My life as a Japanese salaryman

Remember that crazy crosswalk that is always shown whenever the topic of Japan or Tokyo comes up? Now I walk it everyday.

Remember seeing footages of Japanese commuters being pushed into a train? Yes, everyday, indeed, I'm pushed into a train so packed I can feel every tiny muscle movement of the commuters around me. I can feel them straining to upright as more people are packed into the train, pushing them aside where there is no space to go.

So I'm slowly becoming a Japanese salaryman. At the same time, I'm becoming a stereotypical American expat. Every morning, I'm ashamed to report, I stop by Starbucks to get some coffee on my way to work.

What redeems all this is the luxury I'm now pampered with. Expensive sushi, taxi to go home...all such material comforts. Just keep myself busy enough, and maybe my soul won't get a chance to complain.

First week of work--and some snowboarding!

I'm finally done with my MMBA! I came back to a cold and snowy Tokyo, totally jetlagged, last Sunday, and stayed at home the whole day. It was about time to come home, but I also know I'm going to miss many of the people from MMBA! Then, on Monday--Woohoo--I started on my first engagement! I won't say much about the engagement here, except that I really feel the need to improve my Japanese. Besides attending meetings that were held in Japanese, I really couldn't do much because of problems with SPSS. Uh! What a pain to deal with. The incredible thing is, SPSS somehow manages to avoid any appreciable improvement despite having gone from version 10 to 16. I'd definitely use another software is there were one.

It turned out that this weekend was a long weekend. What did I do? I headed to Gala Yuzawa, the closet resort to Tokyo. It's an investment by Japan Railway, so the resort is the train station. You literally step out of the train into the resort. Brilliant! The mountain itself was OK--a little small, by my standards. There was a lot of fresh snow, however. Enough to make me very very happy! I went with my friend, Darwin, who's a beginner, so we spent a lot of time on the bunny slope. He's doing very well by the end of the day already! The most amazing thing about the resort, besides the convenience factor (or should I say, its imaginative vertical integration in its value chain), was the number of people there. I used to complain about long lift lines at Heavenly. Well, turned out that was nothing compared to this. I swear a great percentage of the entire Tokyo population was here! The hills looked like ant-conquered-donuts from afar. The runs were so dotted with people it was difficult to get one smooth run in! Some small observations about snow sports in Japan: 1) People don't wear helmets. 2) There're a lot of beginners. 3) Snowboarding is much more popular than in Europe.

One more piece of good news--I'm almost done with constructing my Ikea furnitures!