Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Congratulations to Rent My Flat in Feodosia!

This is a website I help look after for a Turkish friends’ flat in the Crimean resort town of Feodosia. This year they were featured in the Lonely Planet, something they are very proud about.

The Lonely Planet had this to say about the website:

Rentmyflatinfeodosia.com (www.rentmyflatinfeodosia.com) – This private apartment for rent …. also has an informative English website with detailed museum, restaurant and bar listings.

Nice to hear that they think the site we put together is useful and informative.

I put up a page about the Lonely Planet Ukraine Travel Guide.

I was planning to visit Feodosia this month, but got offered a new job that was too interesting to turn down – hopefully we can visit this exciting place next year!

All the best to the Rent My Flat in Feodosia team.

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As upstairsforthinking pointed out, Google’s Street View has hit Japan and now you can navigate around some parts of the Isles of the Rising Sun from the comfort of your own home. It is going to take a lot more work before they cover the whole country, and I imagine if this gets more popular there will be some privacy complaints (privacy law is quite strong in Japan), but this is a very useful tool indeed.

Here is the view of the entrance to our apartment building.

View Larger Map

Now, can you find Tokyo Tower from here?

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Shouts to the team at Kiwiology for adding this blog to their directory of New Zealand blogs. Ka pai!

Kiwiology is…

Kiwiology is a directory of kiwi blogs – the stuff that makes up the New Zealand blogosphere.

Blog topics include, but are not limited to:

New Zealand blogs, Kiwis blogging overseas, blogs about New Zealand politics, the environment and sustainability in New Zealand (or by people based in New Zealand), New Zealand’s economy, Kiwi businesses and business topics, New Zealand issues and current events and kiwis’ personal blogs.

Recent blogs (as of this posting) added to kiwiology include:

• Bwagy | Marketing Blog

• Blizzardboy A Kiwi in Japan

• Our Sport

• Oswald Bastable’s Ranting

• PhotoForum NZ

• nothing better to do

• OutdoorKnit

• Frank Observations

• Dead Sharks

• NZ Tramping

Also, if you have a New Zealand related blog, or would like to suggest one, you can add it here.

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Just finished switching back to Ubuntu. I have been using Linux for a long time now it seems, starting out with Redhat back before they went “professional” and turned into Fedora, then I used Mandrake for a while, until they too went “professional” and became Mandriva. I think there is a pattern there.

After that I started using Ubuntu, and then when we moved to China, I bought a Mac and used OS X. I thought it would be easier and more reliable to use in China where I wasn’t sure how good the internet connections would be. As it turned out Linux would have been a better choice as Apple still haven’t made much inroads into the Chinese market (at least not in the province we were in), and the internet connection we ended up getting was faster than Jesse Owens.

After a bit over a year using OS X, I went back to Ubuntu. Using OS X was Ok, never really had a problem with it, but it was a bit like waltzing across the floor with a stylish but slightly forbiding great aunt that one didn’t really want to get ones hands dirty with. So, back to Ubuntu. Used that for a while before feeling adventerous, and missing KDE, I installed KUbuntu. Not a bad operating system, but I had a lot of problems getting Japanese input to work (as others have had), and not finding a solution, went back to Ununtu.

I toyed with giving Fedora 8 a run, but the install DVD I have has a lot of problems and kept crashing at different points during the install. Funny really that even though it has been such a long time since I have looked at that American offspring it really hasn’t changed that much – at least in terms of the installer. Not the prettiest thing out there.

Ubuntu’s installation is pretty easy. One thing though, if you are in Japan and wish to give it a go and you have a fibre optic connection from a provider like Plala through to NTT (like any self-respecting space-cadet) you will need to open up your synaptic package manager and install the pppoe tools which are on the cd, but aren’t installed by default, to get your internet connection working. Running pppoe-config as root from the command line will get things working.

All in all, it is nice to be back. And nice to have Japanese input again. I should catch up on some email now.

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Fountains pens are one of those little luxuries which I particularly enjoy. Feeling the smooth flow of ink across the page is a very pleasurable experience, that despite advances in writing technology over the past 100 years, has still not been replaced. I still remember being terribly proud when my teacher at primary school judged my penmanship good enough to graduate from the humble pencil to a fountain pen. I wonder if children in New Zealand still enjoy this? Or do they go straight from pencil to myspace?

Last weekend we were going book shopping in Yaesu, near Tokyo Station when we stumbled upon the Pilot Pen Museum. There are so many little museums scattered around Tokyo that it can be fun to see what finds when out for a wander. The Pilot Pen Station is a Museum and Cafe with a neat display of writing implements – both produced by Pilot as well as outlining the development of writing instruments through out the ages.

There is a cafe on the first floor, non-smoking through-out. It looked pretty standard for a Japanese cafe and we didn’t try what they had on offer. The museum itself is on the second floor – up a staircase which quite ingeniously traces the history of the Pilot Corporation up each of the steps. One of the highlights of the museum was their collection of maki-e fountain pens. I had seen these before in department stores around Tokyo but didn’t know too much about them. They are made using a special lacquer coating process and then have very beautiful individual designs drawn on them. Very Japanese and beautiful to look at.

The museum is open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 5pm and Saturdays 11am to 5pm, closed Sunday and National Holidays. Admission is free and they also accept Pilot brand fountain pens and the more exclusive Namiki brand pens for repairs. The museum is easy to get to – one minute from the Ginza Line Kyobashi Station (if coming from Shibuya), 3 minutes from the Takaracho Station on the Asakusa Line (if coming from Ueno / Asakusa) and 8 minutes walk from the Yaesu Exit of JR Tokyo station.

Having visited the Pilot Pen Station museum I had a bit of a poke around on the internet to see what I could find. Pilot themselves don’t have much of an English website. But I found an interesting interview over at the perennial purveyors of pulsating missives – pingmag – with The God of Fountain Pens. As well as that, I found an informative page about the pen museum at Tokyo Fountain Pen Scene (complete with map). The person responsible for that site also sells fountain pens on ebay – here is his page. He seems to have a good selection of pens for sale. (I have no relation with what he is selling btw).

Finally Pentrace East has quite an indepth guide to fountain pen culture in Tokyo. I didn’t realise there was so much to do related to fountain pens in Tokyo – that page has recommendations for a couple of days of pen related sightseeing in the capital alone!

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Found this site: Japankeibai.com whilst surfing the intrawebs today. The website has a good number of foreclosed property listings, mostly in Tokyo as well as in Osaka and other parts of Japan. Still not quite sure how the service works, but the properties seem to be very cheap. I know a number of foreigners here in Japan who bought property here during Japan’s bubble period, and who paid some very high prices for those properties, and as a result are still paying off home loans from that period. Today things are a bit easier, and if these properties are as cheap as they appear to be then there are some really good deals on the japankeibai.com site.

As a little aside, when we were in Akita late last year we saw some properties being advertised for sale there. The cheapest houses were 1,200,000 yen – and that is for a house! In the middle of nowhere, and pretty run down, but insanely cheap! More normal and livable house started at around 3 times that.

Here is a list of the latest properties listed on the Japan Keibai website:

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Tsukuba is blessed with a wide range of things to do and one such point of interest are the Botanical Gardens run by the National Science Museum on Higashi Odori.

Opened in 1983, the Botanical Gardens provide an ideal destination for an afternoon out with the family. A large range of diverse flora are on display in this facility spread over a 14 hectare area. We visited there a couple of weeks ago, but spring is really the best time to visit with some stunningly beautiful flowers to see. Autumn though is not without its own niceties. The following picture shows Chrysanthemum nipponicum which blooms during October.

There are both indoor and outdoor gardens, ranging from tropical planets through to desert cactii, montane grassland as well as marshland plants.

The gardens are opposite Tsukuba University and a link to a map on google maps is here: Tsukuba Botanical Gardens. It is possible to visit from Tokyo – take the Tsukuba Express from Akihabara to the final stop (about 45 minutes) then take the Kanto Tetsudo Bus from Tsukaba Center to Tsukuba Techno-Park Oho (about 5 minutes) and get off at the bus stop of the Tsukuba Botanical Garden.

There is an english website here with more information about the plants and activities of the botanical gardens.

Entrance is 300 yen for adults and university students and free for rugrats and other students. The gardens are closed Mondays except for public holidays (much the same as the Tsukuba Public Library).

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