And now for something completely different

Asian people suck at English!

Hilarious!

Bootlegged DVD’s suck

Looking for a home

After all that has happened for the past weeks, or maybe because of all that happened, this place is still my home. I feel so at home here. I don’t know why. I feel very comfortable. At work and at home. It’s not because of Japan. It’s not because of my friends. It’s because of myself.

I am thinking about my future. Too much, as usual. I am changing the way I am thinking continuously. I used to think I can only feel at home if I have certain things. Things like internet, a PC with lots of games, lots of anime, but also things like my family, and my friends. I gave up most of these things when I came to Japan, and I came to realize I don’t actually ‘need’ any of these things. Of course I need my family, but I know they will be there for me when I need them, and I will be there for them when they need me. This is certain and will not change.

I changed my mind again. I believed that you need friends to feel at home. Not entirely true, but I felt really dependent on my friends then, back in the time when everybody left Japan to go back to their own home. I became very good friends with some people, better even than with my best friends in Holland. And I felt I needed them. But as you get closer to people you realize that they are farther away than you think, and that there will always be a distance between you. They have a life of their own, they don’t share yours. That’s why friends come and go. I learned to value my friends in this way, and they are very important to me.

My mind is so clear. I had a great rest on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I slept for more than 8 hours each day. It’s been several months since I had such a great rest. I cannot believe how clear I am now on certain things that have been keeping me occupied recently. A lot of things did not go the way I wanted it recently, and I could not fix them. This was mostly my fault, I made the wrong decisions. Maybe because of lack of sleep, but probably because I was not mature enough. Maturity is not something you can learn easily. Just by experience I guess. By living your life. And by not being sleepy every day

Trust yourself.

Improve yourself.

Never give up.

Wouldn’t it be great to have someone to share your life with?

Too much good luck?

I have a theory. If you’ve been getting a lot of good luck, then there must be a time after which you’ll get a lot of bad luck. Something like karma I guess. A person cannot always be lucky or unlucky. It must change after a while. Ever since last September I’ve only been having good luck. Really good luck. It seems the bad luck has finally caught up with me now. And now that it has, I realize that it doesn’t have anything to do with luck at all, and that it’s just myself, who is creating the good luck and the bad luck in my life. I can decide to turn it around if I want to, but maybe I am looking for a bit of bad luck right now, because I feel… unhappy, or uncomfortable, with so much good luck. I’m not used to it.

My life is a mess. Things I never even thought about pop into my life and force me to think about them. I don’t have much answers. I know how to handle my life, and my problems, but I’m always afraid of making the wrong decisions. So far, my life has worked out quite nicely, based on decisions I didn’t even think about much. If I would describe the most important choices in my life so far they would have to be these:
- Choosing to study Information Technology after high school
- Trying the pilot training program at the KLM
- Coming to Japan
The pilot training was something I thought about very long, and it was the only choice that did not go the way I wanted, since I failed to qualify for the education. A lot has changed since then, and I’m about to make two more choices that will greatly affect my life, in the near future and in the far future.

I have secrets now. I used to put everything about my life on this blog, but I cannot anymore. I have secrets that I need to protect. Close friends will know or at least guess some of my secrets, but I am the only who knows them all, and I will keep them for myself. It is another piece of life’s wisdom, which as usual I have learned the hard way.

(also, today is the first day in weeks that I’ve had a good sleep. yatta!)

((if you look back at your life 10 years from now, will you be happy about the decisions you made when you were young?))

Life, and habits, and stuff

Habits. The stuff you do every day. Like going to the same place for lunch every day, or taking a break exactly at 4 o’clock every day to go to the convenience store. Lately I’m breaking my habits and doing stuff out of the ordinary. Actually, my life has been crazy since a couple of weeks before I went back to Holland, and it hasn’t been the ‘normal’ since then. I’m just going from one crazy phase into another. And every time when life seems to settle down another crazy thing happens.

Someone says I think too much about life. Why? I like to think about stuff. I like to be an idealist. I like to try to see the world in black and white. What if nobody had secrets? What if everybody could be nice to each other? I’d like to imagine a world like that, and sometimes I will try some thought experiment in real life to make my world more like this world. But sometimes I’m just kicked back into the real world, and I realize that the world is not so simple. Of course I know that. But thinking about life is my hobby. Other people like to build model airplanes, I like to think about life. So what? It’s a nice hobby, I think. I don’t think it’s a problem for my lifestyle. I can live my life quite well, and I don’t think I’m naive. There’s a difference between being naive and idealistic. An idealist does realize that the world is not so simple. I like to step out of my life sometimes, and look at it from a different, idealistic, point of view. But at crucial times I have to be realistic, and look at life from a realists point of view.

My life is my life. Looking at my life is my hobby. This does not affect my ability to make decisions in life. It helps me rather, because I can look at it from two different ways: the idealistic way and the realistic way.

Enough seriousness. Here’s some stupid pictures.

No, that’s not a huge orange. The Japanese are experts at miniaturization. Even the banana’s are smaller in Japan. Note also the text on the chocolate: “The very delicious chocolate. Be happy with this chocolate”.

This is a picture of Optimus Prime on a horse with yoghurt on the background. I don’t know why.

Now, I think I am going to write a letter

(this post did not make any sense because I am crazy and sleep deprived)

Chinese restaurants

We have a lot of Chinese restaurants in Holland. Even the smallest town will have one, and usually there’s at least 3 of them within 10 minutes driving distance. But here’s the trick: it’s not Chinese a all! They serve Chinese food of course, but not that much, and most of the food is either food from another Asian country, like India or Indonesia, or food that got kind of made up by people immigrating to Holland a long time ago, so I guess it can only be called a native food of Holland.

Anyway, I got quite a shock the first time I tasted Chinese food made by a Chinese person. It tasted so different from the Chinese I was used to. They don’t know bami, nasi or sate. Instead they make mapo dofu, or they do some interesting stuff with peppers and meat, or egg soup, or other delicious things I forget the name of. Anyway, mapo dofu is my absolute favorite.

So there’s this really great Chinese restaurant near Kawasaki, and I’ve been there a couple of times now. Every dish there tastes great, and the Chinese owner is really nice, especially to other Chinese customers, who frequently get one or more dishes for free I’d recommend anyone ever in the region of Kawasaki to give it a try. Look for Miraku (味楽）near Kashimada （鹿島田) station. That’s my food Osusume (recommendation) for today

Morals and ethics

Let’s take a look at the morals of some people, including myself. I’ll give you some stories, hopefully anonimized enough for people not to recognize who the story is about. Ask yourself: what would you do in this situation?

You are traveling through Japan on a rail pass, which allows you to take any local train for free, but not the Shinkansen. The pass is valid for only a couple of days. After the pass has expired, you are supposed to buy a normal ticket again. Since Japanese people are very honest and kind, they never look at the date of the pass, so it’s quite possible to use the pass for another day without anyone noticing. Would you?

And an addition to the previous story: suppose you can actually use that pass to enter a shinkansen, even if it’s not allowed? Would you do it? Even for one station? Why or why not?

Here’s another one: your boss in the company asks you how many holidays you have taken so far, and how much holidays you have in total for the current year. Will you answer him honestly, and tell him that you already used more than half of your holidays, or do you lie?

I twisted the above story a bit to make it more interesting. It didn’t actually happen this way, and the person asking for the holidays was not our boss, who already knew about them. This incident kind of inspired me to make this post, because two people at work, I will not say their names, asked me at the same time if it was a good idea to lie about this, so they could have more holidays. Of course both people are honest as saints, so they reported their holidays truthfully.

The last one then. It’s about how people react to people that are not kind to them. Let’s take person A and B. If person A is mean to person B, or person B thinks that person A was mean to him/her, how would you respond if you were B? Would you be equally as mean to A? Would you ignore A? Or would you do something even meaner to A?

Personally, I would ignore A. If it’s a person I have to deal with every day I will try to reconcile, or deal with him/her in a normal way. I would definitely not return the treatment I have received. I think that’s quite childish and immature. It’s something I would expect from people just entering high school, not from employees or university students.

My personal philisophy is that anything is fine, as long as you don’t hurt people. Even bending the rules a little, or ignoring them completely is fine to me if I’m not hurting anyone. I’ll share another anecdote that happened to me a while ago.

I was sitting in the back of a car in the middle of nowhere. The Japanese person who was driving stopped at a traffic light. The crossing was in the middle of nowhere, and there was no sign of any car for 2 or 3 minutes. Any Dutch person would look carefully left and right, and then cross while the light was red. But not this Japanese driver. He unbuckled his seatbelt, opened his door, got out of the car and ran to the sidewalk. At this point I was quite confused, and I had no idea what he was doing. He ran towards the traffic light for pedestrians, pushed the button pedestrians use to signal that you want to cross the road, and ran back to the car! I was having a lot of trouble trying not to laugh out loud as he entered the car again. There’s some Japanese politeness for you.

Still thinking about the shinkansen thing. I would not hesitate to take it if I had the chance of riding it without a valid ticket (and without getting caught, of course). Only if I was not being an annoyance to other people. In other words, I would ride it if it meant that other people who would normally ride it could also still ride it. In my eyes I am not harming anyone, but getting a free ride. Not everybody thinks the same way, though. Some might argue that you did not pay for your ticket but you are using the Japanese rail system. They will have maintenance costs that they need to pay but cannot, because you did not pay for your ticket. So they will have to get more money from other people just because you didn’t pay. That’s why it’s fortunate that only stupid foreigners will try to do this in Japan. Even so, the ticket price might increase by 0.0001 yen. Where is the limit? When do you decide not to take it?

What would you do?