Minimalism - Online Income - ESL - Japan
Since I started teaching online for $5 a lesson, I’ve found myself weighing up purchases based on how many lessons I have to teach. Take, for example, a single cup of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. That would cost me half a lesson (15 minutes), which is certainly worth it! Some real examples Looking through my orders on Amazon this year, here’s how much time I’ve spent working for each item: A […]
Is the weekend over already? Time seems to be flying these days. We are well into spring and the suzumushi (bell crickets) are piercing my brain with their high pitched singing. It must be time for some more Ramsay Ramblings! 5 yen a bag, or take a box for free! Today, my mother-in-law came by for a visit, but before she did, she stopped off to buy some groceries. Now, […]
On January 1st 2008, Yahoo! Japan officially unveiled their redesigned web portal. Despite Yahoo’s popularity among the Japanese (over 60% share of the search engine market), we’ve had to wait this long for them to come up with a flashy web 2.0 style homepage. Pushing slow adopters to increase their screen resolution With so many people in this country using Yahoo! I was quite surprised they dropped the old 800-pixel-wide […]
There was a ridiculously long documentary on Japanese TV tonight about Al Gore’s new cause, global warming. I sat through the first three hours; watched ants eating houses, deer ravaging Hokkaido, watermelons growing in November, hybrid iguanas and evil konbini bentos (those CO2 polluting lunch boxes sold at convenience stores). While I much preferred Al’s DVD, An Inconvenient Truth, some of what they showed was quite convincing, and would no […]
England has always seemed to be quite advanced when it comes to supermarket technology. They had long, spacious, barcode-reading checkouts when I was 17 and worked in the frozen section of Waitrose. It wasn’t many years later before they introduced hand-held, customer-carried barcode readers so shoppers could check prices for themselves. People buying less then ten items have been able to go through an “express” checkout for years, and all that time, the checkout girls and boys have been allowed […]
Mami still hasn’t been to the new shopping center that opened recently in Kakamigahara. Saying that, she hasn’t been out much at all since the baby was born. I, on the other hand, get to drive past the AEON shopping mall on my way to and from work everyday, so I had the pleasure of watching them build it over the last year, and now I can pop in to […]
Across from where they are building the new shopping center is a four-storey department store for baby stuff. Although I’ve passed it everyday on the way to work for the past two years, I never realized just how great it was! I was kicking myself after spending loads on teaching toys at Toys-R-Us, when I could have got them here much cheaper! They’ve got everything from diapers, milk products, maternity […]
I’m really excited about the new shopping center they’re building on the other side of town. One thing I love about Japan is the convenience of everything, and when it comes to shopping, you can’t beat a shopping center. In all honesty, there’s nothing particularly different between modern shopping malls in Japan and the ones back home, but that won’t stop me welcoming the new Aeon Jusco into my little […]