Typhoon!

I really need to get a better phone - one with a better camera. I did my best to capture the amazing sight we had here last week - the typhoon! This pic is taken from the office window on the 18th floor. The clouds had rolled in and the whole sky turned orange. It was about half an hour after sundown, but the last bit of sunlight reflected through the storm clouds, giving everything an eerie glow. We were lucky though, as the typhoon (number 7 of the season), apart from the light show, left us completely unscathed - not a single drop of rain - before turning off and hitting Shizuoka and Tokyo. Numbers 10 and 11 are still on their way, though...

The latest saga to relate has to do with the acquisition of a new DVD player. I hadn't realised how blessed we are in Oz, that all new DVD players are automatically region-free, which I suspect is a byproduct of the Australian market being too small to support its own region. I assumed that region coding was on its way out everywhere, but I was very much mistaken. This being the land of consumer electronics, I did not expect any kind of problem with picking up a cheap region-free DVD player, so I went to the nearest Yamada Denki and had a look around. They had a great selection, and I had one in mind, until I tried asking someone about the region coding. When I finally got my point across, I was told that they were all region 2, and that they didn't have any region-free players. I was flabbergasted. "None at all?" "No, all region 2" "Why not?" "Its against the rules" (which, of course, means "end of conversation" here).

I fought back the urge to wax lyrical, starting with "Back home...", recalling my previous experience at Bikku Kamera, where the response was "Why don't you go back to America, then!", after asking about getting a computer without a pre-installed OS. I was on my way out, when I had an idea. I asked someone younger. He pointed out the one that was region-free, but it looked extremely dodgy. Anybody ever heard of the brand "Taxan"? He also mentioned that Osu was the place to go to. This seems to be a pretty common answer, since this area appears to have the biggest grey market in the city. I was near there, so I went. I looked around, found a few places, but always the same thing - they would have one, and only one, and often it didn't have any brand name at all!

It was back to the drawing board, and time to do what seems to be necessary every time I want to buy something that costs more than $10, I had to wait and ask everybody I know what to do. Well, no, that's not strictly true. The first stop was Google, which produced a whole list of weird brand names, and one horribly overpriced recognisable brand name (which, I suspect, has had to be re-imported back here). A few people recommended Osu, one recommended a shop somewhere in the south of the city, which he couldn't remember the name or location of, and a few more said "Try the internet".

At last, the guy who runs one of the local watering holes that I spend a bit of time at offered to show me the place in Osu where he got his. Turns out, it was the same place I went to before, but they were well hidden in plain sight. There was a whole shelf of the dodgy brands I'd found on Google, cunningly camoflaged under several shelves of CD players. And then, in a little shop around the corner (which just happened to be the place I'd bought my monitor, although I'd never seen any DVD players there), they had a stack of Chinese region-free DVD players on sale. This was the same brand my friend had bought (anybody ever heard of "Evergreen"?), his worked just fine, and it cost under 5000yen. I was just glad the ordeal was over, and promptly bought it and took it home to try it out.

Lo and behold, no problems. Figuring out the remote is a bit of a challenge, but thanks to the universal symbols for "go" and "stop", its not a big deal. I transferred the speaker-subwoofer set I'd got for the computer, loaded the Taiwanese pirate of LotR I'd inherited (Thanks again, Kim!), and, for the first time in ages, all seemed right with the world...

So, as you can see, I've been enjoying my Obon holiday (a whole 4 days off! Woohoo!), avoiding the crazy travel crowds (since everybody gets the same public holidays, and nobody takes their allotted personal holidays, everybody travels at the same times, choking the roads and trains so that noone can get anywhere), and investigating my stack of Taiwanese pirate DVDs. Arrrr...

A couple of other firsts. After hearing so much about the local izakaya chain "Yamachan" and their famous chicken wings, I finally had an appropriate occasion to sample their wares (the verdict: "Oishii!") - I could eat a ton of those wings, and I think maybe I did... And my first time at Karaoke in Japan. Not all that different from Sydney, but a bigger selection of songs, but not necessarily better, so this time, I sang both "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Stairway to Heaven"!

Back to the grind tomorrow...