griffinn's Quotable Blog

ROAR!!

有一種人，他的言語、舉止、態度、氛圍，一切一切都是負面的。他還沒有開口，你的預警神經已經叫你快逃、快逃。一開口，你的任何正面的想法都會蒸發掉，對於這個人所代表的所有東西，你都不會再有興趣。

就在這樣的情況下，我離開了會場。一個我每年度也毫不猶疑地付出時間盡我能力幫忙的會議，現在因為這麼一個人我同樣毫不猶疑地放棄了。

所以，舉辦會議也好，公司聘任也好，要慎選人才，而且不要光看辦事能力。他的嘴臉，就是你的公司單位的嘴臉。

Some say that you're more likely to find inspiration, renewed determination, or even the meaning of life, while on a trip somewhere far away. Just ain't so in my case. I found it during a casual walk through a local bookstore. No, not the meaning of life. Just an explanation for that feeling of... inadequacy.

I find the most joy when I create something. It's been like this since as far back as I can remember. Making a paper model of the typhoon signal hoisting tower, making random music, writing useless programs - From these the fulfilment comes. Managing a project, throwing e-mail around to arrive at a compromise, watching your insight being assimilated into The Machine, or simply set aside, that earns my paycheck but also consumes the soul.

But "enjoyable work" is an oxymoron, right?

Random recommendation: Go watch An Inconvenient Truth. It's not entertaining, but it's important. Go read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It's not entertaining either, but it's important.

The two actually fit together into a coherent picture.

Day 8 doesn't really count, for all we did was pack up and head for the airport, where we waited for a few hours.

The Japanese are a disciplined people - They don't need wastebaskets on the streets, yet they manage to keep the streets clean anyway. Disciplined does not equal stern, though - Some of their TV shows are absolutely nuts.

The nation as a whole seems not to really care about foreigners - Even receptionists in hotels don't necessarily speak English. Yet they embed into their own culture a lot of American ways of life, loan words from the English language, brand names that "sound" European.

I don't have a conclusion to sum it up magically. It's just an interesting place to visit, not for any particular scenery or cuisine or tourist attractions, but just to interact with them.

Shinjuku. Another large shopping area with a section of roads sealed off for pedestrians. Pretty much like Mongkok, they say.

Went to the shabbiest Starbucks we've seen to date. And then it's yet another wanton session of senseless shopping. I bought a useful gadget for a change.

Shopping trip in Shibuya. Not much to talk about, really, except that I managed to hop to 2 Starbucks stores.

Bought a useless USB gadget, and a useless toy that works in the same way as the Crocodile Doctor thing, only in a more interesting way. My mission in Japan - to buy useless gadgets - is complete. Now I have an extreme tendency to just stay in the hotel and use the computer for the rest of my stay.

Dinner at Gyukoku (牛角). Great DIY charcoal-grilling place. The 1-hour wait in the queue was worth it.

Leaving Karuizawa for Tokyo.

It's sunny for a change. Too bad we're leaving. (bleah) I'll be missing the heated toilet seat.

And we didn't get to see any red leaves, and red leaves were the very reason we chose Karuizawa in the first place. (bleah x 2)

The transport to our next hotel is surprisingly uneventful. We sort of cruised through the train system and the streets right into the Shibuya Excel, without having to consult the map or ask anyone.

Then, straight off to shopping in Harajuku. I went nuts buying Monokuro Boo stuff in Kiddy Land, while Jessie went nuts elsewhere. Then it's Starbucks-hunting time.

Dinner at Ichiran (一蘭). It's set up as two rows of solitary stalls for noodles, not unlike the partitioned seats in libraries. It feels pathologically lonely eating there.

Yay! Internet access is free in our hotel here. Uploaded the entire backlog of journals.

Confined by rain again. We were hoping to go to the lake area for some sight-seeing and a walk in the meadows, but now have to go somewhere with a roof.

Went to the hot springs by bus. I like the bus ride more than the destination itself. They have differential bus fares all the way, i.e. you pay a different fare depending on the exact station from which you board and the exact station to which you're going. As you board, you take a ticket with the number of your station. A large LED at the front of the bus displays the fee you're supposed to pay, depending on your station's number. The entire system is highly workable. (i.e. The bus companies in Hong Kong are liars.) Strangely, they don't have proximity cards on the buses yet. (There's the Suica card, but it works on JR trains only.)

Had Japanese food. This is the third night. I like the omelette best. Probably because it's the least Japanese.

And now, a story of mystery, intrigue and utter tragedy:

Recall that we had no internet access in our room. But on this last day before we leave for Tokyo, we managed to find an Internet cafe. Now there's some information we really need to find out about some destinations in Tokyo, so we were overjoyed to find this cafe and went in for an intense search session. After having spent perhaps 1500 yen, we had the useful information we needed, and left.

On our way back to our room, we had to pass through the train station. We've passed through this concourse maybe 4 or 5 times before, but it's only at this time that we noticed a very small sign, located at waist-level, which says:

Free wi-fi available in this concourse.

(Insert horrified screams and echo effect here.)

---

When you suddenly have too much free time, strange thoughts enter your head. Here's an example:

There are two alternative ways to prove that the logarithmic scale is gay.

#1:

• The log scale's main purpose is to present an exponential series on a graph as a pretty straight line.
• Only gay people care about presenting things in such a way that they look pretty.
• The log scale is gay.

#2:

• The linear scale is straight.
• The log scale is gay.

Confined by rain in the Prince Shopping Mall areas.

The four areas of the mall house vastly different kinds of shops. It was obviously planned this way. I hope we have places with such distinctive character in Hong Kong. Everything is so... generic, over there.

Starting to be detached from Hong Kong and to care more about Japanese / Korean politics and US Baseball, because that's what TV news here talk about. TVs are great tools for assimilation.

The pranks on TV are really, really elaborate, complete with fake company fronts, fake research departments, fake subterranean monsters, an entire crew of fake Vietnamese architectural site workers, all to play a prank on just one person. I don't know whether to pity their triviality or admire their thoroughness.

First visit to Starbucks! Yay! White hot chocolate tastes just like diluted condensed milk (diluted + condensed ≠ cancelled out). Starbucks Hong Kong shouldn't bother to introduce this line of products.

Slept right through 10:00am and missed the breakfast. So we had to buy our own at Starbucks, Prince Shopping Mall New East. (Yay!!)

New East is just like one of those large outlet centres in the US. Once you step outside the shopping area, there are few pedestrians. We went to the Old Karuizawa district for a walk along the conventional shopping areas and things here are not particularly remarkable. The miscellaneous small shops along the way are interesting, though.

Shops close arbitrarily here, giving the entire town a desolate touch.

Ate a mass of roasted something on a bamboo stick; couldn't really figure out what that mass was. I could only convince myself and Jessie that it's probably beef tendon. For all I know, it's slightly more gruesome than liver.

Went to a 居酒屋 for dinner; it serves home-made soba. The food is quite nice actually, except the soba - supposedly its featured gourmet. -_-

When we returned to our room it's not even 8:30pm yet. Nice to have some free time to type all this - Internet access isn't available so there's nothing to distract us.

Couldn't do much; arrived at Tokyo and then Karuizawa; by that time night has fallen.

And when night falls, it's really dark. There seems to be no street lights.

Communication is difficult. Most people here, even those in the tourism industry, speak only Japanese.

Our place at Prince Hotel East is a wooden cottage within a forest of chestnut trees. The heated flooring is really nice. And the toilet, oh, the toilet! It has a heated seat as well as a butt-cleaning water jet. We love the former but are afraid to try the latter. When you flush, water is returned to the reservoir through an open tap and a sink on the top, so that you can wash your hand using the allotment of water that's flowing back into the reservoir. Another nice feature.

And so the design of every amenity makes sense here, except the ceilings and door frames. They're so low that my hand crashes into the ceiling when I change clothes, and I bang my head on the frame as I pass through doors.