Ippoippo

Last night, Wales played Japan in the Rugby World Cup. You can read about it at the BBC here, or in Japanese (日本語) here.

It wasn’t a full stadium, with attendance at about 44000 people. Ticket costs had put people of I guess, and also some fans travelling from Japan maybe couldn’t justify the cost of going to both France (for three of their games) and Wales for one more game.
Still, there was a reasonable number of Japanese fans there. There were a few Japanese families there, some of which I think were those who live in South Wales because of the Japanese factories based in South Wales. Yuko spoke to some, and they said they had travelled down from the North of England for the game, again familes of people working at Japanese factories there.
The other main contingent of Japanese fans seemed to be older men (and the odd older wife in tow). One chap we spoke to ran a travel agency company, so he was pretty much mixing work and pleasure. Younger women though, it seems, don’t tend to support Rugby much. They all end up being Baseball and Football (soccer) fans.

The game itself was reasonably enjoyable, and the Welsh crowd got behind the Japanese side, appreciating their playing style (running the ball a lot) and their ‘never give up’ attitude.
The Welsh side played pretty poorly in the first half, and the first Japanese try was a corker. The 2nd try the Japanese got in the second half was pretty good too.
In the end though, in the second half, Wales started playing better and we started to score a lot more.

Yuko enjoyed herself though, and now would like to see a proper 6 Nations game. Wouldn’t mind using the 6 Nations as an excuse to go up to Scotland for a game.

I’ve got some pictures… over here in my gallery. I’m putting together a small video too, if I get the time.

For once, we had good weather on Bank (Public) Holiday weekend. Fantastic.

Saturday was spent down in Cardiff Bay. Yuko and I were not overly impressed to be honest. The Millennium Centre is quite an impressive piece of architecture, and there happened to be a small market on there… but that was it really. The rest just seemed to be over-priced restaurants.

Sunday and Monday was spent back at my folks place, where we enjoyed a rather big BBQ with the parents and sister, bro-in-law and niece.

Soon, the World Cup is upon us… and Bogue found this rather amusing little video about “Football/Soccer vs Rugby”

Me and Yuko are now in a new house.
We spent most of Saturday and Monday moving stuff from one house to the other. New house is bigger (too big… but there was limited choice in the area where we wanted to live), but it has a great garden.
Sunday was bloody awful with the weather, so we didn’t do anything that day.

The move is pretty much complete now, just some tidying up of the hold place before we vacate properly this coming Saturday.
Then of course there is all the unpacking to do.
The first house we moved into was a short term measure, as we couldn’t really check out properties while in Japan. New place is much nicer, less shabby.
As a result of the first UK house being a temporary measure, large numbers of boxes remained unpacked… so this time around, we are finally getting to unpack properly… 5 months after getting our stuff over from Japan. At last! Means my Japanese language books are getting unpacked, which gives me some reading material and ‘homework’ to do whilst on the train.

The one downside where we are now though is the absolutely piss-poor broadband availability. The local exchange for our bit of Cardiff still limits us to 0.5Mb Broadband. Hello, that’s what I was getting in Bath back in 2003! My wireless Vodafone connection is 1.4Mb (in theory… though it’s very temperamental to weather conditions and does drop at times). The thing that annoys me about the Vodafone connection is the tiny download limits.
One suspects that if there was cable availability in my neck of the woods, BT would up their game to keep pace.

The other good thing about this moving though… means we’ve got an excuse to have a house party. Hopefully, the weather will be nicer, which means BBQ time!!

Top of the World

Now this is a seriously impressive effort! Can’t imagine doing anything this daft when I that age

Rugby WC

Wooohooo. The tickets are on the way… got a phone call on Friday. They are being delivered on Thursday. Rugby World Cup, here we come

Bloody hell, the Welsh rugby team really know how to get me stressed. A win for Wales at least. A shame the Irish didn’t get the championship, but there you go.

Wales were probably the better team on the day overall (England did play like muppets at times), but as usual Wales made it difficult for themselves, and were constantly unable to convert pressure to points. Shane Williams ought to be shot (well, maybe not that, but you get the point) for some of his s**t play.
Englands tries came out of nowhere. The first, was due to a lucky bounce. Mind you, I had to point out to my mum who was bemoaning “why is Wales ALWAYS unlucky!!”, that leading up to the lucky bounce, there was two missed tackles that let England break away. The situation for a bounce shouldn’t have occured in the first place. As you can tell, I was quite tense for 80 minutes (Though, the lamb roast and booze that mum had put on for us, as we were visiting them, did de-stress me a bit… cheers Mum).

What did lighten things up as well was the commentary on the BBC, with Eddie Butler and Brian Moore. I seem to recall early on in the game Eddie Butler came up with some (rather childish, Welsh-chip-on-shoulder, type…) remark about the English… and that completely pissed of Moore. The mood was set, and I’m sure the commentary team was about to start throwing punches at each other at times. Ahh, we need a new Bill McLaren, always impartial even when Scotland were playing.