So… I knew this would happen. I totally knew this would happen. But I kept thinking, you know, “it’ll happen, I’ll twitch, I’ll panic, it’ll be lots of running in circles, then it’ll just return to normal and I’ll figure out a way to keep things on level ground.” Hah.. yeah.

What’s going on? The yen is speeding ahead of the other currencies in the world at a pace I didn’t know was possible. What does this mean? The USD, the euro, and, more importantly (for me), the swedish crown, are all steadily losing their value against the yen.

(Yen/SEK is not “yen per second”, but “yen per swedish crown)

The above is a *very inofficial* diagram based on my own plotting of the yen versus the swedish crown as I’ve lived here — I’ve kept good track of it since all my cash is in Sweden, which means that whenever I withdraw money from an ATM, the amount of money I actually “lose” from my account varies depending on the above chart. As you see, there’s a nice downward curve there at the end, starting at the end of this summer, and, well, so far not ending at all.

I thought this was something “local” at first — as in, local to Sweden, and/or to Japan, but it seems everyone around me is talking about this now, and even the folks back home are saying that the market is looking hairy. I’m sure you guys have felt it too one way or another (stockholders, in particular).

It’s no trifling matter, though. I now pay about 44% more for everything that I buy here, compared to this summer. Imagine if your rent, your gas bill (if you have one), your electricity, your groceries, your bus tickets, the alcohol at your bars, cigarettes, gasoline for your car… imagine if all of that, in one single sweep, got 44% more expensive.

What usually cost $1 suddenly costs $1.44. What usually costs $20 now costs $29. What usually costs $50 suddenly costs $72. And the big bad one — rent. My rent here went from something like $210/month to $320/month. A $110 increase. In about 2-3 months’ time. It hurts, lemme tell you.

There are varying theories on why this is happening, some more disheartening than others. We swedes have speculated that this is a temporary deal, because Japan is so extremely dependent on import/export. The yen simply cannot stay stronger than the rest of the world, because the rest of the world will refuse to buy from Japan (the Japanese will want payment in yen, and the rest of the world will not wanna buy at 44% the higher price), especially with companies like Sony and Nintendo who don’t want to fall behind Microsoft in the console competition. If Sony and Nintendo are forced to cut prices by 44% just to keep up, it won’t look pretty on their financial reports.

Then there is the theory which stretches back 7 years or so. One of the women I teach English to told me today that when her daughter went to Sweden (yep, her daughter has lived in Sweden) back in 2001, the swedish crown cost 12 yen. That’s close to where it’s at now, if you take a look at the chart above. According to her, things have simply fallen back from being out of proportion for the last 7 or so years. Since 2001, she claims, the yen has gradually dropped in value against the other currencies and kept dropping steadily until it was what you see if you look at the chart around summertime — 17.88 yen per swedish crown. If I had only known. Well, in hindsight, I’m not sure I’d have done any differently from what I did, but I think I might have at least saved up 1/3rd of my buffer in Japanese currency if I’d realized the yen was so outrageously weak compared to 7 years earlier. Live and learn.

Update: The real reason appears to be panicky international investors;

“The yen’s recent jump, so lethal for Japanese exporters like Sony, was set off by panicky international investors rushing to unwind yen “carry” trades, which had taken advantage of Japan’s low interest rates to borrow yen to invest elsewhere. Reversing those trades means buying back the yen, lifting its value.”
– http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081029/as_japan_earns_sony.html

In any case, now I’m twitchily trying to not spend money on anything if I don’t have to, and I’m also trying to find a(nother) job while studying. It’s quite a pain for me, because I’m a spoiled Swede who’s never ever worked and studied at the same time in the past (student aid and such), but now is not the time to go all “but my studies must not suffer — I cannot allow myself to take time away from them” on myself (they call it “iiwake” over here) and just get to it because I’ll ruin myself otherwise.

Wish me luck. (The next post will probably be about how I lost that job teaching those kids that I wrote about earlier…)

Since I got here in April, a few people have gone out of mine and others’ lives, sometimes just as abruptly as they entered. Since we’re all here temporarily, with different set times of stay, friends depart as we stay, and we are reminded of when our day comes.

It sounds a little overdramatic, maybe.

The first person to go home was actually this twitchy little Swede who I briefly spoke to. He was here for all of 3 days, even though he had paid to be here for 3 months (paid the school tuition, and for the apartment he was to stay in). A day or so after I arrived, the landlord asked me to go “speak to this guy who’s from Sweden, cause I can’t figure out what his deal is”. The guy was 18, had just graduated from high school, and was completely terrified at the thought of being away from mom. He had called his mom the day after he arrived, and she’d immediately booked him a plane ticket back home. Stupid mom. In any case, he was now dead set on returning, and nothing I said would change his mind. “It runs in my family. We get nervous, stressed out.” That’s what he said. I can’t claim to be a psychologist so I’ll leave it at that.

The next people to leave were Daniel and Elin. They were here for 10 weeks (roughly 3 months), and although I didn’t actually know them very well, I had still talked to them a lot and felt like I sort of knew them.

After that came Jun, The Korean Guy, who left about a month ago if I recall. I didn’t know him that well, but Rojio (no clue on the spelling), a spanish girl, had begun to date him, so she was kind of devastated when he went home.

Then yesterday, Ricardo. Ricardo’s originally from Guatemala I think, but he’s lived his whole life in Sweden, so he was in the Sweden-group. He’s also one of the closer friends I have here so far, so him leaving was a bit of a bummer. Lee, a chinese girl who’s been dating him basically since a month after we got here, was and still is devastated about his departure.

I guess what affects me the most is seeing the one being left behind. I know that at some point I’ll be going back home, and I’ll be leaving everything that has taken on a meaning here during my stay behind. I will be leaving my girlfriend behind, and although we are talking about long term plans and what to do from here on, we will be apart for a long while, regardless. At least 6 months. Possibly a year. Possibly even more.

My original plan has always been to stay here for 2 years, but with my current level of proficiency, I may be ready to take the highest-level test in Japanese proficiency as soon as March, next year. If so, there really is no meaning in me staying here for another whole year. It would be a waste of money that I never had to begin with (student aid).

So now I’m looking at maybe only being here for another 6 months. We’ll see though. If I’m 100% sure that I can pull off that exam, I will go back in April. Otherwise I will stay another year. Decisions, decisions.

So, 6 days from now (on Friday), I toddle aboard a plane that goes to Istanbul, Turkey. Then I sit there and stare at a wall for 5 hours or so, after which I trundle aboard a second plane that goes to Osaka, Japan. Gee, I’m finally going.

I for one am amazed that I *am* going. So many hurdles in the way of my trip that could’ve prevented me from pulling it off, like government aid restrictions and the like (say “CSN!” to an unsuspecting Swede and they’ll react about the same way another human would, if you were to exclaim “Blood, blood, blood!” (Hitchhiker’s Guide reference, there…!)). For the record, this is the itinerary: Stockholm, Sweden 02:10 PM on April 4th —> Istanbul, Turkey 06:35 PM; Istanbul, Turkey 11:55 PM on April 4th –> Osaka Kansai, Japan 04:55 PM on April 5th. Aside from the 5 hour wait in Istanbul, looks good to me!

My mother keeps harassing me about preparing for my journey, and has been doing so now for the last 7 or so days. Admittedly, I’m moving outside the country and will be there for 2 years, but how can you possibly prepare for such a journey 2 weeks before the plane leaves? I’m not shipping anything there since Sweden has no affordable plans for such things (you wanna send something FROM Sweden, you gotta send it express, no cheap boat routes available, whereas sending stuff TO Sweden, you have those options — it makes no sense).

(returns after doing some packing — decided to start today, and take things slow — how on earth am I going to fit it all in there?!)

Speaking of the aforementioned in-parenthesis problem, I have one big trunk (150-something litres, i.e. 35-something US ounces (non-liquid)), one big backpack (75 litres, i.e. 17 US ounces (non-liquid)), my lap top (in its own case), and a carry-on bag that won’t be nearly as big as the trunk/backpack. So if I guess the carry-on bag will be something like 10 litres, that puts me at around 240 litres or so. In there I intend to fit all necessary clothing, a bunch of books, the more expensive parts of my computer (CPU, RAM, MB, 3 HDD’s — not because drives are expensive, but because the drives have tons of stuff on them that I’d like to have available), and, more importantly, gifts. Yeap, mostly got chocolate but got something else too for my girlfriend (she might be reading so won’t tell you what it is!). I think the limit per bag is 20 kgs… or was it 40 kgs…? Gah. *checks*

… 20! Figures. But if I pack right, each bag may weigh 20 kgs so I’ve got 40 kgs to play with (that’s about 100 lbs in total, unless I’m mistaken), and the carry-on may weigh up to 8 kgs. Don’t really wanna lug around 8 kgs but hey. (Does that include my lap top’s weight? I guess I won’t go too close to the 8 kg limit or I might find that out the hard way.)

Oh well. Today’s a sort of farewell party for me with the family. It started out well with my mom being grumpy this morning and tossing vacuum cleaners at me while I slept (seriously…!), and then she lumped the cooking chores upon me and went out to help my brother with something he needed help with. The party is in over 4 hours so I’m not sweating it just yet, though. Thought I’d take it easy, pack some, write on my blog-gone-extinct, and I guess start working on dinner once we’re a little closer to dinner-time.

Tomorrow, in fact, is also a farewell-thingie for me but at lunch time. My sister has kind of excommunicated herself from our family — at least during the bigger gatherings — so she tends to come visit for lunch the day after we have some big party. I suppose that sounds worse than it is, but is worse than it appears. The result, in any regard, is waffles. Lots and lots of waffles. With varying flavors of jam and whipped cream. Waffles are not a dessert in Sweden, for your information. It’s a perfectly normal thing to have for lunch, and even dinner.

Speaking of days, I’ve noticed that every single day, there’s something I have to do that is at least semi-important. Last week I had TWO things every day that I had to do. I was so sure I’d miss some appointment somewhere, but so far it seems like I’ve pulled it all off — embassy visits, dentist appointments, etc. And the only day I don’t have anything planned for now is Tuesday. Monday I gotta go to the Japanese Embassy to get my visa, and I am also meeting up with old friends from high school, and on Wednesday I gotta go to the dentist AND I gotta go to another dentist. Yep, two dentists, one day. Dentist-ophobes beware! (I know “dentist-ophobe” isn’t a real word, but I can’t recall what the real word is right now). On Thursday… I gotta pack whatever’s left! And on Friday the plane leaves.

You know, the more I type, the more I realize that there was a lot to be said after all. I keep thinking I don’t have anything I want to blog about, but once I sit down, all kinds of stuff just sort of pop up. I guess a “real” blogger would have simply written one of the many things I’ve written above, posted it, then written the others and kept them unpublished and then published them one at a time with a couple of days in between. Good to keep the audience listening, and all that (I think Technorati, for example, only considers a blog active if it is posted to once a week at a minimum — boy I’m lucky if I post once a MONTH to this thing).

Speaking of “popping up”, the word for “appear” (as in “come out”) in Japanese is “deru” (出る). I went out to grab lunch a few days ago with a former teacher of mine who happens to be American, which has somehow lead to us speaking English when we talk (both in emails and in person). When I switch languages like that, though, I tend to get confused sometimes, and at some point I ended up responding to her in Swedish. Realizing that I was suddenly speaking Swedish, I wanted to say “Swedish is ‘coming out’” (not sure why I wanted to word it that way), and what I ended up saying was “Swedish is der-ing!” Der-ing? Talk about bastardizing languages in general. Was fun at the time though, but she probably didn’t get the reference and I didn’t explain.
In any case, I can’t wait to get started, both on seeing Japan in general, and in learning Japanese, and actually being able to socialize with my girlfriend. But I think one of the things I look forward to the most is seeing the people, as I think there’s a lot to be discovered about humanity in examining cultural differences. I do intend to blog more, especially once I get a new digital camera (expect lots of pictures!), so don’t unsubscribe now, despite my incomprehensive, rather-too-large and sporadic-to-the-point-of-true-randomness blog post titled “About time!”.

In case you haven’t seen it, I moved back to my mom’s place at the end of January, where I will be living for the last two months before I move to Japan. Back in April 2007, I switched ISP and went with some offer they had. The offer unfortunately bound me to use their service for 12 months. That is, until the end of April. With my move to my mom’s place, I was more or less forced to take the ISP with me (or pay for February, March, and April without actually using the service).

So my mom canceled her internet and I requested that mine was moved to her apartment. This was to take place at February 1st (i.e. her expired “end of January” and the move was to take place “the first of February”). In theory, that was supposed to happen, but around noon, January 31st, the net connection went down. And didn’t get back up again until yesterday, roughly 2 weeks later.

During these 2 weeks I couldn’t do anything at all. So I played offline games, like Starcraft (good game), Diablo 2 (um. Obsolete version of WoW, at this point), and Neverwinter Nights (um. Deranged and buggy version of WoW, especially since I couldn’t grab any of the updates online, so I played the release-version). Let me tell you… my appreciation for World of Warcraft has taken on new levels after this experience. There are so many things in WoW that improve upon the things that exist in the older games. Despite that, once I got back into WoW, I kept trying to hit ‘r’ to rest, when I was wounded in WoW. I also tried clicking on spots on the ground to “go there”.

Starcraft was good fun though. I enjoyed the story line almost as much as I did when I played it for the first time. I played through the whole first game, and  got to the Terrans in Broodwar, but at that point I sort of lost interest. The repetitiveness of “take out the whole map which is filled with enemy bases” missions just got boring after 3-4 times in a row.

Once I got back online, I was struck, as always, by the “so what now?” daze. While offline there were so many things I wanted to do online, but when it came down to it, I only really checked email, talked to friends, played some WoW, and that’s about it. I was a bit worried about the visa application for my Japan trip (the school will receive the visa at the end of February, and will notify me shortly after, they say) and I was kind of concerned about the various projects I have going that need finishing before I leave Sweden.

I mostly slept. With all that time on my hands, I kind of lost the motivation to do anything useful. I did get most of my things packed away (the things I won’t bring with me to Japan) and I did some hiragana practice and so, but not as much as I could have. Nothing I’ll beat myself with a stick over, but still. I am ever reminded of the necessity to be busy, for me to be productive. If I end up not being overly busy, I seem to shut down or something.

Anyway, I’m back in case you wondered (but with the infrequency at which I blog, I highly doubt you did).

There’s a promotional video about Sweden, of all things on this planet, on YouTube. It must have been released very recently because I saw it in the newspaper on my way to the hospital this morning.

It’s cute, I like it. I’ve never seen anything promotional about Sweden before so it was definitely interesting. URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxGpFAZuDhU

My ISP:

1. blocks outgoing port 25.
2. screws their own sendmail servers up and doesn’t manage to fix them in 24+ hours.

Go Bredbandsbolaget!

I went to a museum yesterday. It was sort of a surprise-paid thing by my school, and I saw some pretty amusing things.

The first thing I’m only linking to, as it’s not safe for work: a man.
Giggling and bouncing around that image were a bunch of school children (probably ages 8-9 or so), and it amused me to no end. I saw the headlines had this been America. (Oh and yes, there were female “versions” too — and one with both.)
Another thing, that was actually pretty cool, was this little iron meteorite:

That thing, they claim, is older than earth! 4,600,000,000 years old. And you could touch it! I did. I’ve touched something that’s older than earth. Have you?

And the final thing I wanna show you is this - can you guess what this is? Admittedly, my cell phone camera sucks beyond belief, but still — this looks like something out of a computer game, or a warzone:

If you can’t guess it, then I guess I’ll tell you. That’s a rock that naturally glows when exposed to UV light. I can’t recall why, but it was a pretty damn cool rock. I want one in my living room.

I read a FAQ earlier about intellectual property (by the pro-IP lads), in which a question was exactly similar to this:

“Q: Is it legal to say the word ‘foo’ while chopping another human being to little pieces with an axe?”

“A: No, it absolutely isn’t!”

I mean… I can say that anything and everything is illegal if I word it right and quote the wording just so.

I wrote this this morning. I am simply posting it now plus adding the picture.
If not for my lap top I’d be in complete darkness now. It is 5 am and there’s no electricity in my house.

Enrogue’s down. I give a fleeting thought to the people out there who might want the “portraits site” or the various other ones out there (Sixdays.. right. He might want to write a blog entry. Or Nicole…).

I have no lights. It is night, and night is by nature black. We humans simply chose to override, ignore and revert, but nature sometimes makes itself remembered. I stumble into the kitchen and drink from a bottle of water and look outside, at the stark blackness of the world.

It is unusual for me to yearn for times lost. Maybe it is the history classes I’ve been taking lately; maybe it’s that I’m getting of age to think such things, but I did. The magnificence of darkness… I wanted to experience those times when night was night, black was black, day was not.

I am tired of pollution and global warming, terrorism and population crises. It’s no wonder people out there get sucked into fantasy worlds. I’d rather wield a sword and stab a dragon in the eye too. The darkness outside reminded me of this all. The mistakes we’ve made to get this far, and I wondered if we remember them all still.

I took a picture (it took awhile to find my digital camera). The picture is of my cell phone lying on my table against the window. The picture isn’t of any spectacular quality or anything. The light from that cell phone was my only source of light. Under normal circumstances it is not a light at all, but here it became a damn star. This is what my apartment looked like, with the windows open:

So, when I was 9-10 years old, I dated this girl. For the first time in my life, I dated a girl. She was cute and funny and easy-going, and I broke up with her a day or two after we got together.

Her brother was a friend of mine, and one day I was spending the night over at their place. I ended up in the couch with her and him, watching some science fiction movie on the T.V. which I commented on, making both of them giggle hysterically throughout the whole thing. I was definitely on a roll then, and didn’t really think much of it at the time. Go me. Or so.

The next day, I got a call from her, telling me she thought I was super-funny and she wanted to date me. “Surely,” I agreed, and thus it was as official as things get for a 9-10 year old. A foreboding fell over me like a dark cloud, and brooding I returned home that night, thinking about what this would mean.

The following day came and I and a few friends went to where she lived. But alas, she had done silly things that day so she was grounded. She waved at me from a window far up in the apartment complex where she lived, and the foreboding came over me again. “What if my friends find her ugly…?”

The day after, I called her up and broke up with her. I couldn’t stand the thought that people would talk about me behind my back about my supposedly-ugly girlfriend. Well done, I. Another proud memory to add to the ever-growing pile of prideness.

Later at school, a bunch of people asked me reverently about my cute, new girlfriend, and I mumbled something illegible and moved on. Turns out she wasn’t ugly at all. She was cute. But how was I to know? I mean, it’s not like I had eyes to see with or anything. Funny deal though, because this happened over 15 years ago and I still remember it clear as day. I remember the particulars about it, and I remember how confused a boy I was. My feelings about matters were dictated in full by my friends, not myself. I was a mindless wolf cub in a pack, but without the sharp teeth and claws and cool, glowing eyes.