The colorful wolf

Lately I'm beginning to realize how unique my time here in Japan is. Actually, I've known that for a while, but I"m starting to realize now how hard it's going to be for me to meet all the friends I've made here. We come from different places, we have one year of overlap and a very similar experience here, and then we go our separate ways again. Even the friends you treasure most have their own life, and they will go their own way. As it should be. If you stay here more than one year you are the only one not going on with your life, and the adventuring spirit is kind of gone. It's less strange now, it's just like traveling around Europe. It's not scary anymore. It's just life. Ofcourse I haven't decided much what to do with my life. I'm not regretting my decision to stay here at all; in fact I'm quite happy with it. I have 6 months to get a job somewhere in Holland or somewhere else in Japan. And if all else fails I will (try to) do a master in Holland. I'd prefer a job somewhere, though..

BUSY!!!! I'm extremely busy lately. At work it's a rush to get things finished before I go back to Holland. I'm involved in two huge things with a deadline. They both involve programming. I'm helping to make a program that evaluates our speech recognition models, and we keep on adding features and finding bugs. It started from a small and simple program, but now it's becoming a huge solution-for-everything. The other thing involves my own little language: Dutch. I'm working on a new speech corpus. The deadline is not before I leave, but I want to finish it before I go. Besides that, the guy who I'm working with on this will leave a couple of days before me and he's not coming back until next summer, so I will be without help for a while x_x

At home it's busy too. I'm trying my utmost best to be a little less lazy, so I can at least leave my room a bit clean before I go. And then there's Hokkaido. After my stay in Holland I'll go to Hokkaido for about 9 days with some pleasant Chinese people, and we still have a lot of planning to do. One day finished, 8 to go... o_0 This trip might be even more crazy than last year's, when I went to Kyoto together with Jose and Aaron, where we ended up with our bicycles on the highway being chased by yakuza. ... Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it was quite a crazy trip :)

Crap :X My suitcase is huge but it's already 10kg with only a couple of very small things put in. I don't think I"m going to be able to bring anything heavy home. I'll have to leave all my artbooks, all my Transformers, all my manga, and all my anime and just take the bare necessities. Meh.

I don't want a DSLR!! I think it's too bulky, huge and too expensive. My camera is rather crappy. I bought it exactly a year ago, just before the crazy trip to Kyoto. Now the screen has a white spot, the CCD has several dead pixels and there's scratches all over. I'm thinking about buying the new 10 megapixel compact camera by Canon, but maybe I should save some money.. I think I'll wait at least for the review at http://www.dpreview.com/.

Oh yes. I read 'The Little Prince' by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Thanks Kamil for lending it to me. I like it :) I wish I had a flower ^_^

(also, this is my 151st post in about one year, which makes it roughly one post every 2,5 days)