Age old viola

Now: getting in touch with my old musical self.

Today I discovered that the awesome jellyfish shots I took were Lost in Synchronizing and not present on Flickr. I feel sad for them, and thus I will give them an entire post of their own on the greatest place that is satf!

And as expected, when I was able to snap a shot of it, it surely snapped a few of me too!

Me (black T) + Bakke (bag over shoulder) on Vikingsgatan in Helsingborg, Sweden.

Me + Bakke heading home from the gym (thus my hair is a mess) a sunny day in Helsingborg.

Am I now Internet famous?

I’ve been using Aardvark for more than 6 months now (an active and proud Aardvocate), and I’ve really come to love the concept.

It’s both well executed and really works community-wise: ask a question and get it answered (or at least get something to get you on your way).

For those of you unfamiliar, Aardvark is a network of people such as yourself that may ask questions (‘How can I learn to play awesome guitar?’) and get answers by other people (‘At the awesome guitar score, there’s where!’) or the other way around (someone asks, you answer) easily through your IM client, the vark.com website or even through email.

You can specify topics which you know much about (Programming, wine, cats, Vancouver, etc) or answer random open questions from any topic (by enabling the Extra questions setting on the website or by writing ‘try’ in an IM chat with Aardvark).

With the extra questions setting, you sure get your share of questions – and through it a share of odd questions. Therefore I decided to put together a small list with the most prominent ones!

– Does anyone know… why your not supposed to wear socks and sandals?

– Is this creepy or what? http://gizmodo.com/5288232/dismembered-doll-limbs-hold-your-keys

– Is there a way to loose one inch around the bust in one week? I need to get in to a dinner dress by friday.

– Do they make barrels for the specific purpose of being worn as clothing?

– How do you train a performing circus bear to dance?

– When I walk with my book bag on it always makes my shirt rise up in back. It there a way to prevent this? It’s annoying.

– How do I preform a meeping sound? I.E “Meep”

– Can u die from excessive damage to the funny bone??

If you have any fun aardvark questions, please do share in the comments, and if you haven’t got Aardvark and like to try it out (you’ll love it), here’s my personal invite link to join my network!

Most of the pins have been delivered, hope you global satfers like them!

I, on behalf of all of satf, would like to wish you a merry christmas, happy hannukah, ferocious vishnu and an overall decent holiday!

And sorry about the extreme close-up of my underpants, but I had to. Have a little comfort in that I bought them in JAPAN and not in Sweden, as one might think.

Hey, thought about it, and I did it.

Random, that is.

For some* of those kind people who say hi in the comments, there might be a pin dropping down your mail chute in time for Christmas!

(This is the time you comment, be sure to leave your email so I can get your address!)

* They’re limited in numbers, so I’ll only give away like 10 or so!

XKCD Volume 0, Actual size-stickers, NO RAPTORS T-shirt.

The picture was also taken with my new lens, Canon EF-S 17-85mm 4-5.6, which I hope will perform as much as it weighs.

The English metro voice
- The Next Station is Harajukuuuu

Anyplace is sleeping place
- Japanese people have a nack for taking a nap anywhere. In the subway, in the café, on the street and in book stores. Everywhere.

R->L switching
- Lock ‘N Loll!

Engrish

- No smorking, preesu!

Synchronized Starbucks ladies shouting out drink orders in perfect sync.
- Hitotsu chooocoreetu ratteeeeeeeEEE!!

Nagasakian school childrens fascination with us tall gaijins, and their burning need to try out their English skills with vocabulary such as “herro!”, “wea yuu from?” and “yuu big!”, and afterwards classmates calling them cool (“kakoiiii”) for being brave enough to communicating with white giants.
- They so brave!

(Female) School uniforms
- who can say anything against the utter cuteness of the sailor uniform?

Vending machines

Hit and miss sometimes. This turned out to be jelly on can.

- They stand on every street and is waiting for those 10’s you have stuffed in your pockets for lack of space in your seemingly insufficient wallet.

All you can drink
- for the price of two beers in Sweden there are places which will let you drink all you can for two hours. A loosing deal for japanese when us westeners catch on. Sweet.

Bread on can
- Yeah, it does exist.

Bicycling cats

- It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?

Cosplayers

- Cosplayers in Japan is A-OK. In Sweden: not so much. Sorry(?).

Food

Meronpan: why is this not available in Europe?!

Kaki: see above caption.

Okonomiyakismiley

- Okonomiyaki, ramen, udon, fried stuff is all pretty great.

Taito Station!

- I may not be a degenerate gambler, but blowing off a couple of hundred (read: thousand) yens on a Taito Station sure is a lot of fun.

General notes and observations:

In Akihabara, every store – no matter how innocent it may look – has a basement with porn.

The Japanese loves them corners: they have corners for ATM, drinking, smoking, vending machines, sleeping, karaoke, etc – and most of the time they’re not even on corners, but in between!!

Japanese people _don’t_ like it when you hang in the ceiling of the subway train. Yeah, totally.

You can be a real jerk in public and later say “Abunai! Neko desu!” (=”Watch out! A cat!”) and all is forgotten and they love you again. This is how we got out of the previous paragraphs turbulence.

Japanese people are friendly and will lend you a cloth if you spilled something. Sweet.

Japanese people are in general 7 years older than they appear to be, and believes the same about us: “You onry 20?!?! So young!”

…or How I Learned that the Swedish Transportation System Sucks.
…or I Know How you Feel, but I do it Anyway.

Yokohama. I must be frank and say that I didn’t get to see much of the city – we spent the bigger part of our stay yesterday at the hotel (Yokohama Royal Park), enjoying the view from our room, on the 59th floor(!), over Yokohama over to Chiba, and the Tokyo tower in the far, yet not too far, Tokyo distance. And with an amusement park below with colours of all variations, I took the time to snap some experimental shots (meaning bracketing and long time exposures – both very exotic to me) with my camera with a few pillows acting as camera stand.

Because of the (serious) lack of wifi, we ended up not being on facebook and twitter, but watching several Entourage episodes in the comfort of the city lights, Krispy Kreme donuts, beer and soup.

Yes, this is indeed another one of them travelling diaries, creatively switching to past tense whenever I feel like it or forget what I was using in the last sentence. No editing.
Well maybe a little editing to add pictures and to translate stuff from Swedish when I subconciously switch to that in my head, but you’ll still get the Comic Sans Treatment(TM) (which I am seriously considering as the default font for body text for the entire blog) and all those extremely hilarious remarks I trumph. A good thong to have in mind when reading this is that being serious in writing isn’t my forté -for the record. And yeah, I meant thing by thong, but I’m so keeping it there.

I am currently enjoying the speed on a Shinkansen SUPER EXPRESS bound for Kyoto. The japanese really have a knack fir naming their trains, SUPER EXPRESS is a far better name than Öresundståg or X2000.

Sitting next to me is a Japanese man who is working his butt off on his laptop, while listening to music on an age-old portable CD-player (seems to be listening to a compilation CD “Beat Pops 1″).

A general observation:
What is it with Japanese and the fact that they always remove their wrist watches when travelling anywhere that is longer than 45 minutes away? Are their watches that uncomfortable? Maybe that’s a business idea – comfy wrist watches. It’s not like they place it on the table to see what time it is, they just put them anywhere.

Also, why do business men here always clutter their desktops with PDF documents and other work related stuff? I might not be a clean freak/perfectionist myself, but the way they do it seems utterly pointless, but I guess it’s the same with any kind of mess. My dad will probably be disagreeing with me on this one saying that it will ultimately take more time cleaning the mess up than finding what you are looking for in it (“the perfect mess”).

The bullet train just whisked past Fuji-san! It truly is a superb mountain. I first saw it for real today, when we were having breakfast on the 70th floor with a panoramic view over entire Yokohama, and in the distance, Fuji.

I Kyoto I will probably do some touristing at a shrine or three, visit some of the places that my Wallpaper* city guide has to offer (designer cafès most likely) and relax at the onsen-ish hotel we are going to stay at.

Arrival!