I'm back

It's been a long time since I last posted and as Ray Ray pointed out, this is long overdue. It's been nearly two months since I really posted and a lot has gone on since then.

For the New Year vacation I trekked across the Northern portion of the country finally reaching my destination of Sapporo, Hokkaido. I rode JR regular trains and it took two and a half days. When we finally made it to Sapporo, on New Years Eve, I got so drunk that I woke up in police custody. Luckily they took me in because they were simply worried for me as I was all alone: my travel buddy left me to fend for myself and I failed.

I've been skiing and to Tokyo Disney Sea. I travelled to Osaka and met up with Mike. We had a spectacular night, the climax being when the two of us yelled out the Team America theme song in the middle of Triangle Park. I went to Kyoto and saw my host sister, ate Okonomiyaki, and had lunch with the Rotarians who let me stay in Japan three years ago.

This week I had two interpreting jobs. The first was for the company wide plastic molding meeting. I have never seen a plastic mold in my life so I really don't know how they expected me to understand any of the content. The meeting went by slowly, my translations went like, "the picture on the left is the old version and the picture on the right is the improved version...factory XYZ raised productivity by 30%." It was embarrassing but I did my best. Today I did my second interpreting job which I thought would be a complete failure. We went to the largest factory in my company (It was my first time going here) and I translated the factory tour. The plant was really cool, tons of robotic arms and crazy automated machines along side dies that could press metal at a force of 500 tons. There was one guy who would stick his hand under one of these dies to put the part in there...it makes me appreciate my desk job a lot more. The plant was really loud so we all wore headsets and the guy giving the tour talked into a microphone. I had my own microphone that I had to speak English into. From an accurate interpretation point of view, I have to say that I did much better than I did during the plastic molding meeting. The only thing that sucked was that I was focused more on the translations rather than the machines that I wanted to see.