Tokyo, Japan

After visiting Osaka, I spent a few days in Tokyo. While I was there, I stayed with Kevin Snedker, a good friend of mine who used to be the Assistant Manager at the MTA Pub while he was at university. Kevin has been teaching English into Tokyo for the past couple of years.

We took the Shinkansen (the bullet train) from Osaka on Monday morning, and ended up having drinks on the train to get the trip started. When we got to Tokyo, we didn’t have anything planned until supper, so we mostly relaxed for the afternoon. After supper, we walked around the city for a while, then we spent several hours having dinner and drinks at The Lockup, and I met several of Kevin and Danielle’s friends. Several of them were Canadians or Australians who are working for a company called Nova, teaching English in Japan, and I also met Danielle’s friend Yuka.

Naturally, I didn’t get to sleep until about 7am, so I got nothing accomplished on Tuesday morning. However, in the afternoon, I walked around Tokyo, and Kevin took me to the Meiji Shrine. This was a large park area in the middle of Tokyo, with a large Shinto shrine in the middle. After Meiji, we spent several hours walking around the Electronics District, then went for dinner on the 49th floor of the fourth tallest building in the city. The view was incredible, and I was lucky enough to get some really good time-exposure photos of Tokyo at night. After dinner, we went to a couple bars, and again, stayed up pretty much all night.

On Wednesday, I slept for most of the morning and afternoon. I played at Velours that night, which was a fashion bar with a very high-class clientele. The venue was gorgeous, with chandeliers and comfortable couches everywhere, and the place was full of fashion models and other notable people. I played from 1:30am to 4:00am, and it was probably the most fun I've ever had playing a show, just because the venue was so different than most of the several dozen other places that I've played in.

Here are some photos from the trip:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_tokyo2007a.html

Unfortunately, on Thursday, I had to get ready to move on. The four-hour trip to the airport in the afternoon was a bit of an adventure, but I made the plane with a little bit of time to spare. The neat thing about the flight was that I left Tokyo on Thursday at supper, and I was booked to DJ in Seattle on Thursday evening. However, flying across the International Date Line moved me backwards by a day, so I arrived in Seattle at lunch on Thursday.

More notes to come shortly about Seattle and Vancouver …

Osaka, Japan

I flew to Osaka (Japan) this past weekend for a show. Although I’ve travelled pretty extensively before, this is my first time in Asia, so it’s been a great adventure so far.

I started by trying to fly to San Francisco for a visit on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, I flew through Montreal and then Chicago. I got to Chicago with no problems, but when I arrived there, I found out that there had been a huge snowstorm there the previous day, which had cancelled over a thousand flights. It was really nice outside at the time, with very little snow on the ground, so I didn’t really think that there were going to be any problems. However, when I got onto the plane, the airline eventually said that they couldn’t fly us to San Francisco because there were no pilots left in the airport – the pilots for our flight had been diverted to fly another plane earlier, to help catch up on the backlog of stranded passengers.

This didn’t seem like it would be a problem – they said that they were going to fly in a different crew from New York to take our plane to San Francisco, so the delay would only be a few hours. However, by this time, the storm had moved so it was over New York, which meant that it took a couple hours longer than expected for that crew to get out of LaGuardia. By the time they arrived in Chicago, the airline decided that those pilots couldn’t take our plane to San Francisco, because it would put them over their daily flight time limit. Our entire flight ended up getting cancelled, which was a disaster because that put all of us into the huge pool of people waiting to fly stand-by. I then ended up getting bumped off or passed over for the next four flights to San Francisco, as the airline tried to slowly catch up on the backlog.

In the end, I did get to San Francisco, but not until after midnight (about twelve hours later than expected). I was a little disappointed by that, because that was the stop on the trip that I was looking forward to the most. However, on a positive note, it was the one night on the trip where I could mostly easily deal with not showing up. Hopefully I’ll be able to reschedule for a visit later this spring, or maybe right after the summer ends.

The rest of the trip went smoothly, and the flights to Vancouver and then Japan were uneventful. We crossed the International Date Line, so it suddenly became Friday afternoon instead of Thursday afternoon. I was a bit nervous getting into the airport because my passport was only valid for two more months and Japan requires a foreigner’s passport to be valid for six months from the time of arrival. However, I had the itinerary to prove that I had a flight already booked to leave the country a week later, so that didn’t turn out to be a problem. Dan Elliot from the Oasis Lounge picked me up at the airport, and took me directly to his club, where I started to orient myself to the Japanese culture. A few hours later, a friend of mine (Ian Warney) showed up. Ian is a DJ and is living in Osaka teaching English. We went out for a night on the town, and I met a bunch of people that evening.

On Saturday, I spent the day touring around Osaka, and taking photos. That evening, I played at Oasis, which turned out to be a very fun night. Ian found me again on Sunday night and we went out for more sightseeing, and then we ate at a nice restaurant in a skyscraper overlooking Osaka.

So far, Japan has been great. There are far fewer foreigners here than I had imagined, but that’s about the only real surprise. The only big challenge so far has been trying to figure out the subway system. I’ve been on subways all around the world (London, New York, Paris, Moscow, and a ton of other smaller cities) but the Osaka subway has been the most confusing that I’ve seen, by far. The fare varies depending on how far you are going, and you have to buy a ticket getting on, then electronic gates scan it as you leave your destination station and don’t let you out if you didn’t pay the right fare. If you didn’t pay enough, you have to go back to another machine and do a “fare adjust” on the ticket. The Osaka (and Toyko) subway systems are not one large system, but instead are a whole bunch of separate lines run by different companies, so transfers can get complicated with ticket changes. Finally, there are very few signs in English, to make things even more confusing. However, after a few days, it was starting to make sense to me. Some of the stations are incredibly busy though – there is one station which has an average of three MILLION people per day passing through it. That’s pretty impressive, considering that the subways shut down at 12:30am and don’t start again until 5:30am.

A few other interesting notes so far:
- The cities are very clean compared to North American cities.
- There is apparently very, very little crime in Japan, and people feel completely safe and comfortable walking around anywhere in the cities.
- I have only seen a few children in the entire time I’ve been here – the Japanese must hide them away somewhere.
- I thought that I might get away with not running into anyone I knew during my visit, but on Sunday night a friend who had gone to university (Kyohei) saw me downtown and luckily had the time to spend an hour or so touring with us. That was an interesting coincidence, considering that Osaka is pretty big (nine million people, I think).
- There are far fewer Western chains than I had expected (lots of Starbucks & MacDonald’s and KFC, but that’s about it).
- A small but noticeable percentage of the population wear face masks in public and while working, either to limit the spread of diseases, or to protect them from smog & allergies.
- The amount of seafood is astounding – it is available everywhere, even as snack food in convenience stores.

Needless to say, I’ve been able to take a ton of interesting photos so far. I’ve got two photo pages up on my website now from the Osaka portion of my trip, and I’ve tried to add many more observations about Japan in the captions to the photos. Here is a link to the Osaka photo pages:
http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_osaka2007a.html

After I left Osaka on Monday morning, I had three days scheduled in Tokyo, so I’ll write more about that part of the trip in a few days.

Benny Benassi

I went to a Benny Benassi show in Halifax last night, at Club Rain. This wasn't really a DJ-oriented trip; I took a bunch of the Pub staff with me and we went down to enjoy the show. Here are the photos:

http://www.djbolivia.ca/photos_benassi2007.html

I've been pretty slack with blog posts lately, since I've been so busy in the past four weeks. I'm leaving on Wednesday morning for a short tour, and I'll be visiting San Francisco, Osaka, Tokyo, Seattle, and Vancouver. I'll try to get as many photos as I can at each show, and hopefully I'll be able to take the mini-disc and record all of the sets for my website.

Yellow Beer, White Foam

It's Friday night, and I'm stuck at home. I was supposed to go to a show in Halifax - DJ & Producer Martin Villeneuve from Ottawa was playing - but the weather was too rough for the drive, with snow and icy highways. So instead I decided to find something else to distract me, which admittedly didn't take long, since I have a huge backlog of work that I'm trying to plow through. But while I was working, I thought that it wouldn't hurt to have a glass of beer.

Have you ever really just sat and stared at a glass of beer? And if you did, did you notice anything funny? A lot of people look at things, but they don't see them. When I look at something, I like to pay attention to detail, because there are a lot of things in this world that don't make sense on the surface, if you think about them. Beer is a perfect example. If beer is yellow, then why is it that when you froth it up, the foam is white? Aha! How many people have really thought about this?

I will attempt to explain this to you, being a bit of a closet physicist (and yes, I had to think about this for a bit). You'll note that I said "closet" physicist, not "professional," so if I have any of the science wrong in this, a proper physicist can feel free to add their opinion. And also, for the sake of colour authenticity, let's assume that we're studying a bottle of Corona, rather than a dark British stout or something like that.

First, you need to know how light works. We see different colours due to many different processes. When direct light hits our eyes, the frequencies of the visible spectrum are sort of "directly" visible, as is, and if there is a combination of all frequencies, we see white (true physicists please bear with me, as this whole explanation is significantly dumbed down for the layman). In contrast, reflected light from any object is sort of the reverse concept. The object is a certain "colour" because it absorbs certain wavelengths, and the ones that it doesn't absorb are reflected away, and those are the ones that we see. So in truth, we've got a sort of "negative image" thing happening here with pigments. Anyway, that's not that important. Well, it is, but not for our beer. The point is that when we look at a beer, what we see are the frequencies of light passing through it.

Normally, a beer is illuminated by a form of white light, or an amalgam of visible frequencies. However, some of the "stuff" in beer will absorb some of those frequencies more than it absorbs other frequencies. In the particular example of beer, the constituent components tend to absorb all the frequencies except the ones that we perceive as golden yellow. So in other words, just as your kidneys filter the beer, your beer filters the light passing through it, letting the golden yellow rays through, but blocking the violets and indigos and all that other stuff.

Now you're probably wondering, "Why does this matter? Beer foam is just made of beer - if you wait long enough, it settles out. The only difference is that the foam is in the shape of bubbles, full of air." That's what I wondered for a couple minutes.

But there is the clue to help you solve the problem. The foam is full of air. In other words, there is "less beer" in the foam than there is in the liquid further down in the glass. The foam is less dense than the liquid beer. After you remember that the beer is blocking certain wavelengths, you can deduce that the foam, being less dense, is also blocking those same wavelengths, except that it is not doing as good a job because there is less absolute material that the light is being filtered through. Because of that, all the frequencies are pretty much getting through the foam, and we see white light, which is the combination of all frequencies. If you actually look very closely, slightly dense foam will have a faint yellowish tinge, and the foam that is lower and closer to the liquid beer is denser and therefore even less pure white than the "thinner" foam at the very top of the glass.

Not really that strange, when you think about it.