Sapporo Snow Festival 2009

You can see some pretty awesome snow sculptures at the festival!  I got to go twice, once during the daytime on Saturday, then again on Tuesday evening with Alex, but a mix up in meeting and communications meant I didn’t meet Alex in the end, but still got to see a few of the sculptures all lit up…  The ice ones look much better by night!

Last Wednesday, a Public Holiday here in Japan, a Singaporean student at the language centre (Wan Jee) arranged for us to go to a Singaporean buffet-banquet at a hotel in Otaru.  It was delicious and we all ate far too much!  I had to leave slightly earlier than the others to prepare to give a speech on Friday morning.  The others went to the Otaru candle light festival in the evening.  My speech went well on Friday, it was all about electrocuting myself when I was little.  We have to do speeches each time we finish a section of the course in front of all of the students and teachers at the centre!

Then just the other day my internet began working!  The NTT (Japanese equivalent of BT) came and put in the line a couple of weeks ago, but it took Biglobe (my provider) a little longer to get it up and running.  The line is an optic fibre link to the exchange which promises a maximum ability of 100Mbps, but in reality it is giving 12-15Mbps downstream and almost as much upstream at the moment…  Which isn’t the 100Mbps, but still isn’t bad for a consistent connection speed.

The final bit of news is I am on Twitter!  If you are on twitter you can follow me at flat3d, I’d love to follow you too…  I’m building up my links (it’s all about the links…)
For those who aren’t or don’t know what it is, it is a bit like facebook’s status updates, but made viable.  In reality it seems to be a bit more like one huge chatroom, with a whole lot of conversations going on at once, the nice thing is it sort of tunes in your friends and tunes out everyone else, so you can follow conversations.  It’s also possible to use it to simply let people know what you are upto, which might sound pretty dull or dim, but I like the idea that I can communicate daily life to folk and friends at home.

The big surprise for me is that it is actually pretty big in Japan.  It seems to be filling (bridging?) a gap between the all out geekiness of IRC (internet chat) and the more mainstream social users of Mixi (sort of Japan’s answer to myspace or facebook…)  At the moment I am much to illiterate to make much use of it in Japanese, but as I learn more hopefully it will be a valuable resource in learning about the tech world/culture in Japan and even help me with studying the language!

I will sometime link it into the site here, a twitter updates jobby or something, but I am not sure the best way to do it yet, or even if it is actually worthwhile…  Some more thought required I guess…

Last night a group of us headed back to Singapore Zoo for the second half of the experience, the Night Safari!  This is something that I think more zoos should do, but it wouldn’t work so well in Belfast I think (too cold!).  The safari starts at 7pm, you go along and they have paths around the zoo dimly lit and some tours by tram around various areas.  Going to the zoo at night time opens the opportunity to see animals that normally don’t show their face during daylight hours, but only become active, or visible, at night.
Obviously the night safari isn’t really conducive to photographs so much and so the three meagre offerings below:

Night Safari

The real adventure, however, only began as we left the Zoo and began our journey home…  Going to the zoo we had taken a “direct” bus promising a 30 minute journey straight to the gates of the zoo.  After a lot of zig zagging, going in circles and taking out public railings, changing bus and catching a mini-van, the drivers finally got us to the zoo, only 45 minutes later than expected!  Quite unusual for Singapore…
On the return journey we sought to avoid the inconvenience of the direct bus by taking the indirect public bus/MRT (mass rapid transit) route back to IHQ.  The first bus worked well, but we arrived at the MRT station just after the last train had left and so we headed back to the bus stops to plan a route home, some of the elder folk and those laden with sleeping children took taxis back, but the rest of us were much more intrepid and sought to select a bus route to get us home.  With some expert map reading and clever interpretation of timetables, we got on the wrong bus and headed off to somewhere else.
After we realised we were on the wrong bus we didn’t get off…  Not us…  We asked the driver how to get home and he (along with some laughing) kindly told us where we should get off and get another bus back towards the road we are staying on.  We just made it and got that bus (now after midnight, the last bus on the route), and made it back to the vicinity of IHQ, with a shortish walk back home!

The night safari really was great though!

I arrived early on Monday morning, the first of the OCers (OC = Orientation Course) and have been looking around and getting to see a little bit of Singapore as I recover from jetlag and settle in.  The weather is hot and humid, it isn’t as hot as I thought it might be though.  High 20/low 30s most of the time, but it is pretty humid.  This is the rainy season, though there hadn’t been much rain on Monday or Tuesday.  Today is a different story, after a clearish morning there was a burst of thunder and the skies opened!

Singapore itself is interesting, the OMF IHQ seems to be at the swanky end of town, yesterday I headed up to Little India to see an electronics store and stepping off the train felt like stepping into a different country!  The most curious thing is that English is the common language, and signs, labels etc are all in English.  Which almost makes it feel as though it’s somewhere tropical and American, like Guam or Hawaii or somewhere, but the English is all British!  There are all kinds of hints to the colonial past as well…  My only experience of Asia really has been Japan, and so to arrive in Asia, go to a shop and be able to understand everything, be greeted in english and answer seems a bit weird!

So that’s about it really so far, it’s been quite uneventful, but the real stuff starts tomorrow!