a perfect lover has no memory

I’m writing this on the second leg of a flight to Toronto from Tokyo.  I am doing so because a) the seat has a power outlet for my tablet PC, and b) because the in-flight entertainment is not so great.

On the first leg of the journey, I took my usual watch-as-many-movies-as-possible approach, but found two hiccups in that plan:

1. This month’s movie selections are not that great.  What I ended up watching: The Wolfman (C-), The Book of Eli (starts as a B+, drops to a D- in the last act), Percy Jackson & The Olympians (C), Dorian Grey (B), and the National Film Board’s Blackflies animated short (A+).
2. The system is goddamn annoying!  When you start playing any item over 10 minutes long, the system forces you to sit through about seven minutes of ads.  It’s bad enough that you can’t fast forward them like you can on other airlines, but you also can’t adjust the volume.  Which means that if the volume is at max (mine was) before you watch your first movie, the adverts blast your ears.

Rest of the flight:

Food = tolerable.

Cabin crew = friendly and nice.  Points deducted for not asking the guy sitting next to me to turn off his PSP during takeoff and landing.  The crew on the second leg did this, but he pulled it out again right after takeoff, while we were still climbing.

Okay, I’m bored of this now.  I will watch another bad movie.

No Comments | In: face to the world, your man in japan | tags: air canada, airplane, in-flight entertainment. | #

Air Canada flight 10 landed about 20 minutes late at Calgary, and those of us continuing onto Toronto on AC10 disembarked, went through customs (no matter how friendly I try to be, I always piss the Canadian customs guys off—this time it was answering “I live there” when asked what I was doing in Japan), picked up our bags, went through the final customs line and then checked-in again.  The woman at the connecting flights check-in booth then told me where to go:

The gate was B23, but the security gate was A, due to construction.  Her directions: go out the door, turn right, go up the escalator.  I went out the door, was forced to turn left due to a partition, looked right, saw no escalator, saw all the ‘connecting flights’ signs pointing left, saw an escalator on the left, and got fucking confused.

There were no airport information staff, and the Calgary whitehat volunteers were nowhere to be seen (there were three of them right when we got off the plane—not sure why, because there’s only one way to go from there).  I followed a couple of women I recognized from my flight, and managed to find an escalator waaaaayyyyyy down to the right eventually, which led me to the correct security gate.  I’m shocked that the non-native speakers made it to the connecting flight, but they did somehow.

I got to the security gate, got through without setting off any alarms—I was told by the guy in the army surplus store in London, England that my boots were hard-toe but not steel-toe.  He was wrong, and I set off the metal detector at Narita.

One thing about this kind of half-assed direct flight is that my itinerary made no mention of the boarding or departure time from Calgary.  So until I got to the gate, I had no idea how long I had to, well, get to the gate.  In the end, it was a good thing I didn’t stop to use a vending machine or anything, because we boarded almost right away.

No Comments | In: face to the world, your man in japan | tags: air canada, airplane, airport, calgary, flying, travel. | #

I am writing this on the airport bus.  I had about 5 hours of sleep last night, which is much more than I usually get the night before a flight.  Of course, today’s flight departs at 16:00, which gave me some wiggle room in the morning.

Not that I wasn’t tearing out the door at the last moment anyway.  Or would have been.

It was raining, and since I didn’t want to try to lug my bags down the three flights of stairs near my house in the pouring rain, I called a taxi.  I had been on time until I made this decision.  It took me 15 minutes to find a taxi number (I was looking on the internet while I should have been looking on the fridge) before I was able to call.

The  dispatch guy told me 7 minutes.  It took them almost 30 minutes.  When I called the cab company at 11:20, I had expected to be at the terminal by 12:50, on the bus by 12:05, and at the airport at 13:30, about 30 minutes later than my intended arrival.

I’ll be 15 minutes later than that, which doesn’t sound like much, but with Air Canada’s online check-in system rejecting me, I need to do a complete check-in.  And in my past experience, the Air Canada counter is always swarming with people by the two hour mark.  I didn’t end up having time to pack a lunch, so I also need to eat.

I would like to eat at the SUBWAY which is on the outside of the security area.  There aren’t really any good restaurants for invertebratarians like myself inside security, unless lunch is going to be a Starbucks frappuchino.  Given that I’m going to be eating Greek when I arrive in Toronto, that’s probably not the best plan.

I’m wearing as much natural fibre clothing as I can.  I’ve been watching a lot of Air Crash Investigations lately (probably not the best idea before an intercontinental flight), and I’ve decided that I don’t want my clothing to melt into my skin in the event of a fire.  So, my disintegrating O’Neils that I picked up years ago in Bangalore (cotton), and my new cotton cowboy shirt.  My undershirt is a cotton/poly blend, because I have no natural fibre T-shirts.  I’m wearing my combat boots, because I can’t fit them in my bags.  Normally, that’s a problem because I take my boots off at security to avoid getting frisked when the alarm goes off, but these are real combat boots this time, so they are hard-toed, but not steel-toed.  Or so I’ve been told…

Anyway, while I’m already missing my wife, I am looking forward to being in Toronto again, no matter how briefly, and seeing some old friends.

No Comments | In: face to the world, your man in japan | tags: air safety, Canada, japan, Narita, natural fibres, Subway, Toronto. | #

I am currently attempting to have my blog automatically update to Facebook.  This post is kind of a test.

Also, I’m using this to announce that I’ve done my best to blog the experience of buying a house in Japan (far from finished yet).

For the (very) few of you who have actually been reading this from the beginning, my apologies for the interruption.

You can see older posts by visiting http://squeeze-box.ca .

No Comments | In: face to the world, house hunting | tags: Buying a house in Japan, Facebook, house hunting, Real estate. | #

They’ve changed the stoplights at Meguro over the weekend. Now they’re the kind that count down.

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Went to see an art show at Higure 17-15 cas near Nippori station.  Cool stuff.

After the show, one of the few restaurants that was still open with a set deal was this Indian place close to the station called ‘Darjeeling Palace’.

The atmosphere is great.  It’s obviously been decorated with 100% authentic furniture probably shipped at great expense from India.  There’s a huge-screen TV at the front playing songs from Indian movies, and, unusually, the sound heard in the restaurant is actually coming from what we’re seeing on the screen.

And that’s where the fun stops.

Our water was brought in beautiful metal cups… that tasted like you were drinking out of an eaves trough.

Both Kumiko and I ordered the Shrimp curry set with lassi.

The lassi was the best part of it, and even that wasn’t anything to write home about, so I won’t.

The naan was also edible, but consisted of a smaller portion than we’re used to seeing in Japan.  Tastewise, not terrible, just not special.

The worst curry I’ve had in Japan tasted like dirty dishwater.  The curry at Darjeeling Palace was not the worst curry I’ve ever had: it only tasted like clean dishwater.  The shrimp in it were overcooked and lacked the texture that characterises that shellfish.  Which is weird, because since I moved to Japan and started eating shrimp again, I have never tasted anything like that.  Of course, taste is the wrong word, as they were utterly taste-less.

The curry itself could best be described as yellow.  It had a taste reminiscent of a sink full of hot water, half a stick of butter, and a squeeze of lemon.  It wasn’t bad as a dipping sauce of the anaemic naan bread, but on its own it was simply blech.

All in all, a disappointing lunch to an otherwise lovely afternoon looking at art and tooling around Nippori.

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Because this goes so well with the other video I posted… because this one is similar, except the humour is unintentional:

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…but if you don’t watch this, you are missing out.

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I just lost another umbrella. This time， it was the unusually large clear plastic one that I bought the other night when I had to walk from a distant station due to having missed my last train. It was raining，and Kumiko SMSed me saying I should take a cab… but I decided that an umbrella would be cheaper than a taxi.

Good clear plastic umbrellas are hard to find.

I was at the Ward office this AM， updating my Alien Registration Card to reflect my new Permanent Resident status，and I guess I got so excited to finally be a fully documented Permanent Resident that I just left the damn umbrella behind.

Oh well， it was still cheaper than a taxi.

Posted by Wordmobi

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It’s exciting! I actually have registered users! It’s uncredible! (And only two of the three are family members!)

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I’m not sure yet.

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