狂ったブログ

Singapore was lovely. Sadly we only had some 28 hours to take the city in, but that was more than enough to know that we want to go back. We lodged (i.e., dropped off our stuff) in the Perak Hotel (formerly known as the Perak Lodge) in Little India, and we spent […]

Once again our visas haven’t finished processing and once again our 90-day temporary permission to stay is expiring. As much as I enjoyed going to Seoul, I wasn’t looking forward to another 2-day trip out there—I’d much rather return to Seoul when I can spare a few weeks to really get to know the […]

Last Tuesday we went to 日光. Photos are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jundai/sets/72157601628191939/.
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A strange thing occurred towards the end of our trip. In front of a shrines that was not open at the time, there was a dragonfly sitting on the handle of the ladle that was sticking out of the 手水舎. […]

I seem to recall hearing people say things like “he died of old age” when I was a kid. Was that just a euphemistic expression that people used to explain things to children, or was that actually a common way to put things? In any case, it occurred to me the other day […]

A large percentage of Japanese vocabulary comes from Chinese (more than half?). As I’ve heard it, the original Japanese language had no writing system (or it was lost to history) and when the Chinese writing system was adopted during the first millenium AD, a large quantity of Chinese vocabulary was brought with it. […]

It’s not every day that you wake up not knowing what country you’ll be going to bed in that night. In fact, before yesterday that had never happened to me. In any case, it happened when we woke up yesterday faced with the fact that our application for a certificate of eligibility to […]

I wanted to migrate my blog when I first moved to Tokyo, but instead it will be in conjunction with moving into my first Tokyo apartment. My previous blog was managed in Typo, which is build in Ruby on Rails. My hosting service, DreamHost, is a godsend for supporting Rails at all, but […]