Ugh again I’ve been remiss writing on this damn blog. I get so wrapped up with life I forget to post… but you must be tired of hearing me apologize… damn catholic school made me guilty and polite.

Okay so as I swore to in my last post, I ordered my iPad last Friday. As soon as the Apple store came up… I hit that SOB and ordered myself a 32GB WiFi only iPad. Why did I chose that model? Well to be honest with you.. it came down to balancing out price and functionality.

Firstly, the 3G vs WiFi only decision to me was not too hard to make. I think the 3G iPad is a really good idea for just about anyone, especially with AT&T not forcing you into a contract but allowing you to buy just a month at a time when you need it. My only hold over for that is that I already have an iPhone 3GS, and I’m not sure I want to pay AT&T twice for the same 3G network. I have no problem paying Verizon or Sprint in addition to my iPhone data plan because it gives me an alternative to the iPhone for access. I always hope if one network is weak in a given area, the other will make up for it. As I already own a Verizon MiFi and I’m in that contract for at least another year, the decision to forgo the 3G iPad seemed to make sense for me. I do have just one concern about the MiFi. It gets about 4 hours of use off a battery… I can see that ending up a little too short. I’m not sure if I want to invest in a second battery for the MiFi, or maybe a HyperMac battery [link]. I’m not sure if it’d power the MiFi or not, so it might be overkill.

Second, the size decision. I know that it’s always a good idea to buy the biggest hard drive you can afford so that if your data needs grow in the future you’re covered, however living with an iPhone that could never hold my entire library of music, and an SSD in my MacBook that made me think truly about what I carry around, it made total sense to me to go with just 32GB for the iPad. I don’t plan to keep music on my iPad. I already have an iPhone and an iPod nano for the car so I don’t see the point in putting my music on another device. I will fill the iPad with photos and movies/tv shows, but I’m used to keeping just 5 episodes of what ever Anime I’m watching and just a movie or two on my iPhone, so how hard could it be to manage it on the iPad. 32GB seemed like a good balance between price and storage.

So now I just sit and wait until April 3 for my iPad. I’m sure it will feel like an eternity waiting the next 20 days or so but I am sure I’ll just use this time thinking of a million ways that I can use it!

Today all the rumors and speculation finally came to an end with Apple’s announcement of the brand new iPad. A device that could hardly live up to all the rumors and expectations heaped upon it by all the click hungry Apple rumor and “news” sites out there. Rumors upon rumors, speculation right up to the last moment, ruining any surprise or excitement over the announcement of the a new product. In this rampant arena of over reaching speculation can any product really live up to the rumors?

So Apple released what for all intents and purposes is a larger iPod touch. I ran around in the months leading up to day talking about how I didn’t want a tablet that was just a big iPod touch, yet today after the announcement, that’s exactly what I want. Some may say it was yet another occurrence of the “Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field”, but I say it was my Christmas gift that changed my mind.

For Christmas, my boyfriend gifted me a 32GB iPod touch. Why on earth did I need an iPod touch when I have an iPhone? The answer to me was simple. I use my iPhone constantly, between music, surfing and running apps, I was constantly running down my battery. I use my phone in the car on the way to work to check my mail, read my news story etc. Arriving at work 25% down was a drag, so I replaced that function with my iPod touch and my MiFi, the only issue with that is that the screen just feels a bit too small, so I moved back to my MacBook Pro, which is also not an ideal solution. What I really need is an iPod touch with a bigger screen… and low and behold… the iPad.

It doesn’t just stop there I’m imagining all of the other ways I can use a 10″ touch screen. Sitting next to my MacBook Pro or MacPro, the iPad could be a secondary screen running my mail, or tweetie, or even a browser. Add to this the fact that Apple is allowing bluetooth keyboards, I can actually answer emails and even gasp… CHAT on it. I’m truly stoked and I will absolutely be ordering one as soon as I can.

Well I’ve been thinking long and hard about this and as much as I’m worried that blogging is over, I am not really over it and I’m going to try to catch up with all the blog posts that I have in draft and that I want to write. I’ve decided to not finish the Japan posts because I pretty much covered that in my blog and I’m not even sure where to start with it. I have about 12 drafts that aren’t about Japan so I’m gonna just go ahead and post them as I can.

Thanks to you who sent me emails and commented that you’re still reading

It’s been a pretty bumpy month for me. To be perfectly frank, since the day after Christmas, I’ve been in a very strange, desperately bleak mood. It’s not been a full time thing, there has been some breaks in both my mood and my sanity.

It feels strangely as I have lost control of it all. Since I got back from Japan, so many things have changed. Work, relationships, friends, family, etc. and I have been unable to sort out all of my emotions and feelings about the changes. I’ve also noticed that things that should roll off my back are just building up until I hit a breaking point and I just lose it.

This has got to stop. I need to get a grip. Life is not so bad and I need to get over it.

Lovely, it’s five days in to a new year and as I’m looking back I’m appalled at the fact that I have 17… SERIOUSLY 17 drafts in my blog and I haven’t published a thing. I’m so far behind on blogging about Japan and it seems to be fully stopping me from blogging anything new. I am not sure what I should do about my blog in 2010. Is it over? Should I get back on the stick? Leave the Japan trip posts for future posts? I definitely need to figure this out. Are you still out there and reading? Let me know.

I know I’m smack in the middle of blogging about my trip to Japan (it’s taking forever) but there is a list of other things I wanted to blog about so rather than wait, I’m going to just do this now.

I read on Autoblog today about an article about manu-matics, or automatic transmissions that can be shifted like a manual. To be honest, I always thought these were a bit of a waste of time until we got our MINI Cooper. My boyfriend and I both have a “car” but right now neither car is really “mine” or “his”. We take turns driving the cars… often. The MINI was the first time our wants and desires were conflicting. I wanted a manual transmission, he wanted an automatic, as he can not currently, nor does he wish to learn to drive a manual. The compromise was the fact that the MINI’s “semi manual” automatic transmission. I’ve had cars before with the semi-manual automatic that really was quite useless (to be honest our Volvo XC70’s is an example of this.), but the MINI’s automatic tranny is actually quite nice. You can actually feel the car downshift to use the engine to slow the car and the shifts with the “manual” mode are quick and exact. I almost always drive the car in “manual” mode and the only problem I’ve had is that when I first started to drive the car, the direction of upshifts and downshifts felt “backward” to me.

To shift up, you pull back on the gear lever, toward you, which to me felt backward because in my mind you move “UP” thru the gears, true you pull back to go from 1st to 2nd but you push forward to go from 2nd to 3rd. Now that being said, after driving for a year in the car, it actually began to make sense to me and I prefer it. Pulling back on the stick while accelerating feels more natural and pushing forward while braking is definitely better, that being said I wondered what the reasoning was behind the different shift patterns used by car manufactuers and apparently so did Road and Track. Today they have a story on their site [link] asking just that. They actually went and asked several car companies their reasoning. Check it out if you are curious like i was!

Next up on my trip to Japan was a visit to Kyoto. Kyoto [link] was at one time the capital of Japan and is still considered today to be the cultural capital of Japan. The guide book told us that to really see Kyoto, you should take 3-4 days. We had just 1 day to see it all !

My friend in Japan was to be our tour guide and he agonized over just what was “essential” to see in Kyoto. We settled on a very aggressive schedule with plans to see Take-no-Michi, Kinkaku-ji, Ryoan-ji, Gion, Kiyomizu-dera, Fushimi Inari Taisha, Downtown Kyoto and Kyoto Station. We made it to each and everything we set out to but ended up walking so far that I had sweat thru my clothing at least twice .

First up was Take-no-Michi aka Bamboo Road, an amazingly scenic area, a single road that weaved it’s way through a forrest of bamboo that is so tall, I couldn’t even capture how tall it was. Just amazing and breath taking.

Next up was Ryoan-ji [link]. I was very interested in going to see Ryoan-ji because of the karesansui, or dry landscape garden. It’s a beautiful garden with raked rocks and 15 rocks arranged around the garden. It’s said that from anyone position, you can only see 14 of the rocks (which is true) and that only by obtaining enlightenment can you see all 15 at once. I of course am not enlightened so I saw only 14

We headed out for Kinkaku-ji next but along the way stumbled upon another sight that I was very interested in… Kaiten Sushi… or conveyor belt sushi. It was an amazing experience. The food moved all around us on a belt and we just grabbed what we wanted off the belt and when we were finished with the plate, we deposited it in a slot at the end of the table where it was counted toward our bill! I had a lot of thing, flounder nigiri, tuna nigiri and maki, shimp nigiri and even UNI… sea urchin. It was all so delicious!

Next we saw Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Temple. You could not go inside it but the beauty of the building was overwhelming. It looked like a giant gold building sitting on the water. Absolutely amazing. From Kinkaku-ji we headed to Gion. We walked past the geisha houses, and restaurants and saw people dressed as Maiko (my friend from Japan was quick to point out that they weren’t real Geisha). The whole street was full of different style buildings and signs. It was almost too overwhelming.

From Gion, we moved on to Kiyomizu-dera [link]. It is a Buddhist temple located in Kyoto that held two points of interest for me, first is the stage… a very large stage that during the Edo period held a tradition that if you jumped off the stage and survived the 48 foot drop, your wish would be granted. Today people just take a tiny jump (really just a step) from the main floor to the stage… I did this but then tripped as I walked back up to the main floor of the temple! The second point of interest was the Otowa waterfall. The spring splits into three different streams and drinking from each is said to give you luck. One is for Marriage, one for Health and one for Knowledge. My friend from Japan told us that they believe that you should only drink from two of the three streams because to drink from all three would be greedy and your wishes would not be granted.

After we drank from the fountain at Kiyomizu-dera, we headed off to the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine [link]. A beautiful shrine that has thousands of Torri (Shinto Gates) that line a path up a mountain. It’s a breath taking sight. The shrine is a shrine for wealth and success in business, so all the Torri are provided by businesses. They are lined up one after another all the way up the mountain. The walk from Kiyomizu-dera to Fushimi Inari took quite some time up some pretty large hills and by the time we got there, it was dusk. This meant that we couldn’t take the hike up the mountain so we just walked through some of the lower paths and to be honest, the sheer number of gates so close together was striking and seeing them in the dark made them all that much more mysterious and mystical, so I guess getting there at dusk had it’s ups and downs.

I have to admit, as tired as you probably are reading this post, it was nothing compared to how wiped out I was from hiking around Kyoto! However we had one more stop left before heading back to Osaka… Kyoto Station [link]. Kyoto Station is owned by Japan Railways (JR), and it’s an enormous black onyx open air building that includes a 7 floor department store that sits on either side of a wide, open stair case which doubles as seats for the stage in the middle of the station floor. The night we were there, a high school band was playing and there were hundreds of people sitting on the stairs watching them play. We traversed quite a few escalators to reach the top of the station where we could see Kyoto laid out all around us on all sides, we even got a killer view of the Kyoto Tower! We stopped at a Cafe du Monde (yes the one from New Orleans) where we had an iced chicory coffee but no beignet as they don’t have them in Japanese Cafe du Mondes! We also went underground in the station to “Restaurant Town” and ate at a wonderful Katsu place!! After we were stuffed with breaded and fried pork, we headed back to Osaka to crash and prepare for our trip the next day to Hiroshima and Miyajima.

Okay, it’s been a while since I sat down to write one of these and it’s showing. As each day goes by I put it off a little bit more each day but I’m determined to write about my trip so here goes.

On our first full day in Japan we decided to venture not too far from Osaka. We decided to go see Himeji Castle[link] in Himeji and to head to Kobe to try some Kobe Beef. We woke up early and had breakfast at the hotel, fish, rice and pepper steak… and then we headed to the subway station and caught a JR Railways train out to Himeji. It didn’t take us too long to get there, but the train was packed. We had to sit on the jump seat but at least it was cool inside the train.

When we got to Himeji, we had a little trouble trying to locate the Visitor Center. We wanted to rent bikes (the guide book said they were free) and ride around the city. We couldn’t figure out where to get them so we headed off to see the castle. The castle is huge and can be seen almost from the station. Its a very old castle and it’s humongous. It was pretty damn hot outside but once we got inside, I could not believe how cool and comfortable it was. The castle had about 7 floors and we were able to go up each of them, but we had to take our shoes off. Which was a problem as the floors were super polished and very slippery and I had been walking… my feet were sweaty and I almost fell a few times! The staircases were really steep and you had to duck to keep from hitting your head, but it was just so amazing to be in a building that was built over 1250 years ago!

After the castle, we headed to see the Koko-en Gardens. It’s a huge 3.5 hectare park with nine gardens next to Himeji-jo. It was a lovely place to visit and walking thru the parks was amazing. There were even a bunch of amazing sculptures made out of ceiling tiles including one that had a huge Kanji character in the center that was the Kanji for “undying love”… it was amazing.

Once we had seen the castle and the gardens, we headed for our second stop of the day Kobe! Our plan was to see a store called Tokyu Hands and to have lunch at the A1 Kobe Steakhouse. Again our maps from my friend, were really helpful but in Kobe we got completely and totally lost! We did finally find the Steakhouse and were able to order two Kobe steaks. We both ordered the same thing… a 6oz sirloin. I’ve eaten a lot of steaks in my day but this one was by far the best. I could not believe how delicious it was!

We left Kobe with full bellies on our way back to Osaka to meet up with my friend and his friends for dinner, which was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It was so neat to see my friend interacting with his friends in their every day normal lives. We had dinner and way to much to drink at a bar where we ate tons of different fried foods… so delicious!

All in all, day one was fantastic and I went to bed fully exhausted… but next up was… Kyoto!

Photos from Himeji and Kobe are here on flickr!

25 September 2009 0130

Well… I made it. We’re here at the Hotel Ilcoure – Namba, that’s in Osaka. The flight was actually not too bad. I slept a little, as best I could… watched some horrible movies, played lots of Nintendo DS and listened to too many podcasts. The flight from Detroit to Narita actually went by really quickly. We got to eat three times on the plane… something I haven’t experienced in quite some time!

Once we got to Narita, it was a lot of hurry up and wait as we had a huge layover, almost 6 hours actually. We got to exchange US Dollars for Yen. It was a lot easier than I expected, fill out a form… stand in a line… tada money changed! The flight from Narita to Kansai was a lot more like a flight at home. Smaller plane, major delay… and only about 45 minutes of flight time.

When we landed in Kansai, we of course had to go thru passport control. I tried to be cute and when the guard asked me what flight I was on, I tried to say it in my best Japanese, of course I said it wrong, they corrected me in equally bad English and laughed. Next it was customs… where I was asked “Is this all the luggage you have?” I answered yes and I was waved through. Just on the other side of customs we finally met up with Rinki. I was so happy to see him. It’s been quite a while since we had our last visit and he was a sight for sore eyes. After some not to affectionate hugging… we went off to pick up Pinoyboy’s 3G modem and got on a train to Osaka.

On the train we exchanged gifts for each other, Rinki had some things for Pinoyboy and me and we both had things for him. Everyone was so happy and excited… I felt suddenly relaxed and not at all nervous about being in a strange place. As we whisked along on a high speed train bound for Osaka I was full of hope and excitement.

We arrived at the Hotel Ilcoure Namba and thank goodness Rinki was there to help us check in! Staying in a hotel in Japan is quite a different experience than in America. First of all, my crappy Japanese was hardly good enough to even check in. Next, you pay per person not per room. Turns out Pinoyboy and I could have stayed in two rooms for the price we paid for one! To be honest, I didn’t really want to stay alone and was glad to have him for my roomate. The hotel room was tiny, but well laid out and functional. Two small twin beds, a counter with a TV and a fridge and a small bathroom with a “shower toilet” and a very deep bathtub. Tiny but comfortable but our home for the next two nights.

After we checked in changed shirts and used the facilities, we headed out in Osaka for dinner. Only problem was… it was almost 10:30PM and Rinki needed to catch the train home before midnight when they stopped running. We decided to have a quick bite at a place called Sukiya where I had a beef bowl. It was hilarious as they were only to eager to give the “Eigo Menu” or “English Menu” so I could order easier. Sad part is it took me the better part of 5 minutes to realize that it was the same menu as Rinki’s!

The food was delicious and hit the spot as I was very hungry. After we chowed down, we said our goodbyes, headed back to our room, took showers and here I am about to have a sleep… tomorrow… Himeji Castle and Kobe Beef!

23 September 2009 0830

Today I take my first trip outside of the US. I’m 36 years old and I’ve never left the country. Well that’s not 100% true… I went to Mexico on a cruise but.. no customs… no passport control, off and on the boat like it was the Jersey Shore.

Today I take a big step. I got my passport (I can’t wait to use it), I’m all packed. I think I brought too much and my suitcase is huge and heavy. I’ll be heading to Philadelphia International Airport, flying to Detroit Metropolitan Wayne International Airport, meeting up with Pinoyboy and then heading off to Natrita Airport in Tokyo and then finally to Kansai International Airport, just outside of Osaka, Japan. All told the trip will take a little over 24 hours. I leave about 9am EDT Wednesday and I will land about 8PM JST Thursday (that’s 9am EDT Thursday!). I’m a little nervous. I get pretty tired of being on the plane by the time we land in LAX usually and this is much further, but I’ve got Pinoyboy, my Kindle, my DS and my iPhone. I hope I’ll be alright.

Well it’s just about time to board… wish me luck!