Why brakes are important

So Tuesday after class, I hopped on my bike to head home. It was lightly raining. It wasn't enough for me to bother with a rain jacket, or to worry about it getting in my eyes too much while riding. I didn't feel like getting too worked up, since I had a lot of homework to get done that night, so I was taking it pretty easy. Also, I've been riding more cautiously in the rain here anyway; my bike's brakes are pretty remarkably ineffective when they're wet. The tires still grip the road surface just fine, but it takes several wheel revolutions of full pressure braking before enough moisture is swept off of the rims for the brakes to start applying any deceleration to the wheels.

Topographically speaking, the route home goes slightly downhill, slightly uphill, flat, slightly uphill, downhill, uphill, and then downhill to the driveway. On the second to last downhill portion, the car ahead of me slowed down and stopped--I think the car in front was making a right turn and waiting for a traffic break (in Japan cars drive on the left side of the road), but that detail is a little bit irrelevant. There was a comfortable distance between me and the car, so I started applying the brakes, not really thinking too much of anything.

After the normal period of not doing anything, though, by brakes continued to not do anything. I realized that my options had suddenly become very limited. To the left of the car was a guardrail, and not enough room to walk by, let alone ride by at 30 mph, which is what I'm realistically estimating my speed at. To the right of the car was oncoming traffic. My rear brake is never powerful enough to lock the rear wheel anyway, and the plastic pedals on the bike are too slippery to allow it, so a move like a skater's hockey stop wouldn't work at all. Again because of the pedals, trying to bail out and just jump off the bike would probably just make me fall uncontrolled and piledrive my bike into the car.

Anyone who's squeamish and has an active imagination should skip the next four paragraphs...

Having gone through that many rejected options, I was out of time and simply ran straight into the car. My front wheel hit the bumper first, and I was launched off the saddle into the vertical rear door. I'm pretty sure it was my left shoulder that put the dent in the door panel; my mouth hit the glass. As I got up I was bleeding pretty profusely. I thought it was a nasty nosebleed.

The driver moved her car out of the intersection, and I picked up my stuff and moved it off of the road. Offering me tissues to try to control the blood, she first confirmed that I had insurance before calling the police and sentencing me to medical care. While she did that, I used the car's glass to inspect the damage to myself. I didn't have a nosebleed, I had a laceration between my upper lip and my nose that was being quite productive. I guess the force of the impact tore the skin open. Also, my braces did quite a number on the inside of my upper lip. My teeth were hurting quite a bit, but they were all there, and all still in the right position.

Shortly after the police showed up, Laura and Kate, two other students in my dorm, came upon me while walking home, and started helping with the information exchange. This was fortunate, as I wasn't thinking terribly clearly at that stage, and due to the massive swelling of my upper lip, I was barely intelligible in English, let alone Japanese. An ambulance was called for, and after establishing that a Japanese-only hospital was fine, I got a one-minute ride up the last hill before getting home, to the Utano Hospital. I thought this was pretty funny, because with as long as it took for the ambulance to be called for, get there, figure out what was going on, and deliver me, I could have walked there. It was something like 100 meters from where I crashed.

I got two stitches on the laceration below my nose and one in my upper lip, with tap to hold the other parts of the cut closed. My lip, since it was shredded in a particularly wonderful fashion, was the recipient of a snip for a dangling chunk. That took a long time to stop bleeding. After the cleanup, I got a CT scan to make sure there weren't any breaks. Then the doctor dispensed some instructions, and I was free to pick up my prescriptions and go.

My total cost for the ambulance ride, ER treatment, and prescriptions was slightly less than US$60. This really makes the US health care system look like an awful joke. I can't see that kind of treatment at a US hospital being less than a four figures even after insurance, and probably over $10000 before insurance.

More good news in terms of insurance: the information reached me yesterday that the driver does have car insurance. Even though there wasn't anything I could have done about it, I am legally at fault (that's fair--she was stopped, it certainly wasn't her fault), so the damage is on my bill. But now at worst I'll have to pay an insurance deductible. The way it was phrased when I heard it, though, I don't know if there even is a deductible. I'll find out more on Monday, when I go in to the police station for paperwork regarding the insurance. That should be fun.

I'll be meeting with the driver on the 28th this month. That's when all the payment details will get fully worked out. I'll be going with at least one person from the International Center at Ritsumeikan to help with the language barrier. My main job will be to apologize. That might sound weird to most Americans, since I got stuffed into an ambulance and she didn't get hurt, but the fact is that she didn't do anything, and then suddenly she had to deal with a damaged car, talking to a big, bleeding, and probably accidentally rude gaijin, and an afternoon full of talking with police and otherwise not doing what she had planned to do.

Anyway, I'm recovering pretty well. By the next day it didn't hurt any more, and I've just been needing more rest than normal. Today the swelling is mostly gone, so I look almost normal except for the cut. It did put a noticeable dent in my studies this week, and I'm struggling to work up the motivation to get back on track with that. But, things could have gone a lot worse, and I'm glad they didn't.

Hectic week... now presenting last weekend's mountain climb!

Pictures!

My little mountain-climbing adventure turned out to be more than I had expected. I only managed to convince one other person to go, thanks to the last-minute nature of my planning - Dan Cerillo from New Jersey came along for the workout. I woke up on Sunday after four hours of mediocre sleep, got ready, and we headed out. Proving to me once again that my sense of scale here is completely thrown off, we arrived at the trailhead by bike in about half the distance I had expected.

The weather was wonderful. Nice and cool. We started up the trail and immediately noticed a key difference in the maintenance level between this trail and popular hiking trails to mountain peaks in the US. Namely, that at the start at least, this trail is literally paved. Since there's a shrine at the summit, they've probably been doing maintenance and improvement on this trail for four hundred years. The paving eventually faded out, but the entire trail was exceptionally well maintained, and the steeper parts had stone or wooden stairs embedded.

The steeper spots were the other key difference from all the other summit trails I've done: there wasn't a single switchback. Through tacit agreement, since we were both there for a workout and to make up for laziness, Dan and I both just plowed ahead at the same foot pace no matter how steep the trail got. The trail was almost entirely shadowed by trees, which also had the effect of blocking the wind. By the time we reached the top, we had plenty of sweat to show for our pace. It was almost twenty degrees cooler (Fahrenheit) at the top than at the bottom, and it opened up to the breeze, which felt absolutely fantastic.

Overall the trail goes up something like 2600 feet in less than two miles, which makes it the steepest average slope I've hiked up. I felt marginally bad at the start, really good at the top, and pretty rubber-legged when we got to the bottom again. All told, we went from the dorm to the top and back in under 4 1/2 hours. That was a good day. I slept like a baby that night.

Monday was nothing special, but Tuesday things took a different turn. I've been delaying posting because I've been trying to sort things out. My next post will finally bring everything up to date.

Meeting people, eating sushi, and climbing mountains

We had a special session of class today, which wound up being one of the most difficult class periods I can remember, including any number of tests. Our teachers got some volunteer Japanese students to come into class and talk with us. We were to interview them about recommendations for improving at various aspects of learning the Japanese language, both in groups of four and one-on-one. I did get some good ideas out of this, but it's still quite hard to ask these sorts of questions, and frequently it's hard for me to understand the answers as well.

After going through the relevant class items, we could talk with them about whatever we wanted, as long as it wasn't in English--this part of it was much more fun, and quite a bit easier. I asked everyone for recommendations on books to read, and one of them is going to let me borrow books. In talking with her, I also found out this student spent a year studying abroad in Boulder, Colorado at the same time that I lived in Castle Rock, Colorado. Interesting.

In a little while tonight, I will be going out with a bunch of the students for sushi. While a couple of the students prepared sashimi for the potluck party a couple of weekends ago, I haven't gone out for sushi since I got here. This is actually the longest I've gone this calender year without having sushi. Clearly this must (and will) be fixed.

Meanwhile, probably due to my reduced level of activity compared to the summer, I've been having problems getting to sleep for the last week. In order to fix this, on Sunday I'm going to go climb a mountain.
The visible high point is 愛宕山 (Atago-yama, or Mount Atago), which is the highest point in this ward and the highest of the mountains immediately surrounding Kyoto. At 924m elevation (3031ft) vs my dorm's 71m (234ft), 7.08km or 4.4 miles away in a straight line, it should make for a decently tiring and scenic but short excursion. Unless I bring along slow people. Which I'll try to do because they'll whine and I'll think it's funny.

Exchange rates and a big breakfast

The exciting news for the day comes from a tip from a Earl. He's in all but one of my class sessions and lives three doors down the hall in my dorm, but was also here last semester. Last night he asked a bunch of us newbies if we wanted to go for breakfast on campus with him today, saying it's pretty cheap. This sounded good because it meant something different to eat. I've still been being pretty uncreative with what ingredients I'm buying.

So this morning we went to cafeteria in the Ikagakukan in the southeast corner of the campus. Every school day, from seven to nine in the morning, it's a buffet-style breakfast, all-you-can-eat style. You get one plate, one bowl of miso soup, one bowl of rice, and as much tea (hot, cold, or both) as you want for 260 yen. You can fit an awful lot of food on one plate if you've had practice.

I should note that the breakfast options are not the typical ones. There is more fresh fruit than there is at lunch, but the rest of the options have more meat in them than the lunch buffet. I've had chicken for breakfast more times than I can count, and I've been a big fan of it, but after having octopus and squid for breakfast I think my preferences may have changed. Octopus feels amazingly substantial in the morning.

Tomorrow I'm going to repeat this, except this time I'm going to bring a container along to stash save half of the monster breakfast for lunch.

Now, the annoying bit for the day: since the US economy is taking a nose-dive due to the panic bill, while this breakfast would have been $2.47 a week ago, it's now at about $2.60. Almost a 5% in change in a week, after the dollar and the yen were pretty much in lockstep for at least a year. That's not a good sign...

Getting serious

With my homework load fairly light over the weekend, I finally decided on something that I've been mulling over since I got here. Since I have discovered Anki, it sort of feels like any ridiculous goal for learning vocabulary is possible, so naturally I feel inclined to test this notion and try to learn all of the JLPT1 vocabulary. The Japanese Language Proficiency Test is a standardized test for certifying a foreigner's level of linguistic competence that's given once per year, with four different levels that you can attempt. The beginner's level, 4, tests knowledge of about 100 kanji and 800 words, which is supposed to be equivalent to about 150 hours of study. Level 1 tests about 2000 kanji and 10,000 words, corresponding roughly to a Japanese high school graduate's level of literacy. Somehow this is supposed to be reachable within 900 hours of study, but I have my doubts about that figure.

Anyway, I downloaded a flash card deck for it for Anki, and just had to work out the scheduling. The most obvious goal, and the one that would do me the most good, is to get this done before the placement test at the start of the next semester. This would go a long way into putting me into harder classes where the speaking and listening requirements also increase substantially; otherwise my main improvement will only be with the written language. There are two cards per word or kanji, one for recognizing the word and one for producing it, for a total of 17474 cards. To give myself a proper amount of time to review everything, I've worked this out to 160 new cards per day.

Everybody seems to think I'm insane. I'm ok with this. Now that I've told enough people my absurd plan, and nobody thinks I can do it, I have to prove everyone wrong.

Additionally, the amount of homework from my classes, while it's still light right now, is increasing. It might soon get to a level where I have to take it pretty seriously. So, I'm finally starting to get serious about studying.

Mostly quiet on the Eastern Front

I've skipped a couple days' worth of posts due to school and other occurences, but this also has the effect of allowing me to make a full post. Hoorah!

Tuesday, I woke up early to go to the bank, withdraw money, and then pay my rent and class fees before the 10:30 am rent deadline. During mild rain I set out on my creaky bike. I got halfway between the first and second lights after Ninna-ji, standing and mashing the pedals as usual since the bike is too small, when suddenly the left pedal (which had more of a grinding feel anyway) starting feeling wobbly. I sat down immediately and looked down at my foot while pedaling. Within one more pedal revolution, the left crankarm of the bike fell off. Great... either the nut that holds the arm on wasn't properly torqued and I pedalled hard enough to loosen it, or it wasn't there in the first place and I finally managed to break the rust. Anyway, I got to do some extra walking, but still wound up getting everything done before the rent deadline. Although it's been established that there's nothing that happens if you don't pay on time, I wanted to get it done on time anyway.

After classes, I got the bike fixed at a nearby shop for a pittance. The bike no longer creaks with every pedal stroke. I got the third and last of my textbooks, the one for my conversation class, which brings my total textbook expense for the semester to 6210円, or about $59.14 at the current rate. After five semesters of buying textbooks for UNM, this is astounding to me.

Wednesday I had only one class session, and the weather was fantastic, so I went to Kinkaku-ji. While I didn't have the mental energy to make a blog post afterwards, I did do a pretty decent job of captioning my gallery of it. Here's a direct link to the gallery.

Anyway, I have now been to every class at least once. Out of ten 90-minute class sessions per week, one is taught in English. My language class teachers have demonstrated that they can speak English just fine, but without actually saying it they've conveyed that we should only bail out and cheat when we absolutely can't think of how to ask something in Japanese. So far the workload is low. I did one assignment during the week, and I did about half of my weekend's homework today in about an hour. This means I should be able to get a good amount of kanji study in over the weekend. For this semester's kanji, I already know 140 out of 252 of them reasonably well; over the weekend I could get to where I know all of them reasonably well, and if I review them enough I could know them all permanently by the end of the month. Because learning this amount of kanji sounds relatively easy to me, I'm going to up the ante and study the B class's kanji as well. I think it's worth the effort for me to try to bump up to A next semester instead of going to B like normal.

In other news, today, I got a friendly simultaneous reminder that it's good to be in Japan, and that it's also still a good idea to pay attention instead of being a retard. After my classes and buying a composition notebook for the weekend's homework, I noticed my keys were not in my pocket. After a moment of panic, I decided the most likely cause of this was that I left my keys sitting in the bike lock. I got to my bike, and sure enough, it was there, locked, with the key sitting in the lock, untouched. I wouldn't ever expect to see my bike again if I did that at UNM, but then, at UNM they don't have multiple bike parking lots like this:
The second floor.
The first floor.
A constant line of people going in to the 2nd floor - the first floor is closed and full. Since my shot of the first floor has an admittedly crappy exposure, to put this into proper perspective, there's parking room for approximately 6000 bikes on the first floor alone. There's another bike lot the same size as this one at the south gate, and a 2nd-floor-only lot that's not quite as big at the north gate. There are lot attendants almost always on duty making sure that the bikes are packed in nice and tight. The traffic, the attendants, and the fact that it's Japan probably all deserve credit for my bike still being there.

Admittedly, if my bike had vanished, I wouldn't have been terribly upset. But, I would have been disgruntled that my room key and helmet were gone. It would cost me at least 50% more to replace the helmet than to buy another bike of that caliber.

More new classes and Typhoon Jangmi

Today, I had my first sessions of my Japanese conversation and Japanese calligraphy, along with the second session of my Japanese grammar class with a different teacher (I have four different teachers for the grammar class). Apparently the homework that I was trying to do for so much of yesterday wasn't due today, it was to be started today. The schedule sheet didn't specify whether it was listing due dates or "do" dates, so I assumed the path of more work. I imagine it would have been much easier after today's class, but who knows. It might not be a bad thing to prove myself serious about things; I may wind up needing some slack later on.

Anyway, so far, I'm liking my language classes a lot. I got more speaking practice in my classes today than I usually got in a months' time back home. It actually does seem possible that I could hold a decently fluid-sounding conversation in a month or two. I will have to stop acting so shy about things outside of class though. But, an exciting thing that may help even more, even with that last bit: we can get free Japanese tutors! We just have to sign up for it and say when we're free, and the International Center will try to match us up with a tutor on-campus during class periods we have off. Awesome.

In other news, Jangmi has done its damage to Taiwan. Even now, I can't find any reliable news on the storm's effects. There are such conflicts of information as "Torrential rains and strong winds have detroyed more than 86 thousands households" vs another news source saying 86 thousand homes are without power. I can't find any two English sources that say the same thing as far as what effects there are, except that they all agree there are a lot of mudslides due to the island still being saturated from Sinlaku.

Apparently Jangmi is only the fourth most powerful storm to hit Taiwan this year. I'm starting to realize the extent to which American media sources keep us in the dark at home. If anybody reading this actually heard anything at all about Jangmi besides on my blog, please drop a comment and let me know. I'm curious.

edit: proving the news sources writing Jangmi articles in English are crap, the 4th most powerful storm thing should actually just be 4th storm. July 13th Kalmaegi as a tropical storm, July 23rd Fung-Wong and September 13th Sinlaku as category 2 typhoons, and September 28th Jangmi as a category 4.

By Wikipedia's stats, which sadly enough seem far more consistent and reliable than the general media's, the 2008 Pacific typhoon season has claimed at least 1612 human lives and "1.366 billion USD." The Atlantic season has done in 944 and "~52 billion USD." I guess that's the real reason the US media is ignoring the Pacific; they just don't know how to blow things out of proportion and defraud insurance companies over here yet.