i think i am quite over ofuro and the concept behind it in japanese households.  for those who haven’t experienced it, japanese people fill the bath at the start of the night, and the idea is that each person in the family washes themselves first then “soaks” in the bath.

good concept.  relaxing in a warm bath is quite nice.

two majors problems, which as of today i can confidently announce.

a) the water temperature is horribly variable.  at least for those families without a nicely temperature controlled bathtub.  it begins at the start of the night at about 46 degrees, which provides me with very sore/burnt skin after i get out.  pain :/.

b) certain people DON’T WASH THEMSELVES before getting in.  i have been really annoyed at the bath being full of random dirt lately after my host father takes his turn.  in fact i haven’t been using the bath after him because of this (and not before because it BURNS).

i thought at first he just didn’t wash himself properly.  it was only tonight that i found out HE DOESN’T USE SOAP.  the old soap ran out, and there was a new one placed in the bath area, but it wasn’t opened after he took his turn.

oh no .  that would explain the dirtiness and the smell.

so before you enter a japanese bathtub think about those that have been in there before you – and if it smells strange in a bad way, just settle for a shower.

left today not expecting to get rained on as much as i did .  walking for the rest of the day felt like i had two water filled sponges beneath my feet.  kappa raincoats sure do a good job at protecting your body from getting wet, but all that water ends up in your shoes lol :s.

the cloud cover really ensures the temperature doesn’t drop at all during the night, which makes for uncomfortable humid sleeping conditions.  daniel described it quite well today – when he looked at the weather forecast on tv, the whole of japan was covered by one massive grey cloud.  *turns on the air conditioning*.

i guess i should be more positive – seeing as i only have another four weeks over here.  and two days.  really not much time, but its sure to pass quite fast with the amount of tests spaced over these next few weeks, along with busy weekend social life ^^l.

played a bit of hitman tonight but didn’t really get anywhere.  i took a few cool screenshots though .  i have so many cool ones that i decided to make an album specifically for them.  there are more on my other webspace but i’ll add them later.

so with a bit of free time on the weekend i decided to get a game or two of transport tycoon going. it went quite well, with a lot of participants and some interesting end results . its a pity playing through takes so long and i won’t get much chance to sit down and have a proper game.

we switched to using the latest nightly build patched with IN (a collection of user-made patches). the game above was started with the aim at connecting the whole rail network together to allow trains to travel anywhere they wished. although only about 3 hours into the game, it was going very smoothly (except for certain people building $500,000 islands and duplicating unnecessary stations ^^;).

one other thing i got around to doing was getting a linux install going on my laptop. after a while its only natural to feel the need for a local bash console window :s. i installed ubuntu within vmware in order to allow a bit of flexibility – and just to test it out before i go around demolishing my partitions. end results were quite pleasing .

now i have to get back to packing my box to send a bit of stuff back to australia. lightening luggage can’t be a bad thing, right?

last night my host father got a phone call from his friend, who was tipped by the police that fireflies were out! it turns out the police were doing their got very well, patrolling this one strip of open countryside wathcing them for 3 hours, and when we arrived they were still there. they even stopped their patrol car and had a chat with us. there were lots of fireflies and i was reminded of zelda:oot :d. yeah that picture above has about 3 visible (the green). i took some video which i will get around to encoding later – probably turnedd out a loooot bettter ^^;.

my host mother actually put one in her pocket and brought it home, but let it free when we arrived as she feared it would die otherwise. i don’t think it wouldve got through australian customs anyways.