Symptoms of winter

During winter time you are experiencing either one of these three things (in my case, it is usually all three!):

1. Cold

2. Hunger

3. Sleepiness

Interestingly enough, they are all interrelated to each other. If you’re cold then you will most likely be sleepy because the body slows down and pulls all body heat to your vital organs to keep them going. You are also cold (or feel colder) because you are hungry and your body has nothing to burn for energy to keep you warm. But cold also makes you hungry faster because your body is works through the food faster to keep you warmer. And lastly, hunger makes you sleepy because you can’t keep your body moving anymore. The easiest thing to do is to slow down until you get your next meal. Neat.

To clarify, please refer to the graph below:

Ha ha, I know this has nothing to do with my previous rambling paragraph but that was what they were, just ramblings. However I thought this comic was hilarious because it is so true! Anyway, my brain isn’t working too well because my stomach is grumbling for more food. I already had dinner but obviously it wasn’t enough for my poor, cold body. Num num, eating during the winter will empty out my wallet if it keeps on like this!

P.S. Sorry for my crazy post!

The thing about thermal underwears…

Updated: 1/12/2008

When the weather turns cold, thermal underwear becomes the next best thing to sitting near a hot heater. They keep you warm and toasty in an otherwise ‘freezing-your-nuts-off’ weather. However as useful as they are, I do have a few complaints about them:

1. First of all, why are the only types of thermal underwear that you can get in Australia are the boring white ones with the little holey patterns in them? You know, the ones you get at Target or Kmart…so stylish!

2. This is something you don’t really consider while living in Sydney as it rarely gets cold enough for long johns but do you know how hard it is to fit them under tight pants?! It is already hard enough as it is to squeeze into them so imagine how much more difficult it becomes to put on pants when you have thick long johns underneath. Thermal underwear also have a tendency to bunch up in areas unless you hold them in place.

3. And if you do manage to pull on your pants, then you have to deal with the problem of your legs instantly looking fatter because of the extra layer. This may be more of a problem for girls because we care more. Ha ha! Furthermore, thermal undies also slightly limit your range of movements but that could just be me.

4. Lastly, just imagine if your putting the moves on your partner, oooooh! Things are getting hot and heavy, clothes go a-flying and then things come to screeching halt when you behold a lovely pair of what is essentially a full-legged pair of tighty-whities. Now what do you do? I was wondering what people in Siberia do as they are faced with this on a regular basis but I suppose it doesn’t matter as much because everyone is wearing one. But in Sydney…?

5. Updated: Trying to pee while wearing thermal underwear kind of sucks if you are a girl. You have to pull down so many layers and then this…and then that…well, you get the picture. It is just not fun!

Tip of the day: Pull on a pair of long socks over your long johns before putting on your pants. This helps hold the thermals in place or just buy skin-tight long johns.

Getting closer to Buddha

I went to Nara with Jeff and Peter during the long weekend and the most notable thing of that trip was me getting stuck in Buddha’s nostril. I kid you not.

Here is an excerpt from an email that I sent:

Went to Nara yesterday which is about 3 hours train ride from here. They have a giant Buddha statue there and other pretty temples/buildings/whatever (they start to look alike after the 10th one!). The pretty cool thing about the Buddha temple is hat one of the pillars has a hole at the base of it that is the size of the Buddha’s nostril. It’s a pretty big statue, probably bout three storeys high and so the nostril is big enough for a child to pass through…or a very determined me…who got stuck around her massive hips…and eventually had to be yanked out by Peter…but only after flailing her legs about and worrying whether they would have to call emergency services (I only thought about it fer a second!).

Get the picture? You don’t? Here is the video in all its embarrassing glory!

P.S. Did you note the flailing legs?

Money definitely makes things a lot more fun

If you come to Japan for a year, you better make sure you enough money saved up to enjoy your experiences here. One of the worse things to do while you are here is to have to limit yourself because you don’t have enough moolah. It means you can’t travel, go out for dinner or do any shopping (heaven forbid!). That is not too say you can’t come to study in Japan but it is a lot more enjoyable and easier if you did have some.

I worked hard for the previous two years before I came to Gifu knowing that I didn’t really want to limit myself if I wanted to do things. I haven’t really done anything outrageously expensive but I haven’t skimped on the things that I did do. For example, I spent about $500 for a week travelling between Hiroshima and Osaka and I’m about to blow another $500 to go to Sapporo’s snow festival in February. And it isn’t just about the big things either; I like going to an izakaya once in a while and usually dinners there will put you back around $30 per person or go out shopping every so often.

I do watch my spending a bit more carefully now since the economy is in recession but I still do the things that I really want to do. Money is there to be spent but you need to have the money there in the first place to spend. Like any Malaysian person would say, “no money, no talk!” In general, I spend about $700-$1000 a month not including rent or bills (but that is usually only another $200) depending on how much I go out and what I do that month. For the 10 months that you will spend in Gifu, you probably need at least $10,000 to get by comfortably.

Tip of the day: Your room gets cold during winter so you’ll most likely be turning the heating on every day. Factor this into your electricity bill. LOL!

Planning to go travelling outside of Japan?

Here is the scenario: I get 3 weeks winter holidays starting from the 23rd of December and for that duration, I want to go travelling outside of Japan (with how the economy as it is right now, it is actually more expensive to travel within Japan). I wanted to go to places where I would get more bang out of my poor abused Australian dollar so I chose Korea and Thailand (with a side trip to Malaysia).

Right, now what? If I was still living in Australia, the most obvious thing to do is to reach for my mouse, click a few buttons here and there on one of the numerous travel websites and presto, you got a couple flights and accommodation booked. Easy peasy! So here I was thinking, “Hey, Japan is a technologically-advanced country; they would have some super duper travel website that can handle everything.” Ha ha. No.

Well first of all, ideally it would help a lot if you could actually READ the stupid thing! I couldn’t but Peter could so he was doing all the looking and clicking. But even then it was a whole bunch of confused jibberish that didn’t really make any sense! Too make the long story short, you can’t book travel plans very easily. Hotels, no problem. Flights, some problem. Hotels and flights, major problems!

In the end, we ended up doing what all Japanese people do when they want to travel to a foreign country – we went to a travel agent. Oh no, don’t even get me started on that (but I will)! Every travel agent company usually has set packages for certain popular destinations like South Korea, Bangkok, Singapore, etc. It includes cheap (or so it seemed; more later) flights and accommodation and is for a set number of days. Too bad you need a PhD. to figure it out their travel package brochures! There were all sorts of colour-coded boxes with a billion different prices in another zillion small tables that needed a magnifying glass to read! Argh! Eventually I figured it out (頭がいいだけど…), chose the cheapest plan, talked to the agent, everything all hunky-dory, then was slapped with a massively expensive price after adding flight taxes, fees etc, of course. I went through all that trouble only to not book the stupid package in the end! I had a few choice words that I wanted to say, let me tell you.

So how did I book my trips eventually? What I should have done from the beginning: went to an international travel website like expedia.com, chose where I wanted to go, click here click there and paid for it. No mess, no fuss. Thank goodness for travel websites that actually work and make sense! Now I don’t mean to rant on and on about how ineffective some of Japan’s sites are (how else should I rant my rage and frustration) but seriously, they still have a long way to go before things get done efficiently without having to go through the middle man. Besides, consider this a lesson for future ICSers who want to travel when they have the opportunity. Don’t make the same silly mistake as I did!