As far as I can remember I’ve never paid an entrance fee for a public park (even if I did not actually paid, thx Wade =D ). Spring break was a good occasion to see sakura blossoms (cherry trees). And I have to add the park is well maintained. Prepare 200 JPY if you are planning to visit it.
Click on any picture to see it fullscreen. Photos are also available in my personal gallery: Here
Vacation time is now over, and the spring term is about to begin. I went to Tokyo for five days, I will post about it later this week-end if I have time. Take it for granted, the webiste is going to change pretty soon. In fact, the only thing preventing me to switch now is that I have not found a template that like yet. However, some things have already started to change: there is now a new gallery (visit it with the “Photos ” link at the top of this page. The reasons why I did that? Well first one, I like this gallery, its easy to navigate inside, it adapts to your screen resolution, … But the true reason is, I wanted to get rid of FlickR. FlickR is good, but the 200 pictures limit on space was a pain in the ass for me. I looked for other solutions, Picasa was considered, but since my server has a 50GB capacity, I thought, hey, maybe I should use it… I have uploaded new pictures, like the panoramas album.
On the 3rd of March, a famous event punctuating Urasa’s busy life every year was held. This is a 裸祭り, or Naked Man Festival. Concept is quite simple, participants just have to get naked. No actually you are just half-naked wearing some kind of traditional outfit, plus straw sandals (very easy to break by the way). It is about bringing big candles (around 40Kgs each) in front of the Temple, taking a cold bath and trying to see a buddha statue in a not very accessible lodge. The key here: pushing, pushing and pushing…
On the 22nd of February,we went inside Honda’s Saitama Factory, a place where they produce cars such as the Odyssey, a best seller in Japan. It was offered by the IM school to all students enrolled in the Operations Management course. It was about 2hours from IUJ by bus, so I spent most of the time sleeping… Another thing is, no picture inside the factory was allowed. Also a good opportunity to spent a day outside IUJ. More pics inside!!
Again, it’s been a long time since my last post, bla bla bla… Time to analyze why I’ve not ben posting much recently.
Obviously, time is the number one factor. Classes, exams, organising a sexy black & white party, all that requires time, and come first in my list of priorities.
Another thing, which I think is related to the time issue, is the average length of my posts: too long! I also tried to implement some kind of dual-language capacity of the blog, but manually translating also requires a lot of time. It might be worth asking whether I should keep both french and english or only one of them. Also implementing this functionality messed up a couple of things in the website.
Busy busy days in IUJ! Ok IUJ coursework always keeps us busy anyway but last week was just… ouch! Multiple assignments / homeworks, quizzes every day, Japanese still there. Somehow I am still alive . So this post is about my first time snowboarding – in Japan – and same resort as last time, the worldwide famous 浦佐スキー場. 3 runs at max, no big difficulties. Basically a decent place for beginners, who also have $$$ in mind. The weather was ok, sometimes sunny sometimes cloudy, but still enough to snowboard without goggles (which I don’t own anyway). The video of the day should land on the blog pretty soon.
Hey, guess what, I’m busy! So many things coming to our face, us, the poor IUJ students, especially MBA :p. Internship applications, homeworks, assignments, homeworks again, group work, group meetings, maintaining a social life, and, for the bravest people in IUJ, JAPANESE!!!! You spend long long nights not moving forward, and then you feel sleepy during classes, then you take a nap, it’s a vicious circle… Anyway, I’m not here to take about class, but about snow! Yeah cause right now, it’s winter (just in case you didn’t notice). As you might have seen in my pics, from my window you can see a ski resort. In fact, it’s Urasa’s ski resort. And guess what? As local students, we get discounts. It’s kind of a small resort, two or three runs only, but good enough to get you back in business.