Gaijin Bubble – Being a good husband – Taking action

Sunset from our front door The intense feeling of ‘being a foreigner’ is starting to fade. These past few weeks there have been several occasions when I’ve been out and about, and completely forgotten that I’m a member of the 2%(ish) minority population of non-Japanese residents in Japan. Upon arrival back in Japan last September […]

Exchange rates, and Running with technology

What’s going on in the currency markets? It’s absolutely mental! During my Year Abroad, £1 equalled 233yen. Today (45 minutes ago), £1 equals 162yen. I was just doing the sums – my salary here is is worth £7000 more than it would have been worth a year ago (if sent back home). This is great […]

Joseph is online

(A blog I wrote a couple of days ago, and am posting now to celebrate our reconnection to the www this morning. Our new fibre modem has resulted in our actual (vs. advertised) download speed quadrupling to 24mbps, the fastest domestic connection I’ve had yet 🙂 It’s several years now since I decided to actively […]

‘Free’ broadband in Japan

One thing I’ve really enjoyed since arriving back in Japan is being able to watch online videos without having to make numerous cups of tea in order to pass the time they take to buffer. The throttled connections we had at university were probably amongst the slowest in the UK, slower even than my parents’ […]