Alexander's

The apartment in Tokyo my company provides is really nice. It's a new building, we have a huge 72 square meter flat with nice hardwood floors and a garden.

Very unlike my dormitory during my study in Japan, this flat really is build for average Japanese families.

The most notable things would probably be:

• A six square meter "children's room"
• A toilet that requires you to study a user manual
• An intercom system with an user interface so bad, that even guys that can read Japanese (much better than I) sometimes end up accidentally calling the police (panic button) instead of opening the door
• I don’t have a bed -- just a simple Japanese futon that can be rolled out at night, or stowed away during the day.

I really like the flat, I just wish they also had tatami mats[^1] in the sleeping quarters.

They are just so much nicer -- slightly uneven, springy and much softer.

Much Softer -- if there are only four centimeters of futon between your back and the hardwood floor you can really appreciate the added softness of tatami.

For now I can still walk and stand upright, but I have another two months in Japan ahead of me.

[^1]: Flooring mat made of rice straw. Originally for the nobility to sleep or sit on.

As an avid reader of my blog you already know that I got married recently.[^1]

Please Alex make sure we have a washing machine in our new flat. I'm not sure my hands could take washing our clothes per hand.

Good thing we still had a spare washing machine in Kärnten that just needed a tiny bit of work. So next time I went home my father and I cracked the darn thing open, just to find out that the main ball bearing had disintegrated. A piece had broken off and most of the balls were missing. Not only is such a specialized ball bearing quite expensive, we were also missing the tools to remove the remains of the old one in the first place.

So I had to buy a new washing machine.

What sounded like an easy task turned out to be pure horror. Every washing machine I looked at had the same feature set and all the programs I'd ever use. They were all super energy efficient, silent, intelligent and -- best of all -- they would get my clothes clean.

So I decided to buy a special magazine with tests and comparisons of washing machines -- great idea -- or so I thought until I checked the test results:

Great for cleaning clothes, but the purging could be better.

For basically every machine in the test.

So why is one machine 300 Euro and one that is just as good costs 1200 Euro?

I sit in a well air conditioned room in front of a computer all day long. Unless I spill food on my necktie my clothes don't get dirty at all.[^2] Even a crappy washing machine would probably be more than enough for me.

In the end I did exactly what companies want me to do. I got a middle priced machine, since the cheap ones have to be crappy and inferior somehow.

I now use exactly two programs and my clothes get clean.

I'm satisfied, but I really can't stop wondering how cool a machine for twice the price would have been.

[^1]: Recently as in almost a year ago - when this blogpost was originally written [^2]: Ok they get dirty if I run through a field or climb a tree to recover my airplanes, but that's not the point here

Like so many other airports Beijing airport has free WiFi internet access.

I found this a bit surprising, since China has quite restrictive internet rules. Generally the government is not satisfied by simply blocking some sites. They want to make sure that they can track who is doing what.

That’s why they need identification.

Too bad that at the time of our transfer -- way after midnight -- there were very few airport personnel working anymore. But like a gentle mother the Chinese authorities did even think of this. They provide these -- only slightly suspicious looking -- machines that promise the great wonder of instant internet access for a simple scan of one's passport.

After a week of roaming through the emerald green mountains of Taiwan -- in absence of my daily internet-fix[^1] -- there was no question. Without a moments hesitation I pushed my passport deep into the slit for the documents, pushed the onscreen button and listened to the sound of an old scanner doing its work.

A popup dialog, explaining in Chinese that the machine had just saved a 4MB file of my passport, left a slight feeling of identity theft in my mouth. This feeling grew even stronger when I noticed that step 3 -- get the internet access code -- was not working.

The only working steps were:

1. choose language and
2. scan the passport
3. there is no (working) step 3

Not willing to give up that easily I decided to try again -- same result. Also switching to another language didn't help at all.

Maybe, I thought, it’s because I still have an old passport that sometimes makes problems when machine reading it.

Sadly no one in my family was willing to borrow me their passport to repeat this surely harmless experiment.

This blogpost was written on my way home from our honeymoon in Taiwan. So it's a bit dated already.

[^1]: For some strange reason Ting was really against me spending half the time in front of the computer