Great Fish II

Great Fish II

Makes you wonder what ever happened to "Great Fish".

If I ever own a boat, I'm going to call it:

"Really Great Fish III"

Nagano ALT football tournament

Another Nagano ALT football tournament took place at the start of the month. Same old formula except I was organising Niigata this time, which was quite frankly, a pain in the arse. It was my fourth tournament without pitching in so I thought I'd do my bit for the team. My chum Pete made a good job as captain which meant I just had to deal with getting the money in and sorting out the hotel.

Football round out. We played well on Saturday and came second in a pretty strong group. I scored a cracking lob in our first game, which we ended up winning 1 - 0 against Nagano. I also scored a long range beauty when we drubbed Gunma 7 - 0. Otherwise, I was definitely fitter than previously though the midfield, where I played, was lacking at times. Sunday was cack as we crashed out to Gifu 5 - 2, not even making it into the quarters. The refereeing in this game was poor, however so were we. We only had one ringer too, which was less than the other teams (and our previous teams).Heh ho, the British Embassy ended up winning.

Caroline and Mr Fuji

We made a trip down to Tokyo at the end of last month as Caroline had a Politics examination. We checked out a couple of areas of Tokyo that we hadn't visited before and made the trip out to Mount Fuji, or Fuiji san as it's called in Japan. Click on the picture above or flickr dooda on the right to see the latest pictures.

2007: A Sado Odyssey

Please watch the trailer above.

I made this myself and it has now made it onto the official Cameron Archibald body of work. As you can guess, it's not easy to make the list because that requires doing stuff. Check out the fine company of masterpieces that it now joins:

• Desk alarm made from my sister's electronic yapping dog, shatterproof ruler and a magnet
• Stairway to heaven ringtone on an early Ericsson mobile phone
• Theme from Steptoe and Son ringtone on an Ericsson T68
• 2005 Halloween costume - futon zombie
• 2006 Halloween costume - Jack Skellington's barnet

Japanese muppets

Last month we made a trip down to Tokyo and Mount Fuji, more still pictures to follow. The video above is of a Japanese puppet show that was performed on the ferry from Sado to Niigata.

It was probably the best ferry ride ever as there were a ton of dolphins performing their own show in the wake of the boat about half way across. It's the first time we've seen wild dolphins over here and it was amazing.

I've uploaded another puppet video and some footage where you can just make out the dolphins here:

http://www.youtube.com/cameronarchibald

Cam the destroyer

Cam the 19th destroyer.

Here are a couple of pictures of me in my new football strip. Our team's actually called the Sawata Destroyer, rather than the Mano Destroyers which I previously thought. I prefer the singular, like we are one gigantic ball of 22 legs, hacking away at anything in our path. I'm a three star destroyer which means the food is good but I lack in leesure (sic) facilities.

Here are our scores so far:

Sawata Destroyer 2 - 1 FC Sexy
Even more of a misnomer of a team name than Grasshopper - what a Swiss...

Sawata Destroyer 1 - 3 Ryotsu
We were a weakened (weekend) team but this was a only friendly.

Sawata Destroyer 1 - 0 Team Jedi
Obviously TJ over cooked it on the force as they scored an OG in the first two minutes.

Sawata Destroyer 1 - 1 Aikawa Yonteru
Matt and I were in Nagano playing for the Niigata ALT team.

Note, everyone plays on the same pitch, so home and away doesn't come in to it. It's been great fun playing in the Sado soccer league so far and I'm hoping to play until the end of July. Great for fitness. The other thing that I'm thinking about starting this week is the Kodo challenge. This involves running 10km every week day for four weeks. I'll keep y'all posted.

The meaning of success and the tree within

The meaning of success formed in
fake fur, mule style colonel's on tatami.

I've been a busy bee lately and therefore been a bit of a slacker on the blog. I'm a slogger. As I was discussing with a fellow Niigata blogger and soccer team mate, Martin, blogging is a catch 22. If you're doing stuff you have no time to tell anyone about the interesting things you've been up to. When you've got nothing to do you blog about nothing. I've maybe just summed up blogging in a sentence there. I suppose, like everything on this planet, including most importantly seesaws, it's a balance.

The picture above will take you to some of our pics. There's a couple of my drive to my main school, including the tree within and some around my school with newly planted rice paddies.