This weekend I spent together with my good friend Tac, who is currently working as a English teacher in the city of Shimabara as part of the JET program. We went around the city, a nearby hot spring and Nagasaki city.

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The area is pretty remote so getting to required a Shinkansen, bus, ferry and train. Shimabara city is located a bit east of Nagasaki, on a peninsula near the centre of Kyushu island. But being so far from big cities it has a countryside charm which you can’t find in big cities like Tokyo or Osaka. Small roads, nature, quiet surroundings and beautiful old architecture. Also we went into a small cafe which served mochi, but that wasn’t the main feature, that place had a million cats! Maneki neko on shelves everywhere. You could buy any one of them and the biggest, and coolest one in my opinion, was 2000$. We also went to the nearby town of Unzen, which if famous for its hot springs (which you can see in the photos). And I managed to set a record, 28222 steps walked (22.3km), it was a looooong day.

Visiting the place was really nice, but it was much nicer to get to chat the whole day to a friend who understands you well. Thanks for showing me around and bearing with my long photography sessions Tac. It was an awesome trip. As I said, Shimabara is a beautiful place to visit for a day or two, but staying longer would be kinda boring. So try to make the most of your time there, have fun with the kids and look forward to traveling around in the future.

Oh! We also went to Nagasaki, where we saw the bombing museum, chinatown and a lot of temples. It was interesting to learn about what happened in Nagasaki in 1945, in addition to what I already knew and learned from Hiroshima.

I love doing these kind of small weekend trips, especially with friends. Too bad it is much harder to do that in Australia as everything is far and expensive. Thats why I plan to travel as much as I can while I am here, in Japan.

Photos:

Another day another typhoon warning. And believe it or not, this is normal in Japan. Typhoon VongFong has made landfall onto Kyuushu at 9am this morning and is slowly making its way towards the rest of Japan. This is the 19th typhoon to affect Japan this year. Trust me, thats a lot.

When it first made the news, they were saying that its the strongest this year, that its a super typhoon. The university even cancelled all the classes! Well it reached Kagoshima this morning and went right through us, but aside from a bit of wind and rain, it was a pretty normal day. When the eye of storm was right above the city, it was beautiful. The sun was shining brightly, there were no clouds, no wind, no rain. Then 30 minutes later it went back to being all cloudy and moist.

And as previously, we ask ourselves, why did they make such a big deal if it was barely any different from a rainy day? I guess after years of being ravaged by typhoons, the people of Japan take them much more serious now. Whats important is that we are ok, and are going back to uni tomorrow.

Cosplay, its an art of dressing up as a character from a TV series, movie, game or any other form of media. You get to pretend to be your favourite character, maybe act out a scene or two from the show/game.

My friends from anime@uts and JASS are doing this thing on Facebook where they talk about their cosplay experiences and tag other people to do it too. So I have been tagged, and instead of posting it on Facebook (ugh Facebook), I’m gonna talk about it here, on my blog.

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Cosplay description:

1. Anizawa Meito (Anime Tenchou) - the mascot for animate.co.jp and a side character from Lucky☆Star. (AnimeSydney christmas party 2012; Madoka Magika Movie 1,2 screening 2012, AnimeSydney christmas party 2013)
2. Accelerator - To Aru Majutsu no Index / Kagaku no Railgun  (Clubs day 2013, SMASH 2013)
3. Business Kyuubey - Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika (Madoka Magika movie 3 screening 2014, UTS O-Day 2014).
4. Haruka Nanase - Free! (every week at least twice at the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre)

Satisfied with:

• Anizawa Meito. I just really like the character and his clothes. Whenever he appears in Lucky Star he is awesome, genki and just plain crazy; and I think I am like that too sometimes, so he is perfect. The clothes were bought off eBay.
• Business Kyuubey was really good too. Getting the cosplay together was a bit hard and expensive as I purchased a real vest, shirt and pants. But it worked out and I won a prize.
• I only swim free… breaststroke and butterfly

Neutral thoughts:

• Accelerator. His cosplay wasn’t too hard to put together and it was rather fun to walk around SMASH with a walking stick. It was hard walking round with a wig the whole day though, that is the only thing I don’t like about cosplays and I stick to characters with black hair.

Most unsatisfactory: 

• None yet, pretty happy with all my cosplays so far.

Future:

• Nudist Beach - Kill La Kill, cause why not!
• Hoshi - Arakawa under the bridge, he is cool and easy to cosplay, just need a guitar.
• Araragi - Bakemonogatari, will only do if someone will cosplay as my Shinobu

So now that you have heard about my cosplaying history, thoughts and future. I would like to hear yours: Ruben, Clara.

Now I am heading to the city of Hiroshima, best known for its century old shrine and gate on the water (Miyajima Jinja) and of course the atomic bombing of 1945.

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Hiroshima is a beautiful city with wide roads and gorgeous green parks, but it wasn’t always like this. After the bombing on the 6th of August 1945, everything within a 4km radius was wiped out with only but a few buildings remaining. One of those is the now world heritage - the Atomic dome. We visited the park of peace and the museum of the bombing. Its such a horrible thing to happen to the innocent people.

Afterwards we took the city tram and the ferry to Miyajima island where the famous Miyajima shrine is located. Such pretty, much photo, wow.

And with this our traveling ended. It was fun, would definitely love to travel some more, but alas, money is not infinite and neither is time. Uni is drawing closer and so is the deadline for our next ICS assignment. But enough about the bad, instead enjoy the photos I took of Hiroshima:

Summer holidays are not over, and neither are my travels. This time Amy and I set on an adventure to venture into the mountains of Kumamoto prefecture, into a small town called Kurokawa onsen. It took us 3 hours to get there by bus from Kumamoto station; it was a long ride, but totally worth it.

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What is so special about this place you might ask? Well as the name implies, this is a hot spring town. Its full of of ryokans (Japanese style inns) and onsen (hot spring baths or spas). The town has retained most of its traditional look, there are no convenience stores or tall concrete buildings. Only small wooden inns and baths.

We spent 2 nights there and went to a some of the onsen. It was definitely worth the time and the money. This is a once in a lifetime experience. You get to completely immerse yourself into the surroundings and relax in the outdoor baths overlooking the river. The inn you stay in will provide you with a yukata (summer, less formal version of a Japanese kimono), which you can wear while walking around town. We also got a delicious Japanese style dinner at the inn both days we stayed, which included shabu-shabu, yakiniku, fish, miso, sashimi, and a lot of small things on the side.

There is also a mountain which you can walk on top of (2km walking trail), which has an amazing view of the Aso volcano range and the valley underneath it.

Overall it was a great experience and I would recommend everyone to try it out. Though the ryokans are a bit pricy, we ended up paying 33,000Yen each for the 2 night stay.

Also here are all the gorgeous photos from the trip:

Yesterday Apple announced the new generation iPhone and they had one more thing to say. The new iPhone comes in 2 models the iPhone6 and the 6+ with 4.7’ and 5.5’ screens respectively. They got a spec bump over the previous generation and a new slimmer design. Thats pretty much it. For features Apple introduced Pay, a service which will replace all your credit cards and allow you to pay with your iPhone using NFC. That’s awesome, but only available in the US for now.

Then came the big news, Apple announced their first wearable - the Watch. The smart watch field is something new to Apple and they decided that now would be the perfect time to try to make one. And they did, and its pretty. Read all about it on their website, they can describe it much better than I can.

Though I would like to say, I would like to buy both the phone and the watch, the iPhone 6 is not worth it without Pay and Australia doesn’t have it yet. And the watch is still in its first generation, coming out in Jan or Feb next year. Maybe its worth waiting for the iWatch 2, which will be thinner and better.

We all knew it was coming, but we probably have no idea how little know, and what to expect. I am of course talking about the September 9th Apple Keynote. Every year Apple has held a Keynote around this time in September to introduce their new hardware, more specifically new iPhones. We (by we I mean all the denizens of the internet and beyond) were all guessing that this year won’t be different. Oh boy, were we wrong. Well I can’t say for a fact yet, but come September 10th 2-4am Japan time, and I will be able to say that we were.

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Judging by pure speculation, rumors and leaks that we have gotten over the past months from various sources, we can assume that the new iPhone 6 will be debuted in 4 days time. Also there are rumors that Apples new wearable (iWatch as it is known among us) will be introduced as well. We knew this a few months ago, but now we have more. Apple send out invitations to this event, mentioning that it will be at a completely different venue from where they usually hold this event. Not only is this venue 3 times bigger, but it is also where Steve Jobs unveiled the first Macintosh and the first iMac. It has significance. Furthermore, they build a 3 story high structure right next to the venue building, and have strict security around it. If this is not suspicious, I don’t know what is. Lastly, Apple made a countdown till the Keynote on their website. They have never done this! They even used to ban people for live streaming events, but are now streaming the events themselves. Of course they have streamed them on their website before, but they never included a timer or written phrases like: “Wish we could say more” or “and so will a lot more”, these clearly indicate that the Keynote won’t just be iPhones. A close friend of Tim Cook has tweeted this:

Holy shit people, hang on to your hats, this is going to be a wild ride.

— Jim Dalrymple (@jdalrymple) August 28, 2014

They hyped this up, it better live up to our expectations.

Happy birthday Miku!! You have been with us for the past 7 years, singing amazing songs which we will remember forever. And of course good work with the concert yesterday. It was amazing!

This year was the second Magical Mirai, this year held in both Osaka and Tokyo. Together with Tac, Dale, and Mary we went to see Miku preform live on stage. But not only did we get to see an amazing performance, but there was also an exhibition of Vocaloid related art, goods, and other things.

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Even though we arrived at the event hall a good 3 hours before the start of the concert, the exhibition has been going on since morning and thus a number of items that we were interested in, were already sold out by the time we got to the shop. That was rather unfortunate, but that just goes to prove that same as in during comiket, there is a lot of people willing sacrifice their time for these goods.

After looking around and collecting all the free loot, we went in for the concert. Being tall helps a lot! I was able to see the stage without any kind of problems, even though we were in row 31. The opening song made me already super pumped as it was one of my favourite tunes the past year. And hearing and seeing Miku “live” fulfilled my dream.

I am really impressed in how much all the animations have improved. All the movements of the vocaloids were smooth and super realistic. And the costumes they wore were really cute.

Overall it was an amazing experience, that good that I would love to go again!

As we were not allowed to take photos or video during the show itself, all the photos in my album are of the exhibition and outside:

For the past 5 days I have been traveling around Korea. We visited the port and beach town of Busan, the capital Seoul and took a tour to visit the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at the border with North Korea.

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In Busan we visited a buddhist temple, which had a golden Buda and two of the cities famous beaches which gave us a glimpse of the night life of Korean people.

After taking the bullet train to Seoul and walking around for a bit, it was evident that we have arrived in the capital of the mighty country known as South Korea. The streets are wide, there are much more people around, more cars, and it was much cleaner then Busan. We took a day tour to the DMZ and even crossed the border into North Korea (for 10 minutes) at the JSA. I was surprised to see just how string the influence of the US army is on the border of the two Koreas. There is a big US military base and they have over 100 soldiers stationed at the border.

Returning back to Seoul and spending the days just walking around the city, visiting a number of tourist spots and universities, we got to see just how the Korean people live, and I can say it is definitely worse than Japan. Much better than any other asian country I have been to, but definitely nowhere near the quality of life that Japan has to offer. I’m talking about the cleanliness on the streets, the attitude of the people, the convenience of transport (the metro system is ok, but our tickets wouldn’t work every single time, cause the IC card reader had errors), and of course the way they drive. If I had to compare Seoul to any other city I have been to, I would say it is very similar to Kiev. There are old and dirty parts of the city, there are amazing and expensive new ones, there are cultural districts, there are shopping districts, people aren’t that friendly, but they were helpful at times.

Overall the trip was full of experiences and Korea is definitely an interesting country, but I doubt I will be ever coming to this side of Korea again. But North Korea is on my radar as a future travel destination.

Here are photos of this trip:

Being a developer, you are the only person on the team who has any idea of how things are actually done and the boundaries. Watch this skit and see for yourself just how ridiculous company meetings can get.