sukiyaki party

We had a small get together to have sweet beef stew (sukiyaki) on Sunday night and it also gave me a chance to play wih my new camera on the first day.

New camera

Unfortuanely, I've only had my old digital camera for 3 years, but the batteries hardly last 15 photos anymore. I found a good website online, http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/ which has lots of personal reviews for all cameras. I found that lots of people were having the same problem as I was with my Nikon Coolpix 3100.

I knew that the next time I bought a camera it would probably be a Canon since I know lots of people raving about their Canon camera. I also knew I would get a camera with a longer optical zoom so I could get better photos of wildlife. From the website, I found the best choice for me was the Canon PowerShot S2 IS. It has a 12X optical zoom and lots of other features such as making it much easier for me to shot in manual mode but with also lots of settings for different situations as well.

Anyways, here are some pictures of the new camera. From now on, the pictures on my blog will be taken with the new camera.

Mount Fuji

Every so often, I can see Mount Fuji from my apartment building. Today though, it was really clean, although still small since it's 150 km away:

Weekend update

I had a fairly productive weekend, but not much exciting to say about it. I got lots of cleaning done in my apartment. My roommate moved out at the beginning of January, but I've only just had time to give my apartment a good cleaning and to change the arrangement of the rooms. Hopefully by next weekend it will be finished.

On Saturday night, I went with Ayako to see the movie, King Kong. It was enjoyable even though it was 3 hours long. Movies are not cheap here, about $18, but yet if you see a later show (after 9pm), it's cheaper (about $12). There's even movies that start at midnight. I was surprised to come out of the theatre at 12 midnight and the refreshment stand and souvenir store were still open.

On Sunday, I went to a restaurant that serves things made from Anko (red Azuki beans). We ate oshiruko, which is anko soup with a sticky rice ball in the middle.
We also had obanyaki, which is small, round, thick pancakes with either anko in them of custard cream...both very yummy.

My Birthday Party

On Sunday night, I had a belated birthday party with some friends at a local bar. Ayako made a delicious lemon cake for me.
Since people know that I like sake, I received many bottles of sake for my birthday. Below is me having sake poured at the bar. The glass is in a wooden box and so they overflow the glass with sake so that the box fills up as well.

new iPod

To help spend some Xmas money from mom & dad as well as the Juns, I bought a new iPod:
So now I have all my music and photos on it. I can also put videos on it, but I don't have any to put on yet. The attachment below it is called iTrip (not made by Apple) and I use it to play my iPod music in the car. I can set the radio to a station not being used and put the same frequency on my iTrip, and my iPod plays through the car radio...pretty neat I think.

Osaka

On the night after returning from our day trip to Kyoto, Craig and I met Craig's girlfriend, Miki, and we went to an area in Osaka called Dotombori.

It's the largest entertainment areas in Osaka with lots of big signs for restuarants and bars.

The other time I had a chance to look around on Osaka was on my last day there. I went to Osaka castle and had a good view of the city from there.

While I was at Osaka castle, I had a chance to eat takoyaki, which is famous in Osaka. Takoyaki is bits of octopus fried in a ball of batter....yum yum.

Nara

The day after I visited Kyoto, I went to another small town near Osaka, Nara. It only took 30 minutes from where Craig lives to get there. It has a number of interesting sites so it was good for a day trip. First there were a number of pagodas.

Past the pagodas, there is an entrance to a huge park that has a number of temples and shrines in it as well as about 3000 tame deer.
The deer were as high as my waist and they were used to people so it was easy to go and pet them. They were often looking for food and come up to you if you reach into your pocket. If you pull out a camera though, they just walk away and look for somebody else. Even though there are so many deer there, they are all spread out, so I usually only saw 5 maximum together, except when one old lady pulled up in her car and dumped buckets and buckets of food peelings for the deer. I think she does this regularly, since the once the deer saw her car, they started walking up to it.
It was strange visiting some of the temples when there were also deer there:
The biggest temple there is Todaiji temple, which is actually the largest wooden structure in the world.
Outside it, there was a wodden Buddhist deity. People can rub a part of the statue where they have pain and then rub the same part of their body and the pain is suppose to get better.
Inside the temple is the Great Buddha, which was very, very large:
Outside the temple there were some beautiful flags leading up the walk:
I also got a nice view of Nara when I took a walk up a hill near a temple:
On the way back through the park, I saw a woman selling sweet potatoes that she had roasted on her cart:
I bought one large sweet potato from her. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish it all, so I shared it with a doe and her 2 fawns. ^^

Kyoto

The day after returning from Korea, I got on the shinkansen (bullet train) and went down to Osaka to visit my friend Craig (who I taught with in Toronto). It was my first time on the bullet train since arriving in Japan and so I could enjoy it more this time. I was amazed how smooth and quite the ride was even though we were travelling at 300 km/h. Smooth enough that I fell asleep both there and back again.
I even got to see some snow as we went a bit north and inland on the way to Osaka:

Since there were only 2 stops on the way, it only took 90 minutes to get to Osaka, which is 300km away.

The next day, I did a day trip with Craig to Kyoto. I was amazed at the wide selection of souvenir stores there that actually offered interesting gifts that weren't too expensive. I also liked that each store actually sold different things than the store next to it.

First, we made our way to Kiyomizu temple, which draws lots of tourist. It's very popular in the spring for its cherry blossom trees, but was still busy the day we went, even though it was winter.

We made sure to get some good luck by rubbing little statues:
And I took a chance and shook a wooden box with a small hole in the bottom where one stick will drop out. As you can see, the timing of the photo was good...just as the stick was coming out.
My fortune (which was the 2nd best out of five and told me I'll have a pretty good year^^):
Next, we went to Yasaka shrine, where first we washed our hands to purify ourselves before going in:
This shrine is one of the most popular to go to at New Year's to pray and to get you fortune for the next year. It was still busy the day with lots of people getting their fortunes.
Walking around one park, we even saw some fancy cars.
Another thing I liked about Kyoto was walking along the narrow stone streets. There were a number of rickshaws that you could rent a ride from:
We were also lucky to see a maiko (apprentice geisha) or 2 having their photos taken. I'm not sure if they were real maiko or just made up to look like one for photos. Still, it was neat to see them.