Next week I will be attending YAPC::Asia in Tokyo.  It’s going to be the biggest YAPC that’s ever been held with 1000 people attending.  When I tried to buy a ticket in August it was already sold out so I’ve bought a ticket off a friend so I can attend!  The conference is mostly going to be in Japanese but there will be a few talks in English and I’m looking forward to hearing Rik’s keynote.  My Japanese has improved in the past year but I will still find it difficult to understand the talks and it’s tiring concentrating on Japanese so I won’t be able to listen to a whole days worth of talks in the language.

I’ll be travelling to America towards the end of September and I’m hoping to catch up with Perl Mongers in New York, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City.  I am also hoping to speak at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop so it would be useful if I actually managed to write a talk proposal for this…

In November I will be in Europe where I should manage to catch up with my friends at Birmingham.pm.  I’m not going to make it to the London Perl Workshop though as I had to fly back to Japan before that as I have a Japanese exam on the 1st December.

I noticed an odd thing today – no one was smiling.  I’m used to people smiling in greeting but today everyone looked miserable.  And then I realised so did I. Every time I step outside I have to brace myself for the wall of heat.  I carry water, a parasol, a fan, and a cloth everywhere I go.  I have to wipe sweat off my face when I get onto the train and I spend most of my time outside feeling sticky and disgusting.  I’m wilting in the heat and so is everyone else I meet.

Of course it’s been like this for months so what changed today?  I blame it on the silly notion that autumn starts in September in Tokyo.  My teacher has been talking about this in school for the past week, I’m seeing ads for autumn food and drink, and I get asked what I’m going to do now that summer is over. All this talk of autumn brings thoughts of cooler days but the weather at the minute is exactly the same as the weather last week.  I have been told many times that Japan has four seasons, I’ve even had to read an essay on this, and I get asked if there are four seasons in my country.  It seems that seasons are a thing to be proud of and here they long for them to last a perfect three months.  I imagine that in some parts of the country they do but having lived in Tokyo for nearly 7 years now I know that my concept of autumn isn’t really going to start here until around November.  At that point it will be cooler and the leaves in Tokyo will start to change to a bright yellow or red.  Last year the peak autumn leaf viewing time in Tokyo was the first week of December, which I have been told is winter.

I want the weather to dictate the seasons and not the calendar.

For the first time since I started attending YAPC::EU in 2001 I’m going to miss the yearly conference.  I’ve been watching the tweets and status updates of people arriving in Kyiv with mixed feelings.  It’s expensive getting from Japan to Europe.  I’ve been lucky that in previous years there have been family events in Europe around the same time as the conference making it easier to justify the expense.  But Ukraine is quite far from my family and not convenient to get to from Tokyo.

I’ve been living in Tokyo for nearly 7 years now and whilst I really enjoy YAPC::Asia it doesn’t feel like my home conference to me.  I imagine that’s because I see YAPC::EU as an opportunity to catch up with friends.  One of my friends called it “the family reunion” aspect of YAPC, which is incredibly important to the people who attend these conferences regularly.  This year I’ll read about the conference from a distance and miss my friends.

My sister Christine and her daughter Naomi are visiting.  This does mean that I’ll be out and about quite a bit in the next week or so.  We won’t be going too far away from Tokyo but we did drive to Hakone on Saturday.  It’s a beautiful area even on a day that isn’t that clear.

Today I am going to the zoo, if only I could figure out how to get a teenage girl out of bed…

Fruit is expensive in Tokyo.  I am tormented when I enter the store by the smell of peaches but I don’t want them badly enough to pay 780 Yen ($8, £5.20) for one.  They will come down in price but by then it will be the pears that mock me with their perfection and ridiculous prices.   I always check the price of fruit before I buy it but I should remember that tomatoes are also a fruit.  Yesterday I was in a hurry and I nearly bought the wrong tomatoes.  They were 980 Yen ($10, £6.50) for a packet of five medium sized tomatoes.  I was horrified.  I assume that there is something special about them but they didn’t look particularly good.  I think I’ll be waiting a while before I make tomato soup again.

 

 

I got an email from Amazon this morning that was supposed to contain their deals of the week.  But all is said was “DUMMY”.  Not sure that will encourage me to buy anything.

I always have great plans to blog when I get home from travelling, but I find it hard to think of things to write about.  When I tell people outside Japan where I live they often ask what it is like to live somewhere so exotic.  While there is no doubt that I find lots of things about Japan strange and interesting my day to day life is not that different from the life I lived in Northern Ireland.  I cook, clean, study, and spend most of my time doing things that are anything but exotic.

The past week has been a quiet one.  I didn’t feel overly well at the weekend so we stayed at home.  I did make it to the cinema during the week to see The Great Gatsby, but I couldn’t think of anyone to go with.  So, for the first time, I went to the cinema alone.  There seems to be some sort of stigma about doing this and I’m not really sure why.  After all, it’s not like you talk to your friends during a movie.  The only odd thing that happened was realising that there is a 3D version of this movie.  What is the fascination with 3D movies?  I don’t like them.  They cause strain on my eyes and I don’t need things to jump out of the screen at me.  Thankfully I got to see the 2D version.

In other exciting household news I found a new recipe for using up spare egg whites.  The coconut and chocolate macaroons were very good and I will certainly make them again.  They were also very easy to make gluten-free by substituting the small amount of flour used in the recipe with rice flour.

On the study front I completely failed at reviewing my Japanese but I did sign up for Heroku and wrote my first node.js program.

Every day it gets a little hotter.  I have all my doors open but there is no breeze and it’s becoming unbearably sticky inside the apartment. The city is dull, grey, and waiting on rain.  Summer would be so much nicer if the sky was blue, but it’s going to be overcast for months.

I was given an early birthday present from one of my Japanese friends.  At first I wasn’t sure what it was and I thought it was a set of chopstick holders.  But it’s an ornament to display somewhere.  She bought it so that I could look at it and feel cooler during the hot days of summer.  The penguins certainly make me smile.

 

It’s been raining for the past few days.  It’s the sort of rain that reminds me of Ireland, a light rain that’s on and off for most of the day.  Soon the rainy season will begin and that won’t be so pleasant as the rain will be torrential.  I have been meaning to get back into my exercise routine but I don’t feel like going back to the gym just yet.  Since the weather is pleasant I decided to walk in the rain instead.  I live beside a river with an excellent walking route that I’ve walked many times.  But yesterday for the first time I saw a crab.

I was walking close to the water when something skittered across the path.  I was alarmed, as I thought it was a giant insect, but then I realised it was a crab. I have seen crabs before in other places, but not that often.  I tried to get closer to the crab, but I think I scared it more than it scared me, and it ran away into the long grass.  When I got closer to the grass I realised that it was crawling with crabs.  There were hundreds of them all frantically moving around.  I tried to take pictures but they really do move quickly.

At first I was fascinated but then they began to look more like insects with very sharp claws.  The more I looked at them the more I thought of horror stories (I shouldn’t be allowed to read Stephen King and Dean Koontz).  They looked creepy with their strange eyes on stalks and the thought of them getting close to me was making me feel odd so I continued with my walk and moved a bit further away from the river bank.

I told Marty about them, so maybe I’ll be brave and go back at the weekend so that he can see the crabs and protect me – from the madness in my head.

With all the travelling I have been doing over the past few months I took a break from studying Japanese.  I don’t go back to school until the 8th July but I need to start preparing now or the class will be incredibly difficult.  This morning I was looking at practice books filled with kanji.  I wrote the kanji but I am having difficultly remembering what it means.  With other subjects I just need to quickly read over the information and it comes back to me, but not Japanese.  I know that I need to practice everyday but I find it hard to be that disciplined.

Since moving to Tokyo I have bought a number of children’s books.  Every now and again I get them out of the cupboard and try to read them.  It’s an incredibly frustrating exercise when I can’t manage to read a book written for a five year old.  One of the problems is that they are written completely in hiragana.  It’s both a good and bad thing.  Good because it does mean I can read the whole book aloud, bad in that I can spend quite a while staring at a simple word like “moon” because I am so used to seeing it written in kanji.  I’m also not expecting the equivalent of “Mr Moon” but I do need to remember that these are books written for small children.

This morning I decided to read “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”.  I loved this book as a child and the Japanese translation looks just like the original.  I wasn’t that hopeful when I opened the book but I could actually read and understand it.  I didn’t know the word for lollipop and was amused that it translates as “licking candy”.  I also didn’t know the word for butterfly but it was fairly easy to work that out from context.  I’m incredibly pleased.  And yes I know it’s a book written for small children but I need to get excited with every achievement in language learning as it’s easy to be overwhelmed with everything that I can’t do.  I can still remember my joy at learning to read books in English and the hours I spent in the library trying to find more books I could read. This morning I want to to find more books that I can read in Japanese.  Long may this feeling continue!