The Airlines Only Do Safety Demonstrations In English When I'm Aboard

First of all, my apologies for not posting anything yesterday.  I came home late and tried several times to get my pictures from my phone to my computer, but my internet was being weird and I couldn't get them there.  So I just didn't post.

That being said, I'm leaving tomorrow around 4pm for the Tokyo Big Site for a trade show, and won't be back until Sunday.  I think I'm going to take my computer, but that doesn't mean I'll necessarily have a chance to post again until I get back Sunday evening, so don't get too discouraged.

Anyway, today was another day of rolling plastic back and forth, so I'm just going to talk about yesterday.  Yesterday was the sort of day where I didn't have to do anything and I didn't feel like doing anything, so I didn't do anything...most of the day.  I did spend a few minutes in the morning with Mikey and the kids on Skype.  I did watch a few episodes of the Simpsons on Project Free TV.  Then I went for a bike ride, out the opposite direction from my long walk last weekend.  I really didn't discover much.  There were a lot more stores and houses, and some more beautiful views of the sea but I didn't want to brag.  But then, I rounded a corner and saw this:

Yes, those are beautiful Japanese cranes in a Japanese rice paddy in Japan.  It's as if the Japanese gods of Japan folded two perfect Japanese origami cranes out of Japanese crane meat and covered them in feathers, and then put them in a Japanese rice-paddy-diorama.  It was breathtaking, or so I thought.  Until I rounded a corner and saw this:

It's difficult to tell from a phone-camera photo, but it was pretty cloudy yesterday except for the shaft of light coming down out of the clouds onto this holy dome at the top of a mountain.

I could feel an irresistible force drawing me in the direction of the shrine.  It was as if the Japanese gods of Japan had crumpled and thrown away the crane diorama of my mind.  By the way, the corner I "rounded" from the crane scene was a 90-degree corner to my immediate right (clockwise).  The aforementioned rice paddy is immediately to the left of the white fence in this picture.

Needless to say, the irresistible force was not strong enough to drag me up the mountain against the wind on my bicycle, so I gave up and went home, pretty shortly after taking this picture.  But boy do I want to see that place.  Local legend tells that something big and white and both dome-shaped and pointy is up there.

One last thing I'd like to touch on is the complexity of "trash day."  I have a giant poster-sized chart that tells me how to divide my trash (recyclable plastic, recyclable metal, glass, combustible trash, non-combustible-non-recyclable trash, clothes, pillows/teddy bears, appliances, etc.).  Then I also have a 36-page book on how to put out the trash, accompanied by a separate poster-sized chart telling which day of the week each different type of trash is picked up and what kind of bag to put it in.  I was going to go through all of that, but then the company president told me to throw my apartment trash away at the company.  The only thing I have to separate out there is recyclable metal.  WHEW.

Now, look how cutely the Japanese package their bacon!