I’ve just been playing a little bit with Microsoft Seadragon… It’s pretty cool!
Click more to see one I made of a panorama from our holidays in the summertime! Continue reading
Microsoft SeaDragon
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Category Archives: Photos
Surf envy…
On Saturday a bunch of us went to a beach near the Ferry Terminal Emiri and I went to Ibaraki from. We were celebrating Stephanie’s birthday (A JLCer with Pioneers Mission from Canada).
The beach wasn’t the cleanest of beaches, quite a few of Japan’s beaches or coastal areas that haven’t been turned into cliffs have the misfortune of being dumping grounds for the Pacific’s garbage… That combined with prolific fly-tipping in Japan and more relaxed views on garbage dumping in other east asian countries brings a lot of garbage to Japan’s coastlines… This beach wasn’t so bad though, most of the drift was wood and natural stuff, but the odd piles of plastic bottles, a tv here and a sofa there, probbaly dumped and washed up in a storm. This particular beach also had the privilege of being next to a ferry terminal and a port that is home to an oil processing plant! But, all things considered, the water was pretty clean, and pretty nice temperature for swimming!
JP, a surfing and snowboarding missionary, was along with us, the waves were pretty small, but there were a lot of surfers out in the water. I had a serious bit of surfing envy! The beach was fun, and I did a bit of swimming and even brought the volleyball to the sea to have some fun, but the sea isn’t nearly as much fun when you aren’t catching waves…
So I’ve been searching for surf kayaks on yahoo auctions… I need a kayak, a paddle, a car, wetsuit and all the gear…. I don’t think it’s going to happen!!
Here are some pics from our day at the beach! It was still fun, and I got a bit of sun too!!
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| Saturday at the beach |
Summer Holidays – Week 2 – Aomori
Over the past weeks I have had a lot of things I wanted to blog about, I thought there and then, “This would make a good blog post!” however, I usually forget to blog about them. Which is probably for the best as often things that I think will make a good blog post turn dull and boring when I get my typing fingers on to them!
The big news of the past few weeks however is that in the second half of my holidays, for which Emiri and I went up to Aomori on our way back to Sapporo, we got engaged! After three years of getting to know each other and ultimately seeking God’s guidance, it was finally the right time. I had hoped to propose to Emiri on her birthday, but as it landed on a Sunday and we were back in Aomori, Emiri had been really looking forward to going to the various church services she had been part of for years, and helping out at as she spent her last months in Itayanagi helping out at the church there. So my plans were postponed til Monday, maybe we could go to the seaside and find a nice quiet spot on a beach… maybe we could have if the heavens hadn’t opened and poured all day! We ended up going to see a (mediocre) movie, but having a very nice dinner at a shabu-shabu restaurant in Hirosaki.
In Japan the traditions before getting engaged are a bit different to the UK, so when I went to talk to Emiri’s father about the whole thing the week before in Ibaraki, he was extremely helpful and understanding. At the end of the day I think our approach ended up somewhere lost between the UK and Japan, but regardless of cultural affects we were both aiming to arrive at a place where we were both clear as to what was happening and had expressed any thoughts and asked any questions. The four of us (Emiri’s parents, Emiri and I) ended up sitting down and having a good talk about the future and how things would pan out etc. From my current understanding , in Japan usually the guy proposes and then together the pair seek approval from parents (on both sides…This is all a bit complicated and would take a bit to explain here, so I won’t bother…)
Anyways, upshot of all that is we are engaged!
So here are some photos of our time in Aomori, and I will post some on Flickr for all the folk behind the great firewall who can’t see the picasa ones!
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| Summer ’09 in Aomori |
Summer holidays! Week one – Ibaraki
Here are some pics from the first week of my holidays with Emiri, we went to Ibaraki and stayed with her parents there. It was a good week and below is a link to some photos with lots of captions!
I just realised that although Emiri’s littlest (although final year in highschool) sister, Seika, was there too, but she was studying everyday (in summer holidays!) from early morning to late at night so she could do well in university entrance exams! So there aren’t many pics of her, but I am not sure it will necessarily be a summer she wants to remember!!
Anyways, here are some pics:
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| Summer ’09 in Ibaraki |
Maruyama Zoo!
It has been golden week here in Japan. Golden week is a rare opportunity arising from a bunch of public holidays falling together. Depending on where you look definitions include the 29th of April (Showa Day) along with the 3rd, 4th and 5th of May (Constitution Memorial Day, Greenery Day and Childrens’ Day). As such we had a week off JLC and the nation deserted work and took to the roads (well… most of it!). The roads and parks are chock full of people as they try to make the most of this opportunity to get away from home… I am not sure if everyone sees it as a challenge to see how far they can get away from home before U-turning and heading back again in time for work on Thursday… But sometimes it seems that way!
Not to be left out I also took to the roads and headed for Maruyama zoo with Emiri. I like zoos quite a bit, sometimes they are a bit depressing with small cages and so on and so forth, but I like to take photos of animals and it’s rare that I might get to take a picture of a lion or giraffe outside of a zoo situation really… This particular zoo is the smaller of the two zoos I have heard of in Hokkaido, the other one is further away and more expensive, so we opted for this one. It falls into that category of being a bit unpleasant if you stop to think too much about the animals in their little enclosures without too many other animals about… but I didn’t stop and think too much!
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| Maruyama Zoo |
Some photos of animals (and some humans got in there too)
Back to Ireland for a week…
If you missed it, it’s too late! For a brief, one week only exclusive appearance, I was back in Northern Ireland! It was a good week, I arrived and got to go to FAPC on Sunday for the last vacant services and met a lot of folk! Monday and Tuesday were spent preparing for PC and Cara’s big day on Wednesday. Tuesday was also spent with a brand, shining new cold, which has spun itself out until even today! I also got to go to the installation of the new Rev at FAPC on Thursday, meet family and friends and even was about for my brother’s birthday on Friday! What a week…
Some pics from the big wedding for you to see. Best man isn’t the best place to take photos from, so there aren’t many and they are pretty terrible. I only brought my point and shoot back with me, and it has certainly seen better days!
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| Paul and Cara’s Wedding |
Snow festival and more…
This is a little bit late, the Sapporo Snow festival finished last Wednesday… But here are some photos from it!
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| Sapporo Snow Festival 2009 |
You can see some pretty awesome snow sculptures at the festival! I got to go twice, once during the daytime on Saturday, then again on Tuesday evening with Alex, but a mix up in meeting and communications meant I didn’t meet Alex in the end, but still got to see a few of the sculptures all lit up… The ice ones look much better by night!
Last Wednesday, a Public Holiday here in Japan, a Singaporean student at the language centre (Wan Jee) arranged for us to go to a Singaporean buffet-banquet at a hotel in Otaru. It was delicious and we all ate far too much! I had to leave slightly earlier than the others to prepare to give a speech on Friday morning. The others went to the Otaru candle light festival in the evening. My speech went well on Friday, it was all about electrocuting myself when I was little. We have to do speeches each time we finish a section of the course in front of all of the students and teachers at the centre!
Then just the other day my internet began working! The NTT (Japanese equivalent of BT) came and put in the line a couple of weeks ago, but it took Biglobe (my provider) a little longer to get it up and running. The line is an optic fibre link to the exchange which promises a maximum ability of 100Mbps, but in reality it is giving 12-15Mbps downstream and almost as much upstream at the moment… Which isn’t the 100Mbps, but still isn’t bad for a consistent connection speed.
The final bit of news is I am on Twitter! If you are on twitter you can follow me at flat3d, I’d love to follow you too… I’m building up my links (it’s all about the links…)
For those who aren’t or don’t know what it is, it is a bit like facebook’s status updates, but made viable. In reality it seems to be a bit more like one huge chatroom, with a whole lot of conversations going on at once, the nice thing is it sort of tunes in your friends and tunes out everyone else, so you can follow conversations. It’s also possible to use it to simply let people know what you are upto, which might sound pretty dull or dim, but I like the idea that I can communicate daily life to folk and friends at home.
The big surprise for me is that it is actually pretty big in Japan. It seems to be filling (bridging?) a gap between the all out geekiness of IRC (internet chat) and the more mainstream social users of Mixi (sort of Japan’s answer to myspace or facebook…) At the moment I am much to illiterate to make much use of it in Japanese, but as I learn more hopefully it will be a valuable resource in learning about the tech world/culture in Japan and even help me with studying the language!
I will sometime link it into the site here, a twitter updates jobby or something, but I am not sure the best way to do it yet, or even if it is actually worthwhile… Some more thought required I guess…
Night Safari
We have been getting on well on our course this week, things have started to gather pace as people overcome their jetlag and settle in, getting to know one another.
Last night a group of us headed back to Singapore Zoo for the second half of the experience, the Night Safari! This is something that I think more zoos should do, but it wouldn’t work so well in Belfast I think (too cold!). The safari starts at 7pm, you go along and they have paths around the zoo dimly lit and some tours by tram around various areas. Going to the zoo at night time opens the opportunity to see animals that normally don’t show their face during daylight hours, but only become active, or visible, at night.
Obviously the night safari isn’t really conducive to photographs so much and so the three meagre offerings below:
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| Night Safari |
The real adventure, however, only began as we left the Zoo and began our journey home… Going to the zoo we had taken a “direct” bus promising a 30 minute journey straight to the gates of the zoo. After a lot of zig zagging, going in circles and taking out public railings, changing bus and catching a mini-van, the drivers finally got us to the zoo, only 45 minutes later than expected! Quite unusual for Singapore…
On the return journey we sought to avoid the inconvenience of the direct bus by taking the indirect public bus/MRT (mass rapid transit) route back to IHQ. The first bus worked well, but we arrived at the MRT station just after the last train had left and so we headed back to the bus stops to plan a route home, some of the elder folk and those laden with sleeping children took taxis back, but the rest of us were much more intrepid and sought to select a bus route to get us home. With some expert map reading and clever interpretation of timetables, we got on the wrong bus and headed off to somewhere else.
After we realised we were on the wrong bus we didn’t get off… Not us… We asked the driver how to get home and he (along with some laughing) kindly told us where we should get off and get another bus back towards the road we are staying on. We just made it and got that bus (now after midnight, the last bus on the route), and made it back to the vicinity of IHQ, with a shortish walk back home!
The night safari really was great though!
Liffey Descent 2008
Saturday was the annual pilgrimage to Dublin to take part in the Liffey Descent canoe marathon. This year we entered three teams, Jake and Lyle made their usual effort, Steve and Tommy were once again teamed up and team Scuba, or PC and my team, had the addition of Andy L slotting into midship. Team Scuba also had a bit of a shake up with PC taking the more demanding stern position and me taking the more risky bow. The amendments to team Scuba didn’t translate quite into the performance booster we had hoped, with 5 swims our total time was pushed up to 4 hours… It wasn’t our best performance, but it was enough to earn us 8th place in our class (Canadian threes, out of 21 boats).
Tommy and Steve finished 24th and Lyle and Jake came in 8th in the canadian twos class.
The cycling squad was made up of Paula, Cherith, Emma and Ruth this year, taking a shorter route, but providing some good photo coverage of the river action:
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| Liffey 2008 |
