Regina Glei's Blog, page 15

Basic Instincts

Last week I wrote a “neutral” report about the contents of the Tokyo Motor Show, today though I’d like to explain, why I would never ever pay for a Tokyo Motor Show ticket by myself and go there voluntarily.

While there are of course many people going to car shows because of the vehicles, there is also a tribe of (male) people who don’t give a rats ass about cars, but who go there with the sole purpose of taking photos of pretty young women in short skirts.

These people are male, ugly, many of them are a bit older, and I find it simply disgusting to see these drooling farts eagerly shooting pictures of pretty women with huge, fat, expensive, compensating for something cameras.



There is a lot of talk at the moment, finally, about hordes of men in the show business and elsewhere abusing women sexually. You don’t have to look at Hollywood for that, it’s everywhere.

I stood at the booth of my company for only one afternoon and I’ve seen enough. There was a dude, ugly, in his fifties, slimy, drooling, fat camera, who was talking to one of the miniskirt girls with her laughing embarrassed. I am very glad they were too far away for me to hear what they were talking about…

Another creature, same description as above, but a different guy, tried to “get in contact” with one of the girls by having printed out a still he had shot of her… Yet another creature, same description, different guy, printed out the girls’ names (dunno where he got them from) and gave them attributes: Sexy XX, beautiful YY, sultry ZZ. Then he made them pose for him holding up their big lettered printouts……. I could have vomited.

As long as the human society is tolerating such behavior, as long as car show producers work with sexy girls, as long as we pay women for doing such things, there will be sexual harassment. For the women at car shows it’s of course easily earned money and some of them looked like they were truly enjoying the attention, teasing and playing with the drooling creatures. But the thought of what these creatures do with the photos, the thought of one or the other of them masturbating onto print outs for example… Humans are still ruled by instincts and we are not too far away from our animal brethren…

And now I need a drink.

Tokyo Motor Show 2017

The Tokyo Motor Show for passenger cars happens every two years and the last time I’ve been there was 2009 (OMG! ;-)) 2009 definitely wasn’t a good year to go to the Tokyo Motor Show because it was right in/after the financial crisis and all non-Japanese car makers had pulled out and the Japanese ones had minimal booths spending as few money as possible.

By the way, I’ve never been to the show as a private person, only when I had booth duty for the company I work for. This year I volunteered to do half a day of booth duty on the last day of the show, a Sunday and went a bit earlier than I had to to take a look around.



In 2009 there were also very few visitors, but now 2017 things have long returned to “normal” for such a show. It was well visited but not painfully crowded either.

Non-Japanese car makers have returned, but not too many actually, well, only the ones that actually have some sales in Japan.

Zero US car makers and from Europe only French and German. Peugeot and Renault were there, then Mercedes Benz, Audi, VW, Porsche (of course), BMW. The Italians = Ferrari didn’t bother.



But let’s put things a bit into perspective here. A colleague told me that for example at the Shanghai Auto Show there are 2000 exhibitors (!), at the Tokyo Motor Show there are 180… well, but one has to consider the market size of course too, 120 million, who have maybe the world’s best train system, vs. 1.4 billion people in China.

The motto of this year’s Tokyo MOTOR Show was: Beyond the Motor… eh? Interesting concept to make the motto of a “motor” show “beyond the motor”.

That topic was supposed to suggest that the car of the future is your “extended living space” where you can do something else than drive thanks to highly or fully automated driving dreams. It also had the undertone though, at least for me, that the times of the combustion engine are coming to an end. Almost everyone showed automated driving concepts and electrical vehicles of whatever sort.



I have at length described my problems with driving a car in this blog during the years when I still rode one, thus I am a front row customer when it comes to a fully automated car.

I want something like this: Once I am retired and live on the Japanese remote island of my choice I want to take out my smart phone, open an app, call/order/book a car and it comes (without driver) to my apartment at the designated time and I hop in and say: car! Drive me to the beach/the supermarket etc. and when I get off after the car has driven itself to my destination the fee for the ride gets deducted from my credit card via the app. So please, dear automotive industry: make it so until I retire!

Loud Park 2017 Day 2

I started the second day of Loud Park with the opening act Cry Venom, a new formation which plays “neo-powermetal” whatever that is

Loud Park 2017 Day 1

Every year in autumn there is Loud Park, Japan’s biggest heavy metal festival in the Saitama Super Arena.

I went every year since 2012 and this year as no exception. As (almost) every year it was raining for Loud Park and hallelujah that it’s indoors!

Japan Writers Conference 2017 Report

It’s been a while since I attended the Japan Writer’s Conference, but since it happened in Tokyo this year, I was able to go for one of its two days.

It was great to meet some old friends and acquaintances.

The seminars were a pleasure to attend and a nice distraction from the day job.

The first seminar I went to by Marie Orise dealt with the “downdraft” and the “updraft” of a work of fiction. The downdraft is the first draft, the updraft is the refining, self-editing part of the fiction writing process. Marie made a poll concerning who has more trouble getting the story on paper and who has more trouble refining it. The audience was divided nearly fifty-fifty. I definitely belong into the category of finding the updraft harder to do. I have no problem at all getting a story written. But then refining it, oh my, what an act.

Some hints from Marie what to look for in the updraft were:

If something doesn’t “spark joy”, delete it.

Delete mundane details, no matter how much you like them.

Sometimes it helps to keep the three unities of theater in the back of your mind: The unities of action, place and time and to streamline your story with their help.

Always ask yourself what you want to say, how much of it and in what order.

I shall keep on struggling with the updraft and thanks for the tips, Marie.

Hans Brinckmann did a great seminar on how he turned his WW2 memoirs into two publications and it was fascinating to listen to his memories of when he was a twelve year old boy in Nazi Germany occupied Holland. It’s been a while since I listened to an eye witness report from WW2.

SciFi trilogy author Eli K.P. William’s topic was author voice and other voices like the narrator’s or the characters’ voices in a work of fiction.

Especially since I’m writing in a foreign language, I think it’s difficult to acquire a distinctive author’s voice. I was especially grateful for Eli’s tips on how to make your different characters sound less “the same”. His suggestions were: make “rules” for each character what kind of words they use (e.g. Someone has a Scottish accent), major characters have “dialogue tags” (e.g. Someone says “Oh Lord” all the time and you know it’s that guy speaking and you don’t need an “Z said” so often.), vary the rhythm of speech, imagine characters voices in your head while you write and edit, never let your character say something that’s obvious to the others present (also known as the “as you know, Bob” phenomenon. ) though sometimes this is very tricky, when you have characters explaining essential plot things to each other.

Let’s see if I can implement that into my future stories

The Wasen Festival

Autumn is beer festival time in Southern Germany and of course the whole world knows about the October Fest in Munich.

More or less at the same time as the October Fest is the “Wasen” in Bad Canstatt next to Stuttgart, which is the same as the October Fest only a bit smaller.

Wasen means wiese by the way and wiese is the German word for lawn. Also the October Fest is known as the “Wiesen” among locals.

On the lawn you put up beer tents and merry-go-rounds, raffle ticket booths and food stalls and there is your festival.



I’ve lived in Munich for a couple of years and thus of course know the October Fest quite well, but the Wasen in Stuttgart could be even handled as an insider tip, since it is apart from its smaller size an exact copy of the October Fest.



I went on the weekend during my business trip to Germany together with an old university buddy of mine and we went on a Sunday afternoon, which should have resulted in large crowds but while the festival was well visited, it was not crowded and there were no significant queues anywhere and you got a table in the beer tent without a problem.

Wow.

I don’t know why the Wasen was so “empty”.



While I didn’t go on any of the rides, I did enjoy the food around and the atmosphere. Even my little home town had a fun fair like this every year, if without beer tents. The rides, raffle ticket booths and the food stalls haven’t changed really over the years.



What has changed is security. At the entrance to the Wasen were guards and they checked your rucksacks and made you throw away soft drink bottles… more security before entering a beer tent and the guard there was complaining of the size of my rucksack and making an “exception” letting me in with it. It’s sad that the world has come to needing security guards for a fun fair.

Thankfully, nothing happened and my liter of “Radler” (“pale” beer with Sprite) was very good

A Bit of Ireland

I moved on by bus again to Ireland and arrived in Dublin in the afternoon, did some exploring of the Trinity college and a garden with a statue of Oscar Wilde before heading home for a short home-stay at a friend of mine who happens to live in Ireland. He lives in a suburb of Dublin called Celbridge and that was my base for the last few days of my trip this summer. He was super kind and took a day off to show me some sights, the only downer was that it rained the entire time. All in all it was my only day in Ireland and Scotland with constant rain and thus I guess I can consider myself lucky, since it does happen to rain loads in both countries.



We drove out into the Irish mountains for a look out to a lake then went to Glendalough which has two things to offer, the ruins of a church and monastery which is from the 13th century and two more beautiful lakes. Despite the rain, we rounded the smaller lake and took a look at the bigger one.





Especially the bigger one is very scenic and even in the rain and mist it looked beautiful. After lunch at a very Irish pub, we drove on to the coast and in the wind and rain the Irish Sea was quite rough for its usually quiet standards. It looked great but we soon left the beach again due to high winds and lashing rain.



On my last day in Ireland, I went to Dublin again on my own and did the Guinness storehouse tour. I am not a beer drinker at all but it was interesting to see the storehouse which explains how Guinness is made and is being very modern and smartly arranged for a “museum” like that. Your entry price includes a pint of Guinness and I managed to drink a quarter of it, which is a personal beer drinking record of mine, hahaha.



Next I went to the Dublinia museum, which tells the history of the city of Dublin starting with a Viking settlement and ending with an exhibition of how archeologists work. The museum is right next to the Christ Church of Dublin which started to exist in this spot since almost a thousand years ago. It has a nice crypt with a strange highlight, a mummified cat and a rat. It appears that the cat was chasing the rat and both got caught in a organ pipe where they starved and died sometime around 1850. They mummified there and when the organ was repaired a hundred and fifty years later the tragic pair came to light.



I greatly enjoyed the Ireland trip which had just the right mix of nature sights and history. Apparently most Irish are okay with the north-east being not a part of their country, but thanks to the Brexit idiocy a lot of problems are ahead for the people in the region. At the moment there is a soft border and you can come and go from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland as you please. It is weird enough that you have pounds in the north and miles and when you drive into the south it’s suddenly Euro and kilometers. It remains to be seen how the British want to deal with the soft border after Brexit but in my humble opinion, as mentioned before, Brexit is the stupidest thing the British have ever done and the people of Ireland won’t have fun with its self-made disaster.

A Bit of Northern Ireland

I was very happy about my hotel choice in Belfast, the Holiday Inn, since it was right in the city center and only a few meters away from the bus tour pick up point and the bus stop to Dublin. The bus tour down to the Antrim coast was great and we had big luck with the weather, some rain before and after the major attractions and sunshine in between. The bus stopped at the Dark Hedges, a row of magnificent trees used for several movies and TV shows, the most famous of them being Game of Thrones. Much of Game of Thrones is shot in Ireland and there are entire bus tours themed around the series, which reminded me a lot of the bus tours through New Zealand back in the day when the Lord of the Rings hype was at its peak

From Scotland to Ireland

Instead of flying, I decided to use ground transport to get from Scotland to Ireland. I wanted to go by bus to the ferry port but those buses were fully booked and ended up going by train. The train journey was less stressful than expected, since it was Sunday morning and rather empty and the two transfers in Glasgow and a town called Ayr were less of a hustle than I had thought. However, arrived at the end point, a place called Stranraer, I faced troubles going the last ten miles or so around the bay to the ferry port in Cairnryan, which has no train access.



Stranraer and Cairnryan are tiny villages with NOTHING there. The ferry is basically made for people with cars. At the station in Stranraer is nothing. Not even a taxi booth. A family had booked a taxi and it came to pick them up and I asked the driver if he could help me to call another cab or whatever. After some back and forth he packed me into the car as well, which I was very grateful for. It was a bit ridiculous. You can see the ferry at the other side of the bay, but how to get there??? I was not aware of the tinyness of Stranraer

A Little Bit of Scotland

After two days with the family in Germany, I headed on to Scotland. I visited England several times to go to London, Brighton and to Bloodstock heavy metal festival, but so far I had not made it to Scotland yet. Arrived in Edinburgh by plane from Cologne I felt like arriving in Tokyo. The town was packed with people for the Edinburgh international festival that on top of everything celebrated its 70th birthday. Frankly, I had not even known about the festival before I arrived. I went to the Edinburgh castle in the afternoon of the arrival day and thus did everything I had wanted to do in Edinburgh and escaped the crowds into the hotel.

That hotel wasn’t a real hotel but a brand new student dorm vacant over the summer and not lived in yet by students. The rooms and facilities were all brand new and thus it was a pleasant experience. I was to spend four nights in Scotland and had booked two tours with a tourist bus company. A two day tour to Inverness and back and a one day tour visiting Stirling castle and a distillery. The Inverness tour was great. We drove over the highlands, visited some castles and famous Loch Ness. I had deliberately chosen a small bus with only 16 passengers and there was a lovely crowd on board and the guide was great too.

The highlands are very beautiful and at times reminded me a bit of the Great Plains of Mongolia. However, the highlands are more rocky and the mountains are higher too.







In Inverness I stayed in a sweet little bed and breakfast and two American ladies from my bus stayed in the same place. We went out together for food and spent a few minutes in a pub with live music. On the way back to Edinburgh we visited Culloden battlefield and mysterious Neolithic stone circles followed by a whisky distillery. That one delivered mostly to big whisky brands where the stuff gets blended and wasn’t so super interesting to be honest.

The one day tour led me to Stirling Castle, which is where Mary Queen of Scotts was born and it lies beautifully on a hill with 360 degree views and it was well visited but less crowded than the Edinburgh castle.





Over country roads we went to Loch Lomond which is ripe with sailing boats and a holiday destination. Last part of the day was “real” distillery, Glengoyne, still in private ownership and originally Scottish. I still am not a whisky fan, the stuff is too strong for me and I prefer my port wine, but it was interesting to learn how whisky is made.

Apart from the too full Edinburgh, which is a city of 700,000 people and not laid out for double that during festival times, I thoroughly enjoyed the Scotland trip and got what I wanted, some old castles and beautiful landscapes.

A word on politics. Both tour guides were Scottish and greatly in favor of Scotland leaving the U.K. and becoming their own country. The desire for independence from the U.K. was freshly renewed after the Brexit idiocy. The most recent vote for independence was held before Brexit happened and both Scotsman said they are dead sure that if the vote had been held after the Brexit decision, it would have looked different. I don’t know how representative those two guides are of course, but they both said that many of the 52% who voted to remain in the U.K. were scared by propaganda that the U.K. said “you guys cannot survive economically without us”. Now though the sentiment is even worse, since at least those two Scotsman think they cannot survive without the EU but can well survive without the U.K. Both were totally against Brexit and said that Brexit was the stupidest thing the British have ever done. I find myself agreeing with those two guides. Get out of the U.K., Scotland and remain in the EU!