想い出は遠くの日々

I’m about 3 months into the co-op term and now I am able to draw lifestyle comparisons between my country, Canada, and my new place of employment, Japan.

This co-op experience has opened my eyes quite considerably… two folds to this experience. I have learned what I like to do, and what I don’t want to do again in the future. It makes me think of what Canada’s shortcomings are, and what I things I should cherish in Canada. My co-op job in Japan has been the result of years of planning, there were many tears and sweat to let me come to this moment. Some expectations shattered, some expectations fell short. I will remember this and I think when I look back at myself in December, I will see a stronger self.

Another intern, Chris, at my office and I had an interesting discussion regarding East versus West mentality. Relating to the subject of career planning, we discovered that we’re completely opposites in career mentality, a perfect case of the difference between East versus West. Despite the fact that I spent most of my life in west, I still hold dear values from my Eastern culture roots.

Coming to Japan took years of planning and proper execution for me… for him, he came to Japan on a whim because he thought it was interesting.

I have a path to follow, this co-op experience is a step along the way to my already defined goal… for him, he is unsure of what he wants to do, he’s a generalist, and not locked into anything, and willing to try anything.

My excessive planning has allowed to me come up with many contigencies that soften the blow of failure, never become too surprised, never can have enough planning. He doesn’t need to plan and do things on the fly, resulting my far more spontaneous and exciting results.

East versus West my friends… I am unsure what is the best.

Enough of this heavy stuff… on the weekend, I went down to Yokohama to meet up with Vincent on Saturday. We ate at a Chinese restaurant down in chinatown but unfortunately, despite being in Chinatown, we failed to secure authentic Chinese food and instead opted for Japanized Chinese food… I have beef brisket and Vincent had Ma-Po tofu. That’s it for this week… I’ll post something about Sunday later on this week… I just need some time to phrase that blog post without offending anyone.

I guess I’ll do something slightly different from everyone else regarding the Mount Fuji blog entry… Now that I’ve fully rested up, I’ll type up something a bit long.

Mount Fuji: 3776 metres tall.

Anyway, this weekend was the Co-op Japan Program 2006 Mount Fuji climbing weekend where a bunch of us co-op students got together from different parts of Japan and climb the tallest mountain in Japan.

Everything started off on Friday night where we bussed off to Kawaguchiko 河口湖 and stayed at a really cheap inn. That was basically the pre-party before we set off for the mountain the next day on Saturday. The only thing I did that night was down three beers and played cards with my friends… nothing too special happened here.

Since the CJP people wanted to see the sunrise on top of Mount Fuji, Saturday morning and afternoon was free time to do stuff around the area. Some people went off the Fujikyu highland where they rode rollercoasters all day. I was with the other group (me, Vincent, Kelvin, Kevin, and Mari) where we decided that we won’t participate in such hectic activities. Instead of screaming on a rollercoaster, we toured around the nearby Kawaguchiko lake. It was pretty neat… in the morning, we got onto a 30 minute boat ride that went around the lake, followed by an outdoor lunch at a nice restaurant, then finally a relaxing Onsen 温泉 bath. We were all prepared for what laid ahead: mind, body, and soul.

So we got back to Kawaguchiko station around 4:45-ish then started to buy stuff for the ascent. In my bag: 4 peanut butter sandwiches, 1 bag of beef jerky, 1 onigiri, and 1 fried chicken sandwich. This was basically dinner and whatever else that I would be eating up the mountain. Oh, and also in my bag: various pieces of winter clothing. Only seven of us made it onto the bus to the 5th station on the Yoshida 吉田口 trail because many CJP people were late getting back from Fujikyu highland.

The group of 7 (me, Vincent, Kelvin, Kevin, Mari, Kamil, and Duncan) made it to the 5th station by around 7:30 pm and we began final preparations for the ascent up into mountain. Oh, here’s a neat thing, the 5th station is already above the cloud line, so it was a pretty high location already. I got a trusty Mount Fuji hiking stick and a headlamp; both are essential for a successful climb.

At this point in time, I better explain the route that we had to take up the mountain. Starting from the 5th station, there are other stations along the way: 6th, 7th, 8th, and 10th (top) that provides climbers with various facilities (washroom, drinks, food, etc). Washroom usage costs 100 yen, and at each station, you could get your stick branded with the station stamp to indicate your progress.

From 5th to 6th station, it was a very easy hike through the forest… not too much of a challenge. Time finished: 8:30-ish

From the 6th to 7th station, it was a bit more challenging but it mainly consists of well-graded slopes, so we all made it up without much trouble. Time finished: 9:37-ish

From the 7th to 8th station, it was starting to get quite brutal. There were many “7th” stations along the way and boy was it annoying to find out that the next station wasn’t the 8th but just another 7th. The route going up turned into these rock faces that were difficult to scale especially in the dark. This and the air started to get real thin and cold, which added quite a bit of fatigue. By the time we got to the 8th station, I was starting to feel pretty tired… but everyone seems to be intact, for now. Time finished: 11:30-ish (I think)

From the 8th to 8.5th station, things started to turn pear shaped. There were an insane number of 8th stations and as I ascended into higher altitudes, there were more rock faces to scale with increasing difficulty. I think at this point, some people in my group started to feel the altitude sickness or cold kicking in. I wasn’t in good shape either. Time finished: around 1 am

From the 8.5th to 10th station, the ascent into the mountain has turned into a death march. This is where the full effects of the cold and the thin air kicked in… Mari started to feel the effects of mild hypothemia and that got us quite worried. Nonetheless, we cheered Mari on and eventually, we made it up to the summit by 4:00 am; just in time for the sunrise at 4:50 am. I was mighty impressed that Mari got up to the top despite her condition… my props to her.

Anyway, I’ll leave describing the summit to my pictures. But to put it in few words, it was a breathtaking experience.

I stayed up at the top till around 6 am and started to descend the mountain. Neat thing I found out is that my cell had full signal on the summit… so I gave my folks a call back in Toronto. They were wondering why I was calling them at 5 am in morning and when I told them I was on top of Mount Fuji, I think they were dumbfounded.

Anyway, the way down was just as brutal as the ascent. The path was covered with soft sand and it wreaked havoc on my legs… it was a 4 hour death march down the mountain. I was complaining the entire way down…

I guess I should end this point with some of my thoughts on this event. This trip wasn’t a vacation, to me, it was more of a pilgrimage and a test of endurance. Should I find a time where my willpower wavers, I will recall this experience and how strong I was to ascend to the tallest mountain in Japan.

First, advanced apologies for the lack of pictures in this post. I have yet to completely set up my new IBM Thinkpad and its corresponding applications.

With that aside, I’ll give a short update regarding the stuff that happened last week.

Work again was uneventful. I’m coding up my proposed project and I think that is going quite well given the large degree of freedom I can exercise in coding the project. I guess I’m content about that.

I guess many of you are wondering why I have a new IBM Thinkpad now… recall my last post that I mentioned that my laptop is freezing up. Long story short, my Dell Inspiron 8500 completely died in the middle of last week and I was without internet or email for several days. Some of you might think this is a minor inconveniece but email is like air to me, I’ll wither and crumple without a computer. So I made it my goal to get a new computer on the weekend. I guess everything else was on hold until I get a new machine. Thanks to kakaku.com, I was able to search for the best and lowest priced computers available in Japan… so after finding what I wanted, the IBM Thinkpad T60, I headed down to Akihabara to the store that sold it at the lowest price. An afternoon later, I’m once again armed with a laptop.

I’ll probably post something more interesting later on this week. For now, I have to replace the Japanese Windows XP with an English one. It’s rather difficult to do stuff in a language that you barely understand.

The weeks keep zipping on by…

It’s really hard to come up with witty blog posts anymore. It takes a lot of time to type this all out in such a somewhat amusing fashion.

Nonetheless, here we go.

Again, with all my weekday beginnings, it’s pretty slow around the office… Friday night got quite interesting for me. I was invited to this “newcomer’s party” for the people on my floor (a party for people who has been with the company for less than a year).

There was plenty of beer and food to go around… and after everyone had their fill, there were games that pitted the floor’s departments against each other. And being a determined intern, I wasn’t about to let my team (my department) down. I’ll go into a little bit more detail here:

The first game was Sake Identification. The object of this game is, given 4 unknown cups of liquor, match the cups to the corresponding name/brand of the liquor. Now, if all the drinks were of different kinds of booze (ie, vodka, rum, rye, etc), it would be easy… however, all the cups were filled with various kinds of Japanese Sake. So it wasn’t an easy feat to accomplish. Thanks to my team, I was able to find out which brands had the highest/lowest alcohol content so I was able to identify 2 of the 4 cups by tasting and smelling the drink. The other two was much more difficult as I hear from Okamoto-san that they’re pototo based Sake and the alcohol content is about the same. I ended up guessing those choices… in the end we got 2 out of 4 right; placing second overall in that game round.

The second game is “Quiz Millionaire” – the electronic version. Just think “Who wants to be a Millionaire” but in Japanese. Everybody takes turns answering the same question and basically, last man standing is the winner (if someone gets an answer incorrect, then they’re out). I wasn’t much of a help here cause my knowledge of Japanese culture, common knowledge sucks. One amusing thing is that there are aids to help answer questions: 50/50, and call a friend. I really got a kick out of the people who elect to use “call a friend” cause they end up calling up the audience’s cell phones. Thanks to the brilliant Toyama-san and the sharp Group Leader Mizuno-san (who helped Toyama-san on ‘call a friend’) in my group, we won this event.

The third game was darts… three darts, max points win. Despite my sucky dart throwing skills, we managed to get second again (I think).

Overall we got second, and our group was presented the prize of “ultrasonic cleaner”. My boss made me go up and accept the gift. And I was forced to give a short acceptance speech. I ended up saying something like “Uhhh… watashi no Nihongo wa yokunai desu. Demo, watashi no chi-mu wa eigo ni ‘Kikku assu’ desu.” (My Japanese is bad but in English, my team is kickass). I think it over pretty well despite the fact that about 95% of the people there probably have no idea what kickass means… I’ll come up something else wittier next time.

Moving on to Saturday… one of the coworkers who was with me for Futsol the week before invited me to play tennis with his friends at the NTT tennis courts. So I spent my Saturday playing tennis… it was really fun despite my lack of skills and people were really going easy on me. I could barely hit a straight forehand shot. Most of my forehands were generating pop-flys that sent the ball out of the tennis courts (or as my coworker puts it: it’s another home run!) My backhand always curved to my right, and any other shots (drop, slice, smash, etc), I just couldn’t do it. Six hours of tennis later, I was exhausted. I ended up going to dinner with them at a pseudo-Chinese restaurant and eating fried rice. I say pseduo-Chinese cause it’s Japanized Chinese food… And oh, I learned a valuable lesson that day: if you’re wearing shorts and you’re near trees, spray your legs (or any skin exposed) with bug repellent. I made that fatal mistake and now I’m suffering the effects of 23 mosquito bites (last I counted).

Sunday, I went down to Yokohama to see Kelvin and Chinatown. Getting from Shin-Tokorozawa down to Yokohama was a two-hour journey that involved at least 4 transfers… Oh, on my walk to Chinatown, Kelvin and I discovered this bamboo art exhibit that showcased bamboo devices that made music. I found that very neat… I’ll post up the video of this as soon as I find out how to compress and integrate videos with my blog. Anyways, as I might have mentioned before, I am always searching for a Chinese restaurant that sells authentic Chinese food (ie, red bbq pork, not the dry-super-salty Japanese version) and especially a Hong Kong style cafe where I could get Pineapple buns with a slice of butter. No dice. When I got down to Chinatown, most of the shops there sell pork buns and still pseudo-Chinese food (although closer to real Chinese food now). Anyway, we walked around till the early evening then I went home.

That’s it… my laptop is getting quite unstable these days and I better get this posted before it freezes again. I need a new laptop… maybe an IBM Thinkpad T60p. Anybody got a good laptop suggestions?