my family and i are on a tour in japan. we're visiting osaka, kobe, universal studios, kishu, uji, kyoto, and some other places. yesterday we arrived at the kansai airport in osaka, located on an artificial island in the middle of osaka bay (which is really pretty when you're driving away from the airport).. then we went to kobe.. then we went to rokko mountain, took the cable car to the top for a really nice view.. then we came to our hotel, the rihga royal hotel in sakai, osaka.. and today, we went to universal studios, which i knew was built in an old industrial area, but didn't know that it's built on top of a toxic waste dump. that concerns me. but anyway..
so far, japan has been awesome. exhausting, but awesome. u always hear that japanese people are so nice.. and it's true. they're so nice and obliging. u might've also heard that japan is very clean. it is, without a doubt, the cleanest place i've ever been. every public restroom has has a neutral or pleasant smell. the air is clean. roads are clean. people are clean. water is clean. food is clean. public transportation is clean. maybe i'm obsessing about the cleanliness cuz we were just in taiwan, and it is not clean there, people. air is gross, roads are gross, public transportation is gross (especially buses), buidlings are gross. man. well, corporate parts of taipei, like taipei 101, are not as gross.. actually, pretty nice. and danshui is another place that has some nicer parts. but for the most part, my experience in taiwan has been less than optimal. ok, maybe gross. whatever. japan, very nice. it's like, nice everywhere. granted, i'm basing all this on what i've seen in osaka and kobe.. but i'd be less enthusiastic about how nice everything is if i just saw (or smelled) something crappy.. but it has yet to happen. and it's not so much how nice things are, but more how prevalant the niceness is.
and the cleanliness is sort of weird, cuz i mean, we were at universal studios today, and you'd think there'd be some trash, some littering.. but i hardly saw any. like, are the workers just coming out every 10 minutes to pick up trash? or is it that japanese people don't really litter?
i've seen two fits since i've been here.
anyway.. another thing i noticed is that there are a ton of cute/attractive/hot japanese girls here. i think attractive japanese girls in japan outnumber attractive white girls in the states. they all seem to really care about how they look, or something. their makeup is almost always really flattering.. not overdone, kinda "gentle", and pretty. ALTHOUGH.. these girls seem to have a homogenized look.. like, they all look nice.. but they all sort of look the same.. or they all look nice for the same reasons. maybe it's cuz all asians look alike anyway, so the same style of hair, clothing, and makeup would work for all of them.
hmm, what else. our hotel is really nice.. rihga royal hotel sakai. the rooms are small (i've been told that all hotel rooms in japan are small. everything in japan is small, anyway), but there's lots of little niceties. like, when i got out of the shower, the whole mirror was fogged up.. except for a large square area of it, in front of the sink. what else.. there's a pants presser thing. and kimonos. and a teacup set. and "floor lights" on the bottom of each bedstand that u can turn on the middle of the night if u have to pee, and u can see where you're going. and what else. slippers. nice-smelling soap by shiseido, or whatever. a retractable clothesline that u can pull across the length of the bathtub. um.. a nice toilet that washes your butthole. um.. a little button by the door that u push, and it'll say "do not disturb" on the outside of the door. oh, and i'm rooming with some random guy who's on the tour.
some things that japan lacks: paper towels. i have yet to come across a bathroom with paper towels. this sort of sucks because it's f'ing cold here. like freezing cold. like wear-3-layers-plus-a-thermal cold. anyway, it's cold, and your hands get really cold. um.. what else. people say that there are no trashcans, but i haven't found that to be true. and our hotel bathroom lacks a fan. but i guess those are useless anyway. it just feels less stifling/humid when i hear the fan, or something. haha. hmm.. and.. oh, the porno comics.. maybe it's cuz we're on a tour, but i've only seen one place that sells them, and it was in a train station. but this place was nice and well lit, and clean, of course. but back to what japan lacks. hmm. oh, we were at universal studios today.. and i noticed that the kids are not little shits here. i appreciate that. hmm.. i guess i can't think of anything else that japan lacks. maybe i'll notice something by the end of the tour. oh, free internet. both hotels in taiwan had free internet. but the connection was slow and blah, and this connection is nice. and clean. and supported by matsushita, which i thought was interesting.
oh, despite the extreme cold.. japanese girls will still wear skirts.. sometimes really tiny skirts. with boots, but still, it's gotta be cold.
oh yeah. the food is really good. i've had japanese food in the states.. and eating food here, i almost forget that i'm in japan. just something i noticed. and we had ice cream and cheesecake that were made using the milk from kobe cows.. so good.
ok, i'll try to update later if i can get some internet.
i am in the office of my dad's friend. we just had dinner with him and his work group and this nice restaurant. two of his workers speak spanish, and since i speak spanish better than i speak taiwanese or chinese, i am speaking spanish with them. it's f'ing weird. and random. but kinda cool. cuz i would otherwise not be talking to them at all.. and not that i'm actually talking with them a lot or whatever.. but, it's a whole lot more than what i would be doing.
the other weird thing is that i am in their office.. like where they work every day.. and i'm working on my embedded controller programming homework. it's so weird! i am like in the middle of their every day work life, some guy from california who doesn't know them, who doesn't speak their language except for the extra language that they learned.. sitting like 5 feet from them, doing homework. man it is weird.
so, i'm in taiwan now, and even though this drupal site isn't live yet, i'm going to write in it anyway.
we are in an awesome hotel, called hotel national taichung. free internet!!! i don't think i've missed internet this much before. i think this case is "worse" than usual because i am in the middle of trying to figure out webhosting stuff.
on that subject, i am backing up my old movabletype from my free 1and1 host and copying it over to my new bigbluehost host. even though i've got the new movabletype setup on this server, i wanted to have the old one, too, and since i get unlimited mysql databases, it doesn't hurt. so i backed up the tables from the 1and1 database (can't backup the entire database as a whole.. tried importing it, got an error about creating a new database, and login and password, etc.), created a new database and user on bigbluehost, then imported the backed up tables to the new database. worked perfectly. and now i'm ftping my movabletype folder to my laptop, then uploading it to bigbluehost. then i gotta change the database settings so that movabletype reads the correct database (i.e., the "old" one that i just created). i'm hoping it works, cuz i haven't been able to do normal movabletype stuff in a while, ever since i tried figuring out all this new shit. well, we'll see.
maybe i'll write some stuff about taiwan later, after i've gotten some sleep. i've gotten like 3 hours of sleep in the past.. 36 hours.
drupal is more complicated than movabletype because it is really a content management system, whereas movabletype is specifically for blogs. i'm just trying this out on my new webhost, since i've got new setups for both drupal and movabletype.