Justin-Klein.com – Life of a Traveling Programmer

Hello again boys n’ girls, it’s time for your daily dose of Japan! But rather than taking my usual path of “first I explored here, then I explored there” I’m going to summarize just a few of the highlights of my week. Even when I don’t have time to take an entire day and trek out to an unexplored area, I like to try to see something new each and every day. This is not nearly as hard as you might think. In fact, it’s almost impossible not to. Which is a good thing, because the deal I made with myself is “I’ll only take a study break until I find something I’ve never seen before.” It usually takes about twelve and a half seconds.

Let me illustrate with a few examples. Continue reading »

Stone Lantern at Matsuo Taisha Shrine…I think

Due to the positive feedback I’ve been getting on this new photo layout deal, I’m obviously going to stick with it – I’ve also decided to just start putting photos to the left of my little rants (like this), as I often won’t have a story for every single photo, even though I may really like a particular one.

Buckets at Matsuo Taisha Shrine

Now onto the meat. The farther I progress with this kanji program, the harder it gets for me to keep up – but I’m (barely) hanging in there, at the moment I’m on number 833/2000, just 25 short of where I need to be to finish by my target date (yes, I DID make myself a schedule – when it’s this tight falling even a little behind would make my goal impossible to reach). Still, despite the difficulties I’m pretty pleased that I’ve actually managed to learn EIGHT HUNDRED kanji in two weeks. And better yet, the results are starting to show – last night I was able to fully understand a pregnancy warning on a can of beer. Useful stuff!

Construction workers returning from a job up Katsura Gawa, Arashiyama

Even so, I can’t resist exploring the city, no matter how much harder it makes keeping up. The weather has been getting noticeably nicer lately – more sunny days, warmer nights, more temptations to go out and have fun. So, three days ago I decided to take another little excursion to an area called Arashiyama (this picture).
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Noooooooo!!!! I just spent like an HOUR writing this post and then accidentally hit the “back” button on my browser, erasing the whole thing. Let’s see how much I can remember…once again…

So, after spending every day of the last week in my room studying Kanji, steam has officially started to shoot out of my ears. I REALLY want to learn the meanings of all 2,000 Joyo kanji before my buddies Ron and Jason come to visit on March 20th, but that means learning no less than 500 new characters per week (while reviewing all of the old ones so that I can retain those too).

Yet somehow I managed to stay on schedule this week, and as a personal reward I decided to take the day off and go visit Fushimi Inari shrine in southeastern Kyoto. And what a pleasant surprise! Just minutes before I was going to leave, Dylan IM’ed me to tell me that he and a bunch of his friends from YHM were also planning to go there today! So we met up and did some exploring together. Pictured left are a few of them doing what Gaijin do best in Japan: break rules and annoy Japanese people…

…I mean take pictures.
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