I hate Golden Week. The island is crawling with tourists and half the stores are closed. The only good thing is that a lot of the tourist events are cool.

Next weekend is the annual Naha Dragon races. I was considering going down to see them. Today I found out that my OIC was recruited to be on one of the teams, so now I really want to go. I've seen a lot of great photos of the races.

But my camera's kit lens zooms from wide-angle to natural, not telephoto. A wide-angle shot of boats in the distance is not going to be cool. So after work today, I grabbed a taxi to the authorized Pentax dealer on Gate 2 Street, near Kadena Airbase.

It was a ¥3,000 ride to get there, only to discover that the store was closed for Golden Week. Did I mention that it was Golden Week? Luckily, there was another camera store that the driver knew of, on the way back to where I live. I'd been by it many a time and hadn't realized what they sold; it doesn't cater to Americans, so their signage is all in kanji and katakana.

None of the staff spoke English, but that's all right, because we could easily write out specifications to each other. ("K_AF 50-300 mm?" "F?" "F4.5-F6".) I found a lens I wanted... and then I couldn't get it, because my debit card was declined. Which is a problem. I need to call my bank again, as my card has started getting randomly declined at about half the places I try it at. I've called the bank and they insisted that there was no problem, the card was being denied because the cashier entered the wrong expiration date- but that's BS, because some places it'll swipe and work, and some it'll swipe and not work.

So today during my lunch break I opened up an account at a credit union that has a branch on-base. Getting up at 5AM just to call my hometown bank's help line during EST working hours is for the birds.

Posted by: Boviate at 07:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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