Photo gallery from TUG 2013 trip
Thu 31 Oct 2013 by mskala Tags used: latex, typography, travelHere's a photo gallery (salvaged from my old gallery software in June 2020) of my trip to Japan in 2013 to present at TUG.
itinerary
Three copies - because last time I was in Japan, I made two copies, and lost one on my first night. Still okay because I had a spare, but this time, I made two spares. One of my Japanese friends says this means my blood type is definitely "A."
bibimbap
Airplane meal on the flight from Toronto to Incheon. Left to right, top to bottom: kimchi, melon, white wine (a surprisingly good one), empty coffee cup, vegetables and meat, toothpaste tube of pepper paste, seaweed soup, rice. I watched the Korean people on either side of me for how to eat it, which turned out to consist of dumping the rice and contents of the pepper-paste tube into the large bowl and mixing it all up thoroughly with the large spoon. Note the tableware: two spoons and a fork, all made of actual metal.
Another airplane meal on Toronto-Incheon flight. Described as "pasta." Note it came with a metal knife (!).
Hello Kitty Café, Incheon Airport transit zone
Charlie Brown Café, Incheon Airport transit zone
Incheon Airport transit zone, Korean culture outreach centre. Since the point of this sign is to tell the Korean locals that the "experiential program" isn't for them, why is it written in English, Japanese, and Chinese, but not Korean?
Part of my hotel room at Tokyu Stay Shibuya. This is very luxurious compared to other Tokyo business hotels in its price class.
See http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11052007
The latest and greatest Panasonic washer-dryer laundry robot.
Kirin Beer, from hotel vending machine.
View from the window of the hotel room.
With the next few images: view from the complicated pedestrian overpass complex in front of the Shibuya train station.
Statue of the Faithful Dog Hachiko, Shibuya train station. This place is usually much more crowded than it looks here; at the time of the photo, the crowd had more or less self-organized into a clear space and an orderly line-up for photo opportunities. One group of tourists asked me to take their picture, so they returned the favour by taking mine.
Condomania
OOZE CHARM
Cat Cafe Calico
Japanese society has included a sort of "prostitution lite" - paid-for affection that doesn't go as far as true sex acts - for many centuries. First it was human girls. Now the cosplay cafes have girls wearing feline ears and tails. Paying to pet real cats is a new thing in the last few years; such establishments probably existed, but were much less visible, when I last visited Tokyo in 2011.
I went to Mt. Takao on a weekday - leaving Tokyo in the morning and coming back in the late afternoon - so I was riding relatively empty trains and looking across at the trains on the other platform going in the opposite direction, which were packed like this one.
This would be a view of Mt. Fuji, if it weren't completely fogged out.
I'm told that it's advisable to go on a weekday because the place is very crowded on weekends; but that did mean it was all elementary-school field trips, all the time.
I took a different, more woodsy and less developed, trail on the way down the mountain. That may not really have been wise because I hadn't brought my hiking boots and the rain had made it quite muddy. But it's what I did.
Not real ones. I saw some statues of them.
Although I hiked the whole way, there are a cable car and a ski lift both going from the base of the mountain to halfway up, skipping the steepest part of the trails. Many people take one or the other and then hike the rest of the way. This is the upper station for the cable car.
Hotel Vanilla Sweet
Looks like it!
The Giraffe
Main landmark for the walk from the hotel to the conference venue.
University of Tokyo Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences (conference venue)
conference opening
Opening remarks by Steve Peter, TUG President (on video). In person, left to right: Frank Mittelbach, Didier Verna, Haruhiko Okamura.
Chu-Hi Sicilian Lemon
Chu-Hi is a mixture of shochuu, water, sugar, and fruit flavour. It's better than Slat, anyway.
Bus for the conference excursion. Note the ashtray. I doubt we were actually allowed to smoke - I didn't see anyone try - but that was a thing recently enough that the charter bus is still equipped with ashtrays.
café du monstre
Note the road cones, special clamps, and other infrastructure considered appropriate to support one little temporary construction sign.
マッシュ スカラ
Hand-set math equations; see the printing from this a couple images later.
BIGOT
Other writing on this van, in French and Japanese, indicates that it's a bakery and the "T" is meant to be silent.
Park rules almost certainly translated by Google Translate or similar; the way it has moved the (1) (2) (3) item labels to mid-sentence is characteristic of machine translation.
"Seifuku" means "uniform," so I want to believe that kids go here for advice on stuff like how floppy their socks ought to be.
The reflection, and my not having a polarizing filter for my camera, made it really hard to get a shot of these gas prices. I think they're in yen per litre, and at about a penny per yen, maybe 30 or 40% higher than Canadian prices.
Glasses are a sex-fetish thing, worn for fashion reasons even by women who don't need them.
I was a little disappointed to see several posters mentioning Eric Clapton, and not one misspelled.
Nogizaka 46 and AKB 48 are famous "idol groups" - theoretically pop-music performers. "Playboy 47" seems to be trying to cash in on their recognition.
Pork curry, Narita International Airport. It was horrible.
Juice squeezed from ume, of course.
"Ume" is a fruit popular in Japan, usually translated as "plum," though Wikipedia claims that it's technically more closely related to an apricot.
Pretty rare because of its unique process.
This Japanese-language tourist guide to Canada contains 20 pages about Victoria (population 345k) including a two-page spread specifically about Butchart Gardens; 7 pages about Winnipeg (population 672k); and 25 about Montreal (population 3408k; all these figures for urban area).
0 comments
