The colorful wolf

Eerst de belangrijke dingen: volgende week gaan Kamil en ik op fietsvakantie. We zijn van plan om geld in te zamelen voor een goed doel. We zoeken sponsors die voor elke kilometer die wij rijden 20 yen (ongeveer 0,13 EUro) willen doneren aan een goed doel (we weten nog niet welke). We verwachten ongeveer 600km te rijden. Lees meer hierover op Kamil's blog in het Engels.
Je kan mee doen door een reactie achter te laten op deze post, of door mij een emailtje te sturen. Dank u :)

First things first: rather than reading this boring post, please take a look at Kamil's blog first.
He proposes to raise money for charity by using our bicycle trip. The idea is that for every kilometer we ride, you will pay us 20 yen (about 0,13 Euro). In the end we will donate the amount to a charity, we don't know which one yet. We're expecting to ride about 600km. Please participate! You can respond to this post or just send me an email if you'd like to join.

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There's a lot of things I should do more often: cleaning my room, washing my clothes, studying a foreign language, calling home, and finally, blogging.

Every day something interesting happens in my life, and there's almost never I day when I have nothing to report on my blog. Yet I update my blog on average twice a week. SO why? Is it because I iz busy? Not really. I think I can find the time every day to blog if I really want to. However, I don't want to feel like it's something I have to do. I just don't feel like blogging every day. Even today I'm not really into it, but this blog needs a serious update, and a lot of writing (even though some strange Chinese person prefers pictures over lots of text :P)

I used to write about a lot of things though. Every weekendtrip, every big trip, described up into the smallest minor details. I recorded what people said and did, our exact schedule, the things we saw, unexpected things, funny things, you name it. Right now all I write is "Hey, we went to [this place], here's the pics, enjoy!". Must be boring for you guys. Can't be arsed to do it differently though. It's no longer a traveling blog, it's more like a blog about me now. How strange.

So what have I been up to? Today is Sunday the 22nd, 16:20. I'm sitting in my room in front of my PC, balcony door open and window open, enjoying the weather. I'm at the fifth floor and it's quite windy today, so I'm getting a lot of fresh air in my room ^^ The weather has been really great this weekend. Not too warm and not too cold, unlike all you damn Europeans who get warmer weather Japan every day since I've moved to Japan...

We did some hiking yesterday. We went mount Takao, near Tokyo, but actually kind of halfway between Atsugi and Tokyo, quite far to the north. The hike itself was nice, but there were too many Japanese people. First we climbed Takao, which proved to be not that 'taka' (tall), only around 700m, and then we moved on to mount Shirouyama (castle mountain). From there we walked down to the nearby lake, lake Sagami, which had a really cool river with some bridges. I ate one of the best pizza's I ever had in Japan there (only the Italian place in Shinjuku was better), after which we went back to Machida. Kamil and me had to do some shopping there in preparation for our bike trip.

When we came back to Atsugi Kamil suggested we buy a tent for me, since I still haven't bought one o_0. He looked up a place on the internet, and we went out to find it. It was quite dark already, and we had some problems finding it, since it was quite north of Atsugi, not a place we're familiar with at all. Eventually we managed to find it though, and it turned out to be quite a huge outdoor and camping store. I was faced with the choice between a small, light, expensive tent, and a small, heavy, cheap tent. Eventually I took the cheap one, because this trip is already costing us way too much money...

We're having so much problems in planning this bike trip!!! Everything seems to go wrong. Sending the bikes to Nagasaki was supposed to cost around 10.000 yen maximum, but we asked again at the same store, and now they're telling us it will cost 22.000 yen! We got it down to 15.000, but that's still a lot of money. So we decided to reverse our plan: take the bicycles with us in the plane, and send all our other luggage by Kuroneko (the transport company). That should be a lot cheaper.

But the bicycle itself keeps on having problems too -___-. As for my bike: not all of the gears work, the suspension doesn't work, the bike computer's button doesn't work anymore and just this morning my lock broke... Very lucky indeed. Kamil had similar problems with his gears and some parts of his bike already started to rust. That's a lot of negative publicity for Giant Bicycles here, but that's just the way it is. Fortunately for us the guy who sold us the bikes was very understanding, and we hope to get all our problems fixed by Wednesday. We're leaving for Nagasaki on Friday by the way o_0

Oh yeah, I did some shopping for clothes today and I found some weird Dutch T-Shirts in Uniqlo, a well known Japanese brand you can get almost anywhere here in the Tokyo area. I have absolutely no idea why they have shirts with a Dutch expression on them, especially as silly as these, but I found them quite cool anyway.


'Duik in de dijk'- Dive into the dyke (not that kind of Dyke!)


'Achterom is 't kerremus' - Around the back it's carnival (amazingly colloquial Dutch, I really wonder where the Japanese got that from..)


Last week then. So busy with work! I experiences my first real staff meeting. Can't say much about it I guess, except that it was a very long meeting :| Besides that, I'm working on a program that will put all my programming skills I've learned so far to good use, and it tests the limits of my knowledge nicely. I'm quite happy about the new project. It's like an architect designing a new building. You get to be creative, and design something. But unlike the architect I'm also the one doing the constructing part, so I have a lot of things to think about ^^ I was quite bored with work, but this project makes me feel motivated again :)

I'm going to be very busy the coming week. On Monday I will need to pack all my luggage, because we will send it on Tuesday morning to Nagasaki, so can be sure that it has arrived there on Friday, when we need to pick it up again. On Wednesday we need to go to the bicycle shop, where the guy will fix my suspension and Kamil's rusty bike. I'll also get a bicycle bag then, so I can take it with me into the airplane. Thursday we need to take our bikes apart and put them in the bags, because we're leaving Atsugi at 6:00 in the morning on Friday. Very busy schedule!


Finally, here's some pictures of our hike last Saturday. Since I just said that I'm usually too lazy to provide good commentary for my travels, I feel compelled to only show you the pictures this time :)