Filled Under: event
Going North
Birds or human – aren’t they similar?
I’ve recently just moved place. I used to live next to uni until last Friday, but the plan to go overseas next month means we (me, and two other housemates) would have to pay empty rent for a couple of months if we stayed on. Plus to our surprise, the rent for next year also went up by $140, that’s around 25% increase from the current rent! My theory is that because of the financial crisis, people couldn’t buy properties, and can only rent instead. This also goes with people who lost their estates recently. Where are they going? Well, that’s obvious.
We started the process around Sunday. We scheduled the removalist to come on Wednesday morning, thinking that we should be finished packing by then. The plan was to move the stuff to a rented garage. Cleaners were scheduled on Friday morning, and we left Thursday to be empty so that in case we have anything we need to do before we move completely i.e. got more stuff to move, we can still do it then. We’ve got mail redirection set, and so we should be set, were we?
No way! The week was filled with sleepless nights. Monday was the eye opener – decluttering wasn’t easy especially if you have a time frame of two days. My estimation of "I think we’ll finish in a day or less" was wrong, so wrong that everytime I opened an unexplored section of the wardrobe that I sighed in despair. I didn’t realise how much stuff I have accumulated in the mere period of 10 months. Probably I’m a horder, it runs in the genes it seems.
So yes, as expected, Tuesday night was a long night/morning, ended with a visit to McDonald’s at 6 am. The breakkie didn’t symbolise completion of packing, but just enough packing for the removalists to move the big things like sofa, beds, dining table, etc. The removalists came early at 7 pm, but instead of two bulky guys, we’ve got the opposite. Not too bad with handling the boxes, but after moving the mattress and the sofa bed, they were pretty much exhausted. The move took 4.5 hours which comes with a substantial price tag, but I guess there is no way we could’ve done it ourselves. We did some more cleaning and managed to produce more boxes by Thursday, so we move more stuff to the garage >.<
Friday morning we carried a table top and shoe racks to the garage via bus. Because the goods took a fair bit of space, I hit several people in the process but thankfully they all can do with some ’sorries’. Cleaners came on time and we were too tired, all three of us sat down and dozed off on the corridor outside the apartment. Passerby would have found it weird, but we couldn’t care less. Not at that time anyway.
After we gathered some energy, we found chucking things out wasn’t an easy job either. Vinnies didn’t accept mattress and any electronics, therefore we have to carry it to the Salvos which was about a block away. The electronics were finally left on the side of the road in front of the apartment. This was all done using a Coles trolley which we pushed along from Randwick. It took a while to get the trolley from the supermarket to our place, but it was definitely worth the trouble.
I wondered about all those properties I’ve seen on inspection day. My apartment now looked like them. Bare with no personalities, no soul, like a head without face. The previous inhabitants must have gone through a lot of trouble to do the defacing. Amazed at the frequency of people moving in and out and how much suffering it might have caused them.
I left all windows ajar, I made sure no fire and no lights were on. I said goodbye to the place I used to call home. I shed some tears and I tried to move on. It was a nice place with lots of memories in it, four years to be exact (Minch has lived there all the way). I got the feeling again – the same feeling that I always get at the end of the year, just that this time it’s a little too early. Feeling of my life’s changing again and the hopelessness to resist it. Do you get that? I wish I get better at it, and be a stronger marty. More change is coming as I will graduate at the end of this year.
Migration finished around 6 pm on Friday. I hope this doesn’t become an annual event. Now to sore back and muscle pain.
The Land of The Rising Sun
I haven’t blogged for a while now, especially nothing much for this year. Part of the reason was because I went to Japan and US for a holiday. There could never be too much of a good thing, but sadly it had to end, and now I am back in Sydney – ready to begin 2008, or maybe still not yet…
Despite what I am doing now, the holiday was fulfilling. I went to two countries which I have never travelled to, and found cool observations that were totally different to what I was used to. Japan was for 10 days, and US for about 3 weeks. Not a bad time-waster activity eh? :p
Ja Pan
the soft-toys enjoying the view from shinkansen
It was a quirky country – for no matter how many times I’ve heard about Japan, I was utterly amazed at their idiosyncracy. So much to mention about this land; I don’t know where to start. To begin with, everywhere in Japan was very clean (as what you would’ve typically heard), but there weren’t many rubbish bins around! I could find one in front of the convenient stores (good old seven eleven) but most of the time my bag served another functionality as a waste pod.
One of the best part of staying in Sheraton was the heated toilet. I regularly spent quality time in the bathroom, and this feature has just brought it to a new level. I could spend ages on the seat, reading books or sometimes carrying squirtle (my laptop) to play around. The bowl came with a remote control that I could control even from outside the bathroom door. Dryer, bidet, different water pressure, you name it. It’s all there. The one in Shinagawa Sony Building was even better. It had a flushing sound button which, as the label suggests, triggers the controller to make a flushing sound. What for? That is what I still couldn’t figure out until now +_+
from the left: stop button, 2 buttons to clean the bum, bidet, dryer, then pressure controllers
Everything in Japan was well designed. The power plug had a automatic rotating cover to make sure that unused plug would be safely covered at all times. The ticket machine received the tickets whichever way I slid it through, no need to look for where the arrow is pointing. The sewer cover was beautifully decorated with sakura pattern and other patterns.
sewer cover in Nagoya-jo (see the castle in the middle?)
What made me realise is that it doesn’t take that much effort to do, but most of the time people don’t think about it. The tables in the restaurant have little ledges underneath the table top for ladies to put their bags on. It doesn’t take that long to attach those ledges, but it is rare for us to think about it that far. Most carpenters probably just stayed with the common way. They assume, if something is already mass-produced for a long time, it will be good enough to stick to the previous design. Design starts at the beginning not at the end; it’s not an afterthought ((http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2006/08/from_design_to_.html)). They need correct attitude to open new ways of thinking like the Japanese.
Another example of their prominence would be their train network. I imagine it would take at least 50 years for Sydney cityRail to achieve something equal to what Japan currently has. This was how complicated Tokyo’s train network – stations every 2-3 km allowing residents to go to every nooks and crannies in the area. JapanRail also had another network which include Shinkansen and other slower trains. Shinkansen could go as fast as 300 km/hr, really makes Sydney trains run like snails. In terms of schedule accuracy, the train would get there exactly to the minute (including inter-state ones). Ah life will be so easy in Japan, at least in terms of transportation.
But here is the quirkiness. Japanese are mostly slim and slender, thus I can hardly see any potential for the Biggest Loser to be popular there. Yet their most popular sport is Sumo. When it is in season, Sumo-chans go on match everyday, and Sumo-shows are broadcasted almost the entire afternoon. They are huge and fat. There is nothing muscular about them, except when they are fighting. The curtness of the match shows Sumo-chans immense power and control to triumph against their opponents in that split second. It reminds me of cockfights in Indo; feed the chucks so they would win. Exactly the same but definitely more addictive than watching cockfights. I still watched Sumo-chans until when I was in SF, thanks to NHK.
The Japanese were ridiculously polite. I was amazed at the guy that always stood outside the hotel lift and bowed to every guests entering and exiting the elevator. He was always smiling. The shuttle bus driver would say ‘Hai, doumo arigatou gozaimasu’ to every single person that went off the bus. That is about 20 times per run. Imagine he does 4 runs every hour, for at least 6 hours work: 6 x 4 x 20 = 480 ‘Hai, doumo arigatou gozaimasu’ per day! This guy was always smiling as well. Sometimes the politeness was just too much to bear and I wished they could be more like normal human being.
Conversation was not extremely easy though, even though I can speak a little bit of Nihon-go. I used to learn the lingo over 5 years in Indo, but the last time I touched the book was about 5 years ago. Hence I could hardly form a proper sentence at the beginning. I learned to use body language especially to the older people, so that they will correspondingly respond the same way (at least I could understand better then). Japanese will rarely respond in English no matter how much they understand them. Maybe because they consider it to be impolite to speak with broken english. Knowing Japanese was useful especially when I went outside Tokyo.
Japan is rich and stunning, travelling there was excellent. There was no need for tours and it was extremely safe. I felt a lot safer there than I do in Sydney. If you are looking for a place for a holiday, I would suggest this destination. Sometimes JetStar has some sales, like to go to Osaka for $380 one way :p I am tempted go again…
ps. I am less inclined to write about my US trip since you can easily see the US-culture (or the non-existence of culture) in the TV and the Net. There were nice scenic views and great buildings there, but other than that, it was mostly man-made within the last century (especially the sky in Julius Caesar Vegas).
APEC Week
A week of blessings for me. For others, especially those who have to travel pass the city, this week will be a peril. 21 world leaders come to Sydney to have a VERY BIG meeting. The results: so much chaos, so much publicity and so much fuss for nothing. It is amazing to hear how Bush was sorry about the disruption he caused and yet still decided to go mountain biking in St. Ives to even create more traffic jams. I mean, going on the limo with 20+ motorcade just for a 150m walk from Intercontinental Hotel to Australian leader’s Sydney office is an overkill alright. Seems like he knows his time is going to be up very soon, might as well produce more hatred towards him as much as he can.
I took this pic on Tue night in the city. Can you see the banana skin on top of the bin? It just shows how much plastic bags went to waste (pollution…) just for the big huu-haa 
no holes on the bin
Going back to my blessing week, I am “working” from home 
I did intend to work from home from Mon to Thu (Fri is a public holiday), but there were so many distraction and work stuff wasn’t as interesting as other things that I could do from home. I did manage to get something out for my manager, but not much. Other things that I do? Read papers for my assignment, which were quite interesting albeit they still put me to sleep after 20 mins of encounters. Set up my wiki, my flickr account, tidied up my blog (more plugins!), and read books – good books.
To say the least, I feel like I have managed to catch up with my uni work and that means a lot of stress taken out from me. I usually have that ongoing worry about things that I haven’t done as I’m afraid of getting bitten by them, but then I still didn’t end up doing anything either. Procrastination rules! 