Quick Update

Heres something rare...a quick blog update. Its Monday, a rainy day off, and Amanda is away for a day trip to Kyoto to meet a school friend. Which means Im on my own here today to do the usual things...go to the gym, finally clean the bathroom and unclog the sink, do some internet surfing, listen to some music, play some super famicom, do some grocery shopping, watch the news, and finally update the blog. Have a great day!

Buckets of Rain

Last summer we had a normal rainy season in Japan. From late June to early July it rained about every other day, enough to make some plans cancelled but not enough to detract us from doing things.

This year the amount of rain were getting is truly ridiculous. As I write its still coming down in buckets and has been consistently for about the past month. I remember it being nice on Saturday afternoon while we were working...and thats the only time I remember it being nice recently. Even on Saturday night it rained with such a ferocity that it started flooding and mudslides in parts of Nagano.

Its too bad because this is usually an excellent time of year in Japan...the time of summer festivals. Almost every small community in Japan has some sort of summer festival in late July or early August, which usually includes some combination or all of the following: fireworks, big lanterns, parades, dances, lots of girls in yukatas (summer kimonos), and lots of traditional Japanese summer food like yaki soba (fried noodles), okonomiyaki (japanese cabbage pancake) and takoyaki (fried octopus balls).

We wanted to go to a big festival at Nagoya Port last Monday but it rained so hard that we had to forget the idea. Its shocking because last year on that very same weekend I remember going to the festival and it being beautiful weather. I also remember going to Utsumi Beach that day in the afternoon and it being basically the hottest and most humid day of my life up to that point...40 degrees and sweltering humidity. Now its just wet and sweaty.

Hopefully the rain doesnt follow us to Cambodia and Thailand where its rainy season there too.

The Killing Fields

Since Amanda and I are going to Cambodia next month and spend a few days in Phnom Penh, we decided to rent the 1984 movie The Killing Fields, about the American bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s and the subsequent Khmer Rouge revolution in the late 1970s.

If you are like me you have a passing knowledge of this conflict but not any in depth knowledge. After all, Cambodia is a tiny insignificant country in comparison to where other atrocities have taken place in, say, Asia and Eastern Europe in World War II or the Balkans and Iraq/Afghanistan in recent years.

After learning a bit more about the horrors of the rule under the Khmer Rouge I think I can say now that it was probably the worst genocide in modern human history. The regime put the clock back to year 0, transformed the country to an agrarian collective, brainwashed all children to believe they had no parents and only loyalty to the party, and most famously of all killed almost all the countries intellectuals after forcing them to work in the killing fields and then subsequently blugoning them to death and burying them in mass graves. You cant make stuff that terrible up, and it really has no equal. In Germany during World War II you had a regime try to eliminate a group of people that were for the majority foreigners...In Cambodia you had a regime try to eliminate its own people.

So yeah, it doesnt exactly make positive material for a movie or a fun summer trip. But the movie was excellent, many of you have probably seen it but if you havent its probably one of the best movies about war ive ever seen, and balances the seemingly endless amounts of movies that are produced about World War II and Vietnam.

Were still trying to decide whether to actually go visit the Killing Fields and the matching Torture Museum once we get to Phnom Penh...theyre generally among the only tourist sites in Phnom Penh. Ive already been to some pretty terrible places: Aushwitz, Dachau, and Hiroshima to name a few. But the image from the movie of the main character running away from the Khmer Rouge only to find himself in an abandoned killing field with nothing but skeletons and skulls was pretty morbid and maybe well just take their word for the horrors and skip it.

i me ipod

about 3 weeks ago i finally caved in and bought an ipod. i considered getting one for the longest time (maybe over a year if memory serves me correctly) but since i never had a computer i would never have a chance to take advantage of it. now since we have a computer i finally decided to take the plunge...and not just for the teeny weeny 2 gig nano sized one, im talking the gargantuan king of the ipods 60 gig model. its hard drive is 3 times the size of our new computer so i could basically try to fill the thing up for a year and not finish.

or so i thought. after 3 weeks of hard work transferring my fair sized cd collection ive already filled up 10 gigs. ive got about 10 more gigs to go, and after that maybe put some videos and pictures on the thing...i hope i never lose the thing because theres gonna be alot of stuff stored on there.

the actual machine is cool. very easy to use, good sound, no problems thus far.

and if anybody is interested to what ive been listening to recently, the following 12 groups/artists have released excellent albums since 2005 up till now: Band of Horses, Bloc Party, Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah, The Flaming Lips, Guster, Johnny Cash, Kayne West, My Morning Jacket, Pearl Jam, Sleater-Kinney, Spoon, and Sufjan Stevens. If you dont know some of these groups you should definately check them out (but who hasnt heard of Johnny Cash???)