Cory’s Japan Blog

Okay here are the pics. I didn’t get as many good pictures as I wanted considering the number of them I took. I attribute this mostly to not having my cable release with me, I was basically limited to 30 sec exposures or letting the camera decide the exposure on aperture mode. Still, some came out nicely. I have more that I’ll publish some day when I get bored and have no other pictures to show.

So I’m stuck here in a netcafe in Ikebukuro until tomorrow. I took a bunch of pictures tonight/last night around Ikebukuro and my apartment, some turned out kind of OK. I still feel weird walking around the city and setting up my tripod in the middle of the busiest few square KM that exist on the planet, but whatever.

Anyway I’ll post the pictures tomorrow when I get home.

In the meantime I noticed the CAD dropped big time again. I am going to try to take advantage of this when I start sending money back there. It’s at a pathetic 77cents per 100yen now.

One possibly interesting thing is that my roommate needs the house to host a friend or two today, because they’re all going to England together and leaving tomorrow. So I’m basically screwed and have to spend the night at a netcafe or something. So I think I’m going to go to Ikebukuro and take a ton of night pictures until I get too cold to stand it anymore, then I’ll go to a netcafe or something for the rest of the night. Bleh pain in the ass.

Nothing happening really so here’s some crappy pictures my friend took with my camera. My friend really sucks at photography. It’s too bad because we saw a nice looking black GTR parked near the convenience store we were just inside. Stupid photography challenged friend.

I went to momo paradise the other night which is an all you can eat sukiyaki place. Sukiyaki is basically like this, they put a big metal pan full of a soup stock on a burner built into the table. Also placed on the table are plates of thinly sliced beef and pork, and plates of vegetables, mushrooms, etc. as well as a bowl into which you put the contents of an egg and stir it up with your chopsticks.

You let the stock come to a boil, and then start adding the slices of meat and vegetables to the stock. The meat cooks in about 30 seconds, the veges take a bit longer. You pull what you want out of the pan and dip it into the raw egg mixture, then eat it like that. Very delicious. Guess if you’re a vegetarian you can’t eat this though.

Then I had dessert with my friend. For scale, that dessert glass was about the size of a large honeydew melon or a huge cabbage. It looks a hell of a lot smaller in the picture than it was.

Nothing going on today. Had an English lesson today with my favorite student, always fun talking with him.

One of my older students quit coming to lessons a few days ago and sent me a poorly written and somewhat angry sounding email. I’m not sure if it was meant to be angry or if he was just looking up words in his dictionary and picking angry/insulting words by accident which I think is more likely. Anyway, it’s too bad I won’t be getting money from him anymore, but in all honesty I hated teaching him. He had no motivation to learn and his English just plain sucked, despite that he was always asking to move to advanced topics even when he couldn’t understand the (easy) subject I was teaching him. Bah. Can’t please some people. Need to find another student to replace him.

In other news I got another wacky business idea that I think might work out pretty decently thanks to Japan Post’s fantastic prices and speedy delivery around the world. Once it’s in swing everyone that I know that reads this blog regularly will get a full sized sample. I finally solved my dillema of what product to sell - I found a product that’s made cheaply, without much labor, does not require much storage space, is not heavy, can be shipped for under $5 anywhere in the world and can be sourced anywhere. Took damn long enough. Anyway I’ll post more on that once it’s in swing. Sales on ebay and yahoo auctions Japan start next week. I might throw some stuff up on my store as well but we’ll see.

No pictures this time. I’m considering selling my D2X and Nikon lenses because

A) The kind of photography I do is mostly long exposures of architecture, I haven’t done that much photography requiring high speed action shots. For the studio that I have set up I could just as easily use a Large Format Camera with the same lighting I have now

B) That kind of architectural/wide angle night photography is best done with a Large Format film camera or tilt shift lenses for the built in perspective correction

C) Tilt shift lenses don’t work properly with my D2X (When the perspective correction is used the lens body hits the mirror box of the camera) and are too expensive, while a Large Format Camera would cost me about $200 to buy or build including a lens, plus I already have a tripod

D) Though I -almost- got some photographs I took published in a big magazine here, I’m not making any money from that camera which is a problem considering the price I paid for it. Unfortunately wedding photography is not a big business here; if I were in Canada I’d be doing weddings 24/7 but here it’s very  rare

Meh. Will think about it. If I do sell it I’ll replace it with a compact Olympus or Canon, and a large format 4×5 press camera or some other 4×5 or 8×11 camera. Great thing about Tokyo is we still have lots of very professional film labs around.

Even McDonalds is better in Japan! I got this glass for free today at McDonalds, awesome. They don’t do stuff like that anymore in Canada or the US. I’m going to go back later this week to get a blue one since my room mate recently broke 3 glasses by accident in the last few weeks, bleh. Not bad huh, pay $5 for a meal and get a pretty nice glass for free (Not plastic!)

I photoshopped one of my pics to look like it was a miniature scene. Not sure how good it looks but whatever.

More pics from Tokyo. Took these last night after a lesson. Had a bunch of lessons all in a row last night, didn’t finish till super late.

It’s not even 5:30pm yet and it’s almost pitch black out. Of course the fact the whole damn city is surrounded / covered in buildings that block out the sun at every hour except noon, but still, wtf.

In happy news the Bank of Japan decided to bail out the country by dumping the yen for other currencies. Basically this means the yen is getting weaker which means my money from abroad is getting stronger. Unfortunately I have to withdraw it all by tomorrow because my debit card for that account expires on November 1st, so I won’t be able to ride out the improving exchange rate much longer, but as it stands I’ll only lose about 20% instead of the 40% I was losing earlier this week/last week. Good! I can hardly believe I’m saying 82yen per dollar is a good rate. A year ago a dollar bought 120 yen!!