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Took a trip to the Singapore Zoo yesterday. There were a LOT of primates there. The orangutans and chimps are a major draw as always; I guess some famous orangutan died recently and the entire city mourned her. Foreign dignitaries used to arrange for dinner with the ape. Go figure.

They also had a very impressive lizard and snake exhibit, complete with Asian Giant Tortoises and even a Komodo Dragon! It's hard to get a sense of scale from the photo but this guy was HUGE, easily longer than a human being. Most of the animals have daily feeding schedules where you can get a closer look at them, but of course they only feed the dragon twice a month. But he was still out sunning himself. They also had a few Gila Monsters. People who know me will find that highly ironic.

Wendy's mom brought home a couple Malaysian fruits last night. One is called Rambutan and tastes something like a lychee, and the other is called "Dragon Fruit" and its innards look and taste somewhat like an albino kiwi fruit. The wiki article says the latter fruit originated in Mexico, and is a traditional fruit of tribes in the Sonoran desert. My gut tells me that article is full of crap, because I've sure as hell never seen this fruit in my life. They both look like they came off a sci-fi space station.

You may have noticed I haven't posted anything the past several days. That's because I took a trip up to Malaysia to an island beach resort on Redang island. As you can see, it's far from pretty much everything, a 2 hour boat ride from the mainland pier and a 9 hour boat ride from Singapore to the pier... which is exactly why I went there. As you can see, there are two connected beaches separated by a rock outcropping. My hotel was on the southern one; I stayed at Redang Beach Resort.

The bus ride over was a night bus sleeper coach with TVs and a large selection of movies. I was a bit nervous going through Malaysia customs, but the guy next to me helped out. He had a China passport and his girlfriend was from Indonesia, but they both spoke fantastic English. They had both moved to Malaysia at age 14 and met in high school there before moving to Singapore later. At one of the rest stops they shared their food with me, a jackfruit. It tasted almost like a lychee, which will make no sense if you've never eaten one of those, but it had a sweet outer layer and a hard rocklike pit in the center. This was just the first in a string of chance meetings with really nice people.

On the boat ride getting off I met a woman from Kuala Lumpur who happened to be a diving instructor. She was on a trip with 5 other people, one of whom is an associate producer for some Malaysian travel show. The boat pulled right up to the beach and we hopped off to check in, and then they invited me for some coffee. So we dropped off our stuff and walked around to a restaurant on the other beach where I saw this:

I listened them talk a bit in Malay and a bit in English, and sipped on an iced coffee. They ordered some light snack food, a kind of sausage-jerky stuff that was green and made from fish (and quite tasty with a bit of spicy red sauce), as well as a mashed up banana wrapped up in a leaf. She wouldn't let me pay, but gave me her business card and suggested I give her a call the next time I was in the area to go diving. The rest of the Malays I met on the trip were some of the most laid back people I've ever met. Completely chill. And almost all of them speak English quite well, especially considering it's not the national language.

The package deal I purchased included a bus ride and ferry transfer to the island, 2 nights accommodation at the hotel, meals, and snorkeling trips (gear not included). Renting a snorkel and mask for the whole trip cost about 3 bucks, with a life jacket it's a bit more but not overly so. Every day the hotel boat makes two trips to other islands around the area for snorkeling, but there are reserved swimming/snorkeling areas with reefs that make for great viewing and you can go any time you want. I applied sunscreen and wore a T-shirt but still got burns on the back of my legs from being face down in the water so much.

I took my first swim around the block with the snorkel right after renting it, and was astounded at the number of colorful fish swimming around in just 1 meter of water. As I got further from shore into the deeper parts, I could see schools of zebrafish swimming around, lots of butterfly fish in large groups, and plenty of individual parrotfish chomping on the reefs (a few species: one purplish-red with green fins, and a greenish one with a blue tail and red lines radiating out from its eyes). The coral were also very impressive in a few places. While the areas around the jetty and high-traffic boating areas were bleached, the rocky areas had plenty of fan corals, brain coral, and anemones. One of the divers told me the visibility was 50 meters, and it seemed pretty clear to me. One boat trip took us to a pristine reef around a remote island, with entire forests of staghorn and finger coral, massive numbers of large fish schooling around them. It also had large numbers of jellyfish very close to the surface, and so I didn't linger for long. But I did see one clownfish way down on the bottom, hiding in the safety of an anemone. Absolutely amazing.

After snorkeling I came back and just sat around at the beach for awhile.

Sea, sun, and sand... what else could you wish for?

Two days of that was some great relaxation. I met some great people, partied with the locals working there (who were really awesome), strolled on a fantastic beach with no crowds in the way, and got a great view of the sea. At night there was live music and dance clubs for those who wanted to do that sort of thing. The hotel rooms even had air conditioning. And the whole trip cost me less than 300 bucks. Phenomenal.

The title reads: Combine NOTEBOOK. Mouse over the photo if you're having trouble reading the text.

This is one of my students showing the international sport of connecting several straws together to make one long straw. As you can see, Japan is not all that different from America.

Thursday I was in Sendai for a conference and stuck around afterwards to buy a lens for my camera. Originally I had planned on buying a 50mm fixed lens, ideal for shooting low light... but they were charging way too much money for the one I wanted. Then my eye settled on a cheap Tamron 70-300mm telephoto lens, with a macro mode. I figured at under $200 it was a gamble, but cheap enough that I could pawn it off if I wasn't satisfied. I saw it came with a hood, and had the same size threading as my stock lens. That pretty much sealed the deal.

The optics are pretty good. There was some slight purple fringing on a couple of the shots (and major fringing on reflections from an aluminum bicycle) but sticking my UV filter on next time should reduce that a bit. The mount has a bit more give than I'm used to, but not enough to cause problems. And of course, being a telephoto lens with a large zoom range, the aperture suffers-- this is not a lens for low light shooting. The only real flaw I can see is that the autofocus is noisy and slow (about 2-3 seconds for AF lock, while making the mating call of the Terminator). But switching to manual focus gives better control over composition anyway.

With those limitations in mind, I popped this guy on my camera Saturday and went to town, eager to try it out. Two minutes later the frame on my glasses snapped in half as I was walking down the street, apparently from the cold. As it's rather difficult to take photos if you can't see straight, I walked back, arranged the half-broken glasses on my face, and drove to a glasses shop in the next town. After this little detour I had little time left before I had to meet with Mr. Watanabe (a local community leader who enjoys inviting me over to his place to practice English), and after that I was supposed to go to another person's house in the mountains for dinner. So I only had time to do a quick run around the block, borrowed monopod in tow.

(these are cropped images; make sure you click to see the whole picture)

The left statue's head had a tinge of purple around it. Nothing a little Photoshoppery couldn't fix.

This is taken facing almost 180 degrees from the previous photo, pointed at the intersection about 200 meters down the street. The range on this lens is pretty cool.

The same shot, focused close. As this isn't a photography site, I should refrain from using words like "bokeh". But since it apparently comes from Japanese, I can use it anyway! HA!

Having to think about focus makes shots like this more difficult. Recomposing wasn't an option as I was shooting through a shrub. Do you focus on the left stone which is closest to you, and let the details on the right fuzz out, or do you shoot for the middle of the road and get everything kinda in focus but not really? Maybe I should have stopped down a bit more, but this was already at f/10.

At some point, you have to stop thinking too hard and just shoot.

Overall I'm quite satisfied. I'm used to using the stock lens which is 18-55mm; with this one I found myself trying to zoom out, and then backing up to compose my shots. The minimal macro range is 90cm (about 3 feet), and in macro mode it won't let you zoom out farther than 180mm. At that range, a large orchid just barely fits into the frame, which is pretty much what I wanted. I'll try out the macro later and see how it goes.

This actually happened not last weekend, but the weekend before, which was a 3 day weekend. Weekend weekend weekend! But the story must be told. Photos will follow shortly.

Day 1: in which the Author and his Companions star in a James Bond film

Last weekend was a three day vacation, and a few of us from the area wanted to take a road trip somewhere, so we decided to visit Sado island on the Japan Sea coast. The four of us piled into a kei car and hopped on the expressway, leaving work a couple hours early so that we could get to our first stop before dinner. Since we couldn't make it to the island in one day, I had reserved a hot spring resort hotel just before the coast, with dinner and breakfast included. The original resort was apparently built in the 60's or early 70's, with the same sort of decor that would appear in a James Bond film.

We checked in to our double suite (!) and sat down to a feast of epic proportions. Oyster soup, pickles of various kinds, fruits, vegetables, a few different kinds of fish, and something sweet that none of us could identify. We bathed in the onsen for awhile, played some hearts, and went to sleep.

Day 2: in which the Author gets a Life (or at least rents one)

After a rather large Japanese-style breakfast and some coffee, we checked out of the 007 hotel and made a beeline for the ferry terminal. The website said that the ferry didn't take reservations, and although we had arrived an hour and a half before the ferry left, they didn't have space for our car, and the next ferry wouldn't leave for another 3 hours. Disgusting. After much wringing of hands, we decided to park the car, catch the next jetfoil we could, and rent a car once we got there. Ironically even after all of this, we still arrived at the same time as the original car ferry, and spent less money overall. (I have no idea why it costs three times as much to ferry a car over and back than it does to rent for 24 hours, but it does.) The car rental place had a kei minivan left for us: a Honda Life. Yes, the car is called a "Life". I had to say, though, that it was a lot less painful to rent here than I thought. I showed my driver's license, they photocopied it, and then I was in the car ready to go within 2 or 3 minutes.

We drove across the ocean and up the coast to watch the sun set, before driving to the southern tip of the island to check in to our hostel. The hostel was run by an old lady with a house on a farm, and she had a hearty home-cooked dinner waiting for us when we arrived. As we were the only guests, we had a chance to chat with her for awhile, and then we finished our meal and went to the baths down the street. Though they weren't as nice as the mountain resort, one pool had some seat-shaped indentations with jets that gave a great massage. Some of the locals gave us some advice on what to see on the island, and we discussed our plans back at the hostel.

Day 3: in which Heather shows mercy

As we had limited time on the island, we decided to see the gold mine and maybe a temple or two on the way back, if there was time before the ferry left. The gold mine tour was pretty short; I guess that gold had been found about 400 years ago, and people had been tunneling it out of the rock since then. The gold mine tour is basically a museum that shows how the ore was extracted, the different techniques used to pull seepage water out of the mine, the refining techniques, and some other things. One particularly interesting exhibit was a gold brick inside a lexan case with a fist-sized hole cut in it. The sign said that if you could remove the brick from the case, you could have a 1/4 size replica of it, in gold of course. The brick, about a foot long, weighed 12.5 kg, and was quite slippery. All those movies you see about people moving gold in briefcases are full of shit. That stuff is HEAVY. Most people couldn't even pry it off the velvet case bottom to hold it in their hand. There was one guy there who was able to lift it up, and was almost able to slide it out over his forearm, but his wrist was too big.

We left after a few hours, and stopped at a couple temples on the way (thank you in-car GPS). It was raining quite heavily, so we didn't spend all that much time taking photos, but both the places we stopped were quite unique in their architecture. (Side point: I switched my headlights on during the rain because visibility was almost nil. No fewer than 3 drivers flashed their brights at me as if to say, "Dude, your headlights are on!" For a culture that seems so obsessed with signs about driving safely, they sure don't act like it.) We made it back to the ferry with plenty of time to spare, grabbed a bite to eat, and headed back up the coast toward Atsumi onsen.

We were greeted at the door around 7 pm by the rather intoxicated proprietor of the inn, who seemed surprised to see us. I guess they had expected us to call that day and confirm our reservations, or there was a miscommunication, but in any case they had a room ready for us. Dinner that night was truly a feast fit for a king: we each got our own crab, two or three soups with mussels and vegetables and various things, a filet of a very sweet fish, a giant fish head (which, surprisingly, was quite delicious once I figured out which parts were edible), and a mushroom stew. Then they brought in a plate to share amongst ourselves, which had several types of sashimi, raw shrimp, squid, abalone, some sort of sea snail, and a split open lobster which was still alive and moving. Heather took pity on the poor critter, and calling upon her biology classes and knowledge of sea creatures, put an end to its misery by skewering its nerve cluster with a wooden spike. He was delicious.

It was one of the new ALT's birthdays and none of them had been to Matsushima yet, so yesterday I took some folks there to eat oysters and see the scenery. Overcast skies meant that most of my photos came out underexposed, and the bottom photo in this entry required massive postprocessing work to look halfway decent; I need to start shooting in raw mode and learn how to meter properly in order to avoid losing the shadows.

Most of the fall colors this year haven't been all that great. The trees are all changing at different times this year, so that by the time the maple trees are in full color the rest of the trees' leaves are brown and sagging. I went to Naruko last week but it was overcast and only half the leaves had changed over.

Most of the other trees were either still green or had lost their leaves. This lone tree was trying to disprove the old Japanese adage that "the nail which sticks out gets pounded in".

I took this photo directly below the tree in the photo above.

Set into an alcove on one island, I don't know whether this is a gravestone or just a simple marker.

I like how despite the caretaker's best efforts to keep things spotless, leaves still collected on the roof.

As I raised my camera to take this shot, a flock of seagulls graced the scene with aerial acrobatics. Isn't it nice when nature just poses for you?