We have a typhoon going through right now, and though it`s only hit really hard in the southern area of Japan, it`s been really dismal and rainy the past two days. My weekend was spent stuck indoors, cleaning my apartment, playing darts while playing Simon and Garfunkle and my Moulin Rouge soundtrack as loud as I dare, and reading a lot. And watching Japanese TV, which hasn`t gotten any more interesting or less annoying since I`ve got here. Thankfully, Ghostbusters has been playing on my movie channel constantly, and even though I cringe everytime I hear the Movie Guy`s pronounciation (with the Japanese phonetics, it sounds like, `Go-suit-oh bass-turds`), it is indeed a comfort.

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A week or two ago, I found this sports shop in Shizuoka. Went in and explored the hockey section, checking out some jerseys...and there is an official Canucks jersey, on for half price - I ended up buying it for about $75, which is a loooot cheaper than if you buy them in Vancouver. Of course, if there isn`t a hockey season this year, I am going to be very angry.

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So. With a lack of anything blog-worthy, I shall stop typing now.

There are a lot of bizarre types of bugs in this crazy country. And the normal bugs that you`d expect to find in North America can do all sorts of weird stuff that our bugs can`t.

Take spiders, for example. They jump. Really, really far. I was trying to catch one that was in a classroom once, and the eight-legged freak jumped a good two feet across the room.

There are cicadas everywhere here. They`re big and loud and they lie on the ground pretending to be dead and when you walk by go nuts and try to fly into your head.

And there are cockroaches. Oh, boy, does this country have some crazy cockroaches. `Gokiburi` is the Japanese name for them. They`re huge and they fly. And they`re everywhere. I despise cockroaches; they`re so creepy, and fast, and unkillable...they`re like silver fish, which rival roaches for my most hated insect (which, since I`ll be moving back into Gage Residence at UBC this year, is kind of ironic; loathing silverfish and going to Gage is like hating swallows and living in Capestrano).

I was on the train yesterday, and I was sitting in a booth with two rather attractive young Japanese ladies, when all of a sudden they both got up and moved across the aisle. I was a little confused, but being a foreigner has some weird effects on people. Then one of them pointed at the floor near my feet, and I was out of that booth and on the other side with my two new female friends in about half a second because there were COCKROACHES EVERYWHERE!

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Okay, I have an apology to make to you, Faithful Reader. I promised myself that when I started this blog, I would keep it interesting. I despise those blogs that degenerate into the most boring and useless of electronic drivel; ones that consist of riveting anecdotes such as, `I went to the store, and grapefruits were on sale, so I bought three.` Next time I update this, it will be much more interesting than this `Roaches on the Train` story. I promise.

I climbed Mount Fuji last week, and it was one of the most difficult thing I致e ever done, physically and mentally. We left about 8:30pm on Sunday night, taking a train and a taxi to get to the fifth station - it痴 a ways up the mountain, where people usually start climbing from. We started climbing at 10pm. After about 15 minutes, I was tired, but we didn稚 reach the summit until just after 4am.
 It痴 all volcanic pumice, very loose and very light, so it痴 easy to take one step and slip back three. Also, it痴 very, very steep, and there are some big boulders in the way that you have to clamber over. And it痴 dark, and it gets very cold very quickly - it痴 below 0ｰC at the top, and it hovers around freezing for a good portion of the climb (the summit is at about 3900m, and we started climbing at 2400m). The guidebooks say it takes between four and six and a half hours to reach the top; it took us just over six, with a bunch of rest stops. It was incredibly tiring. I can稚 even describe how exhausting it was...imagine being just dead tired after half an hour, and knowing that you have several more hours to go. It only took us two hours to descend, but by that time I was so tired I couldn稚 run. I have never been so completely drained of energy. All I could do was move my legs in accordance with gravity.
 And then there was the altitude sickness. When I first heard of that, I dismissed it - no bloody way I壇 ever get altitude sickness. But of the four of us who climbed together, myself and another guy, Jeremy, both got some pretty crazy altitude sickness going on. When you ascend a mountain relatively quickly, your body doesn稚 have a chance to adjust to the decreasing levels of oxygen in the air. Hence your brain gets oxygen deprived and can lead itself to some pretty groovy effects. At about the 2800m mark, I noticed that all the rocks in my peripheral vision were getting zebra stripes, and whenever I壇 blink, I壇 see stripes instead of just blackness. My field of vision started getting smaller, and I got really dizzy. After a few hundred meters, I was getting purple zebra stripes, and not just in my peripheral vision. Jeremy got the same thing - dizziness, vertigo, distorted vision...it痴 a pretty groovy trip in all. Our conversations were like this:

Jeremy: Hey, Cam, how痴 it going?
Cam: Not so good...got some purple zebra stripes going on...you?
Jeremy: My rocks are turning green.
Cam: Okay, time to rest.

 Then we壇 curl up off the path a bit and try to keep ourselves warm while we nodded off a bit and tried to get the rocks back to their natural colour.
 Anyway, we made it to the top around 4:15am, and got to watch the sunrise at 4:30am. Just beautiful - indescribable, with the sun coming up over a big carpet of clouds and lighting up the whole sky. Incredible.