Sunday, October 05, 2008

Postcard from Japan v2.0

Reading through my blog, you might observe that there are a lot of posts with their titles same as some older ones, with just v2.0 or v3.0 appended. While some might think that this is pure stupidity, to me this comes naturally. You see, growing up the geek way, in earlier days, when software were not released yearly to make all the moolah, the major releases were numbered by increment to the next full whole number, and minor releases and bug fixes were numbered within that whole numbers as decimals. We had DOS 6, Windows 3.11, NT4. Heck I still prefer to refer windows XP as NT5.1.

Anyway, coming back to the titles, the V2.0 here stands for the fact that this is my second long term trip to Japan, and in the first time I am writing on this trip.

This time around, I am here for eleven months in total, compared to the two and a half long duration of the trip last summer. And more importantly, month and a half of these eleven are to be spent in a language training institute, which in my case is OVTA, some twenty miles from the capital city of Tokyo. Too bad that there are time limitations to the time that we can stay out till each night, else a night out in Tokyo wouldabeen fun.

Anyhoo, so far the 25 odd days have been real fun. We've been to Tokyo Disneyland and watched an overdose of parades, what with Tokyo Disneyland celebrating its 25th Anniversary, and the Halloween season hanging around. Have also spent a great day roaming around the streets of Akihabara, and hanging out at the camera floor of Yodobashi Akiba, the bloody biggest electrical and electronics goods store in the world perhaps.

The actual work for which I am here is also going on pretty decently. The 5 days a week seven hours a day language classes have given me a slight understanding of the language and the ability to carry out basic conversations. Better fluency in communication will come over time, but as of now I guess I am pretty OK on the language front.

So far so good. Lets see what how the rest of the trip goes. Worry not, I still have lots of minor releases within the v2 of this postcard series to work on.