an old cherry tree outside the train station.

Aging Cherry Tree

Yesterday was the perfect Sunday. We slept in, languishing in our futons until after 7 a.m. We then lounged around, did some projects and household chores until 9:30 a.m, at which time we drove to Numazu, where we went shopping at a large sports shop, buying some running gear and other goodies, before making our way to the coast, near Senbon Hama.

The weather, though cloudy, was quite comfortably warm, and the long path along the beach was uncrowded – perfect for a long run! Brian ran hard for 20km, and I ran mediumly-hard for 18.

After the run, we stopped at the nearby Fishmarket Taproom where we caught up with an old colleague and had a pint of Baird’s Beer. Being hot, sweaty and tired made our post-run beer all the more perfect!

Hmmm. The comments on this blog are working, but for some reason, my WordPress (blog ware) is marking some valid comments as Spam and holding them in the filter. I have reset the spam-catcher, and hopefully the issue is resolved.

However, I do check the spam folder regularly, and usually catch real comments that accidentally get routed that way.

So, please comment away!

This weekend, the delicate and ephemeral sakura (cherry blossoms) were at their peak in many places in our region of Japan. Anticipating a sunny Saturday, we made plans with a couple of motorbiking friends to take a day trip to Izu where we could enjoy some hanami (cherry blossoms viewing) under the sunny sky. When Saturday dawned, it was rather cool and cloudy, but otherwise still good for a bit of motorbiking to the Izu peninsula.

When Brian and I biked to Izu a few times last summer, we opted for the fun, traffic-free and scenic route along the Izu Skyline. This route crossed our minds again yesterday morning, but we followed instead a more direct route to Koganezaki, on the west coast of Izu. Though we’d anticipated more sitting in traffic than actual fast riding, after a bit of traffic in the Mishima area, we then found ourselves zipping along the 136 by-pass and the Shuzenji toll road, over the mountains and smoothly down to the coast.

View Koganezaki in a larger map

The views along the way were at times breathtaking – cherry blossoms along the mountain roads, beautiful vistas over the ocean…

Cherry Blossoms

The views from Koganezaki park were also stunning.

View from Koganezaki park

And you could even see Mt. Fuji from there (look just to the right of Brian…)

Mt. Fuji...

After walking around Koganezaki, enjoying the ocean view and some cherry blossom viewing, we rode to the town of Ugusu where we had a traditional Japanese set lunch at this rustic little restaurant:

Nonbirija restaurant

And that was just Saturday! Today we have a cloudy but pleasant Sunday and are looking forward to a drive-and-run along the ocean in Numazu.

As some of you may remember, I became enamored of Ubuntu, the awesome Linux operating system, a few years ago. My infatuation never really faded – I love playing around with Linux and totally love Ubuntu.

When I got my Acer netbook a few months ago, one of the first things I did was make it dual-bootable with Ubuntu (and the originally installed OS – Windows 7 Starter in Japanese). Happy was I to discover that Ubuntu had released, though I had not earlier noticed, a version optimized specifically for netbooks. It’s called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, or UNR.

The menu and desktop environment look a little different to the main Ubuntu release, but overall, I have relly been enjoying surfing around in my UNR.

UNR Desktop Favorites menu

Above you will notice that I’ve got Picasa and Google Chrome installed. These are proprietary programs and do not come pre-packaged – I had to install these myself. Another Linux distro available and optimized for netbooks is called EasyPeasy. EasyPeasy looks a lot like my above UNR screenshot because it is based on Ubuntu, but includes some popular applications, like Picasa, Skype and Flash, right out of the box. However, whether including proprietary software (something Ubuntu and most other Linux distros do not do) is a good thing is debatable.