Wally Nes’ Blog

As some of you may have noticed there hasn’t been much going on with this blog in a while.

Due to certain circumstances I have had little to talk about lately. You see my life is currently built up around school and I can hardly write an interesting blog-entry regarding my school life now can I?

Oh, there is stuff outside of school.
There is work, but I don’t think you want to hear about that either
There is the D&D campaign but that’d take too much background info for you to understand the awesomeness of my new Warlock. And then I’d just be bragging without telling you much of interest anyway.
There is WoW and the new WotLK expansion which I don’t get to play as much as I would like. Damn school!
There are the tales of my housemates, but one of em stopped speaking to me. I have yet to be told why. So not much of interest there.
My friends can write their own damn blogs.

Oh, but I’ve made some trips to Lille. This has been discussed before but now I have accompanying pictures.
Lille is the city where the Fair Maiden lives with her family. I really should see if I can’t make pictures of them so I can show you guys. For now I will have to do with some pictures of the city. I apologize for most of the pictures were made on my mobile and are significantly fuzzy.

The quaint little houses are of Lille
The local von Trap family
The eternal fascination of churches with the phallus. OK, that is a bit of a cheap dig I suppose. They built a church with the south face made of see through marble with a glass outline to make that beautiful picture. Marble is partly see through when exposed to direct sunlight. The one drawback to this design, as most Lillians?, will point out is that there is very little direct sunlight in Lille. But it makes for a pretty view anyway.
The presence of a technical university with a Mathematical department can be seen in the local produce
Unfortunately for me the Lillians have been inspired in part of their infrastructure by the Japanese.
Some of the locals are very into alternative forms of house isolation with good effects I think. This building is located next to an small botanical garden building built in the honour of some guy who gave a lot of money to the city upon his death with as only small snag: Build a building in my honour with at least some of that money. With a full glass dome that building is quite nice to look at. Even though it has been unused for some time.
The local stalkers. Eh, I didn’t make that picture. And look at her next picture. Do I feel at ease????? NO!
And worthy of mention is a local cafe that gives real Hot Chocolate. Just for background information what most of you have always been drinking is Hot Cocoa. Hot Chocolate is made from real molten chocolate bar where as Cocoa is available in cardboard packages and made from powders: The result is far richer, far more fat, more yummie and far more likely to result in stupid pictures being taken of you.

Should you plan a visit to this city there are many many things to see. I didn’t even directly link the opera house, the churches, the chamber of commerce building (That’ll give me an excuse to post again about this place if the drought of subjects persists). However it isn’t all good news

DISCLAIMER: The local youth gangs are vicious.

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Quote of the day:

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job

- Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

I wanted to write this post 1.5 months ago but got distracted.

Backstory: Sinterklaas! For those of you that are not of Dutch origin that have not been following this blog may wonder what this entails.
Well, If you look at the Christian name for December 5th you’ll see that it is actually called St. Nicholas. This is because there was actually once upon a time a Bishop who was raised to Saint status by this name. Nicholas of Myra worked for many years to better the lives of people that lived in what is now known as Antalya in 3rd century roman empire.

Yadda yadda yadda. He gave gifts. And as a child in Holland you are introduced to this mythical figure giving you gifts. Who the hell cares about he was a Greek born bishop in Turkey like a million years ago.

So . . . This guy comes from spain and gives pressies to the kids! That’s all the back story you are interested in unless you study history or smthg. Gifts!

Oh. And Candy!
Sinterklaas comes with his own specific candy. Kruidnoten, Chocolate-letters, Speculaas-dolls.
Sinterklaas is like a kids dream come true.
So I got home from Japan on September 1st. 2nd, I moved. 3rd I went shopping.

I came across this:

I am actually not sure what Yoda is doing there. But there were kruidnoten.

3! months before the actual thing. And I only noticed it then because I didn’t enter a Dutch store before (not being on the same continent and all).

Over the years I’ve heard many people argue about finding Christmas decorations earlier and earlier in stores (We came across some in Lille this weekend) and they’ve started selling these Sinterklaas-specific candies in the summertime(though app we didn’t have one of those this year), 3 months before the start of it.

We had to ban kids from bringing Sinterklaas candy into schools (Dutch only, sorry I doubt this made headlines in any other language) 3 months before the holiday is here.

And euhm . . .

Yeah, all around sillyness

And Yummieness

Damn those things taste good.

Next year. Chocolate bunnies in January!

Well, Fingers crossed

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Quote of the day:

There are 3 set ways of going bankrupt. Gambling, Women and Engineers. The first two are fickle but will at least give you pleasure. The last one is the only sure way to reach bankruptcy while giving you very little physical pleasure. Congratulations, you have now joined this elite group

- Some guy speeching at Raph’s school to the graduate students

For those of you that keep a close eye on this blog will notice that the “currently reading” section changes. A lot.
This is due to the fact that I have 2.5-3 hours everyday to read.

The longest entry that I had in that list was Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot, which managed to stay in that list as long as it did because I read it in Japanese.

Recently, the list has been filled with “Soon, I will be Invincable“, “Les Misérables” and I am currently working through “The children of Húrin“.

The first book is a tale told from the two perspectives of 1. The Ultimate SuperVillain and 2. A rooky in a Superteam. This is, purposely, written with a sense of humour and tours along quite a few of the cliches of the Hero vs Villain realm. It was a fun and enjoyable read.

I interrupted Les Miserables for that book as I had the unabridged version spanning some 1500 pages and a book of that size begs for interruption after a while(I did bridge quite a few pages myself though). So returning to this universe of 18xx france after this cliche side-track I come across Marius throwing his life away on the Barricades because Cosette was taken away from him (So badly taken away from him in fact that she sent him her new address). Jean Valjean breaking into the barricades and face certain death to drag this boy out and see him restored to his daughter. Jean Valjean sacrificing himself for things long dead and buried and removing himself from his daughter’s life. A daughter so pretty but so witless she does not notice her own father distancing himself and thinks nothing of him leaving her at the day of her wedding. The story which comes to an end when Marius finds out Jean was indeed not the bad guy, something he could have told him easily had Jean wanted/Marius asked but nooooooo. The revalation is just in time to watch Jean die of a broken heart.

I am now going through the last pages of a story roughly written by J.R.R. Tolkien but edited and published under the name of his son. The main character has so far managed to get 3 big groups of people (humans, elves and assorted) killed due to his good intentions, noble heart but foolhardy stubbornness.
Having a safe haven to return to he does however not do this due to . . . something or other. Really, you would expect the character who remonstrates himself 6 times that he should have listened to the wise elves to return to the wise elves and take his place at the side of the wise elf-king but no. He heads to the last band of humans living in freedom and tries to hang up his sword and live in obsqurity. His mother and sister seek out to find him, his sister falls prey to a dragon who wipes her memory and she ends up falling in love with her brother, marrying him and getting pregnant of his child. When the great dragon comes to finish of this last band of humans in Morgoth’s domain he comes again upon the main character, whom he had let live after the last time he burned/ate his group of friends to go forth and despair. In the epic struggle that consisted of main character lying in wait on the dragon’s path and thrusting a sword upwards (he learns, at least) and then catching an eyefull of hate from a dying brainwashing dragon while he gloats (OK, maybe not). Sisterdear ofcourse cannot contain herself and sets out to find her man. The dragon, on his last breath, tells her who she is and the combination of her seemingly dead lover/husband/brother and the obomination in her womb she throws herself in a raging river and dies.
In what one might expect from how I described things above the main character is not actually dead and I expect that when I read on on the way home I will find him killing himself off out of some sense of honour.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I liked all 3 books. It’s just that . . . . MAN, can we do with a few less horribly simplified characters and some less cliches?

I am not an unread man, and I oversimplify the events taken place in the books somewhat in order to write it in this post (Les mis is 1500 pages, how long do you think an accurate interpretation would be). I am aware of the roles filled by both Cosette and Nienor and why they were painted that way but . . . Damn.

I will shorty return to a work of Neil Gayman. An author I only recently discovered though I read his Manga series “Sandman” 9 years ago and loved it.

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Quote of the day:

10 Spanish and 10 Italians in Vulcanus in Japan 2008. I pity Nakamura-san should she stick around at the centre.

- Wally

I had intended to write something about this myself

I truely had.

I required some pictures. But I didn’t take any so I had to wait for the other guys to put them online.

Now I found some pictures. And I concluded . . . there is no reason for me to write anything except link this.

Yes, it is in Italian. No, you can’t understand it.

But just look at those pictures will ya. Could we write anything that would even approach explaning this?

Now, if you are in Japan as long as I have (a whooping 6 months now) you start to get desesitized by some things. This, I fear, has been reflected in my posts. To show you some of the things I have become accustomed to:

My morning television:

and

Just the thing you need to get you going. The ninja thing was a special btw, normally they get trainconducters/secretaries/streetsweepers to line up and help them. There was also a cover on a comedy show with maid-bar workers, but that one is X-rated. Sorry

Now, surprisingly: going to work here is much the same as it is back home, except that people resemble sardines more than back home. At work however:

OK, mass-morning excercises. Nothing weird there. I work in a company of 6000 Japanese people, you have to stretch before . . . sitting behind a computer.

After a hard days work you have to eat. This can be done by simply pointing at a bit in the menu, hoping for the best and shoveling it in. However, if you want to be a bit more discrete about it, here is a little instructional video

After food, there is Karaoke (well, this IS Japan)

Well, I have to admit that most Karaoke is less lalalala and more lyrics

Well, that was . . . .not Japanese. We can do better than that, all together now

Oh dear god, Can’t trust Gaijin to do anything right. That’s . . .That’s . . . French! You can’t sing French in Japanese Karaoke bars.
It’s supposed to go a little something like this:

And for the real hard-core:

After having screamed our throats hoarse (alcohol, bad sushi and no vocal training usually has this effect) we head to the club

One listenes to this, and similars for a while before proceeding home. If one is not totally exhausted (or drunk) one could have a browse online for those funny videos. Except that here, they seem to be a bit different

Anyway, all this funny stuff should have no influence on a healthy, sober European.


So, this is me, a healthy and sober European bidding thee: “Goodnight”

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Quote of the day:

You want to do what? HAHAHAHAH, I’m dating a 16 year old Japanese girl

- Raphaelle in reference to the Purikura suggestion

So, I woke up this morning and I looked this in the face.

Now, this sort of thing happens to me more often, early morning, not quite awake. So I move to the window outside my door.

This.

OK, this is new.

I got to work late today. 3 guesses why.

1.

2.

3.

OK, so I got to work late because I overslept. But the weather didn’t help either.

Anyway, I didn’t type all of this up to bore you with such mondane things. That was what the last post was for.

Tuesday I had my kyuudou training. (That’s Japanese Archery for those of us who haven’t taken a fancy to the language). And at the end of the training I did some actual shooting. Weird as it may seem, archery practice does not actually consist of non-stop shooting. (I was surprised). Now, you shoot per 4 arrows, and as it happened my last 4 arrows had 3 hit the mark. This prompted my sensei to invite me to the tournament the next day.

Well Gee, lemme think. I had plans for . . .

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELL YEAH

OK, so let me explain how this works.
1st, you set up your target, that’s that thing over there. This is it at full zoom (10X optical, 380 mm equivalent).
Then you put on a pretty dress, and stand all bad-ass. Like only a man in a skirt can do. The motions on the following pictures ensui.

This should see the arrow to your itsy pitsy target. Some people can’t hit the target straight away, so they cheat. Or . . . well, I don’t know what the heating of the arrow head does for your game if it does not need to pass through armor. But it is something you can do apperantly.

Now, Japan wouldn’t be Japan if they didn’t make a big ceremony out of it. In this case a lady who turned 70 (and is still shooting) did the honours.

After that came the time that us mere mortals were allowed to line up. Besides having to go through motions to shoot the damn arrow already, you also have to go through specific motions to get to and from the spot in the first place. So they put me in the first batch to watch me stumble into people. (OK, that was probably not their intention, but it felt awkward anyway) Once I got to my spot (without stumbling into people) I made a fine show of myself.

I didn’t hit a single thing. Oh, and I forgot to put on the dress too. Of course, in the first round 2 of the contestants hit something, so it wasn’t so bad. I managed to remove myself from the active area without bumping into anyone again. Which was good considering I’d hooked my bow into someone elses during a reload and I’d made enough of an ass of myself already.

Anyway, 4 arrows per session, 5 sessions total, and I wasn’t doing as well as I had hoped. Especially not because I started my kyuudou career with this. But at least I looked good doing it. Not quite as good as this guy of course. And he looked quite skilled (he won). I am pretty sure all of them managed to get through the competition without having to address things like this. Ouch.

So, I had a fun time shooting at things. Small little things, far away. (that didn’t shoot back!) and at the end this happened. Because I had actually come in 5th? Really? My name is ワリー in Japanese btw. That’s my tag above that red 5. Holy crap.

An unexpected competition, and an unexpected result.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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退職のためにこのカードを書くことついて聞いて、何かを書くことを考えました

その結果、「じゃあまた月曜日に会いましょう」と決めました

– Written on a retirement card by Wally

After being asked to write on this card I had to think for a moment what I would write. I settled for “See you on monday”