I am still alive. Busy, but alive. The new school year has started and this year's new first year students are really a great group. Much better as a whole then last year's new students.

Things have been progressing for me as well about future grad school prospects. I have a meeting with a professor who has tentatively agreed to supervise me bearing a few things falling into place. So Monday's meeting will be a matter of working out all the details, and hopefully, I'll be able to come out knowing much more concretely whether Kyoto University is gonna happen or not.

I hit another mile stone yesterday. My lovely 50cc scooter roller over to 10000km. Since the odometer is only 4 digits plus the decimal, I got to see it roll back to 0000.0. Of course, I documented the occasion. Moments like that are ones that every man dreams of.

バイクの修理屋さん

One of the great things about riding a 50cc is the little amount of maintenance it requires. Fill up the oil every 1000km or so, keep an eye on the battery, and that's about it. Everyone in a while you do need to go get it checked out though, and that happened to me yesterday. I'm incredibly lucky to have a small motorcycle shop minutes from my house, and even more lucky that the owner is incredible.

Last week I started to notice that my bike was having trouble starting up. The same thing had happened about half a year ago and the problem was a worn out spark plug. Rather than wait and see if it would get as worse as it did last time, I rode over to the shop and told the man what was going on. Right there he gave my bike a full inspection, replacing the spark plug (which was on it's last legs as I had thought), tweaking the carburetor and brakes, and checking all my filters and fluids. 15 minutes after I had pulled in I was back out and riding like new. Total cost to me, 2000 yen. Now that is some good service.

Surprisingly

Japan is widely considered to be one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, and to a certain extent this is most definitely true. What might surprise you however, is how completely technologically inept a large number of people are with things like bank machines, self-service machines of any kind for that matter, and most shockingly, computers(!).

At my school, some teachers can barely even create a word document. Of course there are those who know how to work their way around the computer, but it's really only a handful. We recently had a worm virus infect a number of computers, mine included. I managed to clean mine up by myself in about 30 minutes, but there are still other teachers who are having troubles nearly a week later. An IT guy has been visiting my school for the past few days, and it looks like today he managed to finally get it all sorted out.

So while, it's true that Japan has some of the most technologically advanced items and facilities in the world, the average person's ability to comprehend/use this technology on the whole, seems to be rather lacking.

水泳大会

Yesterday, my city held it's first ever (annual) open swimming contest. The focus was on students from elementary to high school, but there was a general division that was open to any competitor. The general division was limited to the 50m events which was a bit disappointing, but since for the sake of time, each competitor was limited to two events, it probably was for the best. Not that it really mattered though.

When I arrived at the pool for warm ups I was given a program with all the events and competitors. I checked my two races to see what kind of competition I was up against. Lovely! Me and one other guy. My chances of winning now stood at a solid 50%. Then my competitor came into the change room, all 5 foot 6 and 72 years of him. Make that 100%.

But it wasn't about winning for either of us. Both he and I just wanted to get out there and see how we held up. First up was the 50 breaststroke. I forgot what stroke I was doing when I first jumped in and flutter kicked a couple times. At the turn I noticed the old guy wasn't that far behind and I picked up the pace for the last 25. Either I flew, he slowed down, or a bit of both, cause I finished 10 seconds in front of him. Still my time, 38.9 or so, was nothing spectacular, especially when I heard that one of the elementary school students I teach does a 40 second 50. She also happens to be in the Japan Junior Olympic program though, but that's another story.

The 50 free went pretty much the same way. I finished in 31.6 seconds. I was really hoping to just barely crack 30, but it wasn't meant to be. This time was also around the best time posted by the top elementary school student.

Considering I went in with no practice, having not swam competitively in 10 years, I think it went pretty well. I got a couple of nifty certificates too, and had the lovely support of some of my fellow English teachers who came to cheer me on. Also as I was leaving I heard one of the parents in the crowd remark "This was on heck of a competition huh? Even a foreigner and an old man came out to compete!"

Burgled

It appears that someone broke into my motorbike over the weekend. I was down in Kyoto over the weekend so I parked my bike Saturday afternoon at a local train station.

When I came back to the station Sunday night I noticed that my gas meter didn't rise and said empty. I knew I had plenty of gas, so I just thought that it didn't move because it was so cold at the time.

Monday morning it didn't move as well so I thought I would take it to the bike shop to get looked at, but as I was driving close to my house, suddenly the bike died, and I realized it really was out of gas. Luckily, I was close to a gas station, so I walked it over to fill up. That's when I noticed that someone had broken the lock. The gas cap was also gone and the tank was completely empty.

It's only a 5 litre tank and it couldn't have been more than half full at the time, so I can only wonder who steals 300 yen of gasoline?! Maybe they tried to steal the bike itself, but couldn't because of the lock I always have on it. If that's the case, I guess I got off light, but still now I have to go through a bunch of hassle with the police, my insurance company, and I have to bother my supervisor at the board of education to help me with it all. All for 300 yen of gas and a gas cap.

I'm thinking of trying to set up a sting Friday night, but I'm wondering what are the chances that they'll strike twice, and even if they're tempted, seeing the same bike in the same place, might seem a little fishy and scare them off. I still might give it a shot though, cause I'd really like to get this guy, and I'm sure the cracker-jack police force will spend little, if any time looking into such a small matter.