Yes – OK i admit it I spent the evening in an Irish bar. There was a reason, my guide book suggested it as a bar that was frequented by foreigners and Japanese and I did have a conversation (in English although my few words helped) with the bar maid and a japanese guy who works for an American bank who was getting drunker and drunker.

 Result!… that’s what I wanted nightlife to be like.

Wandered back on the other side of the river which (I think) is the old red light district. Nothing much to see but a lot of groups of japanese guys standing outside of resturants doing the “well I don’t want Chinese, you chose last time” type of discussion.

Still no sign of the other three guys that I’m sharing the room with. I may go and crash soon and see who is there in the morning.

 
BTW – I know we’re a bit short of pictures – I’ll try and get some on line soon.

There is another post to go before this that’s on the PDA, I’ll post that when I find some WiFi access.

This is just a quick one to say I’m in Kyoto, found the hostel OK it’s a cramped dorm room (4 bunk beds) but all very clean and well maintained. All I’ve done is put some washing in their machine, showeredand changed.

Off out for a wander round the night life soon.

Why a blog? Well relax, I’m not about to start documenting my life in detail; I’m not aiming for a book deal and I’m not an emo (I’d need to be on myspace for that anyway).

The idea is that I’m going to use this to document my trip to Japan that starts on 1st October. Just in case anyone is interested in where I am and what I’m up to day by day.

With that in mind I’ve been trying to make sure I can post to here in a number of ways.

1. Sitting at a PC using the standard admin page for when I can find a cyber cafe.
2. Via email, I can do this for text only posts, so I can add news from anywhere I can mail, including via the moby.
3. I wanted to use Picture Messaging as well, and there is supposed to be a plugin for that; but can I get my a message from O2 to the MMS server? Nope; so that out but…
4. I can send a Picture Message to a email address and get it published here on the blog.
5. I have a wifi PDA that I’m taking with me so I can connect anywhere I can find an access point and there is a nifty little tool called Pocket SharpMT that will allow me to post easily (even if there are some issues with the paths used for uploading images).

One issue that I haven’t solved yet is how to get pictures from my camera (compact flash card) to the PDA (SD/MMC card) for re-sizing and uploading.

Well finally, after a lot of messing around I’ve decided that WordPress is the blogging tool to use. I did start with b2evolution which has some nice features but also fails to work properly in a few places and has a lack of response in the support forums.

WordPress has the advantage of being widely used so there is a whole raft of themes and plugins, many not compatible with the newest versions it would seem, but there is a lot of choice.