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Let it be known; I have been mildly busy the last couple of weeks. Okay! There are a few things I have learned, and I'm now going to share said knowledge with you, The World:

1 - The Dark Knight (a.k.a. Batman 2) is pretty much an okay movie! It's like, "What if Batman was in the Real World!?" Not MTV's "The Real World", of course, but like, oh I don't know, Chicago? WHAT IF. Also (spoiler!), Batman's Spider-Man.

2 - If I marinate salmon in miso for two days, and I accidentally BURN the freaking hell out of it, it basically turns into the best salmon I've ever eaten.

3 - Achewood is so incredibly funny, I lol out loud every time I read it. How have I missed this webcomic? How is babby formed? Read it from the beginning if you dare.

4 - I'm not interested in traveling; I'm really only interested in Japan. I've talked to several people about travel, done research on traveling in East Asian countries - it really isn't my thing. I care absolutely nothing about Europe, South America, anywhere else in Asia... I know, I know, I sound like some uneducated moron. I would like to go to New York... for an afternoon, maybe? I would also like to go into space. It isn't that I *hate* those exotic locales I've never seen. I simply feel like any time I spend in England/France/Greece/Russia/Mexico, I could have spent in Japan. Now, if someone is willing to pay my way, however, I'll go just about anywhere. Not Florida. Not Las Vegas or Mexico, either.

5 - The GIMP is much better than it used to be, but can still be damn frustrating if you are used to using Photoshop CS3 all day.

posted by tangentbot @ 7:53 PM

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NOTE: I'm going to have to put a hold on video uploads for awhile, at least the ones in consecutive order... but I *will* post them as soon as I can, I promise. The uploading is taking forever, and it keeps timing out for whatever reason, so I'm done with it holding me up.

Friday. I'm not sure how many miles we traveled, but if we hadn't luckily grabbed an early limited express out of Aomori, we would have had to hunt down a hotel in Osaka on Friday night. The limited express got us from Aomori to Hachinohe in an hour, whereas the local express made the same trip in two and a half hours. In Hachinohe we almost missed our transfer on the Shinkansen, being noobz and all. We asked an officer and he motioned to us to wait where we were and full-on sprinted across the station to grab transfers for us so we wouldn't miss the train that was leaving in 3 minutes. Hectic and awesome. Again, JR people are the best. I think we spent a total of eight hours on trains that day. Here's some Shinkansen!

After a long, pleasant trip on the Shinkansen, we found ourselves in the Shin-Osaka station. We made our way to the subway lines, taking many wrong turns but eventually getting on the right trains. Note to visitors in Osaka; your JR pass is only useful on the outskirts of Osaka. If you plan on traveling around downtown, the subway is your best bet, but unfortunately is not owned by JR. That means every trip starts at about 200 yen each way. Anyway, we took the right trains and the wrong exit gate, so we ended up walking all over the place, looking for any landmarks that made sense. Streets in japan do not make any sense, and Osaka is especially crazy, which I'll talk about later, so we asked a cop. He broke out a stack of maps, explained to us in Japanese where our hotel was, and showed us how to get there. It totally made sense, so we thanked him and started off... and he insisted to escort us there! He spoke zero English, but talked to me the entire way, and some of what he said I actually understood. He jokingly heckled some kids who were standing around, which was pretty funny; one of the dudes kinda freaked out and his friends laughed at him - good times. Anyway, police escort to our hotel... what else... oh yeah! The place we are staying at is AWESOME! You can even watch a video of it.. later! I've tried to upload this freaking video file about five times already, so if and when I get everything uploaded, I will post it. Yay!

So the video in question JUST finished uploading, of course, after I complained. I guess sometimes you do carry an umbrella to prevent it from raining. Enjoy!

posted by tangentbot @ 3:45 AM

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So Thursday was our trip to Akita. Let me preface this just by saying we were warned by a friend, "You don't want to go to Akita; Akita is downtown Kent." Akita is also the birthplace and hometown of the author of my favorite Japanese cookbook, Gaku Homma. Akita also hosts the National Fermented Foods Summit, in which I am very interested. That was enough to make me at least want to see for myself if it is "downtown Kent". We got to the train station about 2 hours before the Limited Express leaves, so we had a quick breakfast first and hung out in the train station for awhile. The train ride was long, but very smooth. It took us just over two hours. I'm not really going to talk about Akita that much, other than to say that the mall is where it's at - and that's not saying much.

That place we ate lunch at was f expensive, for serious. It was good, and the waiter was really funny as he tried out his English skills on us, but we paid twice as much for food as anywhere else we've been. Sandy got a crepe for dessert and we walked over to check train schedules for the trip back to Aomori... we had less than 5 minutes before the last train left! We friggin booked it, making it onboard at the last minute. The express train we took to Akita was a one-time thing, it turned out. We now had to look forward to a 2 hour ride to Odate, waiting for 40 minutes for a transfer train, and another 2 hours back to Aomori. Ugh.

We ate dinner at a place we saw earlier that week and it was very delicious. You aren't tired of looking at awesome food, are you?

I had oyakodon (chicken and egg over rice), pickled vegetables and miso, and Sandy had braised pork and vegetables on rice. We went to bed, disappointed in Akita but looking forward to Friday, when we will travel from Aomori to Osaka via regular train, two Shinkansen, and two subway trains... but more on that later. I leave you with a video of rice paddies - again - on our nearly five hour train ride back to Aomori.

posted by tangentbot @ 3:51 AM

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We are in the middle of planning our return trip to Japan, which will take place in the last 3 weeks of May. So far, our itinerary is thus:

It seems crazy and busy and very transity, but I love trains. This trip will let us see more of Japan then our last trip, and we intend to pack very light this time. We'll probably do all of our shopping in Tokyo our last week there, although I still intend to buy knives in Kyoto and at least 2 katsuobushi and a kezuriki in Tokyo (perhaps one of those artisan hand-crafted aluminum pots as well - I wish I could get a few donabe, but I'm afraid of them breaking).

So, that's it so far. I'm going to put a "Japan" section on my site or something - I already have plans on moving my last Japan blog, japanbot, to this website, so I might just do a "Travel in Japan" portion or something. Anything could happen, who knows‽

/tangentbot

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