This is the first leg of my fabulous tour of asia. I'm in Kobe, Japan. Here are a couple pictures of my apartment. This is my third time in Japan. After about a month, I'll be traveling to Shanghai for a 1 month stay, then on to Thailand for 4 months. My goals are to have fun and learn languages. It's a vacation after all.
For those of you who don't know, I'm semi-retired. My definition of that expression is slightly different from most. I work 6 months out of the year, and play the other 6 months. This is the 2nd year of trying this. I really enjoyed my first 6 month vacation, but I will try to improve on it.
As for my work life, I see no need to improve it. I'm not going to become independently wealthy, I won't be able to retire any earlier, and my lifestyle won't improve by working the whole year through. I've tried to retire completely before, only to become bored with it, and feel nervous and guilty about not working.
Anyway, back to my trip. I have some excuses for not getting on this blog right away, and this is good because it gives me a chance to complain. My apartment, which I paid for in advance, has a tiny little chair, and a small crescent shaped desk. This makes using the computer very uncomfortable. My school loaned me the desk you see in the picture, and now I'm looking to rent a good computer chair. I might have to buy a bad one for 60USD though. Anything is better than the one I have.
And the internet connection is really unstable. I went most of Sunday without a connection. When I try to talk to my Skype language partners, we get shut down every few minutes. I's really frustrating. The school is going to try to intervene.
I'm still pretty bad with this new cheap camera of mine. I think I just have to hold it steadier than my last one. The other thing is I should probably figure out how to get the picture size down. It took a long time to load these first two. It's just a matter of spending more time with this blog.
Eventually, I hope to post short movies here too. I've been seriously thinking about creating a podcast to teach Thai language. I don't think this is the right place to do it, but it's a current dream of mine. There are very few Thai learning resources, and it would be a good excuse to spend more time in Thailand.
