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My posts are getting a bit out of order again. Sorry!

Slava told me off on Friday for not blogging about him yet, so I guess I should do that now. Slava came down to NZ from Canada to show his lovely girlfriend Marie-Pascal (look I remember her name now!) around our beautiful nation, and of course to catch up with all the people he left behind here. It's been great having you over Slava and I hope your trip back has been less encumbered by smelly feet!

Slava as you all know is the author of the Factor programming language, which I made him present at one of our work Thursday pizza sessions. At least a few people showed up, which was nice. He's also a pretty good drinker, merrily swigging on my bottle of 42 Below last Saturday at our post-SHDH party. Last Friday we (this includes Marie-Pascal) we out on the town in Wellington to show him some Wellington nightlife. This included Southern Cross, Matterhorn, Vespa, Shooters (to break the pattern of decent places) and Attic (new place above Subnine on Edward St). Was a good night out.

So that brings me to this weekend, where I took a trip to Auckland for Planet Hardcore, an event that hasn't happened since around this time in 2005, when I last tripped up to Auckland with Eddie for it. This year we were lazy and flew, rather than last time when we drove. It just so happened Slava was in Auckland again just prior to flying home, and they had a car, so we got a ride from the airport on Friday night. Thanks for that guys :)  We also went out on the town in Auckland on Friday, but not before me trying to navigate from Ponsonby to the Viaduct Basin, but ending up walking down a squishy grass path next to a motorway that eventually ended us up at a dead-end naval base. Oops. A $12 taxi rescued us from that little situation though.

I'm not really up with the play on Auckland bars, but I knew from a friend of mine from Auckland that I should go to The Met on High St, so we tried that, but they wouldn't let us in because we looked "Too Cas". Slava thinks dressing up to go to town is gay, but I don't blame him. None of us were especially well dressed for the night out. So we didn't go to the Met. We ended up in a rather deserted bar called the Rose and Crown, listening to bad music while sucking through jugs of beer and some lovely shots. Eventually we headed over to Viaduct Basin for some clubbing, but were disappointed by the choices on offer. Next we were led by a lovely gay asian guy to a bar called Globe somewhere downtown, which was our final point of call for the evening. At around 4am we said our final goodbyes (Slava and Marie-Pascal were flying out on Saturday) and turned in for the night.

Of course we spent a fair bit of Saturday sleeping, but we did manage a massive walk while I tried to navigate us from downtown to Newmarket on foot by the longest route possible. I overshot Grafton and got us most of the way to Epsom by the time we consulted my in-phone GPS to get us back on the right track again. We eventually found Newmarket and located Space, the venue for Planet Hardcore that evening. We then caught The Link bus (in the wrong direction) back to town to get some more sleep before the big night out.

After waking up again, we decided we really wanted to eat Hell for dinner. Unfortunately Hell is in really stupid places in Auckland, so we had to walk all the way out to Vector Arena just to get our fix!

Having fed ourselves, it was time to head back to Newmarket, once again on the Link in the wrong direction (too easy to do) and to Space, which turned out to be a really kick-ass club. The theme for the party was eighties, so of course we turned up in the appropriate garb. The photos should be in my gallery sometime soon... (look under parties)

PH was absolutely awesome, but 8 hours of mayhem certainly took it out of me! It was nice to see how many people took the theme seriously! Some absolutely rad costumes out there!:)  I really should write all about how great each set was and blah blah blah, but I can't be bothered. If you care, just come talk to me about it.

Luckily we scored a free ride back into town from John (?) at 7am, and got into nice snuggly bed by 8 and slept through to about 1. We went and had some nice curry for lunch at the "authentic asian foodcourt" on Queen St, then had a 1 hour somewhat lukewarm spa on the roof of our backpackers (Base on Fort St) before wandering up to the IMAX theatre, only to discover that Harry Potter is the current IMAX movie. Screw that. We saw the new Fantastic Four movie, which was even cheesier than the first, if that's possible. Not too awful though.

The rest is pretty uneventful. We managed to fly back home without issue, despite the Qantas check-in lady telling me I'd already checked in somehow. Oh, and some lovely comedy on the plane when one of the flight attendants doing the safety demonstration put the lifejacket on inside out and then failed to find the light, whistle and inflation mouthpiece in time to the safety video. She looked a little embarrassed when she discovered what she'd done, but got a good laugh from some passengers :)

So now I'm safely home in bed back in slightly-colder Wellington. Quite an eventful weekend, huh? Hope yours was as exciting!

I was lucky enough to be in the pilot of SuperHappyDevHouse Aotearoa, held yesterday at Southern Cross in Wellington. We had a good time sitting around chatting, eating, drinking and listening to some lightning talks. I won't go into details because I'm sure other bloggers have covered it better, but it was definitely a fun day! Many thanks to the sponsors, Google, Microsoft, Mindscape, Actrix and Cafenet!

Various people's photos are available on Flickr here. I didn't take any myself I'm afraid.

Ok so I wouldn't have actually gone to see it if noone had asked, but it just so happened our flat decided to go see it. And it was good! Well what I mean is that it was exciting, loud, lots of explosions etc. As with most movies, the technology bugged me (and the fellow geeks of my flat). I saw serious product placement for Apple and HP in there. I mean really, the Pentagon uses Apple Cinema Displays... yeah... Let's use up all the taxpayers money.

Anyway, it gets one of those "go see" recommendations from me. Also learned of impending release of the Simpsons movie, I guess I'll be back in the cinema again soon enough...

Just a quick followup post. I'm home now. Nothing much new to report except the sunrise from the plane was beautiful (and the southern alps are quite pretty too in the morning), and it's bloody freezing in NZ! I have caught a cold in the space of 8 hours, and am shivering in my room.

Chris should be arriving on his flight from Sydney shortly, and I'll go pick him up.

That is all :)

From narita airport, 2007-06-25, 16:42
Grr damnit. Another long time without any word from me. Poor you guys. As usual, it hasn't been an uneventful time since the last post; quite the contrary.

I'm currently sitting "Bowlbowl" cafe at Narita Airport, about an hour away from getting back on the plane to Auckland. Some of you know I was supposed to fly back on Saturday evening, and fewer of you know that I missed that flight because I stupidly mixed up departure time vs check-in time. Oops. We were at the airport right on time at 6pm, but unfortunately the flight departed at 6:15pm, not 8pm as I somehow thought it was. It was kind of frustrating since the plane was still here with the doors open, but there was no way in hell we could make it through security and check in, then get to the gate in the 10 or so minutes we had. They close check in 30 minutes before departure here anyway. The other interesting thing is that Air New Zealand's staff all hop on the daily flight back to NZ, so if you miss the flight, there are actually no Air NZ staff here to assist you at all. It was JAL (Japan Airlines, an Air NZ partner) that was left with the task of telling us the bad news that there was nothing to be done.

Now I've missed flights before, but never an international one. A word of warning to those that haven't done this before: don't do it! In most cases you just have to buy another ticket, and in our case of wanting to get back home ASAP for work etc, tickets are NZ$4000 each, not exactly affordable. And they fully planned on charging us that. I had a stroke of luck that my travel agent (HRG New Zealand) simply rebooked me for this Monday flight free of charge (I still don't understand how that happened, but I suspect it's something to do with the Victoria University account that my tickets were booked under... Corporate muscle?). Unfortunately since Chris was booked on airmiles, he had no recourse whatsoever. His travel insurance told him he wasn't covered because it was my fault for telling him the wrong time, and his fault for not double-checking. Eek. We have some idea that maybe my travel insurance might pay for my mistake since the blame has been laid on me for it, but an initial conversation with them said I'd just have to place a claim and see.

So we had to get Chris on to a plane, right? And $4000 was sort-of a last-ditch thing to go for (hate you, Air NZ, help your customers out!). He managed to get a price of $2000 to fly to Hong Kong on JAL then manually transfer to Air NZ for a cheaper flight to Auckland, so that seemed like what he was going to do for a while. A stressful Saturday evening ensued where we were calling everyone we could (including on my mobile, which is gonna cost me a shitload) and generally tensions were pretty high. We stumbled, tired, back to Elliot's place in Shibuya to beg for a couple more days accomodation, which he granted us thankfully :) Cheers Elliot!! So at least we weren't gonna have to spend too much money on living. In fact I've survived since then on 7000 yen (about $70 ish NZ) including buying alcohol at duty-free prices at Narita. I just spend my last money on 700 yen udon and a 500 yen beer. Awesome. Anyway back to the story. On Sunday morning we got into gear to try to find the cheapest way to book last-minute travel to Auckland. Oh a tagent here: Chris separately booked himself back from Auckland to Wellington on Qantas using those super-cheap fares you can't change. For some unknown reason they cancelled his domestic flight (sending him an SMS, how nice of them!), which gave him a limited choice of being on another flight. Considering there was no way in hell he was going to catch a Sunday flight from Auckland to Wellington, this was a blessing. Unfortunately because he booked with super-cheap class tickets, he could only get on a replacement flight with super-cheap class seats available, or otherwise have to pay an upgrade fee (or get a partial refund). In the heat of the mement, he paid $200ish to upgrade to a completely date-movable seat so he could get back from Auckland whenever it was he got there, and provisionally rebooked for Wednesday...

But then magic happened. Going on advice from Jake (an Aussie we meet in Osaka - story comes later), I checked on Jetstar's prices, since he'd told us he had got ridiculously cheap tickets from Sydney to Osaka with them. Sure enough, having checked Korean Air, Singapore, Cathay Pacific, Qantas etc and all coming out with about $2000 to get Chris home, Jetstar would give him a last minute Monday booking to Sydney for about 50,000 yen (so $500?), which is awesome. Of course from Sydney you can fly direct to Wellington, negating the need for his AKL->WLG flight completely. And since  the SYD->WLG route is quite competitive, getting a ticket back from there costs bugger all. Air NZ would do it for about $350, but by a stroke of luck (and a lot of holding on the phone), Qantas rebooked Chris's domestic flight to come from Sydney instead for a $250 upgrade charge, probably our best bet. So we did that (cancelling the luckily unprocessed $200 upgrade to a movable domestic ticket that he requested earlier). Some may be thinking waiiit a mo, we're in Tokyo, Jetstar only flies out of Osaka. How does that work (for the uninitiated, Osaka is about 500km away). That's where our JR unlimited rail passes come into play (which we were starting to think were a waste of money). We can catch the Shinkansen (bullet trains) as much as we like for free, and they take only about 2 1/2 hours to get from Tokyo to Osaka. So having booked the Jetstar flight (and Qantas connection), Chris hopped back on the Shinkansen to Osaka to stay the night in the same cheap hotel we were in last week, then head out to the airport to hopefully catch that flight. And that's pretty much the flight-missing story, certainly the most exciting thing that's happened so far :)

Now, on to the back story!

So I've actually had a pretty good time in Japan. By far the hardest thing is being vegetarian, as the Japanese just totally don't get that concept. Down in Kyoto they actually do, since they have some pretty deep-rooted Buddhism there), but Tokyo is hopeless. Feeding myself has been the single-most stressful thing while I've been here, and has required a bit of sacrifice in order to get by. By that I mean I've had to give in to eating Bonito fish flakes and fish stock, since they're a component of pretty much any otherwise vegetarian dish here. Sometimes I wish I could just switch off vegetarianism for a couple of weeks, and I certainly thought I might do it on this trip, but after visiting the Tokyo fish markets and seeing the poor fish being killed and chopped up, and blood everywhere, I decided I really don't want to be eating that shit. For some reason I thought that eating fish was probably a less-big deal than eating meat, but I actually think that fish is much more gross now. In Japan especially, dishes are served that still look like fish, like tempura with the fish tail still sticking out of the batter (apparently a "handle" for eating it wish - ew!). So mm.

Second biggest stress was not speaking any Japanese. I feel incredibly rude not being able to deal with the locals properly. I didn't realise how much less of a tourist destination Japan is compared to Hong Kong, Italy and London (where I have also been on this holiday). Although most people here technically speak English, they're either too shy to, or don't speak it well enough to really use it. I wouldn't dream of trying to speak in English to anyone except those who were probably hired with English as a requirement, such as airport staff etc.

Anyway, Tokyo was fun. Flashing lights, pretty girls (although pretty crazy too), Fireworks and shopping. All good. And Akihabara is a pretty cool place for shopping for geeky thing (I mean computer geeky things here, not anime geeky so much). But Actually Japan has an amazing "geek" culture, surprisingly both for males and females. This may not come as much of a surprise to some that know Japan better than me, but I find it pretty uncanny. Yesterday we went to an Internet cafe in Shibuya which wasn't really so much an Internet cafe as a place for young Shibuyans to live, playing games, drinking unlimited slushies and coffee, and watching manga DVDs. Of course you can order pretty decent food there, and  I'm told they even have a shower. So you can actually live there, for a few hundred yen per hour. And they have chicks there. Go figure :)

I can't remember much of what I did in Tokyo during the first week here, but it involved a lot of walking and catching trains. Generally quite a lot of fun. One standout thing was the Odaiba emerging science museum, which is pretty darn awesome. Lots of the latest tech that the Japanese (and other Asian nationals) are working on is on show there. Oh and the night view from the government buildings is pretty awesome too! There should be photos in my gallery in not too long...

The nightlife in Tokyo is pretty cool. It's nice for me to discover one nation where trance music is still alive and well. Not only that, it seems it's almost a form of pop here. Last night I was wandering through a district of clothing stores, and a few of them were playing some pretty cool trance. Amazing. But back to nightlife! Our only proper night out in Tokyo was at Womb in Shibuya. It cost me 4000 yen to get in (ouch!) and drinks were in the 500-1000 yen range, yet the place was still packed. Becoming a VIP member for free (and submitting your fingerprint for quicker entry next time) does reduce prices a bit though. Womb has 4 floors of action. On the Friday I was there, downstairs was kinda downbeat house music, second floor (big room) was prog trance (quite boring though), 3rd floor is just a balcony over the second floor for smoking and drinking (as far as I could tell), and the top floor had some absolutely wicked DnB on. Those that know me know I'm not usually a DnB person, but that was where I spent most of the night. It was quite a cosy little floor, with an experience much like similar events at Sandwiches in Wgtn for those that know what I'm talking about. Good fun. Didn't do any drinking though, prices were just a little ridiculous.

So um. We did Fireworks on the Saturday after Womb down by the river somewhere just outside downtown Tokyo, with lots of Luke's friends, and Ryoko and her friend too. Fireworks are sold year-round here, and are actually pretty cheap. They have some rocket-like things, which were long ago banned in NZ. Of course we showed the japs why they banned them, doing stuff like strapping 50 rockets together and lighting them with a spark shower firework. Bang :)  The girls unfortunately weren't so impressed with that.

On Monday we set off for our down-south trip, taking the Shinkansen to Kyoto for our first stop-off. In Kyoto we had some trouble finding accommodation, which we hadn't arranged in advance. Turns out the English-speaking information centre for that kind of thing is on the 9th floor of the Kyoto station, hardly obvious :)  But we eventually got ourselves into the Econo-Inn, which was surprisingly close to downtown Kyoto. Our Western-style room was amazingly efficient. And by efficient I mean tiny, but liveable. Our bathroom was about the size of an aircraft bathroom, yet included a Japanese-style vertical bath and shower. Amazing.

Now Kyoto's somewhere special. Not only do they have quite a bit of vegetarian-safe food (yay!), they have some of the most awesome temples in the country, and some awesome shopping downtown. We spent a couple of days in Kyoto looking around, and had a great time. I did most of my shopping while there. For the second day, we hired bikes, surely the most efficient way to get through the trail of temples we needed to go see. It was a blazing hot day, so lots of ice cream and water were consumed too :)

After Kyoto we were bound to Nara for a day. We did Nara as a fleeting visit, catching the train from Kyoto early in the morning, doing Nara, then catching the train on to Osaka the same day! Nara has some more amazing temples, and also has 1200 or so deer roaming around in the park that consumes about half the city. We have some great videos of deer chasing me. Hint: don't put deer food in your pocket then attempt to run from them, you're apt to get antlered in the crotch :) In some ways Nara was my favourite place. The pace of life was nice and gentle, and it really is a beautiful place.

On to Osaka... Well, what is there to sayg Japan's third largest city is pretty big. As Lonely Planet says, parts of it look like the inside of a pinball machine. Sometimes I wonder if the japs need to regulate the use of flashing lights... We had some good food in Osaka though, home of the Okonomiyaki, a kind of savoury pancake/omelette cross that's actually pretty darn good. On Friday while wandering the streets looking for Grand Cafe (a club mentioned in Lonely Planet), we ran into Jake, an Aussie looking for someone to hit the town with. Chris didn't want to stay out past our hotel's midnight curfew, but I was keen to get some Osaka nightlife into my trip. We started out with some convenience store beers (really cheap), then went out to a small bar and had a few more 500 yen beers to get a good buzz going. On the advice of some locals in that bar, we headed in the general direction of the clubs, which was where we ran into an American girl who teaches English in Osaka, and a Kenyan girl who was visiting her. With them we headed to the upstairs floor of Grand Cafe (which is free entry) for some lightweight hiphop music and more beers. Following that, I headed with Jake to a bar down the road that was charging 1000 yen to get in, playing some pretty nice dark techno, but it was nearly empty. We got a free drink for our entry, so we downed that then left in search of a more populated place. That turned out to be the main (underground) floor of Grand Cafe, which was playing rather NZ-style club music, except with a live Japanese rapper who was pretty awful. Still, drinks and girls were great, and we spent about an hour there until it closed at about 5am (when trains start up again). I got back to the hotel at about 5:30, and it was time for us to go catch the Shinkansen to Tokyo to go home. In other words no sleep! So I wrote some postcards at the station in a drunken, half-awake state. Some of you may receive one.

Unfortunately, because we booked our shinkansen tickets back to Tokyo so last-minute, the only seats they had left were in a smoking carriage. If any of you ever go to Japan, you do NOT want to be put in a smoking carriage! I know we all remember when smoking was allowed in bars and you came home stinky, but we lived. Bars actually have reasonable air con (and here, where bars aren't smoke-free, they have super aircon), but trains have pathetic aircon. Also, sleeping while someone near you is smoking is pretty horrible. The air's hardly breathable. That was not an experience I'd like to repeat. Just to back up a bit, pretty much everyone in Japan smokes. Seems even my lovely Ryoko does on the odd occasion. Despite this, people are very courteous here and noone smokes on the street, despite it not being illegal so far as I can tell. There are special designated smoking posts around Tokyo (especially near stations), where the locals happily go, and they don't even throw their butts on the ground. That's quite nice isn't it? And of course they have high-tech solutions for indoor smoking, for example up the government building in Tokyo we discovered an indoor smoking post with a gigantic air purifier in the middle of it that just sucked the smoke straight out of the air. Anyway smoking is disgusting. Back on topic.

So back in Tokyo to take our flight back. We went out for lunch at Tapas Tapas, an Italian restaurant (go figure) with Luke, Elliot and his girlfriend. I had pizza for the first time since Italy, and it tasted pretty much like it does in Italy. And was vegetarian. But foreign food is cheating. Of course by this point it was about 2 or 3pm, and we should've been checking in at 4pm, and it's about an hour on the fastest train to get to Narita from downtown. Eek! But we happily toodled along, thinking check-in was at 6. Arriving at the airport to meet a "Final call" notice on the departure board was a bit of a shock, followed by being told we couldn't check in because the plane was closing its doors. The rest of the story I've already told :)

In the course of writing this post I've actually traversed three locations. I started writing it in the cafe, then moved to the departure lounge to continue, and now I'm sitting on the plane somewhere over a large expanse of ocean. It's very dark outside. Luckily this plane isn't awfully full (which makes charging Chris $4000 to get on it even more ridiculous), and I have a window seat with two empty seats next to me. Sweet! I can sleep across them if they don't tell me off. Unfortunately since I slept in till midday today by accident, I doubt I'll be tired for a while yet.

So am I sad to be going? Yes and no. I'm certainly missing Japan already, only 2 hours after I leave. I'm sort of glad I got an extra couple of days of relaxing in Tokyo. Last night Luke took me for a cruise around a couple of shopping areas and I picked up some green tea Kitkats to bring back. I feel bad for not buying enough presents... But Japan is really awesome and everyone should visit it at least. If you're planning on it, try not to be vegetarian and try to pick up some Japanese before you go; it'll help you immensely. If you can't avoid being vegetarian, you can survive. Check out Lonely Planet for some suggestions of places to go eat, but beware that you'll have to go out of your way to find food. I guess it's not that different from being a vege in NZ, it's all about where ya go :)

Sorry for going on so much, but I'm not gonna stop just yet. I have a few topics I've been meaning to discuss with my blog...

First up, the rainy season in Japan (Juneish). I was supposedly in Japan during the time when it rains all the time. Some websites say it's fairly consistently rainy basically every second day, although my tour guide says there's good years and bad years. I think we hit it on a good year. Of course this meant we were here during a time when not many tourists would dare come, which meant generally lines for touristy things were short and we saw rather few touristy-looking people, especially in Tokyo. Down in the Kansei region there were considerably more. White faces were more than one in 1000 down there :)  So rainy season isn't necessarily that scary. We've had temperatures between 20 and 30 pretty much the whole time, I even got sunburnt in Nara. It did rain a couple of days in Tokyo (and looked like it wanted to rain when I left today), and we got a bit poured on in Osaka the day we were there looking at the castle (ruined the photos really).

Next up, the vending machines everywhere. I remember reading on Luke's blog about how they're everywhere. He's right. I found it incredible at first that the same "brand" of machine was found sometimes only 20m down the road, but I figured out in Kyoto that the machines are often owned (or at least operated) by local shops, so I guess they're competing in a way. The machines sell everything from stuff that looks like water but tastes like liquid panadol to canned coffee (cold or hot, many varieties, some nice) and chilled jars of mini Kitkats. The machines take 1000 yen notes, which is handy, because you often want 100 yen coins for buying things, so a quick stop by a vending machine in the morning for a coffee can also set you up with most of the 100 yen coins you'll need for the day. Oh yeah, Japan's a cash society. I am returning with probably half a kilo of currency because of it. They really could do with eftpos here, but seems they're attempting to mimick the Hong Kong by implementing pinless cash proxcards (stored value cards). Recently they've managed to get all the trains to agree on the Suica card standard in Tokyo, so catching trains is dead easy for someone who doesn't understand how things work. Just buy a Suica, put lots of money on it, and you can catch the trains all day happily and easily. The ticket machines are crazy and annoying, and I still  haven't figured out how to discover how much you should be paying them without someone else telling you. Useless machines. Of course the JR unlimited rail pass that tourists can get (we only had ours for the week down south) are handy, but turns out they only cover JR lines, which won't always go where you want. Suica is the way to go in Tokyo. Unfortunately, other cities don't generally take Suica, so we still had to deal with the rotten ticket machines and fare adjustment terminals down south. Some shops around Tokyko (such as FamilyMart, a convenience store) are starting to accept Suica for purchases, as are some vending machines. Still Hong Kong's Octopus has been much more successful, but then again they've had it up and running since 1997, and they pushed it really hard. Both Octopus and Suica use Sony's PasiMo solution, so they're effectively the same thing.

Next topic.. Hm. Mobile phones! They have lots of them in Japan. Despite DoCoMo and Softbank (formerly Vodafone) both using UMTS networks, they don't generally use standard phones from the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola etc like we might. Each network instead commissions special models from the likes of Samsung, Kyocera and Pantech. Of course the Japanese use their phones a bit more than the average other-country dweller, so they're pretty much geared for a busy Japanese lifestyle. They have big screens (sometimes rotatable), mobile TV, lots of flashing lights, and cute animations. Oh and predictive text in hiragana, which is quite fancy (probably analogous to sentence completion on an English mobile, which probably wouldn't work too well). They've managed to integrate Suica into some of the mobiles, which is pretty cool. And it's not just a Suica sellotaped to the back; it's actually integrated into the phone's software for recharging it etc. Oh, and competition between the numerous companies is very tough. Everywhere you go there's girls in vinyl apparel and short skirts yelling at you to go with a particular network/store/phone model. How can you argue with that? Just pick the prettiest girl, and you get to spent 15 mins with her signing up. Score? That's how competition should be done. Okay okay I'm just kidding, but it's quite funny to me.

I think the final topic for now will be the honesty and politeness of Japanese people. I really wonder what they think when they leave their country and people don't bow to them or apologise profusely at any opportunity... They make me feel very rude by comparison, especially since I don't speak Japanese. I get the feeling I come across as pretty rude despite my best efforts, and I'm probably adding to their anti-gaijin sentiment. They're trying to restrict the number of gaijin coming into the country now to protect against crime etc, which is fair enough, because Japan doesn't really seem to have any. My tour guide says the biggest problem remaining is sexual abuse towards women, including rape. Generally speaking I felt very safe in Japan, and a random guy on the train in Kyoto even affirmed that I was in the safest country in the world (and commented that it was a Korean guy that did the Virginia Tech shootings, somehow relevant?)

I actually tested this by accidentally leaving my wallet in a subway station in Osaka with near NZ$300 worth of cash in it. Of course it was picked up, taken to the shop next to where I dropped it, and when I came back 20 minutes later very stressed, the smiley woman handed it back to me, contents intact. Awesome! Thank you Japan!

Hmm.. Ok one more thing. Rubbish bins. One thing I've noticed on this holiday in general is that public rubbish bins aren't very common. In New Zealand sometimes I complain that there aren't enough, because often I want to throw something out and there's nowhere to do it, but compared to Florence, Rome and Japanese cities, we have heaps. In Japan, rubbish is separated into cans, bottles, combustibles and other. The most reliable place to find a rubbish bin is next to a vending machine, which will have a bin type appropriate for the products in the machine. Yay. I find it incredible that these cities I've visited (not just in Japan) push for extreme cleanliness, yet don't give you bins. Somehow it works though, because all the cities I saw were pretty spotless. People don't litter. Who knows what they do with the rubbish. I ended up just stuffing it in my bag and throwing it out later. London in particular was strange, because the Tube had "Don't litter" signs everywhere, yet no tube station I met actually had a bin in any kind of useful place. Oh well.

Yeah that'll be it for now. There's so much to tell about this trip, and I still need to get around to blogging about Italy and London (and my wonderful Virgin Atlantic flight!).

Thanks for reading all this. If you have, you must be interested in some aspect of my holiday, so you should probably just talk to me to get the goss first hand without any censorship my blog posts may have ;)