feliz año nuevo.

    Well folks, it is a new years.... and honestly one with more verymelons update than the last, so I can say I will slowly increase the amount of updates here. This year I spent all new years freezing as a volunteer in the local temple.

nice shot of my staff ID card! So japanese people don't get all confused

After all these I guess you can tell all those path markers? this ain't no game they are not magically powered by pixels, it was me and my friends that set it up and us frantically patrolling around to keep all the candles lit and replace them when they ran out.

Our bonfire skills are awesome!

Frozen river in the middle of the whole thing

As a reward at the end we got a bit of sake with gold inside, the japanese version of Goldschläger I guess.

 Finally, I got to see the new years ceremony at the temple, it  was interesting to hear the insights of the Japanese people towards the new years, he said he felt that a reset was needed  and we should tackle the new year with a fresh mindset. I plan to buy the clarinet this month(can only afford a used one sadly, Venezuelan government, etc) more updates to come! Also with the clarinet ensemble I will be playing piazzolla tango next... stay tuned.

festivals and fireworks

well, lately I guess there is a mood of celebration around me. First of all, I passed the entrance exam so I get to be a real master student instead of just a research student starting september, also my scholarship goes up a whopping 1000 yen a month!(can afford to buy a pretty girl a can of soda now woot)

since I have not really updated in a while I will try to keep the story tidy for this update, we had a farewell party for one of the lab members since he is gonna be working at JAXA(while I fix the devices he left here so he can return at a later point and actually give more results to them) first we had  the usual korean BBQ... after that we just had to finish up the night with some all night long karaoke(since this is a small city the karaoke just gives you the room from 10pm to 5 am)  we didnt have a reservation so we got several small rooms, something very scary happened I just randomly select a room and seems all the other guys go to different rooms and the girls are like "meh" and they all enter the room I am in, so now I am with 3 japanese girls from 10pm to 5 am having to sing, one of them is ridicously good singing... the other is above average(better than me) and the third girl had no voice from being sick so I have no judgement there, anyhow since I was the dude in the room anything that was around my range of voice I ended up singing. However, to make the night even more interesting... one of our lab members called kenshiro got wasted and he seems to love きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GivkxpAVVC4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcIOg_m-bp4

now, this guy is as tall as I am and his name is kenshiro, we jokingly refer to him as the kenshiro from hokuto no ken and start throwing lines and stuff anyhow he screams the lyrics of those two songs giving no damns about pitch or style. fashion monster is ridiculously entertaining to hear from him.

In other news I had the best damn bowl of tsukkemen I ever had in my life... yes the other bucket is just noodles and meat, all of that is pork... I was almost defeated by this and it is the regular portion, you had the choice to upgrade to tokumori... I will do this next time

this was at the brass club, a friend prepared a very.... typical japanese style summer dinner with watermelons and all

If you know Qwarky I was workbombed by him... when I obtain a TV will play these games.

and to end this picture cycle this is a guide for power electronics with manga style chapters in it, I hate to admit but it is ridiculously good contents wise, beats most textbooks.

in Clarinet news I could not get it overhauled, the technician kinda bailed after putting apart my clarinet.... so I have to save and get another one or find a more brave clarinet expert.

I watched the nagaoka fireworks and festival again, but the pictures are still in processing, stay tuned for more adventures!

secrets

    I am not sure if I said this in the previous entry, but in the 24th some JAXA(Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency, yes the X bothers me too) and I have to show them an experiment and me along some other guys in the lab are working on fixing this pulsed power source and get it running before they come. it is just a giant discharge of a condenser to produce a large current, like 5 kA... so it is pretty dangerous.

Funnily enough I am missing a capacitor, so if you see one let me know

   Just simple connections

rectifier bridge with diodes.

an inductance.

Transformers! more than meets the eye!

   Randomly in the hallways I ran into the 部長 of the brass band(the one I ended up writing that I like on my name tag a couple of entries ago) we talk for a bit, some other dudes pass by and mentioned the word 逢引（aibiki) and how we were seeming to be hitting it off with each other while just talking in a hallway.

 

Social Security

   This month I am kinda poor, some expenses piled up... screening fee for the university(they will return this later, which pisses me off a bit) some taxes for the plane ticket... each of these is around 40万円(forty thousand yen) anyhow to get my mind off things I did an experiment

    To get technical I guess, that is a gate circuit, just sends a timed pulse,  nothing too fancy... the blue thing is a hand built transformer(wrapping wire around a core by hand)

     That is a SI-thyristor, it is just a switch that opens and closes according to the pulse in the circuit above.

    That is the testing circuit just an RC load to see if my setup was working as intended, the huge ass bronze color thing is a rogowski coil and measures current through induction, you just have to be careful to set it on the right direction so it doesn't measure the current inverted

   It was a success, the thing seems to be working if that last picture has enough zoom you can close in on the switch(the one with like plastic boards) and see how the red wire is just actually laying there, pretty messy connection if I do say so myself, but why make it prettier if that works just fine.


   Now in separate events, right now I am wondering if I got thrown into the Japanese social security system(I should not be, students are not supposed to pay, much less foreign ones) but I received a pension booklet and a stack of bills I am not sure I comprehend. Since I am running an english workshop as I said before if you have any recommendations for short stories in english or nice songs it would be appreciated in comments.. or if you have a normal way to contact me just use that.

Lost and Found

I have been putting off my next entry, because I lost my wallet... this caused a lot of issues and I wanted to celebrate finding it by posting. However, I have not found it yet, probably lost the little following I had to begin with, but I think this update will be large.

first of all I had a presentation at a local driving school with the wind ensemble, as compensation we recieved canned coffee and  McDonald's  hamburgers, we then proceeded to stare at highschool cheerleaders and I found a lot of japanese people have a thing for ひざ裏　which just means the back of the knees of women.

Later that night as you can see with mini whiteboard precision we proceeded to prepare a celebratory dinner so we feel better about ourselves, the menu and ingredient list was pretty extensive.

Above we have some pork that was later fried kararage style as far as I understood and it tasted pretty good, I mostly participated in the vegetable cutting and chopping and gyoza folding station as you can see below.

I am a lean mean gyoza making machine, made 154 gyozas and according to the band I was pretty darn good at it.

last two is just showcasing a ton of arcade sticks that just lay around the room we were cooking in(which is used by the arcade games club for practice officially)

To close it up in a semi-bright note, maybe I mentioned this before but I am holding an english workshop(TOEIC intentded) in my laboratory and basically teach english so they increase the TOEIC score, first lesson was horrible, too difficult, I was speaking too fast or that is the feeling I got. Second lesson it went better, but I think of making the third a bit less serious and just try to teach them random stuff instead of so much TOEIC intended information per se, to have an ok change of pace.

    Since I am following sort of a chronological order here, during the crusades I ran to find my wallet, I found a japanese guy's wallet, a key, a bicycle among many other things that did not belong to me to begin with, it was just a streak of dissapointment. After all this stress though, there is one good thing... there were medical checkups at the university besides beeing too large for japanese standards(waist measurement above 85 cm and BMI above 25) I am completely healthy.

 

    My wallet will be missed... sucks that I have to buy a new one, now I can tell I was pretty attached to my old one.

Romantic comedy

     First I sorta finished getting appliances and essential things to thrive here to put it like that, so now that I am settled I guess I can start churning out more updates and cook myself delicious food on my Paloma stove. 

     I guess I will explain why I find this funny... first of all normally paloma means pidgeon in spanish but we also use that word as slang for penis. In more serious talk I was scared installing it since I wasn't sure if the gas I got at home matched the stove(dat propane or butane) but it turns out I have propane and the stove is for that(you would be proud king of the hill) so I got a working kitchen and that thing that looks like a mini oven is actually a very silly grill.

     In other random updates bicycles here tend to have weird branding deals as you can see, for now I got mine from a dumpster... so it is not as fancy as those two. So I have what I would call a bike made in socialism that just fits my needs perfectly.

     I don't know if I mentioned before that I am in the wind ensemble of the university, they had this welcome party for new members, before it starts the club leader who happens to be a girl called 渚（nagisa) is organizing but I get there early so we talk for a bit, she guides me through filling my nametag so people learn each other's names and interests so out of lazyness in things I like she sorta dares me to put I like her in huge font... well challenge accepted I did. After much drinking and finding out half the club plays mtg I managed to get other two girls to join and learn to play clarinet! so I will be lending them my clarinet and lots of indirect kissing action will happen(actually today I bought some reeds and I will try to be more hygienic about it).  

Those pictures are an effort to show the trips I take to the univeristy. you can see it on the left in the first picture, well I will just get to watching Iron Man 3 tonight and let you know how that is.

    To close it up, my lab mates all have managed to get jobs at main branches of companies(fujita, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, etc) but they are in a pickle of sorts, they require higher TOEIC scores to graduate and not be stuck in their entry level jobs all their lives... due to my performance before in this aftermentioned test(980/990) I have been asked to conduct a weekly workshop of english... This will get interesting.

hunting for appliances and some UFO catching action

well just to show around my current surroundings, this is what it pretty much looks like outside my window, the other side is just trucks, so I don't find it that interesting to share around. Yesterday there was the famous bazaar for international students which is just honestly a group of japanese volunteers that find cheap appliances and such and sell them to us for symbolic price. I nabbed a nice washing machine

      At night I went to joke around at the arcade... I was doing pretty good won 5 mokeke dolls, I decided to give some away since... honestly I got 4 of them in two attempts(I usually buy 500 yen and get the play 6 times and pay 5 deal) so by the third time I already had 5. This little kid was staring at me since I started nabbing stuff so I decided to give one to him... the rest I gave to someone I knew that I ran into the arcade, because I really don't like those dolls, just ended up getting them among the things in the UFO catcher.

Still at the arcade, my key is kinda naked so I thought I could use a keyring/keychain so it is more noticeable in my pocket and I run into this machine that has final fantasy sword keychains. It is one of those that you need to be really precise aiming because it is a clamp that catches on to the string or the hole in the prize package and pushses down so you can get it. As usual I drop 500 yen to get 6 attemps since I am not used to the machine, it was going better than expected then this happens.

     That freaking string would not let go, as I kept getting the clamp to push down, imagine one winged hutt playing in the background and sephiroth just laughing at me(I actually picked that because it was the lowest out all the strigs and it wasnt curved as hell like some of the other ones and I imagined those would be harder to pick) eventually with an extra 200 yen I did not really want to spend I got the sword... and I kept the string too and I tied it around my key to see if it has the same resilience. 

   

Back in japan. The re-slammering

 Well, I ended up returning to this Japan(same city too) mostly due to being a fool and keeping my promises... I could have chosen any other place. However, out of dumb loyalty I decided to be a man of my word. At least I can expect myself to put the same effort here than I would anywhere else.

     This might seem kinda random, but this is where I used to live, you can see the bullet holes on the side of the wall there, pretty much every single one is like that, so you could say I lived in a place that has had plenty of action over the years.

     Of course the graffiti, black metal fenced and fenced windows also give a cozy feeling to the whole place.

     My route to head to japan was Caracas -> Frankfurt -> Narita, the first branch of the trip was done on an airbus 340-600 and I managed to nab the seats next to the emergency exit so it was a pretty decent flight altogether. The guy next to me during this flight was a middle aged german who was pretty dead silent all along.

     For the second branch it was an airbus a380, which despite all the extra commodities it had(USB ports, electrical outlets and ethernet ports for free) Ended up being a slightly worse trip since it was super crowded. The pilot kept congratulating the U-19 soccer team that was flying along on their victory in the dortmund cup I think... and hilariously enough most of them were doing math homework during the flight, even helped some of them. During this flight I had two dutch guys that were visiting Japan for the first time, it was kinda scary how well planned they had everything(I am a pretty disorganized guy myself) seeing that I am going to stay for 2 years I honestly had no plans after arriving in narita I was just gonna wing it from what I knew from before and whatever japanese skill I have.

    I held off this update for a couple of days, because I still don't have a proper internet contract at home and I rely on my cellphone for internet tethering. I got more pictures, but I think for now this is a good starting point for the new adventure I guess? Even as it is now I will try to update this more often.