Watching the Hourglass

Hello everyone! I'm back for post numba 2!

First, an update. My lack of heat has been very thankfully solved. Turns out that the gas was off for some reason and, to fix it, all I had to do was press a button. Which was, of course, the only button on the gas box. *headdesk* There was, apparently, no need to suffer through three days of winter camping inside my own house.

Hot showers are awesome. That's all I'm sayin.

And it just snowed. Literally, as I was writing this, the staff room erupted into "sugoi! yuki!" and I turned around to discover that, indeed, there was much yuki falling from the sky.

Another update: I finally (FINALLY!) posted another video on youtube. This one is about the daimyo gyoretsu in Yakage that I went to about a month ago. As you can tell, I've been slightly lazy about editing and uploading it. Anyway, they moved really slow, so I sped up the video to 300% it's normal speed and cut out a lot of repetitive stuff. In totally, the raw video is just over 20 minutes while the edited video is about 3 minutes. I am ze master editor. (Watch out for Lauren's wiggle dance. It's fun times.)

Interestingly, I have apparently posted material that is copyrighted in Germany. They pounced on that thing. Literally, about two minutes after I uploaded the video to youtube, I got an email saying my video was blocked in Germany. Sad times. I apologize to all my (non-existent) German viewers. I promise to be more careful in the future... sort of.

Tomorrow I go home for Christmas/New Year's break. Do you know what that means? That means that I've been in Japan for four and a half months. That's insane! It feels like it's only been about a month. I mean, I only just arrived, right? How can I be going back already?

There's so much more that I still plan to do in Japan, it seems odd to suddenly take a break from it all. On the one hand, it'll be nice to eat some good pizza and have a real, North American style breakfast. On the other hand... Asia! Hell, I haven't even gotten out of Japan yet. And I've only been in three prefectures in Japan. The explorer in me is crying out for more. There's so much, SO much that I want to do and haven't gotten to yet.

Here's a short list of things not yet done. Let's call it my New Year's Wish List.
- Onsen
- Kobe beef
- Niimi caves
- Tottori sand dunes
- Skiing in Japan
- Spend a night in a love hotel
- Spend a night in a temple
- Discover the night life of Tokyo
- Buy a kimono
- Visit Beijing and see the Great Wall of China
- See the Forbidden Palace
- Witness the conversion of sunny sky to polluted sky in a Chinese city
- Spend a week on a Thai island in the sun
- Get a tattoo from a Buddhist temple in Thailand
- See the hill tribes of northern Thailand

It's a good thing that I still have 8 months more here after I come back.

~Jeffles