lolNZ

Sydney - The Week in Pictures

2009-08-15T04:49:00.000-07:00

Got a hotel in a very convenient location in Sydney, right next to the central railway station, bus station and Chinatown (yay for dim sum), 10 minutes' walk from Darling Harbor and Hyde Park.

8 nights in town, plenty enough to browse through the main tourist activities as well as leave some downtime to enjoy a good book. It's supposedly winter here now, but since the daytime temperatures are closer to 20 degrees than 10, it's just right for spending most of the days out and about.

Not really much to complain, so how about just some pictures?

Sydney skyline.

Sydney skyline during sunset.

Opera building and Harbor bridge.

Opera building from the bridge.

Night view from the other side.

The city monorail. Doesn't really go anywhere, just does a little circle around the downtown for tourists.

Chinatown.

Interesting piece in the skeleton room of the Australian Museum.

Bats in the botanic gardens. Very. Loud. Little. Bastards.

Touristy beaches are not so touristy during stormy seas. Only some crazy surfers around.

Pretty cliffs. Also the number one suicide spot in Sydney, if not all of Australia.

Lounging kangaroos.

Kangaroo on my plate.

Koala, I think they call this one.

In Sydney Aquarium, this stingray just floated out over me all of sudden. It's 3-4 meters wide, I guess.

Shark dude.

Om-nom-nom, I'm a dugong and I love my salad.

Colorful jellyfish.

Blue Mountains, 2 hours from Sydney central by train. Charles Darwin was impressed by this view, when he visited the place.

3 Sisters.

That green stuff is actually the treetops 300 meters below me.

Right, back to Finland tomorrow, 27-hour trip in total. Not sure if looking forward to.

Australian Outback

2009-08-09T19:33:00.000-07:00

Darwin is not a huge place, so 4 nights there is plenty enough to get a pretty high resolution scan of it. All the eating, walking around and baking under the sun aside: this is Australia. It took me five minutes of looking off a pathway amid some mangrove-like bushes, before I found my first poisonous spider. The crocodiles eat a few people every year. On all the beaches I found warning signs encouraging people to stay the hell away from the water because of box jellyfish, which even when not lethal, can apparently offer you some of the nature's most extreme roller coaster rides of pain that last for several days.

Nice, long beaches, though, so I suppose it can be worth the risk for some.

Beware.

Get off the track, get bitten by something nasty.

Something strange about this bird...

Sea level moves around several meters with the tides.

Beautiful sunset in Darwin.

It's not a bad place on any account, but while there, you don't really escape the feeling of the rest of the civilization being pretty damn far away, both Sydney and Jakarta being about 3000 kilometers away, and I've noticed that my perverse yearning for solitude requires me to stay in well-populated places, lest I start getting jittery.

So what do I do?

Why, jump on the Ghan and head out into the outback, of course!

The Ghan.

Darwin -> Alice Springs.

Alice Springs.
It's far away from everywhere else on the planet.
Termite mounds.

23 hours through an increasingly desert-like landscape, and I arrive to Alice Springs, a town in the very core of Australia. I guess it tells something about the locals that they aren't all sure about the population of the place, placing it somewhere between 25.000 and 30.000. A very independent lot, they are. I know some people in Finland, who'd feel right at home. (except for the climate, of course. Now is the winter season, so while the day-time temperatures climb to around 26 degrees and night-time temperatures drop to around 0, during the summer it can get as hot as 45 degrees.) You can buy some pretty reasonably-priced aboriginal stuff in Alice Springs, compared to the rest of the country, and even though most of the aboriginal souvenirs are pretty rubbish in my untrained eyes (they are a hunter-gatherer culture, after all), I did nab me a nice didgeridoo against my earlier lamenting on not being able to buy one. It should be on a boat heading to Finland, as I write this. :)

My somewhat suspicious motel in Alice Springs.

Speaking of aboriginals, there's really no nice way to put this in, so I'll just say: good lord their women must be the ugliest creatures on the planet! I mean, damn... Most of them at age 20 and up look like bloated corpses dragged out from a lake after having marinated there for a week or two. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I'm just commenting the ones I witnessed out there. :)

So, back to Alice Springs~

Most of it looks and feels like a little countryside town because that's exactly what it is. But it has recently gone through a bit of a change due to tourism, which now lubricates the area with a few hundred million dollars every year. Go there by train and experience the enormous scale of the outback firsthand, stay a couple of days and then fly back out - perfect. The aforementioned souvenirs are cheaper than in the big cities and eating is pretty good, too: the other day I actually managed to eat kangaroo, camel and crocodile, all during one single meal. :) The biggest attraction in the area is undoubtably Uluru(Ayers Rock), which pulls in almost quarter of a million tourists every year, proving once again that if there are gods, then we human beings are their idea of a joke. It took 4.5 hours by bus to reach Uluru from Alice Springs, stopping in between to laugh and clap hands at a piano-playing and ear-splittingly howling dingo.

Shut up, dingo, you sing worse than I do!
Kangaroos couldn't care less about me.

To give you an idea on how arid the outback actually is: We passed through a couple of cattle ranches on the way. These pastures - let's just call them that - can be 1.5 million acres in size, and on a good year they can support up to 6000 heads of cattle. In most years it doesn't really rain, though, so the head count maxes out at around 600, leaving some 2500 acres per moo-moo to chew cud on. It would be too expensive to build fences around these vast grazing grounds, so what the good people making their living there do, is use water holes to control their beasts. Apparently a cow doesn't wander further than 16 kilometers away from the nearest water hole, so they just leave the animals be, and when they need to catch them, they simply build "water traps" around each water source that allow the animals to enter, but prevent them from leaving - like fish traps. After 24 hours they've usually managed to catch 99% of all animals in the whole area, including kangaroos and other wild beasties, making the technique a lot more cost-effective than chasing single animals around with 4WDs.

Another example would be the few rivers that criss-cross the plains: a lot of the time they are all turned inside-out, bottom at the top, water underneath. When you come across them, they look like dried up riverbeds, but if you dig a bit, you'll hit water eventually, sometimes several meters underground, sometimes only a foot or so. Finke river south from Alice Springs is one of these often inside out streams, heralded by geologists to be the oldest river in the world.

Me and Lasseter highway snaking through the endless outback.
Red sand.
Mt. Conner. It's almost as tall as Uluru, but was born in a completely different way, when softer rock eroded from around tougher rock.

From a great distance Uluru doesn't really look like that much, because it slopes just enough to make it look like a semi-normal hill from certain directions (like the Lassiter highway that takes you to it). It is, however, taller than Eiffel Tower and its circumference is almost 10 kilometers. It's a huge block of sandstone, littered with caves, old aboriginal paintings and funky natural shapes. The aboriginals own the place, but "allow" tourists in for the moneyz, asking them only (nicely) to respect the various sacred places around the rock by not taking photos of them, entering them, or in fact, climbing on the Uluru itself. Tourists, of course, do whatever they damn well please. Sometimes the aboriginals take a stricter stance, though. Some ways from Uluru stand the Olgas, a collection of fruitcake-textured (they really are, at up close you can clearly see the whole thing is a row of huge domes compressed from different types of rubble, as opposed to Uluru, which is just a sandstone layer cake, flipped partially on its side) mountains, the biggest of them at 500+ meters even taller than Uluru. A few years ago a single aboriginal teenager wanted to spend some quality time alone in the Olgas, and the entire collection of mountains was closed for 3 full days so that no one could bother the boy. Would have kinda sucked being a tourist visiting from 15.000 km away at that time.

Sunset there was pretty phenomenal, the blue sky slowly turning towards orange and purple, while Uluru found all new shades of red.

Uluru at daytime.
And Uluru at sunset.
The Olgas.
So there. :)
Nice little detour, all and all, but I'm happy to jump on a plane to Sydney, nonetheless. I've wanted to properly visit that city for quite a long time already.

Darwin, Australia

2009-08-02T03:13:00.000-07:00

In an internet cafe, can't upload photos. Your loss, it's pretty here.

Darwin is a tropical little city roughly the size of Oulu in the northern coast of Australia, close to the equator, surrounded by beaches on three sides and by 6-meter crocodiles on all sides. Spent 1 day here now, walking around the downtown and the beaches, and have a rough idea about the place by now.

Mornings are excellent time for walkabouts, since the other tourists are still nurturing their poor little heads in their hostels (even the so called better hotels here give out a backbagger hostel vibe, if you ask me). It's also great time to prance about, since when the sun starts really climbing up into the sky, it gets a bit warm, fast. Day-time temps seem to be slightly above 30 degrees throughout the year. Similarly in the evening, when the sun goes down, the temperature crashes down to a pleasant 20 degrees in just a few minutes.

Bought me pair of shorts, a couple of new t-shirts and a bucket hat.

Still opting to stay in the shade and siesta during the hotter hours.

It's been a while since I saw this many bikini-clad chicks in one place at one time, that's a definite plus.

Watching angry, drunken aboriginals duking it out in the parks after nightfall is also good, honest fun.

I have quietly accepted that I cannot fit a didjeridoo into my luggage. :(

Hanmer Springs

2009-07-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

Hanmer Springs is a resort village with some geothermal pools and heaps of mountains about 2 hours' drive from Christchurch. One of the international interns at the lab had a bright idea to hint Katy, HITLab's own Wonder Woman, that he would like to see the place before leaving NZ, and five minutes later: house, you got rented. (a 4-bedroom house with a modern kitchen, separate fireplace room, pool table fitted garage and excellent view all around costs little more than 100 euros per day, everything included, and even less for longer-term lease.)

It's a pretty place for sure.

Me, Greg and a brisk walk up a hill to see some views.

Even cheap beer tastes nice outside.

Stayed there for one night, spent the evening soaking ourselves in 40-degree pools that smelled of rotten eggs. Couldn't bring my camera into all that steam, but this should give an idea of what the place is like (okay, so sans the snow other than on the mountain tops). All and all, I quite liked the village and things it offered. The place is like Queenstown without the brutally numerous tourists, and even though they offer plenty to do to the adrenaline junkies, it's quite possible to enjoy a few days' of calm, as well. Plus it's not quite as ridiculously expensive a place.

It's Monday. On Saturday I'll fly over to Australia. My time here is really getting short...

However, movies:

Went to see the new Harry Potter last week. Still not interested in the series. The whole movie was like a 2.5-hour collection of fan service (not that kind of fan service), the characters doing this and that, but the story not really going anywhere. If your dreams at night frequently involve any of the HP characters, you'll probably like it. Otherwise, very meh. (**)

Tonight I'll go see Drag Me to Hell, as it finally came to theaters over here. This is probably the first movie after Watchmen this year that I have any kind of expectations for, since people are calling it Sam Raimi's return to form after all those crappy Spiderman flicks. Lessee.

Home, Sweet and Sour Home

2009-07-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

It's a good thing that I have a comfortable sofa, because I've been spending a lot of time on it.

Right now I still have 19 days left in New Zealand, and I'm trying to make most of it -- work-wise. For a week now I've been playing home office, partly because I can save more than 2 hours per day by not commuting between this place and my office, partly because I can, and partly because of the swine flu.

Because I can: Little by little my day rhythm has migrated so that today I went to sleep around 9 o'clock in the morning and got up around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Someone might ask, why am I doing this, why am I denying myself the sunlight? Got bitten by a bloodsucker? It's for two reasons, really.

For one, I'm tired of having to listen to music quite so loud on my headphones to block away the background noise in the office. Some of the international crowd I'm holed up with just loves engaging in such sports as frequent hour-long skype/phone calls at their desks, or if that fails, listening to crappy music and singing along with it. I'm too much of a wuss to tell them to shut the fuck up, so I'll just stay home.

For two, this way I can stay in touch with the people I know online, as they tend to be awake, when the sun is radiating their side of the planet. From my point of view Finland and rest of Europe are up from 6pm to 9am the next morning, and America comes along a few hours after the sunset here. I sit on my sofa programming and chatting all night. That is what I do these da^H^Hnights. Through my internet connection I breath. Not a terribly social way of living, I realize, but chatting people up in a bar over a drink after another gets old quickly, and the girls don't look nearly as pretty as I thought they did, come the next morning.

Because of swine flu: It's making its rounds here and the number of infected people is approaching the figures required for truly exponential infection rates. Not terribly worried about it -- it's just a damn influenza -- but if I catch it, it'll make my life a bit difficult, as I'm supposed to spend a couple of weeks in Australia starting the beginning of August, and going there with any sort of flu would land me in an instant quarantine. Especially troublesome, since my flight to Finland leaves from Sydney on 16th of August.

One of my colleagues actually told me that his entire family got the flu, and he was the only healthy one *cough*, and how *sneeze* he had to be careful around the house *cough* those days to not to get it himself. Don't you just hate those martyr types, who come to work no matter how sick they are?

So, home office it is.

It'll be nice to move on soon, though. Next time I move to work abroad like this, I hope it'll be with someone, not alone. Gets boring.

Next up, Australia - plans, experiences, pictures!

Finlandia

2009-06-06T04:36:00.000-07:00

Went to see the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra perform Jean Sibelius' Finlandia and some other chosen pieces today. Very lovely, even though my leather jacket clad persona tends to receive some suspicious looks from all the elderly frequenting those social events.

Two things.

After Finlandia they played a Violin Concerto by Sibelius, and for it, a Bulgarian violinist, Bella Hristova, joined the kru. She was really quite incredible, and after the show, during the booming applause, she received a huge bouquet of flowers. Yay for that. The Finnish conductor, Jari Hämäläinen, however, instead of flowers got a large bottle of "something". They really know how to make their Finnish guests happy, it seems. :)

After the violin concerto, there was another interesting thing. A group of 10 or so 75+ years old grannies apparently figured that normal applause weren't enough. Instead they started banging the floor with their feet, making the entire floor shake, and shouted in unison: "UH-UH-UH-UH!" My guess is that they (or everyone around them for the past 50+ years) were rugby fans.

Youtube debut

2009-06-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

Well, sorta.

This is the new introduction movie for HIT Lab NZ, the augmented reality research institute I am currently working in. I make brief 1 second cameos in it, yay..

居直れ

2009-05-25T02:18:00.000-07:00

Traveling changes you.

By this I do not mean that every chump flying back home after a week at Antalya or Canary Islands is going to return to his office next Monday with a halo of enlightenment around his persona, unless this halo can be thought to consist of acquired-through-pain knowledge on airport limitations on allowed amounts of checked-in spirits, peeling skin and stories of haggling with the natives in Finnish, of bad service in restaurants and of diarrhea.

When you travel around, you assume the role of an observer (whether you choose to observe the bottom of a liquor bottle or something else). Indulging in this observatory behavior you start accumulating a crust of sorts that slowly penetrates into your head, if left untouched. People on short holidays and business trips tend to wash this crust away quickly upon returning to their place of residence, unless they overdose and make their stay in an ebola-ridden shantytown in the middle of a war zone or something, in which case the experience can sink in like a knife to the back. When you stay away for long enough, experiencing all sorts of things, you start to realize that it isn't just kids, whose personalities are shaped by the shit they must go through while growing up: an old dog can learn new tricks and acquire all-new phobias, too!

It's like a smoker's cough or that sexy voice whisky can allegedly give you over time.

Now, I've been on this particular journey for a while now. Things have been seeping in, and as I recently had a wee holiday in Japan from New Zealand, it could be said that I was engaged in a double-barreled observatory mode. Now that I'm back in Christchurch, thinking back on it, it feels like I'm watching someone through a keyhole fully well realizing that space has been warped, and it is myself that I am watching. The Watchman is watching the Watchman: I'd make a bloody excellent vigilante Justice Inducer.

Ooh, I'm going to save that name for later use. Justice Inducer. Fuck yea. :)

Anyway, traveling around like this, it really helps you to start seeing your own life in a whole bunch of contexts, the roadmap of your life, as blurry as it is -- for I am not that kind of vigilante -- suddenly forking like crazy, paths that before seemed ridiculous to even consider suddenly becoming quite plausible, even desirable.

There's a lot of text to be written on that topic, for sure.

I might do it later. It might even turn out to be interesting reading.

But now: weather.

I've so far had two umbrellas torn to pieces by the random gusts of wind here. It pours rain completely randomly; one minute there's no cloud in the sky and the temperature climbs quickly close to 15 degrees. Then, not five minutes later, it gets dark all of sudden, temperature plummets down to 2 degrees and the rain starts. I've seen it even rain upwards, like the water suddenly decided that it hadn't been such a good idea to rain down on a place like this after all.
With the rather sizable body of water 5km away from me (Pacific) the weather changes so quickly that it's absolutely no use, trying to prepare for one type, you will always end up either soaked or sweaty.

This rainbow, it vanished in seconds. It almost looked like it was being torn apart, like my umbrellas. I don't think that's supposed to be possible.
Cold weather means more meat is needed. I like these stone grill restaurants, where you can cook your own meat at your table. Quite cheap too, compared to Finland.
This advertisement at a bus stop makes me smile every time I walk by it. "Kids grow up, adopt a dog." Funnily enough, it's paid for by the Greyhounds as Pets association. Well, I agree with them 100%.

Achtung!

2009-05-19T04:36:00.001-07:00

Rain.

Came back home from the movie theater just now. (Angels&Demons, I'd give this piece of pop corn entertainment 3 stars and a quarter. It managed to do away with most of the bullshit moments of the book and the pace was quite relentless)

Got soaked to the bone on the way home. hasn't been raining quite like this before. *This* is New Zealand winter? Are you fucking kidding me?

---

Also, finally reacted to all the email I've been receiving from some of you, my dear readers, and enabled anonymous commenting, meaning that now anyone of you can spam my posts with your porn links and whatgives.

---

Also, began writing fiction again. :) Been away from that side of my life for way too long.

Hiroshima

2009-05-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

It's about 350 km from Osaka to Hiroshima. The Shinkansen got me there in 1.5 hours with 4 brief stops in between. The ticket set me back about 70 euros.

My hotel was a bona fide businessman hotel close to the Hiroshima main train station, run by a disturbingly old couple, who spent most of their time fighting with each other. Now, when I made the reservation online earlier, the website promised that the hotel would have an internet connection for its customers, but when I asked about it from the old lady, she simply pointed at the ancient fax machine on the counter.

Fantastic, off the grid for two days, however was I going to pull through...

In Asia – and particularly in Japan – I have witnessed many old people with what I'd like to call a collapsed spine (who knows, could even be the official term). They are tiny old things, bent over to the shape of the letter 'U', making them seem like shaky wind-up dolls, muttering their way around the undergrowth of the urban jungle, scavenging for who knows what to have escaped death for so long.

The old lady running the salaryman hotel I was to stay in, she had a habit of constantly apologizing for everything, bowing down each time, making it seem like her head was constantly positioned right below her ass, making me hope that she had enough fibers in her diet. It was a tough job getting past her and into the elevator, as I felt like I should answer for each of her apologies and bows like a good boy that I am. When I finally got to the 5th floor, where my room was, I noticed that she must have been the only person taking care of things, as everything in the place was tip-top below my waist level, which was probably about the limit of her reach, and above that... well, looking on top of an air conditioning unit, I found a mummy of... something. Decided to not be too curious, while I'd be staying in that place.

Also, being a businessman hotel, the place was full of ashtrays in every conceivable location, except for the ofuro room, and even there, peeking through the window next to the large bath tub, I could see the ground littered with cigarette butts. How is it that the people in this country manage to live so long? Everyone lies their age?

Right.

Hiroshima.

One would expect a city that was nuked to stay nuked, not to come back for seconds.

But Hiroshima is a right tough bastard of a city.

After it was leveled in August 6, 1945, they said that not even grass would grow there for the next 75 years or so. And still they started rebuilding the place immediately! It was only later that they realized that all the green stuff actually made a pretty quick recovery throughout the area.

What would they have done, if it hadn't?

Tough bastards, like I said.

Due to a slight case of having being blown to teeny-weeny pieces 64 years ago the current city is rather modern compared to most other places I've seen in Japan. Buildings look nicer, streets are more organized, everything is cleaner. I could list quite a few places in Finland that could use a similar treatment.
I wandered around the city, until I found myself at the Hiroshima Castle site. It's a free-for-all park now, about 1km from the ground zero, with several ruins of old buildings and some suspicious-looking trees that carry the sign “A-Bombed Tree” together with the distance to the blast. The bark of those trees tends to be a tad scarred on one side. They re-built the castle, too, but I wasn't too interested in it apart from snapping a couple of photos. Seen plenty of them in Japan already. In fact, I've seen one in every single city I've visited so far.

Walking towards the ground zero, I found some more nuked trees, a stadium, a fancy shopping mall and... the A-Bomb Dome, the symbol of the whole mess, standing almost directly below the point where the bomb was detonated. It, and some other ferroconcrete buildings close by had managed to keep their unvaporized parts standing, partially due to having been right below the blast and therefore having avoided some of the shock wave. The Dome is now – yet another – Unesco World Heritage site, and the locals are making sure that it keeps its looks, all the way down to the bricks and other construction material spread around it, when most of the building collapsed into a semi-molten heap.
There's a free wi-fi available in the memorial park, by the way, the signs informing about it also mentioning that one shouldn't really sleep in the park.

Why the fuck would anyone want to?

There are memorials aplenty around the dome. I checked them out, keeping an eye on the rain clouds above, and headed for the two museums in the park. Interesting, educational places, not holding back on the grimy details – indeed, often re-enacting them to the detail with wax dolls – and cheap, too. One was free to enter (for some reason it was almost empty. I suppose the backbaggers I saw swarming the park around weren't exactly the cultural types) and the other (more gory one, packed with people) cost only 40 cents. Funny thing was that in both these places – again – no one had anything against people taking photos. Digging it.

A watch, stopped at the time of the explosion, quarter past eight in the morning.
A tricycle and a helmet. The tricycle belonged to a kid, who was riding it at the time of the explosion. Badly burned, the child died shortly after, and the father buried the tricycle together with the corpse in his backyard(IIRC). Dug up later, it was placed in the museum together with a sign telling the story.
Glass jars, molten into a kind of honeycomb.
Origami cranes. Fold 1000 of them and it is said that your wish will come true. The girl who made these, Sadako Sasaki, didn't get hers though, as she died in 1955 from leukemia at the age of 12, having been only a mile away from the explosion, when it occurred.

In the evening I met with Ryoko, a local whom I had already met in Kyoto. She took me to try some of the local cuisines and get drunk. Really, you can't find the best foods in these foreign places without some inside help. I shall be forever grateful to her. :) (I think I actually prefer Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki to Osaka-style, it was really lovely.)

Day 2, I hopped on the train and went to visit an island called Miyajima, one of the must-see historical temples in the area and in the whole of Japan.

Coming to see the place, one should really time one's arrival correctly. During the high water the red temple and the huge torii gate in front of it stand completely in water, making it a very beautiful sight indeed, with the green mountains towering in the background. During the low water the place is just a low building complex hugging the wet sand of the beach. You can actually see the correct time by checking the rivers in Hiroshima, as during the low tide they are reduced to tiny little streams, leaving the many boats in them lying on the bottom like shipwrecks.

I arrived to Miyajima, when the waterline was just receding. The temple was already clear of water with only the torii gate still submerged. It was a pretty place though, and I finally bought me a tanuki statue. :) I think it will be very happy indeed, when I place it into my living room's liquor cabinet back home.

The torii gate in the beginning.
Half an hour later.
From the temple.
And later still, as I was on the ferry, heading back to the mainland.
As the water receded, many interesting things were revealed, like different types of crabs, sea shells and jelly-fish.
Tanuki with a cigarette in his mouth. :)
Also, deer, again. This time there weren't any deer cakes to be given, but the animals didn't mind, if nothing else, they seemed even more aggressive than the ones in Nara. I was eating a deep-fried fish stick with bacon wrapped around it (a type of kushiyaki), and one of the beasts was relentlessly trying to take it from me, rubbing its antlers to my kidneys, whenever I dared to turn away from it, much to the amusement of the other tourists.
Found a beautiful garden in a tea room in Miyajima. Almost makes me wish I had a backyard to rape into something similar.

In the evening I – once again – met with Ryoko, got fed and got drunk. Good times.

But then.

Time to head back to the other side of the equator and see if the winter had arrived there yet.

Took the 7am shinkansen back to Osaka and had no choice but to sit in the single smoking car of the train. Businessmen surrounded me, there was a constant statue of smoke rising from the other side of every single seat in front of me. Thinking of it still makes me cough... In Osaka I headed directly to the airport and had barely enough time to complete the suddenly very complicated check-in procedures. People are really panicking over the damn Mexican influenza. On TV in Japan, most of the news were about it. I actually came to Japan and passed through the Auckland airport on the same day that the influenza arrived there, landing several people in quarantine. One day later, and my slight cough would probably have caused some ripples in the customs.

A good, memorable trip.

So long and thanks for all the sushi.

Osaka

2009-05-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

Osaka is a funny city. It's said to be the commercial capital of Japan and it shows: even the population of the city blooms by more than a million, come day time, from the nightly 2.6 million permanent residents.

First 2 nights I stayed in a hotel right next to Shin-Imamiya railway/subway station, waiting for my local friends to get their holiday gear on so I could crash at their place. I didn't really have a good idea about the general layout of the city at that point, but still my inner radar managed to walk me directly into Shinsekai and vicinity of Tsutenkaku Tower. Very interesting place once the sun sets. It's only later that I learned it is the de facto stay-out-if-you-are-a-lonely-woman area in the city, the closest thing to a bad neighborhood the city has. On the hindsight it was kinda clear, considering the nature of many of the little shops there. I did snap a nice photo there, as a mother and her young son were buying coffee from a vending machine, right next to them a life-size poster of a naked chick with an expression like someone was jamming a telephone pole up her nether-regions (this being Japan, they might just have been doing exactly that). Sorry, not going to post the photo here, I have a nice-guy reputation to uphold. :)

Tsutenkaku Tower.

Many Billikens around the city.

If this was China, I'd be suspecting something, but I guess ol'Tommy-Lee is actually getting paid for this.

The hotel I stayed in was a capsule hotel, by the way. However, as I couldn't fit into the little plastic coffins – being an adult-sized adult and all – they gave me a regular room (with a private bathroom/shower) for the same price instead. 17 euros a night in a private room of a downtown hotel is a pretty good deal in Osaka.

Had a long walk around the area at 7am in the morning, slurping on 40-cent vending machine coffee. Shinsekai be swarming homeless people, many of them from other parts of Japan, having escaped the shame of being poor and homeless under the noses of people who might have known them in their previous lives. These people weren't like the suburban riverside hobos with their home theaters and whatnot, nonono, these are almost proper homeless. They both looked and smelled like shit. From the early morning they wander around the streets in small packs or – being of self-employed persuasion – sell porno on the sidewalks, apparently mostly to old dudes, who stop to discuss the minute details of the going exchange rate between squeaking girls on DVD/CD/VHS and cold, hard yen, whenever they spot a sufficiently large pair of J-boobies. Japanese guys can be almost as hopeless in this regard as their American counterparts. It's funny how some of the homeless approached me, as I was lurching by, and started speaking to me in very much passable English. When you fall in a country without a safety net, you fall for a long time, and when you finally hit the bottom, it hurts. A lot of the homeless seemed to buddy up with each other, keeping company, helping the sick ones and so forth. Didn't see the Hobo Hills I witnessed in Paris, though, where on cold nights one stays warm any which way one can, and if one doesn't have matches to set one's buddies on fire with, at least one can still take in some of their rather aromatic body heat. The more the merrier.

Internet access in Japan is quite nice and in a whole lot of places completely free – no complains there, surprise, surprise. In New Zealand I'm already used to there being only one 1MB line connecting the country to the rest of the planet, which results in connectivity being sold by megabytes at prices that make harvesting organs from playground children for extra cash seem only mildly objectionable.

Found my way into Dōtonbori later that afternoon. Namba-Dōtonbori-Nipponbashi area could be said to form the southern center of the city, Umeda parts being the northern capital. Dōtonbori's surroundings are probably the biggest collection of shopping streets I've ever seen, some of them covered, some not, split by a river and spotted by local landmarks and tiny restaurants.

It was horribly crowded. Golden Week really is a special time to be snooping around Japan, and not necessarily in a good way.

Next to Namba Station, a rather large arcade.

The games within are interesting even from a professional point of view. Here's a neat little interface combining Magic The Gathering style card play with RFID chips for interactive gameplay and all sorts of cool effects. Who needs imagination? :) (Yea, that guy wearing a coffee filter is playing the role of a football manager. I guess in the west you need to wallow disturbingly deep into the world of tabletop RPGs to find anything comparable.)

How about this, then? They are sitting in their fancy chairs, betting on a virtual horse race that plays out just as slowly as a real horse race. Some of them seem to spend their entire days in this way, judging by the amount of cans and cigarettes they are packing.

As I've hinted before, I do not have to do my clothes shopping in the children's department, which enabled me to view the vistas over the churning black seas of thick Asian hair. There really wasn't any end to either the shops or the people, no matter how far I walked. I actually made it through a 500-meter stretch of shops selling almost purely kitchen items. And cakes in the shape of boobies. Either the Japanese mothers don't breast-feed their spawn, or they breast-feed them for too long. Shopping-wise, there was no entering the shops with their narrow corridors, unless I was prepared to inflict some serious damage on the little people. Luckily I got plenty opportunities to strengthen the Japanese economy later. Buying loads of useless junk has never been my thing, but there it just seemed like the proper thing to do.

Funny noodle shop. Buy a food stamp outside from the vending machine and get the food inside. Did they get sued by a mute person in the past or something? Why not just directly order from the cook dude, who would be filling your order anyway?

Also in Dōtonbori, I saw a tall, blond guy approaching me at one point, his head hovering a good stretch above the crowd. Now that there was a Scandinavian dude, if I had ever seen one, I thought. Yep, that be exactly what I told myself, might have even said it aloud, since everyone was staring at me even more than they usually did. When the guy finally passed me, I heard him talking to his family trailing him in Finnish. We are so easy to spot, aren't we...

Dōtonbori's famous mechanical crab. It moves around rather clumsily, but apparently has been hanging there since who-knows-when.

The shops in the area sell this and that, and if you want to find anything in the city, Dōtonbori is a good place to start your search in. Visiting a well-known shop for very random items indeed, called Don Quixote, I got some cheap laughs from articles such as things sporting pictures of Obama with the “Yes We Can” slogan, right next to them rubber negro masks for proper fans, and next to those huge afro wigs. This is Japan, racism is part of the deal, accept it or stay the hell away.

Don Quixote shop along the canal and a ferris wheel thing. Not in operation these days.

Me halutaan olla neekereitä, halutaan olla...

Met my friends on the third day in town and moved to their nice little apartment in a very nice suburb filled with parks and that stuff you get, where you don't have huge crowds, breathing space. The building was a bit old and I needed some serious dodging to avoid damaging the concrete with my skull, but the apartment itself was very charming with its tiny tatami rooms, sliding doors and an ofuro the size of a bucket. I do think that in Finland a 4-room apartment of barely 50 square meters would get people scratching their heads, though.

Now that I got me some guides, my sightseeing picked up pace once more. Returned to Dōtonbori and Nipponbashi, and found out that I had missed almost all the rocks that the video game, manga and anime otakus of the country shun away from the sunshine under. Lovely places with many an interesting objects for sale and equally many man-children, whose primary hobby seemed to be whacking off to action figures. I did my best to find something to buy, but failed rather miserably, mostly because all the manga/anime titles I recognize were the ones from 10-20 years ago.

Also visited more temples and stuff. The monk taking care of this one seemed to be living very comfortably indeed. I'd love to some day get a house that nice... (not in the pic)

On the next day I met another blast from the past, as I was re-acquainted with Chie, a comrade-in-arms from the days in Beijing. This lovely, lovely lady never ceases to amaze me with just how similar both our personalities and interests are(undoubtably to the horror of anyone who knows me well). Together we made it to Umeda, the northern central city of Osaka, talking mostly of video games, anime and Yoko Kanno's music after briefly recapping the year since I last said bye-bye to her in Wudaokou, Beijing. In Umeda we elevated ourselves to the top of the Umeda Sky Building. As a popular date destination it was swamped with wedding-related commercialism, but we were there for the fantastic 360-degree view, honestly.

Later on, games shopping, arcades touring, expensive ice cream bars, late-night dining in 40th floor restaurants with panoramic views and other general mucking-about, as well as cooking dinner and getting jolly drunk in the aforementioned mini-family-apartment. The stuff of holidays, my friends. Really a lovely week. :)

UFO-Catcher. You control the grappling arm and try to pick up prices. Very difficult, because the arm is flimsy as hell.

Sometimes the prices were a bit... strange, like toasters. Here's one with salami sausages.

Ingredients: Rice... and stuff.

Making Okonomiyaki with the troops.

Before ending my holiday I still had time for a quick two-day tour in Hiroshima, where I did all sorts of not-exactly-respectful things around the numerous memorials around the city. That's for the next entry, though, this one already reads like half a novel...

Nozomi-Shinkansen, fastest choo-choo in Japan.

IgaUeno - short update and photos

2009-05-04T18:32:00.001-07:00

IgaUeno, a little countryside town tucked away an hour's train journey into the mountains from Nara, is famous for two(2) things.

1) Matsuo Basho (松尾芭蕉, 1644-1694)

A wandering dude and Japan's most famous haiku poet. Visiting his birth place and reading up on him, I started feeling something of a kinship with him. :)

His most famous haiku:

古池や

蛙飛び込む

水の音

an old pond

a frog jumps in

the sound of water

or perhaps in my case, more suitable would be:: 旅に病んで
夢は枯れ野を
かけぬぐる

on a journey, ailing
my dreams roam around
over a withered moor

He wrote that one, as he was dying in Kyoto, having fallen sick right after embarking on one of his journeys...

A statue of Basho right outside the IgaUeno train station.
2) Hattori Hanzo and his jolly ninjas.

This becomes evident right after you lay your eyes on the local train that takes you to the town.
There are ninjas (kinda) lounging about everywhere around the station and the town.
Even on top of cars. Oh, how their flipping-out amuses me to no end, the silly masters-of-disguise!The kids in IgaUeno start their hard-as-nails ninja training from early age.The moat of IgaUeno castle.
And the castle itself. Hattori Hanzo used to rule here with an iron-clawed fist.Even in the castle, ninjas, everywhere. All doomed, doomed I tell you...Masks in a museum. Creepy, but very nice.

Next up, Osaka.

Nara - 2 nights

2009-05-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

Arriving to the Nara train station, it was clear that this city was much smaller than Kyoto with a feel almost like that of a countryside town. It has a population close to 400.000, but it's sorta laying low, spread out, so that you don't really feel like it.

My cute little tatami room.

Nara was also the capital of Japan from 710 to 784, making it a treasure chest for very old things indeed. Kyoto might have been full of temples and such, but in Nara I was literally bumping into “Unesco World Heritage Site” slabs and “Japanese Cultural Treasure” signs around every frakkin' corner! Most of the biggest attractions were concentrated in the central Nara park, which itself was too large to properly cover in a single day.

Gango-ji temple, formerly known as Asuka temple. First full-on Buddhist temple in Japan, first version of it built in Buddha-knows-when, but moved to Nara in the year 718, following the migrational patterns of the empire's capital.

It's funny to think that they allow people to freely enter a 1300-years old wooden building, but they do. They even allow photographing inside. They actually seem to allow cameras everywhere in Japan, unlike in some places *cough*China*cough*UK*cough*, where you might end up in jail just for taking a picture of a building. I'm not a religious person, but it didn't feel right taking photos inside the actual temple. Here's one from the outside, though. Nice place.
Gango-ji's stuff.

An imp (or something) lounging next to the temple.

There are several supposedly interesting museums close to Gango-ji, but as luck would have it, they "aren't doing business on Thursdays". Fuck off, you Japanese are supposed to be like ants, working around the clock, minus the cigarette break every 15 minutes.
Aww, they have a pugsy! There are many dogs around, but most of them are either Welsh Corgis or Shiba Inus.
These signs are much-needed, but this version pisses me off a bit. ("Don't forget your puppy's leftovers." dog: "Master, take that with you, would you." Shit: "Pick me up.")
More like "Pick up that can."

Anyway.

Another thing going for the city are the hordes of deer roaming the park freely. They aren't exactly shy: several times I would just be standing there, when all of sudden one of them would bump its head into the small of my back, begging for shika-senbei – deer cakes – that most tourists there carry around and that are sold all over the park. No idea where or when the habit got started, but the deer aren't complaining. Most of them have actually been taught (by people or is the trick actually passed down from generation to another already?) to bow back to people, when they bow to them, of course expecting a treat afterwards, and getting a tad on the aggressive side, if they don't get it. It was hilarious watching a row of deer standing in front of a tiny booth selling deer cakes bowing down repeatedly in unison, while the old lady inside the booth was giving them whacks across the face with a broomstick. Even the deer should know that you never, ever mess around with the shopkeeper..

:)

In Nara park, a deer and a crow.Deer begging for shika-senbei.

Inside Nara park, the Great South Gate.
Inside the gate, two of these huge demon dudes sneering at people. (looks like a painting, but it's a statue.)
On the other side of the gate, Todai-ji temple. Take this: the original temple was built in the 8th century, and the current version is the 3rd iteration. The current version is also about 33% smaller than the original one, and yet it is said to be the largest wooden building in the world! Yea, it's pretty big.
Inside the temple, a large statue of buddha. Man, those kids were lightning fast, getting into the picture... With all the elementary school students touring the place, going into the temple was one big let's-English-practise! tournee for me.
I preferred these more badass statues, also in the temple.
Outside the temple, Yakushi Nyorai. He was supposed to be master of medicine and now people are lining up to rub the parts of the statue that they are having some ailment in, right after which rubbing the aching part itself, an act that is supposed to have some mysterious healing power. The statue looks a bit scary, being old and all, but I really like the shower cap they have given the guy. :)
Kasuga-Taisha. A shrine famous for its many beautiful stone lanterns. It is surrounded by old forest that is also very pleasant to walk around in, taking in some peace and quiet from the tourist masses in the more open areas of the park.
Stone garden inside Kasuga-Taisha.
During the five days in Kyoto and Nara, I must have walked a good 10-15 km per day. Feeling pretty good about it, and the bottoms of my feet have also gotten used to the punishment. Especially climbing up and down all the hills, I feel, is doing me a world of good.

Kyoto, 3 nights

2009-05-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

11 hours from Auckland to Kuala Lumpur, 5 hours of waiting (middle of the night and 30 degrees, equator'd), further 6 hours to Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan. Hello Zombie.

My friends met me at the airport and took some of my luggage off of me, while I'd travel around the region for the next week. Buggers haven't changed at all since I last saw them a year ago, but the first thing they both said when they saw me was that I had gotten fat.. I like pizza, so?

Keihanshin – the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto metropolitan region is a sprawl of people and people-related things, total population around 18.5 million. It took me one hour to get to Kyoto on my express train from the airport, and during the whole trip the only holes in the mess of buildings were forced in by the rivers snaking through the region, their banks spotted here and there by the shanties of homeless people (there are no such things as social security or unemployment benefits in Japan). Funnily enough, these people often seem to have such items as televisions, radios and fridges in their little makeshift tents. It pays off to rummage through people's garbage in this country of hyper-consumers, I guess. :)

Funny thing. After getting off my train in Kyoto I was standing on the platform checking my map. All of sudden the seats in the now empty train next to me jumped up halfway towards the ceiling of the cars, yanked around 180 degrees and dropped back down. Right, train returns to the airports, need to keep people facing forward to minimize vomiting...

Kyoto.

It's pretty much impossible to pass wind in this city without ending up farting on some god/spirit/sage/ghost or another. There are temples everywhere, and it doesn't take long until you stop reaching for your camera after spotting a new one.

Had a coffee to keep me awake until I'd reach my hotel. Visited the bathroom of the cafe and Lo! It had one of those funky toilet seats with more knobs and switches on the side than your average car has on its dashboard. Seat heater, ass massager, some other type of massager (that I wasn't sure about and was too tired to really try out), different kinds of water-spraying apparatuses, etc, etc. Like I said, funky. :) The water tap was another thing. It was one of those models that activates automatically, when you place your hands underneath it. Fair enough, everyone and their mother has those these days. But. Before it would give you water, it would squirt soap on your hands. All they need to add to that is a touch of TheHoff.

Got to my hostel, about 5km's walk from the Kyoto Station. To my surprise, it was right in the middle of the Geisha district, Gion. I hadn't really looked into this, while booking my stay, I was more interested in my hostel having the highest rating of all hostels in Kyoto. IchiEnSou Guesthouse, no private rooms, but I really recommend it to anyone visiting the city. Great place, great staff, great location, great fun. Old, traditional style house with tatami floors, horigotatsu(a table with a hole in the floor underneath it), and some doors only one meter tall: have a taste of how it feels to be a tall guy like me all the time. Saw plenty of Geishas and Maikos around the hotel. Personally I think they look rather ridiculous, but it was fun to watch the old Japanese guys gawking at them so longingly, whenever they saw them walking around (usually in pairs).

Had some sake with these guys, players of the traditional Japanese instrument, Shamisen.
Then it was time to start touristing.

Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion Temple. Something of a must-see for all the tourists coming to Kyoto.
Koi carps. They put these fishes into every mass of water that can be somehow considered sacred or imperial. I guess people feed them, since all they do is look at you, opening and closing their mouths.
Money, money, money.
Temples are nice and have a lot of pretty things, but...
...for me it'll always be these wünderful vending machines. (yes, this one is *inside* the temple grounds)
Looks like they burned a big house and used the remains to build a smaller house. Actually quite common sight here, keeps out the bugs or something.
Nijo Castle and some pink flowers. Alas, no cherry blossoms. I was about 2 weeks late for those.
From top of the Nijo castle walls into the castle grounds. It's a very charming place, even if it doesn't look like much.
Aren't these things supposed to be used, when there isn't any sunlight around?
Letters on the mountain sides... There are 5 of these huge pictograms around the city.
How can you charge 6 euros for a single tomato? Answer: Carve it into a rose.
Monjayaki. Looks like vomit, tastes really good. Traditional dish from Tokyo-area. Mostly cheese.
Funny thing I noticed: there's a tiny graveyard right outside my hotel room. No wonder I slept so well in there, like the dead. (yes, I actually enjoy staying next to that place now that I know of it)
Going up to FushimiInari-Taisha. 4km of pathways up and down a mountain, lined with thousands of torii gates. My favourite place in Kyoto, I'd have to say. (by the way, the girl entering the gates in the picture, she had "soul sound" written on her ass. :) )
I'd *love* to come here in the night time. I really like spooky places. :)
Panorama.
In the forest.
Shrines.
This guy looks hungry.
"First they lock me up, then they worship me, what's up with that?"
This stuffed raccoon (tanuki) looks a bit worn down.
Whereas this one has some serious balls.
I know it means that you shouldn't leave your handbrake off, when parking on the slope, but the (somewhat) literal translation makes me laugh and sounds more like some too-deep-to-understand-zen-thing: "Cars that take off flight, will not come down in a hurry."
Busy little street and a pagoda.
Looks like a tree house all the way from here.

Next up, Nara.

Rotorua

2009-04-28T16:58:00.000-07:00

Rotorua – 1st day

The road from Wellington to Rotorua was long and windy, but offered a whole range of stuff to gawk at. The Lord of the Rings -esque countryside rolled along seemingly endlessly, a slightly lusher version of what I saw on the way to Queenstown on the South Island earlier -- only there weren't nearly as many roadkills, I think I only saw a couple of flattened rabbits on the way. There are also a lot more Maori on the North Island. Coincidence? One might think so.

At times the road also snaked its way through forests and steep ravines, or wandered endlessly through barren fields with towering, snow-topped volcanoes in the middle. All in all, very nice views. It took 7 hours to reach Rotorua, but I think I actually played with my camera more than I did with my DS.

Traveled by Naked Bus. Unfortunately everyone wore their clothes; Australia might be the new US, but nature isn't the only thing in NZ still offering good things to stare at.
Passing Mount Ruapehu, the largest active volcano in New Zealand (2797 m) and one of the most active volcanoes in the world.

Lake Taupo right after Mount Ruapehu. It is actually an enormous crater of one of the few known super volcanoes in the world. (Remember all the fuzz earlier this year over the seismic activity in Yellowstone in US?)

After arriving to Rotorua I walked briefly around the town (it's a tiny place), had dinner and decided to settle in early into my dog house sized hotel room to compensate for all those early mornings of sightseeing and traveling so far. Fat chance. The walls were made of paper and in the next door, another pair of idiots with their 2-year old, who finally stopped screaming his lungs out around 11pm. Good parents, nice parents. George Carlin really said it the best.

Here's a little panorama of one of the intersections in Rotorua central. Tiny tiny place.

Subtle little hint at my hotel for the visitors to use the toilets instead of pissing in front of the reception?

Rotorua – 2nd day

At the check-in the day before I had also booked a trip to two volcanic spots near the town: Wai-o-tapu and Waimangu. They both involved a good deal of walking, but it was definitely worth it: both places featured a lot of never-seen-that-befores to me. Just check the photos below. Rotorua and central New Zealand in general aren't exactly the kind of places that can be well described in words alone.

Boiling lake of mud. I bet I could sell that stuff for 50 euros a bottle for the women and metrosexuals of the world. The air in that place smelled very heavily of pea soup.

Lady Knox geyser. It erupted soon after I took this picture, but it wasn't all that cool. Just turn your shower head to point upwards and imagine what it would look like, if there was enough pressure to send the water up 10 meters.
There were several craters like this in Wai-o-Tapu, apparently the ground caved in into an underground river. There was a constant churning, bubbling sound audible from below, as well as frequent eruptions of steam.
Path over a hot lake. There are no railings, because the water at that point is very shallow and quite cool to touch. The steamy place in the corner of the picture on the other hand...
Hot waterfall, never popped into my head before that there might be such a thing in this world. :)
Champagne pool and me. Very pictoresque, but unfortunatelly the steam kept covering it all.
The pool is nice, too, of course.
More colors.
Devil's Bath, they call this one...
Onward to the Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley. The mountain in the background is Mount Tarawera (1111 m). It erupted in 1886, destroying everything visible in the picture below, making the Waimangu valley probably the youngest ecosystem like this in the world.
Me, Frying Pan Lake and the Cathedral Rock. Frying Pan Lake is the largest hot spring in the world, created by the 1886 Tarawera eruption, and very active, having erupted itself many times, reshaping the neighborhood, hurling around water, mud and rocks, occasionally killing people. Next to this place the largest geyser in the world was active for some years in early 20th century.
Inferno Crater. Seems peaceful, but is hot and highly acidic. The surface level of the lake varies by several meters over a period of some weeks.
Lake Tarawera and mount Tarawera.

The lake is a paradise for many strange birds.
Next up, Japan desu.

Wellington

2009-04-23T01:40:00.000-07:00

Wellington – 1^st day

The 5-hour train trip from Christchurch to Picton went through some very pretty places, to say the least. Just too bad that after less than 3 hours of sleep the night before my brain had the consistency and cognitive capabilities of a bucket-full of mashed potatoes. In fact I think I probably would have lost to the said bucket in a game of tic-tac-toe. Repeatedly. Without seeing anything strange about it.

I also had the pleasure of sitting opposite and next to a double-family-whammy of Indian tourists, whose two constantly screaming kids didn't really help my mood. I will probably never know, what kind of mental sickness makes some people think that taking kids under school age to a holiday with you is a good idea. Or to a restaurant. Or to do shopping. Nor will I understand, what's so wrong about punching a kid that stares at you for hours on end in the face – the parents don't seem to appreciate me doing it, not that I'm going to let that stop me.

One of the definite highlights in the train was one of the staff members, who was constantly explaining the history and other interesting tidbits about the places we passed along the way. He would for example cheerfully ramble on about how a certain large boulder of an island was named after a whaler's wife, who would always escape her husband's drunken beatings there by swimming, whenever she saw his boat appearing in the horizon. When we were just arriving to Picton (a pesky village of 4k-people at the end of a very pretty fjord), he would also suggest us not to forget anything onboard, because he wasn't in a habit of returning lost things, as proven by the filthy ragtag of kids living on garbage in the freight car of the train. He also wished us good time in Wellington (why the hell would we come to Picton, if not to continue on the ferry?), and in general “on the largest off-shore island of New Zealand that the locals call 'North Island'.” Guess he was from south himself.

The 3-hour ferry ride over the Cook Strait from Picton to Wellington was interesting. I've read that it is one of the most unpredictable and even dangerous waterways in the world, but as we were making our way over it, it seemed anything but. Beautiful columns of light pierced the clouds above and reflected of the ocean surface, and dolphins were bouncing around on both sides of the 100-meter long ferry.

And then the captain told us to hold on to something, as the going was about to get rough.

What's this, then, I asked myself and turned to look out through the window of the bar I was in.

And was greeted by a wave smashing against it.

Window that was on the 8^th deck.

It was a roller coaster ride after that, and I enjoyed it heaps. :)

It's very windy in Wellington tonight. I'm hoping that it will calm down for tomorrow, as I would love to get on top of some of the hills surrounding this rather pretty city for photographs. The wind is making a huge ruckus outside, and the weird wall contraption outside my room's window is not only blocking all of my view, but also funneling the winds down to my window so that there is a near-constant whistling and rustling sound in my room. There are also some paper cups stuck behind the slab of concrete, rolling loudly here and there in the current, like flies looking for a way through a window.

On the north-bound train along the stormy coastline.

Arrived to Picton, population 4000-ish.

Picton's exciting past-time hits include such extreme sports as growing very large pumpkins.
So this is what happens to pineapples, when you don't eat them quickly enough.
Leaving Picton and South Island behind.
It's sunny, kinda...
My first dinner in Wellington, lamb-teriyaki pizza. So-so.
A room with a view...

Wellington – 2^nd day

I'm a lucky dog. :) Waking up in the morning around 8am, there was none of the wind orchestra to be heard, and peeking through my window at the narrow slip of visible sky, I was greeted by bright blue. Up up and away!

The best place to take in the whole city at once is apparently from top of Mt. Victoria, a 200m hill close to my hostel. Finding the correct way to the top, with all the roads crisscrossing, doubling back on themselves, sometimes even running over houses chipped into the rocks below, wasn't that easy, but made for a very interesting walk, the sun all the while creeping higher and starting to warm up my sore throat (damn the leaky windows here). This city, in many ways, reminds me of Busan in South Korea, with all the bays making it seem like the ocean surrounds it on all sides, with all the hills making it seem like a hidden valley in the middle of a mountain range, with many of the roads seeming to run in 30 degree angles and with the swarms of small apartment buildings piled on top of each other. Even the English they speak here is sometimes only marginally more comprehensible than Korean, and I don't think you would have to go far before you found yourself a hot spring – another Busan speciality.

The view from the top of the hill was fantastic, like promised. It was also very windy, though, so I didn't stay for too long. (I've seen many places already that insist on being the sunniest location in New Zealand, but it's easy to believe Wellington's claim for the windiest locale. Thank you Cook Strait, you mouth-breathing behemoth.

Back down from the hill, I walked directly to the Te Papa national museum a couple of blocks from my hostel. This place is for New Zealand something like Louvre is for France, only with free entry for all and not quite so many tourists swarming the place, there only so that they could later brag to others how civilized they are. It's really a cocktail of and art museum and a historical museum, a science fair and even an amusement park. If you ever come to Wellington, reserve Te Papa the half a day it deserves, you won't be disappointed. Come on, it's free you bastards!

Returned to the hostel around 3pm, had a quick bite to eat and rested my legs, then headed on to the hills on the opposite side of the city. On them: botanical gardens, astronomical observatory (was closed now, unfortunately), a cute little cable car running up and down the hillside, and kilometers of paths and roads zigzagging around and up and down the hillsides under a thick canopy of trees. Spent hours walking around there, taking it all in.

It's a very beautiful city indeed. The population of the city itself isn't much larger than that of Tampere in Finland, but it has the feel of a city twice the size of Helsinki, the busy downtown riddled with stuff and buildings that are actually pretty – as opposed to the horrible Soviet relics in Finland... To loosely quote my Lonely Planet guidebook: there are more cafes in Wellington per capita, than there are in New York. I'm liking it here a lot based on these two days, and if I had, say, half a million euros, I would definitely consider quitting my day job and retiring to a place like this..

Also, I got a couple of second-hand games for my DS. The upcoming flight to Japan shouldn't be too bad now. :)

Climbing up towards the top of Mount Victoria.

A nearly vertical bicycle path for crazy people.

I've never seen a swing with a view this nice before... :)

Top of the world, baby!

This silly maori art is everywhere.

The building regulations in NZ leave some room for improvement.

On the hill at the opposite side of Wellington from Mount Victoria. There seem to be cannons on every second hilltop here.
You can take a cable car to this hill.
Though the station can be a bit hard to locate.

Next up, a 7-hour bus trip to Rotorua tomorrow morning.

The road goes ever on and on

2009-04-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

Going traveling tomorrow morning, here's the plan so far:

Monday, 20th of April:
The northbound Tranz-Coastal train leaves Christchurch at 7am towards Picton, where I will arrive right after noon. There I'll board a ferry that will take me over the Cook Strait to Wellington. Both the train and the ferry apparently pass through some pretty awesome locations.

2 nights of mucking about in Wellington.

Wednesday, 22nd of April:
"Naked Bus" from Wellington to Rotorua in the northern parts of the North Island, about 7 hours on the road.

2 nights of random volcanic expeditions in Rotorua.

Friday, 24th of April:
Again with the Naked Bus, this time from Rotorua to Auckland, where I'll stay one night, waiting for my flight the next day. Hopefully I will have time to hunt for some extra games for the Nintendo DS that I bought yesterday.

Saturday, 25th of April:
Spend my birthday flying, as I head over to Japan, making a 5-hour pit stop in Kuala Lumpur.

Sunday, 26th of April:
Arrive to Osaka, Japan, early morning, meet up with my friends there, offload some of my luggage to their place and jump on Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto.

Stay in Kyoto for 3 nights. Temples, parks, temples.
Temples.

Wednesday, 29th of April:
Quick switch to the next temple-ridden city, Nara, where I will stay for 2-3 nights.
Temples, parks, hopefully some cherry blossoms, feed cookies to the deer roaming the parks.

Friday, 30th of April:
Make a day-trip to Iga-Ueno, visit the ninja museum and laugh at the silliness.
Head back to Nara in the evening, stay there for 1 or 2 more nights.

Saturday, 2nd of May:
Beginning of Golden Week and a stampede of Japanese tourists desperately trying to enjoy their big holiday.
Return to Osaka and spend a few days visiting my friends.

Thursday, 7th of May:
Shinkansen to Hiroshima. 2 days of visiting different memorial parks and museums, and perhaps half a day at Miyashima.

Saturday, 9th of May:
Take the morning train back to Osaka airport and return to New Zealand, again via Malaysia.

Sunday, 10th of May:
Auckland. Spend here maybe 1 night before flying back to Christchurch? Not sure, haven't booked any tickets yet. I guess I should be back to work on Monday, but I'm sure they can wait for me one day longer. :)

Old People Are Funny

2009-04-14T20:45:00.000-07:00

So.

I was about to have lunch in this nice little cafe with my friend yesterday. The place was a bit off from the busiest parts of the city, peaceful, seemingly mostly occupied by people so ancient that I can only assume it is indeed possible to simply get demended enough to forget to die.

Got myself a panini and sat down at a table.

Two seconds later there was a kind of sharp clickety-clickety-click and something zipped into existence right next to us.

Old lady: "You know, you two look just like my parents."
Me(outraged): "Well, I never!"
OL: "Where you from, young man?"
Me: "Finland?"
OL: "Oh, that be in northern Europe, innit? You all Russian there, aren't ya?"
Me: "Well..."
OL: "And where you from, little lady?"
My friend: "I come from Japan!^^"
OL: "Aa, you know Pearl Harbor, then?"

Then she started her monologue.

Fifteen minutes later she was still going strong, endlessly swinging back and forth on her two crutches, like some kind of post-polio orangutan.

OL: "--Now, back in the 60s I met this man in Auckland, who really got me started with my writing career. Let's see now. Ahmed. Ahmed he was called. A fierce, fierce man, he was! You see, back in those days we were quite poor, and of course I had already a long history of different ailments that had really put my body down the bad way, let me tell you! And for a girl like me, who got her education in German, it wasn't too easy to find proper employment as a teacher, but luckily there was the time, when I was learning to use them early word pro-cess-ing machines and ended up writing this poem about mice that people back then really liked... where was I now? Ah right, counterfeit passports. You see--"

I think we could still be sitting there, listening to her, had we not finished our food and excused ourselves (repeatedly, maybe up to 15 times, and even then she tried giving us her address so that we could visit her for more delightful conversationing).

In a way it was a pity to end the "conversation", because towards the end she really started gaining momentum. I especially remember this snippet paraphrased below.

OL: "Do you reckon that Obama in the you-night-ed States will live very long? I really don't think so. It's such a shame, after Bush. Both the senior and the junior. Horrible people... You know, he is half from Kenya, black father, was it now.. He also did drugs when he was younger. I'm really into politics, see? People are always saying that I has a very keen eye, can see what it's all about, see? Did you know that there are some presidents in States who were jews? Like Roosevelt! Imagine that! With their huge noses and moneygrubbing! Of course they always change their name so that people will accept them, but it doesn't really change it, does it? Always be on guard for'em!"
Me: "Sorry, but... did you say before, that you are working for Amnesty International?"
OL: "Oh, yes! Such an interesting work! I also do gardening, since after retiring I always have so much time--"

Let's Movie Review! ^_________^

2009-04-06T04:05:00.000-07:00

I've spent many an hour in the local cinema during the past weeks, allow me to share some of my thoughts with you.

Bolt3D ***½

Saw this right after coming to New Zealand, and incidentally, it was the first movie I've seen through a pair of polarizing glasses, which might explain perhaps ½ a star in the rating. I was surprised by it. It is actually a very nice movie, even if the storyline doesn't step away from the well-tread path set by a million stories told before it. It's really not that simple to make humor that is funny for both kids and the adults, but I think Bolt succeeded in it. I even liked the hamster-in-a-ball that some have complained about. (Yay for being in an English-speaking country and the chronic lack of the ever-so-high-quality Finnish dubbing.)

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans **

I give it two stars instead of one, because the guy playing the vampire elder really did a fantastic job in portraying his role. The werewolf dude (it's been a few weeks, forgot all names already) wasn't bad either, but the overall blandness of the movie makes his role quite forgettable. The vampire girl, on the other hand, holy fuck! Talk about a mess.. She was like Gollum, her moods swinging wildly between super-angsty and a princess-shaped paperweight every time the camera cut angles. And there were a lot of cuts. (And weird camera angles. Half the time you don't know if you are looking at the ceiling or the floor of the particular cave the scene is taking place in.) Was it the first Jason Bourne movie, the Bourne Identity, that started it all? That was a good movie, but the assholes who made it, should be skinned alive for killing off the whole fucking action genre and replacing it with the strobo shows that we are being fed these days. Fuck me, even the latest Bond movie would have been tolerable, had the action scenes been properly made! (I'm also heretic enough to call the reboot of the Batman series only a partial success because of this very thing.) Shaky camera and MTV-editing are to the action movies, what all the flicks ending with the word "Movie" are for comedies.

Well, there is some gore in it, and vampires can never be a total waste of time.

Watchmen ****½

(admit it, you clicked that hoping for something big and blue to pop out. Instead, I give you something even better!)

Yea, it's a good movie, a very good movie. Of course it's not exactly like the comic with all the philosophical nyances and whatnot jammed in there, but anyone who thinks that it fails because of that, can cry themselves to sleep until old age and dementia wash away the scars for all I care. Few things that bothered me -- that I can think of off the top of my head -- were that Nite Owl and Silk Spectre (II) were displayed as such brutal little sonuvabitches in a fight that it really took a lot of the impact off of Rorschach's and Comedian's roles. And Nite Owl was supposed to be a middle-aged everyday normal guy, not the kind of semi-beefcake the actor was (the whole manhood-in-costume angle was very well displayed, though, I thought). Oh yes, and the ending... I actually liked this new one over the comic's squid one. It has a different weight to it, but the wrath of an angry god works just the same as an unknown alien thread for me -- it's just that after all the violence in the movie the whole destruction of the city scene was a huge cop-out. It really would have added some much-needed effect to it to show the bloody corpses piled up on top of each other everywhere instead of yet another CGI explosion. :(

Anyway, this movie has been talked to death, and most people have probably seen it already, and for those who haven't, you can come over to my house later and we can watch it together after I buy the bluray, if you bring the beer.

--Intermission--

I was in a cafeteria today, sipping on a vanilla cappuccino the size of an olympic swimming pool, and writing some stuff on my laptop, when all of sudden two girls sit to the table next to me.

And proceed to speak in Finnish.

I got a rare opportunity right there to find out, what it is that women speak, when they think that there is no one listening/understanding them.

It's like guys usually assume it is, they speak of dicks.

And apparently not necessarily of dicks that are attached to a member of the human species.

Oh, weaker sex, you never cease to amaze and mildy disgust me. :)

--And now for the latter part of our reviews--

Transporter 3 *½

For the sake of everything that is still good in this world:

Jason Statham.

Start paying more attention to the movies you are making than you do to level-upping your chest muscles. You are already quite large enough. Every time you take your shirt off on screen, I can hear the women in the theater going cuu-ee and slipping off their seats on their own juices.

Statham has been the leading mug of many a fine picture already, including one of the last year's shiniest cinematic gems: Death Race. The previous two Transporter movies were also pretty good, or at least damn fine entertainment, but this time around I felt like leaving half-way through. Transporter 3 is just a lazy movie. The shoddy camera and editing work is there, like can be expected, but the story, as trivial as it can be in movies like these, just felt too poor even for an excuse to drive cars around really fast.

Luc Besson is credited as having written the script... I really don't want to diss the creative mind behind Léon and The Fifth Element, but this guy is sinking rapidly towards the bottom of the George Lucas Trench in the Ocean of Shit, like some perverse cosplay of Le Grand bleu. Has he really done anything worthwhile since Danny the Dog/Unleashed? I'd rather see him retire, while I can still muster some warm feelings towards his long career...

As for Statham, I really hope this won't become a norm for him. He has the right stuff to become Bruce Willis of the 21st century.

(Incidentally, the NZ guys in the theater needed a change of underwear after every time a shiny German car came rrrrroaring to the screen with its hard-as-steel engine trembling and pulsating with barely-contained power that...oh hell, you get the picture...)

Monsters vs. Aliens ***

I just saw this one tonight, again in 3D, and again, just like with Bolt, I have to say I was really surprised at how much I liked it, since the trailers I had seen before were more cringe-inducing than anything else. Again, the main parts of the storyline aren't going anywhere unheard of, it's just another try on the friends-with-special-powers-take-on-a-super-villain-and-win-because-they-are-not-the-bad-guys. It is acceptable as a one-shot, but if Dreamworks will start churning out sequels like they did with Shrek, I'm going to hire a hobo to urinate into the gas tank of their CEO's SUV.

The humor in the movie is reminiscent of the said Shrek flicks, which is entirely a good thing. It's nice to have two large animation studios with slightly different ideas on what makes a funny. I saw Pixar's Wall-E before leaving Finland, and it was a great movie as well, but in a thoroughly nice way, whereas Dreamworks executives seem to think that it is okay to blow a million or two on a fart joke every now and then. I agree with them wholeheartedly.

The thing that I found most impressive in Monsters vs. Aliens was the quality of the animation itself at parts. Most backgrounds and many of the (even main) characters were overly cartoony and simple, but when something was well done, it was like the pixels were fellating my eyeballs. The destruction and mayhem of the action scenes, water, cloth simulation, particle effects, all very much top notch. It's almost depressing, really, as I like toying with 3D-modelling myself, and these days the professional-level CGI is more than just a bit ahead of what a twerp like me can accomplish with a copy of Blender. In short: effects and overall animation - a slight improvement on what they've done before; characters - a loo-ong step backwards from the vivid personas we saw in the Shrek movies; story - it will be the first thing I'll forget about the movie, maybe as soon as tomorrow; humor - I laughed several times.

-----------------

Alright, let's leave it at that for now. Later this week I will witness the live action horror that is Dragonball Evolution. Really looking forward to it, I have a gut feeling it will be like the unholy union of Karate Kid and Mortal Kombat 2(the movie). :)

Coming up later on:
The new Star Trek movie with Sylar as Spock.
The new Fast and Furious movie, because I hate cars, pointless drama in action movies and I really hate cars.
The new X-Men movie, because Wolverine is like the only interesting character so far in the motion picture versions of the comics, though I have hopes for Gambit in this one.
Terminator Salvation, because I can't come up with a reason to not see it.
Transformers 2, because you can only go up from the atrocious first one.
Heh, maybe even Night at the Museum 2, because ... well, I might be bored enough to see it someday.

Did you notice that all of those movies are sequels? Fuck you Hollywood.

Did you also notice that I'm not seeing movies like Slumdog Millionare, Che, The Wrestler or Gran Torino? Fuck you art fags, I'm seeing movies for entertainment, not to become depressed.

Virtuality

2009-04-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

For a anti-social reject like me trying to enjoy a sunny Saturday afternoon, which is more annoying? Is it the table on my left with four Korean teenage girls going on and on about whatever it is that airheads like that talk about in their silly-sounding language? Or could it be the middle-aged Kiwi redneck beauty at the table to my right, filling up two chairs with her enormous carcass, mouth-breathing like she just held her breath for 5 minutes and talking about equally pointless bullshit in between slices of chocolate cake.

Whatever. It's a pretty day outside.

I've been quite busy these past weeks, mostly working on my next programming task, which has required me to re-teach myself most of the mathematics that I already learned once in university back in the day. In fact, I've been working on it pretty much day and night, office and home, come hell or high water. My beard has already grown past the point where it would tickle my own face and girls have stopped complaining about it scratching their thighs, whenever they manage to pull me away from my computer.

It's good to be a geek. :)

Over the weeks, I've also attended to a lovely set of lectures on virtual reality back at the lab, given by Tom Furness, one of the Great Old Ones in this field of research. According to him, he is the only one of the three guys left alive, who studied the field already in 1960s.

It really shows: this guy is literally a gold mine of information. I consider myself very lucky to have been able to tap into his head like this.

Interesting thing he told us a couple of days ago:

He was working on a data glass tech that, instead of having miniature see-through displays on the lenses, utilize lasers to directly draw the images on the user's retina. The technology is maturing up quickly, and they can already produce very vivid, high-contrast VGA-resolution images that just seem to hover there, in front of your eyes.

The funny part: they were testing their prototype on some guy who just happened to be visiting their lab. The dude put on the glasses and looked at the images shot into his eyes, nodding his head in appreciation. Then he told them: “Impressive, especially considering that I'm blind in my left eye, and I can still see the images perfectly clear with it.”

It's a feature, not a bug!

Apparently the retina in the guy's left eye was still alive and kicking, it was just the rest of the eye that was messed up with large amounts of scar tissue, a result from some accident years back. Prosthetic eyes based on this are already being researched. :)

Onward.

An observation that I have made here.

Skateboards. Holy shit, half the people in the campus seem to use them as their primary means of transportation. They are actually considered cool. Every time I see someone skating, I start hearing the song, The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News (Back to the Future movies, come on...), play in my head.

It's driving me crazy. I swear, I can go to a toilet, and then, in the booth, start hearing the damn song approaching from the distance. The bathroom door opens and as the guy rolls past me, I'm exposed to the full blare of the music so that I automatically try to wipe aside the long curly locks of 80s hair from my face that I know never even were there.

The campus security zooming around on their Segways are cool, though.

And now for something completely different.

Towards the end of April and in the beginning of May, expect a change of scenery, as I travel north towards Auckland, and from there fly to Japan for a couple of weeks of historical sightseeing, beer gardens and hopefully not too many geishas (I really don't see the point in them). I haven't thought about it too much yet, but on the menu so far are Osaka (where my friends live), Kyoto and Nara (which are pretty), and perhaps Iga-Ueno (which is the home town of the legendary ninja, Hattori Hanzo, and the birth place of the entire culture of wearing your pyjamas around your head and totally flipping out for no reason, killing everybody in town.)

Cheers, eh.

No Skool Like Old Skool

2009-03-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

Don't think that my life in NZ is all booze, girls and bungee jumping. No, no, no.

Most of my time is actually spent at the lab, surrounded by a bunch of computers, studying things related to 3D-graphics, graphics programming and especially augmented reality. In fact, I'm often so absorbed into my work that I end up missing the last bus home, which passes the university at 11pm. A lazy bastard like me, there's no way I would do something like that unless I found my work very interesting indeed.

Video games.

I always wanted to make my own, but for some reason never got around to seriously attempting to put one together.

So, a couple of weeks ago I decided to give it a shot!

I've been an avid gamer since 1980s, and I firmly believe that modern game makers have forgotten, what makes a good game good. It is not downloadable extra content, or a fuck-ton of shaders to make virtual boobies look so real you want to lick your monitor, nor is it real-time ray tracing or character models with million+ polygons.

It's nothing more complex than the core idea of the game. It's the game mechanics. It's the way it's been realized. IT'S THE FUN. I have two of the current generation consoles at home and I enjoy playing on them a lot, and will probably continue playing the latest games all the way to my grave, but it is my opinion that most of the games today simply can't hold a candle to the classics of days gone by.

I can accept someone calling games like X-Com ancient. They are getting there, but are still heaps more enjoyable than 99% of the offerings today. Then I hear someone saying that they have never played games like Thief, "because it's too old" and all I can think of is "Holy shit I'm getting old." If I talk about old games, I usually mean the very early 1990s offerings, like the first Monkey Islands or Scorched Earth, or if we talk about console gaming, the late 1980s NES games, such as Megaman or Metal Gear. (Kids who think that Metal Gear Solid 1 on PS1 is the original game in the series, make me die inside a bit).

Now, before someone gets it into their head to slap me in the face with their big fat nerd penis and show off their Commodore 64 or Intellivision -- I did play on them, a lot. But for me, true gaming began with post 1985-games pouring out from Japan, when the technology really started playing leap-frog with the developers.

Okay, okay. The reality is that we are now living in the new golden era of gaming, because Internet and things like Flash allow people to develop their own games with extremely limited resources and still get them to where thousands can play them, be it for free or for tuppence.

It really warms my black heart.

Can we please get to the point of this post already?

Here it is.

I've never coded anything graphical before, and I feel this little project was a great way to start looking into OpenGL. It took me about two weeks worth of long nights to put it together. My homage to games like Scorched Earth and Worms, the wonderful genre of artillery games.

I give you: Dudes!

You start off by drawing an outline:
After which the game generates a level from it, and you can place a bunch of Dudes in it......and then proceed to try and destroy every last mother-loving pixel, whether it belongs to other Dudes or the terrain itself.
A nice little physics simulation for explosions, dirt and blood particles.
And a bunch of weapons that make sure that there is no such thing as a safe place for your opponents.
Good times, I'm very happy with the outcome. :)

On to the next project, Robin!

9000 words in pictures! And some more in writing!

2009-03-16T03:51:00.000-07:00

Went to New Brighton beach on Sunday. Lovely, lovely place. See for yourself. :)The sunlight here is very bright. It was a warm day, but not too warm for my dear jacket.

Playing with... food? Well, the sea gulls like them.
Yea, right.

A gull, a surfer dude and hills.The only purpose of this 300-meter pier, as far as I can tell, is to provide a better view of the ocean. As if you might miss it otherwise. It's construction was funded by private people and some companies. They all have name plaques planted on the top along the pier's entire length. Once the people die, the original plaques are replaced with "In loving memory of XXX" ones.

Back from the beach, in the park near my apartment.

Say what you will, I feel there is something magical about this picture. :)

Downtown Christchurch, seen from the top of the university library. My apartment is towards the left edge, 6km away, near the tall buildings.

Echoes of Steve Fossett

2009-03-12T01:41:00.000-07:00

After my trip to Queenstown I've more or less kept my word to myself and lived peacefully (and perfectly happily) ever after.

Unloaded some photos off my phone, here are some of them.

A snapshot from the Iron Maiden concert.

At the Iron Maiden concert, the counter to buy soft drinks and snacks:

And right next to it, the counter for beer:

I found a great bar a few blocks from my apartment. Right next to the river with a nice view. Specializes in Belgian beers, of which they have an impressively large selection. Love the place. :)

This might be the only time in my life that I have actually voluntarily considered going to a service.
A nice Saturday afternoon. 25 degrees, sunshine, a large maple tree to sit under, a somewhat quiet cafe/restaurant. Later a family with 2 screaming kids came along and ruined it all. The mother was accidentally served some milk that had apparently gone bad, which had her toss her baby violently to her hubby's lap and leap to vomit even more violently against the trunk of my maple tree. The waiter was full of apologies, but I wanted to give him an extra 10-dollar tip for a job well done. ^^Alas, he disappeared after the incident.
Ah, I hear you asking yourself, "What is this about Steve Fossett, then?" Well, you know of the guy, right? Millionaire adventurer, who disappeared in US with his plane. They found the wreckage and fragments of his body months afterwards.

Today I was supposed to listen to a seminar by a Cambridge professor. I went to the lecture hall and sat there with maybe 50 other people, when at the time of the lecture a somewhat flushed guy appeared in front of the room, explaining that the professor in question has disappeared and the seminar was canceled until further notice. Apparently the man is an avid pilot and had flown his private single-engine plane to NZ all the way from UK, and two weeks before had departed to explore some islands far south from the mainland.

No one had heard of him since.

I hope the guy is okay. Would be a huge shame to lose such amount of expertise and experience in an accident, and I want to listen to that seminar, damn it!

Most radical, this one is

2009-03-01T02:17:00.000-08:00

So sorry for the late update, was on a road trip until 2 hours ago.

The Iron Maiden concert last Sunday was really awesome, as you can probably expect from a group that has had 30 years to get their act together. Bruce did escape to backstage between songs "to change into a new outfit" -- extra oxygen and/or other stimulants may or may not have been involved. Fantastic gig, nonetheless, I can only hope that I'm half as active at their age myself.

Fine, got that off my shoulders.

And now we can proceed to the burst of righteous anger that some people have come to expect from me for some reason.

So, I was on a road trip to Queenstown for a few nights. The drive from Christchurch to Otago region takes about 6 hours and is filled with increasingly majestic mountains and the ever-humble and ever-numerous sheep. A drive from, say, Oulu to Helsinki is a long and dreadfully boring one, but on this little trip you won't really notice the time passing in nearly the same way, as you *will* keep your face pasted at the window beside you, sucking in the sights, for most of the time.

Around 11pm on Friday, about an hour and a half from Queenstown, we stopped the car to the side of the road for a moment and I saw the most incredible thing: The Milky Way. Whenever I visit my parents during the winter, I take it into me to always go outside during the night time to see the stars, as the light pollution in the city reduces my star gazing to a glance at a moon -- whenever it happens to be full. But I am willing to bet my eternal beauty on the hunch that even the street lights down in Brussels pitch in on obscuring my view up in Finland.

Not in New Zealand, not down in the southern parts of the South Island, not on that stretch of mountain road. No. There weren't many buildings around us for tens of kilometers to any direction, to the west lied mountains and thousands of kilometers of sea before Australia; to the east lied mountains and tens of thousands of kilometers of sea before the American continents. That, and we were at least 1km up in the mountains, with less air to get in the way.

It was magnificent. Truly magnificent. I know, just how large our galaxy is, but this was the first time that I could actually count stars by the thousands, millions, it felt like!

I wanted to stay there all night.

I wish I can gaze upon it again as soon as possible.

Right.

It took us 1.5 hours to reach Queenstown from that magical moment, and during that time we almost ran over a rabbit, a cat and two possums. (the rural roads in this country are literally paved by roadkill, sometimes you can't go 10 meters without coming up on a fresh(ish) street pizza. These people like to drive fast.)

Queenstown is a small, charming little town tucked away in between a swarm of ~2km peaks and a lake. Very pretty.

Think of the girl-next-door, the pretty one.

A nice lass, smart, good-natured, well-behaved. Does well in school, everyone expects worlds of her, when they notice her at all.

A lot of suppressed anger and frustration in her, from the society-inflicted illusion that she is missing out on... something. The stuff of idiotic teenage years that she on one weak moment decides to vent and ends up in bad company (yea).

A month later she has to get into porno industry to support her drug habit.

As she naturally has huge ... tracks of land ... she doesn't need to bother with too many upgrades to please her chosen audience, and as her reputation grows, so do the crowds, the piles of money, her greed and her arrogance.

Queenstown is the bleached anus of that girl, torn flaccid by the continuos triple penetrations.

It's a town of little more than 10.000 people, annually visited by more than 1.2 million tourists! It's a beautiful little town-turned-adventure-themed-amusement-park, and no matter how much money there is involved, it's bloody ridiculous! There's almost no one actually living in the core of the town, they've all escaped the suddenly-orbital real estate prices and rent levels. And the hordes and hordes of adrenalin-seeking party animals, whom no legion of Uruk-Hai could ever hope to match in disturbance they cause. The center of the town is just a collection of hostels, bars, clubs and expensive shops (the general price level is much higher than elsewhere in the country, and most of the tourist activities start their pricing from around 80 euros a shot and scale quite high indeed towards the more hardcore end of the spectrum), and the locals live higher up in the mountains, almost like trying to escape from a stampeding mass of demon-sheep, or way out in neighboring villages.

Oh well, it's their mess, not mine. Here's some more pics from the road:

Lake somethingsomething, half-way between Christchurch and Queenstown. If the air was a bit clearer, you might catch a climpse of the tallest mountain in NZ, Mount Cook(3754m) behind the lake. (very strange color, the water, by the way)
Off-roading in the surroundings of Queenstown.
Statue of the founder of Queenstown. The ever-present sheep are starting to creep me out.

10am on Saturday morning. As everyone is still sleeping off their hangovers, it's a perfect time for a quiet walk about the town.

Oh yea, almost forgot. Guess what I did? ;)

A bungy jump from 134 meters, from a pod suspended between two mountains, with a river raging through the canyon in between, way, way down. I've done it now!
And I'm never, ever doing it again! O_O

Up the Irons

2009-02-21T18:52:00.000-08:00

Woke up this morning around 10am to a fire alarm going off right above my bed, having slept maybe 4 hours.

Escaping the infernal beeping into my living room I could hear the same alarm making life uncomfortable at my neighbors' apartments as well. Seems we have a central alarm system here, one that we can't turn off ourselves.

It puts on its clothes and goes outside.
A fireman (in full smoke diving gear): "G'day, mate." *passes me by and walks upstairs*
It joins its neighbors and answers their good mornings grumpily.
A cute girl (with her nipples bleeding through her tank top -- oh, the excitement!): "Good thing we had time to wake up before all this!"
Me: *Urge to kill, rising*
It decides it needs coffee, goes back inside to get its wallet.

The alarm stops sounding. False alarm.

A quick shower and a shave later I go outside. It takes me 5 coffee shops before I find one that sells cheesecake:

Afterwards, properly woken up and feeling somewhat cheerful, I find a large group of college students in Victoria Park, all dressed up in kilts, playing bagpipes and drums. I don't know if it is proper for women to wear kilts, but I do wonder if they go all the way and skip the underwear.
Three hours now, until the doors open at Westpac. It's about 4 kilometers away from my apartment, but I think I will walk. The weather is just perfect, (I'm not even going to check the UV-readings for today, to hell with cancer) so stop for a beer or two on the way, and the evening should go down rather smoothly. :)

Future of Gaming

2009-02-19T21:24:00.001-08:00

My host company has a neat Cave system installed in one of their labs. A bunch of projectors behind a large concave screen, hooked up to a PC with a stack of powerful graphics cards and a 2kW PSU to produce two high-resolution images from slightly different point of views. Wear a pair of polarizing glasses and voilà! Instant 3D tuo drop your jaw on the sight of. The pictures below don't really look like much (blurry, dark cell phone pics with both of the PoVs messing each other up), *but* playing Unreal Tournament 2004 on this rig was an Experience.

Holy shit I'm going to have to buy an apartment with an extra room just for something like this...

Chinese Valentine's Day

2009-02-18T21:42:00.000-08:00

You know how it is, going to England and noticing that you are the only sod on the island to actually know how to speak the English language?

It's pretty much the same with the Kiwis: some of them do speak nice and clear, but more often n's-en-kweer. Visiting a cafeteria the other day I actually had to ask the waiter to repeat himself twice, before I realized he was trying to say "Is everything alright, sir?", just failing to get any further than "Sivrthnreetsr?".

I went out on Valentine's day to hunt for some lunch and noticed this lovely advertisement in front of a whiskey shop near my apartment. A perfect present or The perfect present?

Right after the whiskey shop I was greeted by this:

The local Chinese community had moved its Lantern Festival event to the weekend, creating a weird mix of pink hearts and bug-eyed dragons around the park they were celebrating in. This next picture has an interesting mix of Chinese and Maori stuff:

Masks up in the trees. (The whole park was full of these and other kinds of lanterns, but by the time the sun set, I was unfortunately already a bit too drunk to care about returning for more pics ;) )

The center of the city is full of Asian eateries, and mostly at very nice price, too. For example, I ate in a Korean restaurant a while ago, had a plate of sushi(kimbab), a bowl of miso soup, a sizzling pot of bibimbab (A stone pot filled with rice, veggies, meat and egg - you pour too much chili sauce on top and mix it all up before eating.) and a nice cold bottle of beer from the local Canterbury Brewery, all for about 10 euros.

In the end of the Corridor of Homphen above there is a tiny Japanese bar of maybe 10 seats, frequented by random tourists and the local beer-loving Japanese. If you can entertain Aki the bartender by playing the piano in the back, you get a free drink. :)

Riccarton House, the oldest(?) building in Christchurch. Well, at least it's surrounded by the oldest trees, some of them over 600 years old. Kiwis lovingly call their forests "bush". I suppose it is because the lack of indigenous veggie-eating mammals in the islands has in many places enabled the forests to grow into utterly impenetrable jungles. Nowadays the building serves as a cafe&restaurant that seems to go for the "fancy" look. The problem with achieving this goal is the staff. Though dressed impeccably, they don't seem very comfortable speaking "butler English", and as I was sitting close to the kitchen door, I got to listen them fighting over who was supposed to do what and what the hell did that old cunt in table 8 order again? Silly buggers managed to spill third of my cappuccino on the way to my table after they finally got around making me one after 10 minutes of arguing. Nice bush around the house, but meh.

Speaking of no indigenous land mammals (there were bats), why are the walls of the house lined with deer and elk heads?

One more pic. One of the buildings at University of Canterbury. Some call these concrete colossi ugly, but I really like them. Love walking around the campus. :)

Let's talk about the People

2009-02-14T18:52:00.001-08:00

Christchurch has a population of 350k-400k, but it has a very compact center, bringing in mind a city only half the size it actually is.

Christchurch center, close to my apartment:

Even though more than 85% of the total population of about 4.3 million in New Zealand live in its few major cities, they still prefer to have their own separated houses and small yards, rather than stacking their apartments in large high-rises like most urbanized places do. This has resulted in a suburban sprawl that simply doesn't have an end to it, as well as to people being more and more dependant on their cars. I've seen plenty of houses for sale here, and the biggest selling point often seems to be the size of the garage, rather than the place itself. I actually met some city urban planners and saw the cool 3D-models they had created of the city, projecting its growth in different near future scenarios, their goal being to stop the spread of the small housing and focus on developing the central city further. Their biggest headache seemed to be that the people running the city way back in the day had divided most of the land into plots 10 meters wide and 50 meters deep, which doesn't really leave a lot of room for the imagination (or requires a hell of a lot of it, when trying to build something big). But still, unless the economy collapses completely, the downtown real estate prices in this city are unlikely to stop growing on a longer time scale. :)

Many of the houses on the 6km hike between my apartment and my office look very nice, they don't call this the city of gardens for nothing:

Though there are also houses that do away with silly greenery and just look cool by themselves:

Of course you also need something from the other end of the spectrum as a reference point:

(That last one is actually just a less fancy house in otherwise quite fancy neighborhood, I haven't even gone to the "poorer" section of the city yet.)

The Kiwis don't mind having to own a car or two, though, as they seem to like the damn things almost as much as they like rugby, which in turn they like more than they like sex. A good third of the cars I see on the roads here are either SUVs or pick-up trucks. As it is a country full of mountains, it might be understandable, but it still annoys me.

The people themselves are usually friendly and rather laid back sort, not to mention curious as hell, which might bother some Scandinavian types. In many ways they remind me of Americans, just without the constant need to go "Hey! Hey! Look at me! Just look at how cool I am!" They also seem to like working for themselves rather than for some large faceless corporation, as tiny restaurants, shops and hotels are everywhere, whereas things like super markets are few and far in between.

I often pass this lawnmower shoppe and the sign always makes me smile. Lawnmower fight!

On several streets there are stretches kilometers long of only hotels, motels, hostels, motor lodges, B&Bs and whatnot, all trying to outsmart the competition with promises of spa rooms, free internet access, cable TV and even some cheesy themes. Late in the evening most of the "No vacancy" signs outside are lit, which says something about the amount of tourists that swarm the country around the year. It is very popular among travelers to rent a car here (it's quite cheap) and drive around the islands on their own leisurely pace, as the public transportation to the more distant locations is often lacking at best. As a non-driver I have no idea how easy it is to get used to the left-sided traffic.

Then a couple of more touristy shots:

People playing chess in the Cathedral Square.

Yet another picture of the cathedral:

The useless tram line I mentioned before actually goes through buildings at some points. (Check out the size of the egg that kiwi has :)

Tomorrow I'll try and post some photos I took yesterday at a park close to my apartment, where the local Chinese community was celebrating the Lantern Festival. (Same party that got the people in Beijing to burn down their brand-new skyscraper earlier this week.)

Oh yes, and on next week's Sunday, 22nd of Feb, it's time to go up the irons, as Iron Maiden comes to Christchurch for the first time in more than a decade! My ticket is in my bed-side drawer, where is yours? ;)

Arthur's Pass

2009-02-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

Double post, eh.

Yesterday me and about ten others from and visiting the lab went for a little hik...sorry, tramp to Arthur's Pass, a pathway through the mountain range that covers much of the South Island.

Very nice views, though at points the road leading there felt a bit dangerous, what with the happy-go-lucky driving style of the locals and the constant 180-degree turns sandwiched between a rockface and a very long drop indeed.

The weather up in the mountains seemed to change every 5 minutes, but the scenery was nothing short of fantastic:

These Kea parrots are addicted to the rubber parts of cars, and steal your food the moment you look to the other direction. And even if you don't.

What New Zealand outing would be complete without sheep? None!

Kiwis, eh

2009-02-06T20:07:00.000-08:00

First weekend in New Zealand and what am I doing? Sitting here in my office, of course! It's not like I could be out there sampling the sights, sounds and flavors, is it?

Well, it is rather hot today, so I decided to seek shelter for a while, empty my camera and write this little post. Also, they have a very nice coffee machine in the lobby. :)

Recap of the week: arrived on Monday afternoon, horribly tired after over 50 hours of not sleeping, popped into my office, checked into my apartment and slept for 14 hours straight. Rest of the week I have been adjusting my day rhythm little by little, thinking a bit about what exactly it is that I should be doing here (workwise), and hanging out with a bunch of visitors from Europe as well as getting to know the city.

There are several Thai, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and English restaurants as well as two liquor stores, one around-the-clock convinience store and several coffee shops and bars within 200 meters of my apartment. And I can't hear any outside noise in my bedroom even on Friday evening! So far I like Christchurch very much. :)

Same in pictures:

After 50 hours of uptime this was the loveliest sight I could have imagined.

The cathedral in the core of the city. My apartment is only a couple of blocks away from it.

Avon river. It snakes its way through the city so that no matter where you walk, you always bump into it every couple of blocks.

Punting on the Avon. There's a lot of tourist stuff around.

Tourist stuff such as a tram line that costs 5 euros to get on, but that doesn't really go anywhere.

In the city's botanical gardens I actually managed to find modern art that I like!

First dinner after my arrival: banana pizza.

HITLabNZ - this is where I spend my days, mom!

Captain Cook. You can find statues of this guy all over the planet because he went all over the planet.

A migrating coconut

2009-01-31T00:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a fun few days, meeting friends and downing way too much alcohol for it to be good for me.

My flight leaves in few hours, and since I've only slept some 5 hours and am notoriously incapable of sleeping on trains and planes, by the time I arrive to my destination, I should have discovered brand new levels of zombie-like existence.

Whatever.

Went eating and drinking out last night. Just now I took a look at some of the photos I snapped over the evening and these two made me smile.

Enjoying a nice drink after a heavy meal:

Just don't ask this lady about size, mattering and stuff:

Sorry Anu ;)

In Helsinki, leaving in two days

2009-01-29T03:06:00.000-08:00

From the point where I first heard about the chance to go to NZ for 6 months to the point where I'm actually about to go: 11 months.

When I applied for the visa:

And when I finally received it:

Oh yeah, and now, after the bureaucratic hell machine finally produced the said permit, Surprise! I had yet another delay show up and bite me in the ass, literally.

A tennis elbow, only in my tailbone.

A week of antibiotics took care of it, but while it lasted, it looked like I had grown a third buttock. Sitting down and lying on my back were a bit on the impossible side, so some 30 hours of hopping around the planet in tourist class wasn't exactly something I was willing to try. One week of sick leave, one week of glorious postponement.

But now I'm ready to go, yet again!

Spending a couple of days in Helsinki before leaving (flight departs on Saturday afternoon and arrives to Christchurch, New Zealand on Monday afternoon. 11 time zones, 28 hours in the air and 6 in random airports, longest stretch being a 22-hour Jumbo Jet ride from London to Sydney). Today I shall eat out and celebrate with some friends in a civilized fashion. Tomorrow I shall eat out and celebrate with some other friends in a bit less civilized fashion. Hopefully this time around I won't end up passing out on the floor of some random women's toilet.

Baaah~

Epic

2009-01-11T15:02:00.000-08:00

I have received the visa. There is much rejoicing.

It was epic and it went something like this:

In the beginning of November 2008 I find out that I should apply for a special "Working Holiday Visa" that I could get online without too big a hassle and be on my way in a couple of weeks. It sounds good enough. I don't have to send my passport anywhere and it is free (When I applied for my visa to go to China earlier, they wanted me to send them money in an envelope).

But.

Uh-oh, you were in China last year? Naughty boy! Naughty, naughty boy! It gets a chest x-ray to prove it didn't get tuberculosis or it gets the hose again.

Right, not a problem. The hospital doesn't even ask any questions before radiating the shit out of me five minutes after I walk in, just suggesting that I wear a fancy lead bikini bottom to protect my privates (missed my chance for a free vasectomy there :( ).

"So, when do I come back to get the report?" I ask the radiologist after being microwaved something proper. I had brought the radiologist questionnaire form from the visa application website with me and given it to the nurses before my dose of cancer rays.
"Oh, we will fill it up and send it for you. You won't even see them yourself," the radiologist answers happily. "We do these things every day. It's covered by the fee you paid us."

So, a month passes. That's more than two weeks, I think. Sometime in December I finally get an answer from the NZ end to my inquiry on the status of my visa application. They haven't received the x-ray report. I reach for my phone.

"Hello? Hospital X, radiology department."
"Hello doctor Goodnsexy, what happened to my x-ray report?"
"I don't know, sir, let me put you through to some random person."
Waitwaitwait.
"Yo?"
"I had an x-ray taken there for a visa application a month ago, but I just heard that the embassy people never received the report. Know anything about it?"
"Wait a minute, sir." I can hear her lowering the phone and talking to someone else in the room. "Yea, so I still have a week or so of holiday left, but I'd really like to make them last over Christmas, so maybe I just need a sick leave or something, haha."
Bitch...
"Are you still there, sir? Oh, okay. Let me put you through to someone else."
"Third time's the charm."
"Whatever you say, sir."
I listen to the you-are-now-waiting-in-line-muzak for about a minute.
"Hello?"
"My x-ray?"
"Oh that, it's right over there, by the door. When are you going to come get it?"
"I'll come right away, if you don't mind. I'll also bring my gun, if you don't mind."
"Come sometime in the afternoon, between 15:30 and 15:45, I'm having a long lunch today."

By 16:00 I am a proud owner of a huge brown envelope that contains pictures of my more than naked body (which I think I will get framed and put on a wall later) and a sealed envelope, which probably contains the report. I go to the post office and send the smaller envelope to the embassy. I tell -- I pay -- them to use their fastest courier.

3 days later I receive a phone call from Hague.

"Hello sir!" Gosh, she sounds really happy..
"Hi."
"We received some stuff from you. Why'd you send it to us?"
"You are the closest NZ embassy to me, your own website told me to send it to you."
"Oh, okay. We deal with it. Thanks!"
What a nice person, I think, hanging up the phone.

3 days later I receive an email, telling me that the report was incorrectly filled and that I'd have to submit a new one.

Oh good, I was looking for an excuse to re-visit the white corridors of hospital X, lined with old people slowly decomposing on their plastic chairs, some of them probably still waiting to be released from the hospital after being born.

I'm a special person, though, and I don't queue. Instead, when I arrive there, I walk directly into the radiologist's office. There's an open window to the x-ray room there, and I can see some woman in there, topless, putting on a larger version of the lead bikini bottom that I wore for my pictures. No one seems to care that I'm seeing all that. In fact, I don't care that I'm seeing all that. It really isn't all that. I consider nipples that are losing the battle against gravity too lazy to be worthy of my attention. Yea. With breasts like that, I will be looking straight into their eyes when I'm talking to them...

I manage to get the attention of the nurses in the room, explain them stuff, have them laugh and shrug it off and point me to an old doctor sitting in the corner of the room. I give the new blank forms to the doctor and ask him to fill them up. He fills them up, seemingly quite happy to have something to do. After he is done, he gives me the forms and asks:
"Was there something else?"
"Try turning them around, would you?"
"What? The fo--OH! Would you look at that, they are two-sided, aren't they! There's also questions on the back side of these papers, not just on the front side! Must be a really fancy printer, where these came out from!"
"It's a pretty cool printer, yes."
"It saves paper, too! When you print on both sides of the paper!"
"Yes--"
"I think it saves about 50% of the paper required for the printing job, doesn't it? That's really efficient!"
"Could you answer those questions, too, then?"
"I wonder if we have a printer like that, here, too..."
"Please?"
"Sure. Sure! What should I write here?"
"How about: 'This guy definitely doesn't have tuberculosis' after that part, where it asks if I have it?"
"Would they belive it?"
"They might be more suspicious, if you just leave it blank. Again."
"Yea... You might be right. They are foreigners, aren't they?"
"Indeed."
"Not like Finnish, foreigners..."
"You are writing it in Finnish, doc."
"What? Finn--oh, right!" A pause. "Isn't that good..?"

Ten minutes later I walk out with the new report, having triple-checked it just to be sure-ish. I mail it out and go have a beer before heading back to my office. It's less than two weeks to Christmas.

I finally receive the visa on 5th of January, 2009.

Happy new year. :)

Airport hopping

2008-12-02T01:51:00.001-08:00

But only to visit the master, not the servants. :(

Typing this sitting in Helsinki airport, waiting for my connecting flight to London, and further on to Reading, where I'll be spending most of this week doing something that might remotely resemble work.

Got a message from the NZ bureaucrats on Friday: it seems they lost my visa application and are now looking for it with the very best of their tracking sheep. No word of the x-ray report I sent them 3 weeks ago -- guess they never even received that one. I have given up trying to hurry this thing up, really, and wouldn't mind the long wait...

...but it's just that I'm homeless now.

My lease on my apartment ended and I moved out last weekend, now living here and there with whoever has enough extra space to store me in for a night or two. Perhaps I should do like that Japanese guy in Mexico, squatting for several months in the airport, living on scraps and media attention. On a positive note the friends who took all my stuff seem to be genuinely enjoying them.

(I did keep the apartment for 1 extra month, well prepared to pay for an empty place, thinking that it would be a buffer long enough in case of delays. Little did I know the extend and true power of general incompetence.)

Cof^H^H^HEspresso break

2008-11-24T02:09:00.000-08:00

Having a little break from having a little break from work; I'm reaching Nick Knatterton levels of efficiency here. :)

It seems captain Kirk shares my sentiments on the new trailer.

Also, this little piece on how to eat sushi was awesome years ago and it's still awesome today.

(no news on my visa. I shall write them a stern letter, that'll teach'em)

Malfunction

2008-11-20T10:10:00.000-08:00

Three weeks after the last update, and I still don't know.

At least I have submitted all thezzzzzztttt-----

-----ttthhand the new trailer for J.J.Abrams's take on Star Trek really has me wondering. I mean, CGI is always yay for me, but that single instance of "My name is James Tiberius Kirk!"is forcing me to shift to another mental gear for this one, the same I use for watching Michael Bay movies...

And to my surprise, Yahtzee actually seems to like Fallout 3! There probably is something in the water, but this game is now rather high on my to-do list for the next summer.

This is pretty old, but it had me laughing way backkkhh-----hhuh?

Wow.

Did I just make a blog entry?

The hell? I hate blogs! Well, at least the pointless, masturbatory ones, like that very list I see above these lines right now, the one that for some reason I can't seem to be able to delete!

That visa, once it arrives, will be my personal rapture from this stale limbo, where my life consists mostly of work and trolling the internet for crums of information to absord, digest and regurgitate.

It's playing the waiting gaaaiiimmmmzzzztt-----

-----ttkkhhhcurrent mood: need more chocolate.

Beauty is not meant to last, alas...

2008-11-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo my friend took in a park close to my apartment, when the autumn colors were in full blaze, barely one month ago:

And here is a photo I took in the same place today:

That is all. :/

Can it now be cranks up the CO2 emissions time pleas?

2008-10-31T15:30:00.000-07:00

While flying somewhere over Poland a few days back, the pilot suddenly announced that we were going to be late from our destination, since there was a bit of a headwind outside, slowing us down. Nothing too bad, just 300+ km/h.

In Italy it was raining horizontally and lightning flashes filled the skies, though the temperature hung above 20 degrees every day. ("No, I don't want to buy your stupid umbrella, mr. street vendor #502. The water is coming in from all directions! What? Oh, really? Only 5 euros? Well, you see that bar over there? How about I go in there and give that money to the nice gigolo guy behind the counter instead and wait the storm out nurturing a pint of Guinness?") Returning to Finland last night I found out that the winter had let itself in while I had my back turned. It's a blizzard-land out there right now, and even though it makes some of my more winter sports oriented colleagues feel funny in their pee-pee place, I rather curl up in my cozy living room sofa, enjoy a wee bit of Bailey's and read Charles Stross's Halting State, a novel that a geek like me really cannot not like.

It seems that I missed my shot at evading the white, cold stuff this year. Oh well.

Also, business meetings in Italy are pretty much like this.

All the wrong destinations

2008-10-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Business trips are a lot like relationships. You miss them, when you haven't had any for a while, but when you do, you suddenly remember again, why you stopped having them in the first place.

I found myself a flu, which means that whenever a plane lands (with me on it), my ears start bleeding. Between the trip to the capital I just returned home from half an hour ago and the trip to Rome I'm departing for two days from now, I have six cases of let's-suddenly-drop-down-from-12-kilometers-wheeeee marked on my schedule. Good times.

Oh, and my departure to New Zealand has been pushed back to late November-ish. I am mostly okay with it, as I now have more time to finish everything on the home front, but it also means that I'll have to move my long-planned holiday in Japan from the start of this journey to its end, sometime in early June next year. Fakku desu.

Prologue

2008-10-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Me: "Hello?"
She: "Blah blah blah it purchases a new internet connection mega discount package?"
Me: "No."
She: "Sure? It's every bit as shitty as your current connection, just more expensive. Promise."
Me: "I'm moving out from my apartment."
She: "So you use smoke signals in your new place?"
Me: "New place behind a big ocean."
She: "Holy shit."
Me: "Yes."
She: "Bye then, you glorious stud." *click*

From Finland to New Zealand.
It's like Doctor Snuggles' digging machine's controls jammed and it burrowed right through the planet.
With me on board.
lolNZ, the proud son of lolChina.
I'm very bad at settling down, it seems.
Departure delayed once already, current estimate: 15.11.2008.

Stay tuned to piggyback on my unreasonably critical record on things that I step on on the way.