Fuk 8/07 - pt 2

Friday morning I met up with my old boss,  we had to go to Kitakyushu to give an engineering seminar.  It was being sponsored by two institutes,  they covered my plane ticket to come here and somehow got about 30 people to attend (i'll assume its one of those things where companies send someone to attend these things, regardless of whether they actually care about the actual subject matter).

金曜日僕は前のボースと一緒北九州へ行った。午後時エンジンイーリングセミをしました。

We grabbed lunch in Hakata and then took a local train up to this dinky station:

Since it was 2 in the afternoon, the only people here were school kids...  とても田舎！

as you may have heard, there's a big heat wave in japan now (~33 degrees C+ / 90-95F),  luckily i didn't have to wear a suit.　今日本暑過ぎ！

The talk wasn't anything too spectacular,  the institute people snapped a bunch of pictures of me during my talk, but all I took a picture of was my former boss giving his part of the seminar:

He translated my slides into japanese too,  so after I said stuff in english he would summarize in japanese, since not everyone in the audience had good enough English.  In reality i could have just written it all down in advance and stayed home. :-P

前のボース。九大の教授です。

After the talks we did the typical food and booze reception after the talk.  The promise of free food and booze is the way they get those involuntary company guys to stay through all the talks....  セミ後、普通日本式セミパーティした：

Actually this one was pretty decent considering the size of the seminar...セミ小さいけど、食べ物悪くない。

And thankfully for me, they had something else in addition to the sushi.  I have been to some of these things and all they had was beer and sushi (neither of which you will see Etchy ever touching).　僕は酒全然飲みませんと魚（寿司とか）全然食べません。。。このセミパーテイで時々何も食べません。でも今回チケンも有った。Whew！

I should have gotten a picture of the drink table. they had a staff girl standing there dispensing drinks,  not only beer but also scotch and other hard stuff.  luckily no one seemed to get too boozed up -- I guess cause it was only 6pm!   It is a common sight to see lots of drunken Japanese business men stumbling down the sidewalk by about 10-11 at night on Fridays.

After schmoozing for a while, we left and I stopped at the Y0d0bashi camera near Hakata Station.  I wanted to look at underwater covers for digital cameras.  Unfortunately they didn't have the right Casio model in stock.  Etchy's got no time to wait for a special order!

後でヨドバシィカメラで水入るのケース見た。僕のカシオモデルがありません。残念！

Let's skip ahead to Saturday Morning:

I was walking by a Pachinko palor downtown and I noticed a giant picture of J-POP star Koda Kumi.

幸田久美もパチンコがありますか？悪い！

Pachiko is a type of legal gambling in Japan... similar to a slot machine... crossed with a pinball and a video game. and its actually a huge business, there are Pachinko parlors every few blocks, and some of them can get quite extravagant - big buildings, lots of lights and glass. (which means a LOT of people are losing a LOT of money).

There are 'officially licensed' slot machines in US casinos (Elvis, 'Wheel of Fortune' and even Frank Sinatra),  but the Japanese have taken it a step further... in this case Koda Kumi, pop star has her own Pachinko machine...    Star Wars has one, as do many of the more popular Anime and Manga.  They're continuously pumping out new machines,  as you can see on the 2nd picture, its a calender for this week showing the release dates for different pachinko and slot machines. (which means there's people who plan their visits to try new machines?!)

How these Pachinko parlors work is an interesting system in itself... I wrote up a blog about this a long time ago... if you're interested i can dig it up and repost it. :-P

Last but not least, I hit up another camera store looking for waterproof cases...  this one didn't have the one i wanted either, but they had some interesting stuff in their used camera section upstairs:

holy crap! a whole bin full of used point and shoot film cameras for less than US$5 each...  wow, some of these things probably sold for like US$100-200 when they were new.  The merciless march of technology!　525円だけ？！とても安い中古フィルムカメラがある。新時今のカメラ多分1-2万円上でした！