Yesterday afternoon Marty and I decided to spend a couple of hours at Big Echo Karaoke. We hired a private booth, so no-one else was subjected to our singing, and had fun trying to work the Japanese system. By accident Marty switched on the scoring system which gave marks at the end of each song. We weren’t sure what all of it meant but could see that some of it was for pitch, rhythm and vibrato. After a while we decided to pick songs for each other. I picked “Dancing Queen” for Marty and he was horrified that, according to the scoring system, this was the song he sang best.

I’ve been really surprised at the cost of food in Japan. It’s much cheaper than I remember. Today we bought katsu curry for lunch and it only cost about £3.00 each. We went out tonight for sukiyaki, which I thought would be really expensive, and paid around £10.00 each. Although the food has been really cheap it is very expensive to have anything to drink. In some places it costs £2.50 for a glass of coke and a small glass at that. We have been mainly drinking water as we are given this on entering any restaurant.

Tonight I had been hoping to have something more interesting to drink. But we ran into a problem. No-one in the restaurant could understand English. And Marty didn’t know the Japanese for any of the cocktails I wanted. I knew the restaurant served them because they gave us an English menu. The problem was that the English menu didn’t have the same layout as the Japanese one and it didn’t have any pictures. So although it was available it was completely useless to the Japanese staff who couldn’t read it. And therefore useless to us. It was a bit annoying being able to see that the restaurant served lots of things I would like but then being unable to order them.

Marty and I are celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary today.

My little sister is 12 today. Hopefully she has a great day and doesn’t mind too much that I can’t give her a present until I get back from Japan.

For some strange reason cyclists in Japan are allowed to cycle on the footpath. At first I thought they did this in the same direction as the flow of traffic but it seems that they are free to cycle where they please. It’s fun watching them cycle towards each other – that is until you get caught between rows of them and can’t quite work out where exactly you are supposed to walk.

So far, on this trip, the majority of Japanese people I have seen would be described as being slender. I’ve seen very few you would describe as overweight.  I had always assumed that this was due to their diet.  But watching them running around train stations I’m starting to think it’s because they are always in a hurry.  I really don’t understand what the rush could be.  This morning there must have been a train going to Tokyo station every three minutes yet people were still running to catch them.

I went to see Marty give his two talks today at YAPC::Asia. Normally I don’t go to hear him but I was curious to see what sort of reaction he would get from the Japanese. Would they laugh at his jokes, would they understand his accent, would they think he was mad?

The first talk was about using Template::Toolkit for non-web applications. This talk seemed to be liked well enough and he did get some interaction from the audience – although this mainly came from Ingy. The surprising thing was that he was finished early. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Marty finish a talk within his allocated time slot. It confused him. He thought that he had forgotten some examples or was missing some of the slides.

The second talk was the one he was worried about. The talk is called Kongougo and describes the features of Perl 6 that Marty believes Larry got from Ruby and the Japanese language. This is mostly a humorous talk and he was really worried that none of the audience would understand the joke. But he did re-write a lot of slides in Japanese and the audience really seemed to like it. The audience didn’t laugh as much as the European audience who had seen it but they clapped more. The Japanese will clap during a talk if you say something they really like. But, just like the first talk, this was also too short. And again Marty was really surprised.

My theory for this was that Marty wasn’t able to digress as much as he usually does as he was concerned that the audience wouldn’t be able to understand him. Miyagawa believed it was because the Japanese audience is more polite than a European one and that Marty builds lots of time into his talks to cope with the interruptions and heckling he usually gets from the audience.

Whatever the reason for this strange phenomenon Marty wasn’t the only one affected. Damian also finished his talks within his time slots and that is nothing short of a miracle.

This morning we had to travel across Tokyo during rush hour. I had forgotten just how horrible it is to spend time on a train so packed with people that you can’t even turn round to find out whose hands are on your backside. I also found it unbearably hot as the Japanese still consider it to be cold. Thankfully the trains are fast and clean.

All the train stations have happy tinkly theme tunes. Marty tells me these are so you know which train is about to go next. I assumed they were a type of brain washing to make sure that the Japanese don’t all kill each other during rush hour. Play happy music and everything will be fine.

YAPC::Asia has begun. Although I don’t actually know what day it is as the 8 hour time difference has me totally confused.

The conference was opened by Miyagawa – I didn’t catch much of what he was saying as the opening was in Japanese (although at least half of the talks at this conference will be in English). After Miyagawa Audrey Tang gave a talk on PUGS. This was followed by Ingy talking about Module::Compile. At the minute Leon is talking about MighTyV – the web-site that he and Leo put together for a BBC backstage competition.

YAPC::Europe will be taking place in Birmingham from Wednesday 30th August to Friday 1st September 2006.