I know it can be expensive to buy drinks in a restaurant in Japan but I can still get surprised.  On Saturday I went out for pizza in Akihabara.  I decided to order some cola as I was tired and thought that maybe the caffeine would perk me up.   The drink I got was in a small glass, probably around 200 mls, and it cost 400 円 ($5 USD, £3.20 GBP).  It was ridiculous.  I knew how much the drink would cost before I bought it but I wasn’t expecting it to be so small.  My friend ordered a glass of white wine.  He got about the same amount of wine and it was cheaper than my soft drink.  Next time I’ll stick to drinking tap water.

Somehow I forgot to blog in November.  It was a busy month and I don’t write as much when I’m travelling.  I also haven’t been overly well, which is probably the fault of my out of control thyroid hormones.  I was at the hospital this week and had the worst set of results in three years.  The doctor wasn’t exactly sure what has gone wrong, but one explanation was a consequence of the March earthquake.

When I went to the hospital in June I was given a different brand of medication.  It was supposed to be exactly the same thing only made by a German company and not a Japanese one.  I couldn’t completely understand what had happened with the old medication but there was some issue with the hospital being able to get their supply after the earthquake and the German supplier stepped in to help.

My doctor told me that some patients had problems with the German brand and that it’s possible that my medication hasn’t been absorbing properly for six months.  It would certainly be odd to blame the earthquake on my insomnia or to say, “really it’s not my diet, the earthquake made me fat”.  It is just one explanation though.  The other ones involve the disease progressing faster than expected, winter badly affecting my hormones, having some sort of viral infection, or my immune system weakening.  Horribly, whatever is happening is probably caused by a whole combination of factors.  I just wish that when things go wrong they could be corrected faster, but it will be four months before the next set of tests, and it could easily take a year to get back to where I was in June.  This could be a long winter.

It’s the time of the year when Tokyo Disneyland becomes more like Harajuku, when the streets are full of people in costumes, and the crowds are taught how to dance along to the Disney Hallowe’en songs.

Marty loves the Hallowe’en parades as he gets so amused watching the audience try to dance along.  The song started with a chant of the letters O-B-A-K-E and cast members then spent about 10 minutes teaching the audience the actions. This year, Marty attempted to learn the hand movements, but they were a bit complicated.  And although it was possible to follow along when we were being taught, the song played during the actual parade was a lot faster.

We don’t own Disney costumes and I’ve no idea where the adults got their costumes as I’ve only really seen Disney outfits for children.  We should investigate this for next year as I quite fancy spending the day dressed as a Disney villain.  I saw some great villains during the day but I thought it would be rude to try taking pictures of strangers who weren’t standing around posing.  One of my favourites was a mother dressed as Cruella de Vil with her children dressed as Dalmatians.

The Haunted Mansion has also be refurbished and turned into the Nightmare Before Christmas. The queues throughout the whole park were long and I didn’t really want to wait for 90 minutes to see the Haunted Mansion so we waited until the Electric Parade had started and then tried to make our way to the Mansion. We finally found a gap in the crowds and only had to wait 20 minutes for the ride.

Lestrrat wrote recently that “YAPC ain’t over until you blog about it“.   At the start of every conference I convince myself that I’ll write at least one blog post a day, but my plans often go awry.  I have started writing this post many times but keep stalling because I can only think of so many ways to say the word “great”.  It would be such a boring post if I just kept saying that everything was great, the registration process, the venue, the organisation, the speakers, but in reality all these things were great.

I will admit that I attended one conference this year where I didn’t actually register.  The queue was just so long and I knew that I could always come back and do it later, I just never got round to it.  But at YAPC::Asia the registration process was very efficient.  I arrived about 30 minutes before the start of the conference and it only took a few minutes for me to register.  I have been to the venue, so had no trouble finding out where to go, but there were beautiful signs at the entrance to the campus with a map to make it easy to find the main room.

I’m having difficulty in thinking of anything that was overlooked.  I’ve been to conferences that forgot to put up signs to let you know where the rooms were, that forgot to hand out wifi information, that didn’t print out the schedule because they assumed everyone would be online, but not at this conference.  I’m not saying that everything worked perfectly for them, as I remember that there were problems with the projectors on the first morning, but that everything was well thought out and any problems that did come up were handled well.  I received a printed copy of the schedule in my conference bag as well as details of the wifi and a map of the venue.  The main handout also contained useful information such as a section on how to get the most of the conference, bios of the keynote speakers, information on the IRC channels, and the tags to use on social media.

The conference had more attendees than any other YAPC, I believe about 670 of them, but it was only at the closing event that you noticed just how many people were there.  For the most part the venue easily coped with that number of people.  It also had more people helping out than I’ve even seen at a YAPC: 42 volunteers really did mean that there was someone around to handle any problem.

There were couple of quirky things about the venue.  The shutters in the main hall seemed to have a mind of their own and would occasionally pitch the room into darkness.   I did watch a few people stumble on the stairs in the dark.  The main hall  is also near the part of the university where musicians come to warm-up and practice. Not as a group, but as a bunch of individuals all trying to play brass instruments louder than each other.  This racket could occasionally be heard in the main hall, and was certainly noticeable when I was trying to work in the hallway, but I don’t think it caused much of a problem for the conference.

There are also some other differences from the YAPCs I attend in Europe and America.  This conference didn’t use the ACT system that is used by most of the grass-roots Perl conferences in the world. (Maki-san has written about his reasons for using something different.)  The only thing I missed about it is the ability to see who else is attending the conference.  I’m not great at remembering names and have often used ACT to go and look up a person after I’ve spoken to them in the hope that it will help me remember who I was talking to.

There was a professional photographer at the conference.  I quite liked this.  I know that lots of people carry cameras but it’s still nice to have a set of pictures of the speakers and the main events at the conference.

There were prizes for the top three speakers based on votes from the audience.  From memory I think that these were an ergonomic chair, an iPad, and a MacMini.  The keynotes speakers weren’t eligible to win, which makes sense, and I believe that a draw was taken and one of the voters also won a prize.

As for things I would change?  There weren’t that many talks in English this year, around 7 I believe.  I would like there to have been more but I know that since the conference is in Tokyo that the main language will be Japanese.  I also know that fewer foreigners are coming to Tokyo this year.  I would also have liked Larry Wall to have been there, I find it strange being at a YAPC without him.

I’m at the end of my post so finally my YAPC::Asia is over, and now I can prepare myself for the London Perl Workshop!

I went to Tsukiji fish market this morning for breakfast.  This was my first visit though I’ve been living in Japan for nearly 5 years.  I’ve considered it before but always liked the idea of sleeping more than fish eating.  Since it is a friend’s last day in the city I decided to make the effort and got out of bed at 6am.

The sushi was scrumptious.  We ordered the chef’s recommendation and I ended up with more than I could eat.  That worked well as I was able to leave a couple of pieces that I’m not overly fond of.  When I first moved to Japan I didn’t eat sushi at all.  Now I like sushi enough that I eat it for lunch three days a week but there are still some types of sushi that I avoid.  This morning I was served sea urchin, which I find it hard to look at never mind eat.  I’m also not fond of fish eggs, but I did manage to eat one roll that contained these.

I would consider going back as the fresh sushi was certainly worth getting up for, and given how often I travel, it may be the perfect breakfast treat when I’m jet lagged.

 

Being at YAPC::Asia has reminded me that I never got round to writing about YAPC::EU.  I don’t have time to write today so instead I’m going to post one of the pictures I took at YAPC::EU.

 

 

I’ve seen ducks swim towards people in the hope of getting food, but today was the first time I’ve seen carp do this.

Today I saw a great use for all those umbrellas that get left behind on the street car.  Instead of storing them in a lost items’ room they are put in a box at the stop.  If it’s raining when you get off you can take one with you.

 

I spent hours yesterday afternoon chatting to friends.  None of us smoke and someone made a comment on how ridiculous it was to spend money on cigarettes when you could practically afford to go on an extra holiday a year if you stopped smoking.  I laughed and said that the same was true if you stopped buying coffee on the way to work. My friends looked sceptical, yet if you buy a grande latte from Starbucks in Tokyo every weekday of the year it costs more than 100,000 Yen (834 GBP, 1300 USD).

This lead to a more general conversation on the cost of living and how we don’t always know exactly how much money we spend on things.  (One person at the table had detailed financial records on every penny he spends, but he only started to do that when he realised that he wasn’t sure what he was spending his money on.)

When I was in Europe in August and September I was surprised at the price of food.  I believe that I spend a lot more money grocery shopping in Tokyo than I would if I lived in the UK, but I could be completely wrong.  If I had to guess I would say that I spend 4,000 Yen (33 GBP, 52 USD) a day on groceries.  28,000 Yen (231 GBP, 364 USD) a week seems like a lot of money to spend on feeding two people.  I imagine that we spend more money on food than the average Japanese couple, as I still buy some Western ingredients.  I know it would be cheaper to eat Japanese food every day but I haven’t adapted enough to eat Japanese food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Of course my grocery shopping also contains non-food products, but then we also eat dinner out maybe once a week and Marty buys lunch every day.

I know that Tokyo is one of the world’s most expensive cities (Mercer’s 2011 Cost of Living Survey ranks it as number 2), which does mean that I expect to spend more money on food than if I lived in another city.  The Yen has also strengthened substantially over the past couple of years making everything feel expensive when I covert it to another currency.  But now I want to know exactly how much I do spend.  This will mean keeping records but maybe I’ll find out what I’m buying that’s equivalent to the grande latte or packet of cigarettes.

We have visitors arriving this week and for the first time this year we are planning on using two guest rooms.  We have a guest bedroom which shouldn’t take much sorting out.   The other room isn’t actually a guest room.  It’s my study and it contains my electronic piano, bookcases, and my desk. The last time I decided to use the printer I had to attempt to find a path through the surprisingly large piles of stuff that’s managed to accumulate in there during the year.  I hate that and love the thought of having an apartment where you could open any door without worrying about the lurking mess that’s waiting to embarrass you in front of your friends, but I don’t appear to have found a way to transfer my thoughts into actions.

I did peek in last week and the room has been breeding boxes.  I don’t use the room that often and when I do it’s mostly to play the piano.  Given how little space I actually need to do that the room ends up being used as a dumping ground for boxes and other items that need to be recycled.  We really do mean to recycle the cardboard once a month but the door to the room stays closed and the boxes get to stay for another while.  I love the convenience of being able to buy things like bottled water and rice online, but it really does use an alarming amount of packaging.  Mind you, instead of writing about the packaging I should really go and start recycling.