Mike's Blog

The Return to Tokyo (and other places)

2008-07-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

I got the chance to go back to Japan a few weeks back (July 5 - 11). I was last in Japan in October of 1997. Wow time has flown by. Strangely, it didn't seem too different over there, it was still all different like it was before..... Oh, but the kids were still riding around on their bikes talking on their cell phones.... I guess one difference is that I was continually looking for a Internet signal for my laptop. When I got home from my mission, I kept on seeing "web addresses" on TV commercials and I had no idea what they were talking about. Before I left for my mission to Japan, my dad had an old "green screen" Sanyo computer. Boy did things change while I was gone for two years.

On to some pictures:

So I had never ridden on a 747-400 "heavy" before, so I decided to book some tickets on Japan Airlines (JAL) and take it for a ride. On some of the older version they actually had economy seats in the upper deck, but not on the version I flew on. So, it was basically just felt the same as any other plane, but I'm sure we looked pretty cool taking off. The plane looks cool, at least I think so.

When I flew over to Japan for my mission, I was a loner, yep no one else was going to my mission at the same time and so I headed out alone. My flight was delayed for like 3 hours and my mission president had decided to come pick me up by himself so he could just do some of the interviews in the car on the way home from the airport. Well bless his hear, my flight was delayed so long and since I'm sure that he didn't get very much sleep while president, when I got off the plane I walked out of customs to a throng of people. There were so many people holding up signs and since I was an foreigner, they all start shouting. I couldn't see any mission president anywhere. I had to go either left or right, but had no idea where to go. I chose left and just happened to see a very tired American with a suit on and he was sitting down.... and a sleep. I tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped up. He was a bit embarrassed for falling asleep, but it was all good -- he needed the sleep!

My trip over this time was much less dramatic, perhaps because I had already been there. I just kept on waiting for that same place where all of the people were yelling and holding up signs, but it was a bit anti climatic when I got there because it was really quiet. There must not have been many flights coming in right then. Oh well, there were plenty of other things that brought back a flood of memories!

One of those memories were "Danchi's", this is the Japanese word for big apartment complexes. Though I think that Danchi refers more to lower income apartment complexes -- but we called everything Danchi's when I was over there. You could literally spend a whole day knocking on doors in some of the ones in Tokyo. Some days we would ride our bikes out there and take our lunches. We would stay all day long and just go from Danchi to Danchi. Wow, we would get our exercise! So here is a picture of a Danchi. We would start at the top and work our way down, hoping that the JW's hadn't just been there.....

The cool thing (not for us missionaries because we never had one in our apartments) was that a lot of the doors have video cameras so when they can't come to the door, or don't want to come, they can just answer the door from the kitchen area and see who it is. We call them "kekko" boxes. Kekko means: no thanks or I am fine.

A Danchi (brown building):

When I went over there this time I flew into Narita (one of Tokyo's airport), which you would think was close to Tokyo. I was actually 2 hours via train from Tokyo. I jumped on a train and rode into Shinjuku station, which is one of the big stations in the Tokyo area. I had never been to this station, I'm not sure if it wasn't in my mission or if I just never went there. I am pretty sure that it wasn't in my mission. This train station is the perfect size for the "where's the Gaijin" game. Gaijin means foreigner. So one of us a missionaries would stand stationary in one place and the other would walk back a little ways. One missionary would take a picture of the other, standing in a sea of Japanese people. It was much like "where's Waldo".

Here is a view of Shinjuku from my hotel room (the Tokyo Tower is in a couple of the pictures):

Somewhere on this blog there should be a link to a guitar player that I saw in Shinjuku, he was pretty good. There were a lot of bands around playing music.

So from Shinjuku I headed on up to Matsumoto (about 3 hours by train -- no bullet train though!), which is in Nagano ken. "ken" is a prefecture, the Nagano Olympics where held near Nagano city in Nagano ken. Matsumoto is about an hour from the Nagano ski areas. I didn't get to go there, but I hear the skiing and mountain biking is pretty good. Matsumoto sits at the base of the Japanese Alps. Also, I hear that there are some pretty cool Japanese style cabins you can stay in while hiking in the area. I borrowed this picture off one of the Matsumoto websites -- great site! (http://welcome.city.matsumoto.nagano.jp/contents12+index.htm)

Maybe we will get to see it in person sometime!

Here are some pictures I took of the Matsumoto area:

Here is the local mountain climbing shop "green grass":

I got a chance to find the local LDS church. I was hoping to make it to church on Sunday, but it didn't work out. This church was much nicer (from what I could see) than most of the churches I ever saw over in Japan.

So the Japanese office setup is very different from things here in the States. I took a few pictures of a typical area. There are no cubicle, that would take up too much space (I guess). For a society that is typically pretty private, their office environment doesn't really offer that. Interesting. Here a few pictures:

Well, that is all for now. I now know why I only blog every once in a while. It takes a lot of time and the blogger interface is not my favorite. Maybe I will post some other pictures later.

Alternate use of an excavator

2008-06-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

Excavator powered boat

How to tell you made an engineer mad (or a mathematician)

2008-06-15T20:04:00.000-07:00

Big Truck Video (CAT 797B)

2008-03-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

Caterpillar 797B Mining Truck Video -- this is a big truck!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4445151764914171780

The "Knack"

2008-01-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

An Engineer's Dilemma.....

2007-01-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

Luke and Google Earth

2006-11-05T15:55:00.000-08:00

This is really the first time Luke has been interested in using the mouse. He would make the earth spin around and around. It is pretty cool, b/c he would just start putting the mouse over different buttons in the software and start clicking. He figured out pretty quick how to make the earth zoom in and out. I'm a little worried b/c he has figured out how to open documents that are on the desktop--I'm not sure we need too much help modifying any of our documents. : )

Rachel and Luke got out some dominoes that Great Grandpa and Grandma Newman gave us. They had great fun with those. It reminded me about a cool Honda Accord commercial that I had seen using the "dominoes effect". Luke watched it like 20 times. Atta boy!

Digger The Dog

2006-11-05T15:47:00.000-08:00

So, I realized that not everyone would know why my site is named "Digger The Dog". Well when I was in high school I bought (let's call it a Joint Venture between myself, my brother and my friend Dave Torgerson-- later other of my family members got in on the buy too) a 1975 Jeep CJ5 and painted on the back of it was a " dog", I think it looked more like an ugly rat, and it said "Digger The Dog". So that is the history of that.... I'll have to get a picture of good old Digger The Dog and post it on this site.

2 posts in one day. I better pace myself or I might get burned out. : ) Actually I have one more to go yet today.

I went to Dresden Germany once upon a time.

2006-11-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures:

I had to get a picture next to the Deutsche Bank ATM for my brother Brian.

I thought this was a cool plane b/c of the soccer ball on it. Luke liked it too.

I got a chance to walk around a look at different houses in the neighborhood that my hotel was in. I really liked them. The orange one in the middle was one of my favorites. From living in an old farm house, I was thinking that some of the houses (b/c they looked older than my farm house) were probably pretty cold in the winter time. Maybe not.

Germany is really into renewable energy. A lot of the houses had solar cells and when I was flying over Germany I could see a lot of wind turbines (I didn't get any pictures of them though). Also, everything was diesel powered (well everything except for my Mercedes C class rental car--it was a gasser). I got to drive in Germany, on the AutoBahn!! I was doing a cram session on the airplane so that I would know what all of the signs meant. I was especially worried about the ones that had writing on them--I learned that I don't speak German and I for sure don't read it. They cram like 5 words together. Itwouldbelikemenotputtinganyspacesinasentence. They smashed together words just didn't make sense. Just for fun I put in Google "the longest German word", one of the sites I got had the word: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz

It was listed as winning the 1999 longest word of the year (I guess they do an annual survey of all the new words?). As the site explains the word "consisted of 63 letters, 20 syllables, and ten individual words—all to express a law having to do with British beef (Rindfleisch) and the so-called "mad cow disease."

Anyway, I want to echo what William and Samantha have said. You really need to spend more than just a few days in a place to really get a chance to experience it.

I got a chance to go over to an area in Dresden that was bombed in WWII. This area was heavily bombed and most of the historical buildings were destroyed. After the war each city had a choice of either rebuilding like what was there historically or to build new modern buildings. Dresden decided to rebuild in an historical manner. The buildings were amazing. The Semper Opera House is one of the most famous. It was destroyed in 1945, but rebuild was not started until 1977! It was finally finished in 1985. I took a few pictures of it, but really it looks the best at night, so I borrowed a night picture from a website.

Semper Opera House:

Here are a few more pictures of some historical buildings. I'm not 100% sure how many of these were destroyed and rebuilt, but all of them were very impressive. A great site to see.

Well I guess that is enough for now. Once a year maybe enough blogging for me, maybe not.

Taco Truck

2005-11-27T13:29:00.000-08:00