What Is An Expat?

Here are a few interesting signs you might run into in Japan.

Come and visit, but for Pete’s sake leave!

Special needs toilets — only 1 legged headless women or otherwise normal headless men allowed.

 While it may be in the depths of the parking lot, it WAS actually aboveground, at least.

For those of you who have not added your subscription via the “subscribe by email” link over to the right, this would be a good time to go ahead and do that before I turn off the old subscription form.

As you may not, not long ago (ok, we’ve been back 2 months almost!) we were in Japan on vacation. We had a great visit, saw some wonderful places and met awesome new friends. I finally sorted through the 1400+ pictures I took, culled the no-good / not useful ones, edited the rest, and distilled the best into their current form in the 2007 11 Japan gallery.

We went to Tokyo:

We went to Nikko:

…where we were on TV…

One mustn’t miss Mt. Fuji…

Went to Kyoto…

Met (not et) some deer in Nara…

Saw the floating torii at Miyajima…

Visited Hiroshima…

Marvelled at Himeji Castle…

And then we left, which was a bit of a drag, but isn’t it usually?

Check out the 2007 11 Japan gallery.

Well, we’ve made it back and are enjoying being at work again. If it wasn’t for being able to come back to work, vacation could go on forever! I took approximately 1419 pictures before the “why do you exist?” deletions started occurring. I haven’t had the chance to get through too many of them yet, but the upside is that most of my notes were actually written out instead of being notes, so a possibility exists that I may actually generate a trip report out of this. (We’ll see. )

We had a great time but should have taken a few more days. Several places cropped up where we thought “hey, we’d really like to see that” but were unable to due to lack of time. We ran in to several old friends and Uzbeks, some of whom were both. We made several new friends as well, which is always nice. Japan was very polite and friendly overall and quite a nice trip, which I highly recommend to anyone who can make it. It was much easier to get around than we had expected, though there were a few small snags here and there, but none were very bad.

Today, as Day of the Ninja, is your opportunity to experience a day full of ninjocity. It’s too bad we couldn’t have still been in Japan on this day, but them’s the breaks I guess. While I don’t expect to see too many men in black running around here, you can participate to the fullest extent of your nonja (non-ninja) ability by taking a look at the below links:

From Day of the Ninja.com:

Check out these Day of the Ninja Links:

The Big Four

1. Official page – http://www.dayoftheninja.com. This is the page to send all your nonja-friends to so they can learn how to be ninja (for a day).
2. Day of the Ninja store – http://www.cafepress.com/ninjaburger1/4067516. Purchase official Day of the Ninja merchandise.
3. Ask a Ninja event planning wiki – http://askaninja.wiki-site.com. Use this page to plan events and, later, to post photos of those events.
4. Ask a Ninja vlog – http://askaninja.com/node/2349. Learn about the true origin of the Day of the Ninja.

Also:

Step 1: Become a ninja:

Step 2: Take the Ninja Quiz:
http://quizilla.com/users/aeonite/quizzes/Are_You_a_Ninja

I heartily recommend subscribing to the feed over at Ask A Ninja. Every week or two they come out with another Ask A Ninja video and they are very entertaining and done with a lot of style and creativity.

Don’t let the Pirates have all the fun!

HOLD THE PRESSES!

We just got back from Japan and I saw a ninja! He was trying to be clever and be a secret ninja, but as he turned away I caught him!

Now, on the other hand, later in Himeji we’d see a few more obvious ninjas. It was a terrible shame we couldn’t catch them on video sneak-walking through the crosswalk, that was awesome!

These guys really made my day. I look forward to killing them soon!

(except they’re in Japan and I am not anymore, so they’re safe for now.)

(as far as THEY know, that is…)

I did something silly and disabled a crucial plugin, disabling the site for a few days. I have fixed it now, and thankfully it was something simple that occurred to me fairly quickly. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Speaking of inconvenient, I am having trouble with these Japanese keyboards. Not everything is quite where it should be, though it is close…