Well let me get started with talking about how the trip to tokyo finished up. The last day there was still more I wanted to see and do in Tokyo but everyone was feeling pretty tired and wanted to make absolutely sure that we didn't have any problems getting to the bus stop at 1030pm. I was a little tired so I didn't push on any of the things I wanted to do, and I knew this wasn't going to be the only time in Tokyo so I just thought I would go with the flow. We once again ate at dennys, spent a good amount of time at asakusa shopping for souvenirs then finally got to shinjuku. We got lockers for our stuff then started the long quest of finding the square enix store. We met up with Julieane and after probably somewhere around an hour of train, walking, and being turned around we finally found it.
The square enix store is pretty cool. It was a pretty fancy kind of place actually, the staff wore suits and they had a lot of jewelry behind glass. Expensive stuff too, like emily spent $90 on earings and Courtney apparently paid $140 for her necklace when she went there. The big attractions were the statue of Sephiroth in the floor, the costume that Genesis wears in Crisis Core and the helmet for judge galbrather from 12. They also had a giant tonberry and cacutar (sabotender in japanese) plushie. There was also lots of dragon quest stuff that I didn't care about. The pictures do justice for the place so check out my picasa account.
After that we spent a lot of time walking around Shinjuku and Emily was frantically trying to find a Christmas present for her family. People were worrying about time and the long trip was kind of straining our friendship so I think people were getting kind of short with each other. We finally found some food, went to yodobashi (where I bought that perfect grade wing zero custom model. I could have gotten it at Osaka yodobashi any time but since it was my christmas present to myself with mom and dad's money I wanted to have it on Christmas), and tried to make our way to the bus stop. While looking at the map a Japanese person came by and asked in English if we needed any help. He was really nice and actually walked us to the spot. When I looked at the map it was the same spot I thought it was so I felt 100% that it was right, but for the previously mentioned reasons people started to bicker a little about where the spot actually was. It didn't help that the bus didn't come until 1015 but we some how got on the bus home. We really lucked out on the bus though because there were so few people ridding it Pak laid down on the row behind me and I had two seats to try and get a comfortable situation. And it somehow worked I slept moderately well on the way back and felt fine the whole next day. We asked for directions back to Umeda station and from there went home.
From this point on I don't do anything particular. Play WoW, watch some anime, build gundams, thats about it. Christmas eve my host mom gave me a christmas cake which was pretty good but we didn't do anything for it. On christmas day I skyped home, felt kind of down that I was missing all of that, listened to Mathew, Mark and Luke on MP3 while building gundams and played wow. Actually listening to the scriptures while I'm doing something with my hands actually really helps, I really took a lot in and had a good long thought about the true meaning of Christmas.
The next day I knew I had to get out of the house if just for a little bit so I went down to Okamoto to get some money from the bank, looked around the used manga/game store, found a ps2 gundam game in a collectors box with a figure for 480 yen, and by chance ran into Jay. He also ran into Nohea and the three of us ate lunch at Mcdonalds and talked about how amazed we all are that we are in Japan with nothing at all to do. They are doing the same thing, just sitting in their room on the computer or playing DS. I picked up batteries for my wing zero model I'm working on and headed home. Later that evening I got a package. It was from heather, rob, holly and cameron! Oh man I was so happy to recieve a christmas present and the fact they spent $50 on shipping just made me realize how good of friends they are. I was honestly moved to tears by that present it really meant a lot. I put up my little christmas tree and watched walle (loved it).
The next morning (saturday) I modded my model to put LEDs in the head so the eye's glow! I am so amazed with myself. In reality LEDs only need a simple circuit to work but figuring out which ends and making it all fit in there smoothly took quite a bit of time. And because I couldn't get 100 yen head phones to work I used a video cable I didn't need. It works great except its kind of a little too thick so the head can't look up very well. I might still be able to fix it somehow though.
*warning more in depth gundam rant*
ok so for this model I wanted to make it look better so I spray painted the peices while still in the runners. The color was perfect, the reds and blues are vibrant and the white no longer has this ugly dull shade it had before, however now that there is a paint texture to the peices I can't do pannel lining the way I used to. Panel lines are grooves in the plastic that make it look more machine like and normally you use a pen in the grooves and wipe away the excess so only the stuff really deep in the groove remains. The problem is that the paint attaches to the ink of the pen instantly so I have these ugly thing lines and to top it off wing zero has TONS of panel lines all over its legs so it stands out a lot. I have to do more research to figure out what I'm supposed to do.
*end gundam rant*
So because I listened to the scriptures on mp3 the other day and I really wanted to get out of the house I decided to go to church, finally! I'm really glad that I did because right when I entered everyone was really nice and the american missionary took me under his wing and showed me around and introduced me to people. I so easily forget how nice everyone is at church. I accidentally went to the japanese language ward but it was really cool experience. I couldn't really understand most of the lessons but I could pick up bits here and there. Aside from a lot of church vocabulary I don't know they use a lot of keigo and teneigo which is that infamous Japanese polite speach. I was taught that in class but they just wanted you to have a basic understanding of it, and I understand the bits that sales clerks will use but its something I'm not very strong in. It seems like really good practice though so that should be good. It was interesting to see people in suits, street clothes and kimonos all together in sacrament.
Well thats about it I suppose I'll try not to go crazy while waiting for school to start January 7th.
---Ben
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
Tokyo part 3
Okay so today`s main goal was to get to the studio Ghibli museum. We got a late start and ended up eating at Dennys again and then headed off for mikata. We had to transfere to the Chuo line, which was kind of hard to see on the train map we had, but we went to shibuya, transfered to shinjiku, then got on the chuo line. Some how we did a pretty good job at navigating the train lines here in Tokyo. It was about a mile or so to the studio from the station and we decided to walk, it was a really nice suburbian setting along the way. When we finally got there behind the glass was a giant totoro and a bunch of people taking their picture with it. It turned out that we needed to wait until 2pm because they let people in at increments at a time. So we walked around the nice park that was nearby while we waited. The museum wasn`t incredibly huge but was like a really rich person`s house. The whole thing had the miyazaki magical vibe about it. They had one room that was about like the old ways of animation and they had these figures that were the same character but slightly diffrent poses and they spun with the strob light and it looked like they were all moving, very cool. They also had a fake, over the top, old time projector. Like its not how projectors worked back then but it was kind of like a magical way of thinking about it with film being stretched back and forth left and right all over the place. We also a room that was dedicated to the animation process. It had original story boards from movies, original cells, and lots of charts on how cell animation was done. It really make you appreciate the old way of animation, it again just made it feel some how magical. We also got to watch a short film about the kitten bus. The cat bus was a major character in totoro and this was its son. Its a really weird character design. Its a cat with 6 legs, you can get inside of it, its eyes become head lights, and it can turn into the wind if it wants to. This was the first time Erin had seen any studio Ghibli stuff and was pretty freaked out. They also had a cat bus playground thing for little kids and an over priced gift shop.
It started to rain when we got out so we took the bus back and then we ate some cheap donburi place. Then we began our quest for the square enix store. This is where we started to get on each other`s throat. As it turns out square enix store is in shinjiku, NOT shibuya. Both me and Emily looked up the stores location but neither of us could get solid information about how to get to there. Assuming it was in shibuya I was pretty sure we had to go one way but other people thought we needed to go another. It wasn`t until we boared the wrong train that we found out how off we were. We both admitted fault for that then headed back. Becuase we tried to exit the same station we bought the ticket at, the machine wouldn`t take it. Pac some how managed to get pass the gates before the closed but the three of us had to try and explain what happened to the clerk. Thank goodness we spoke Japanese because this guy was so confused as to what we had done.
It started to really pour down at this point and Emily and Erin still wanted to do some shopping. So we got umbrellas and crossed that world famous intersection then headed up a little bit. Me and Pac whent to Tower records while those two were close shopping. We then got some food, rested up, then made the long trip back. I some how managed to get all of my stuff into the bigger suitcase and hopefully emily will help me out and put here three bags into my smaller suitcase and use that one.
got the night bus to look forward to still!
It started to rain when we got out so we took the bus back and then we ate some cheap donburi place. Then we began our quest for the square enix store. This is where we started to get on each other`s throat. As it turns out square enix store is in shinjiku, NOT shibuya. Both me and Emily looked up the stores location but neither of us could get solid information about how to get to there. Assuming it was in shibuya I was pretty sure we had to go one way but other people thought we needed to go another. It wasn`t until we boared the wrong train that we found out how off we were. We both admitted fault for that then headed back. Becuase we tried to exit the same station we bought the ticket at, the machine wouldn`t take it. Pac some how managed to get pass the gates before the closed but the three of us had to try and explain what happened to the clerk. Thank goodness we spoke Japanese because this guy was so confused as to what we had done.
It started to really pour down at this point and Emily and Erin still wanted to do some shopping. So we got umbrellas and crossed that world famous intersection then headed up a little bit. Me and Pac whent to Tower records while those two were close shopping. We then got some food, rested up, then made the long trip back. I some how managed to get all of my stuff into the bigger suitcase and hopefully emily will help me out and put here three bags into my smaller suitcase and use that one.
got the night bus to look forward to still!
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Tokyo part 2
So Saturday we decided to let Erin decide what to do and we ended up going to Ueno Zoo. It was actually kind of a disapointing zoo. First of all the big attraction was the giant panda, but it died earlier this year. Besides that the animals all looked really sad and weak. Like I`m no animal rights activists or anything but these animals looked really miserable in that zoo, and some of them not that healthy. We then walked around Ueno for a bit. Tokyo is really a beautiful city. The city scape just keeps going and even though it is a big city it feels so safe and clean. After walking around there for a while we went back to Asakusa. There was a really big area for street shopping and little stores that just seemed to go on for ever. We spent a few hours walking around and ate dinner at a kaitensushi place. It was good but once I ate squid sushi, I was done. Squid is the toughest thing in the world to eat. Its so chewy you can not bite it at all. There was a strong bit of wasabi underneath too so ugh I couldn`t eat anymore after that. The staff there found out we knew some Japanese and they were so impressed. They must get tons of foreigners everyday who don`t know a word so it felt good to kind of show off a little bit. After that we got some ice cream and called it a night.
Today we woke up earlier and made it out of the hostel at a decent time. For breakfeast we went to a dennys which was pretty diffrent. Like they had eggs toast sausage but I don`t think there was thing on the menu that was exactly the same. After that we got to Akihabara!
Now I have wanted to go to Akihabara for years, it was easily the place I wanted to go to more so then anywhere else in the world; and now after having gone it wasn`t what I was expecting but I wasn`t dissapointed. First of all, I could not find cosplayers! I found maids handing out flyers and I saw 1 foreinger dressed as naruto`s sakura but that was it. I don`t know if people don`t do it all year round or what but I couldn`t find the parades of cosplayers I was searching for. However the shopping is incredible. There are TONS of stores, I got so lost and turned around it just drained me. It wasn`t just the anime stores but tons of electronic stores and DVD+CD places. I didn`t actually go crazy with spending though. Osaka and Kobe have some pretty decent anime stores so I knew what was out there and whats normal prices, and truth betold I only want to buy gundams. DVDs wont play on my stuff at home, figures can get pretty pricy and you dont get to build them, and my japanese just isn`t good enough to enjoy reading manga yet. But I did come out pretty well with the Gundams, I got 6 for 8100 yen, all of them close to half off. Two of them are master grades, three of them are metalic reflective coating models, and four of them are 1/100 scale.
Going to Akihabara had been one of the big life goals of mine and now I can check it off the list, how many people can say that? Feels pretty good
Well I`ve got more things to do in Tokyo for the next two days so I`ll update later
Today we woke up earlier and made it out of the hostel at a decent time. For breakfeast we went to a dennys which was pretty diffrent. Like they had eggs toast sausage but I don`t think there was thing on the menu that was exactly the same. After that we got to Akihabara!
Now I have wanted to go to Akihabara for years, it was easily the place I wanted to go to more so then anywhere else in the world; and now after having gone it wasn`t what I was expecting but I wasn`t dissapointed. First of all, I could not find cosplayers! I found maids handing out flyers and I saw 1 foreinger dressed as naruto`s sakura but that was it. I don`t know if people don`t do it all year round or what but I couldn`t find the parades of cosplayers I was searching for. However the shopping is incredible. There are TONS of stores, I got so lost and turned around it just drained me. It wasn`t just the anime stores but tons of electronic stores and DVD+CD places. I didn`t actually go crazy with spending though. Osaka and Kobe have some pretty decent anime stores so I knew what was out there and whats normal prices, and truth betold I only want to buy gundams. DVDs wont play on my stuff at home, figures can get pretty pricy and you dont get to build them, and my japanese just isn`t good enough to enjoy reading manga yet. But I did come out pretty well with the Gundams, I got 6 for 8100 yen, all of them close to half off. Two of them are master grades, three of them are metalic reflective coating models, and four of them are 1/100 scale.
Going to Akihabara had been one of the big life goals of mine and now I can check it off the list, how many people can say that? Feels pretty good
Well I`ve got more things to do in Tokyo for the next two days so I`ll update later
Friday, December 19, 2008
Live from Tokyo Japan!
Well here I am, finally in Tokyo. Its been a real adventure getting to this hostel in asakusa. We decided to take the night bus because it is less then half the cost of the shinkansen. We had to board the bus at 11:30 so we met up at Umeda station at 10 and tried to find it, according to the map I was sure it was just over one way pretty close but thankfully we have some girls in our group who are able to ask for directions, I can say all of the japanese words its just a guy thing. So we found out it was best to take the train until the next stop and go from there. So we get on the Osaka loop and we ask a guy working there if that train stopped where we needed it to and he said yes but when we got on it, it passed our station! So then we got off on the next one it stopped and walked to the other side, but we couldn't figure out which train would stop there because JR doesn't put big signs on the trains saying limited express or local it just has diffrent colored trains, which are diffrent from what Hankyu uses. At this point we all started to get a little anxious about getting there on time and some how we got to the station we needed to get to and just started walking down this random street in downtown Osaka. We finally find the bus, it wasn't a station it was just the bus parked there. We didn't have much time left but we tried to find a bathroom. Of course everything was closed but the only things around that area were really fancy car dealerships and hotels. Erin ended up asking a restaurant to use their bathroom and they were apparently nice about it. So we ran back to the bus.
The ride on the bus was not so good. Like the seats were pretty comfortable and you had a decent amount of space but I just can not sleep in a situation like that. I don't know if I actually slept or not. All night I was kind of concious but my mind was going all over the place and I could move if I wanted to but my body felt heavy. Anyways it just didn't refresh me enough because when we finally arrived in Shinjiku I felt like crap. We spent a good amount of time walking around Shinjiku just trying to get our barrings. The government office section of shinjiku had some amazing buildings, the architecture is really out there. Emily and Pak got the special edition dissida PSP system at bic camera, and its a really cool. I feel so special being able to get a final fantasy game right as it comes out in Japan.
We planned to get to the hostel at 3 so that we could all just take a well deserved nap. I figured out the infamous tokyo subway line even though its really something else. In Osaka all of the stations are within each other so if you buy a ticket that you have to transfer somewhere you never go outside. Here we had to leave the station and walk a block to transfer. Also I've noticed that on the escilator in Osaka people stand on the right but in Tokyo people stand on the left. Its intersting that there are these little differences between Kansai and Kanto regions.
The hostel is actually pretty nice. For starters it was only 7200 yen for 4 nights and they have a big area downstairs for showers, TV, computers, or just general haning out. The room is a basic dormitory set up with 3 bunkbeds. There are 4 of us, one girl that we saw and someone's backpack that was sitting ontop of one of the beds but we never saw whos it was. The bed has a really nice memory foam pillow but the matress is really painful. Anyways when we got there I passed out and at around 8 we went to a ramen restraunt and talked slightly about what we were going to do today.
The ride on the bus was not so good. Like the seats were pretty comfortable and you had a decent amount of space but I just can not sleep in a situation like that. I don't know if I actually slept or not. All night I was kind of concious but my mind was going all over the place and I could move if I wanted to but my body felt heavy. Anyways it just didn't refresh me enough because when we finally arrived in Shinjiku I felt like crap. We spent a good amount of time walking around Shinjiku just trying to get our barrings. The government office section of shinjiku had some amazing buildings, the architecture is really out there. Emily and Pak got the special edition dissida PSP system at bic camera, and its a really cool. I feel so special being able to get a final fantasy game right as it comes out in Japan.
We planned to get to the hostel at 3 so that we could all just take a well deserved nap. I figured out the infamous tokyo subway line even though its really something else. In Osaka all of the stations are within each other so if you buy a ticket that you have to transfer somewhere you never go outside. Here we had to leave the station and walk a block to transfer. Also I've noticed that on the escilator in Osaka people stand on the right but in Tokyo people stand on the left. Its intersting that there are these little differences between Kansai and Kanto regions.
The hostel is actually pretty nice. For starters it was only 7200 yen for 4 nights and they have a big area downstairs for showers, TV, computers, or just general haning out. The room is a basic dormitory set up with 3 bunkbeds. There are 4 of us, one girl that we saw and someone's backpack that was sitting ontop of one of the beds but we never saw whos it was. The bed has a really nice memory foam pillow but the matress is really painful. Anyways when we got there I passed out and at around 8 we went to a ramen restraunt and talked slightly about what we were going to do today.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Going to tokyo tomorrow!
Right now I am kind of out of it. On the 18th (today) Final Fantasy Dissida came out. Its a really cool fighting game for the PSP that has the villains and heroes from FF1-12 (although 11 and 12 only get one character each while 1-10 gets a hero and villain). So anyways some other foreign exchange students said they wanted to get it at midnight and even though I wasn't super crazy about getting it right away, I love midnight releases, so I emailed them asking what was up last night and they said they were all heading down to Umeda. So ok I thought I'll head down too. We get there and yodobashi is closed. No body actually took the time to find out if there was a midnight release. So we are all sitting there kind of stupefied with ourselves. And we decidced to do all night karaoke and get it in the morning. We walk around for a bit, first trying to find a bathroom for Courtney, then we check out an arcade for a bit and I played a really crazy version of half life 2. It was an arcade game and you sat in a chair and you had a mouse like joy stick on your left hand and a flight stick on your right. The game was heavily edited to be more of an arcade game but the controls just didnt work. In some of the wii shooter games you have to move the cursor to the edge of the screen to move the character, it was the same thing. It just didn't really work out, and controlling a human by using weird joysticks like that didn't make it feel more realistic or anything.
We then tried out a kaiten sushi place. Kaiten is that conveyor belt thing where they just have plates of sushi going around and you pick up what you want. The plates all cost 130 yen so they just counted the amount of plates you have at the end to pay. It was really obvious however that no one there liked their job. The plates were not very clean and the chef had this tube of mayo that he uses on some of the sushi (mayo is diffrent in Japan and usually really good on japanese food). But he just squirts some on the floor! Its like what the heck that is NOT sanitary at all. And then when we called over the cashier, she was definitely not the super spunky clerk you see everywhere else i Japan. So we then go to the karaoke place and spend so long there. The tiredness was getting to me at the end and you know how your throat gets kind of acidicy if you are up really late drinking soda? I had that pretty bad. I've come to really like singing only Japanese songs. Most of them are a challenge just to get the words out in time but its fun.
The all night karaoke ended at 6 am. But yodobashi didn't open until 9:30! We walked back to yodobashi and so a place seling the game at 7am. However the other people were buying the special edition psp bundle so they had to get it there. I wanted to be a good friend and wait with them but for the life of me I just couldn't sit around for 3 more hours. I got mine at 7am and tatsuya put out a folding table just outside of thier store and a cash register and boxes of the games. A few people started to gather but I got mine pretty early on. I hurried back to the train station and started to play but I was falling asleep playing it, I was so tired. I did what I could to get home and crashed in my bed. I set my alarm to go off in 3 hours because I wanted to go to class and turn in my paper in person but my alarm didnt go off, or didnt wake me up and I slept until class just started. I then went back to bed and got up at around 3pm. I emailed the teacher then spent the rest of the day packing and playing dissida. I'm pretty tired right now and I have to board the night bus at 11:30 tonight. Hopefully, fingers crossed, I'll just passout and be all genki for tokyo friday morning. We all did a really bad job of actually planning this trip so it'll be interesting to see what we end up doing. It's all pretty cool finally going to akihabara and seeing what all of the fuss is really about.
Well I'm going to head off back to umeda soon so I'll write back when I return from tokyo.
---Ben
We then tried out a kaiten sushi place. Kaiten is that conveyor belt thing where they just have plates of sushi going around and you pick up what you want. The plates all cost 130 yen so they just counted the amount of plates you have at the end to pay. It was really obvious however that no one there liked their job. The plates were not very clean and the chef had this tube of mayo that he uses on some of the sushi (mayo is diffrent in Japan and usually really good on japanese food). But he just squirts some on the floor! Its like what the heck that is NOT sanitary at all. And then when we called over the cashier, she was definitely not the super spunky clerk you see everywhere else i Japan. So we then go to the karaoke place and spend so long there. The tiredness was getting to me at the end and you know how your throat gets kind of acidicy if you are up really late drinking soda? I had that pretty bad. I've come to really like singing only Japanese songs. Most of them are a challenge just to get the words out in time but its fun.
The all night karaoke ended at 6 am. But yodobashi didn't open until 9:30! We walked back to yodobashi and so a place seling the game at 7am. However the other people were buying the special edition psp bundle so they had to get it there. I wanted to be a good friend and wait with them but for the life of me I just couldn't sit around for 3 more hours. I got mine at 7am and tatsuya put out a folding table just outside of thier store and a cash register and boxes of the games. A few people started to gather but I got mine pretty early on. I hurried back to the train station and started to play but I was falling asleep playing it, I was so tired. I did what I could to get home and crashed in my bed. I set my alarm to go off in 3 hours because I wanted to go to class and turn in my paper in person but my alarm didnt go off, or didnt wake me up and I slept until class just started. I then went back to bed and got up at around 3pm. I emailed the teacher then spent the rest of the day packing and playing dissida. I'm pretty tired right now and I have to board the night bus at 11:30 tonight. Hopefully, fingers crossed, I'll just passout and be all genki for tokyo friday morning. We all did a really bad job of actually planning this trip so it'll be interesting to see what we end up doing. It's all pretty cool finally going to akihabara and seeing what all of the fuss is really about.
Well I'm going to head off back to umeda soon so I'll write back when I return from tokyo.
---Ben
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
byoki
Well this weekend was really not that exciting. This week I have my Japanese history final and my Japanese language finals. Also I didn't have any plans so I thought it would be best just to stay home and do as much studying as I could Saturday and Sunday. I slept in a lot Saturday, tried to skype home but the internet was bad, then around noon I decided I needed to go out to get some food since my host mom was gone. So I headed off to Sannomiya and tried to find a Wendys because I was really longing for some regular American food but couldn't find anything so I ended up getting some curry at some little place. The other reason I went to Sannomiya was to play that gundam arcade game. For my conversation test we had to pick a piece of news and talk about it and I picked an article about how that game is getting a firmware upgrade and the features it was adding so I thought I should know what I was talking about. I'll rant on about that game later in this blog because it will be a lot I'm sure. After words I decided to just check out gamers because they have random sales that are really good. I ended up picking up another gundam model, which I will also hold back on talking about until later.
So I went home and from that point until Sunday night I was just going between playing DS, watching Gundam Seed Destiny on youtube, messing with my PSP to get new programs isntalled, and a little studying here and there. By late sunday I was really regretting staying home all day and was really looking forward to going to school just to get out of that house. For dinner we had this hamburger thing, it was just the meat with some sauce on it. It tasted fine but my stomach started to hurt right after I got about half way through. It was pretty light and it was more like a pressure so I thought I was full. After dinner I just laid on my bed but slowly it got worse and worse and when I tried to go to sleep the pain kept me up pretty late. It wasn't excruciating or anything like that it just felt like there was a lot of pressure on my insides.
In the morning I felt like crap but I had to go to school because I had two finals. I was barely able to eat some yogurt and headed off to school. The walk to the station felt so terrible. I really didn't want to go on anymore. On the train wasn't too bad because I could find some sort of sitting position that didn't hurt as much. At school I just felt really bad. I kind of bombed the conversation test because I just didn't know the new vocab I needed to talk about the story and I could use notes but looking at that totally throws you off. I got an 82 on it which is much better then I thought. I tried to eat some ice cream and fruit for lunch but couldn't get it all down. The history test wasn't too bad I thought. If this was a real class I would have worried because I didn't put college level answers to the questions but since this is make-believe-joke-of-a-college class and there was extra credit I'm sure I'll get a good grade.
Right after I turned in the test I hurried home and the walk from the station to the house was so terrible, I wanted it to be over so badly. I some how made it and fell right asleep. I woke up for dinner and had enough of an appetite to eat dinner. I messed around online for a bit then went to sleep at like 11 or something. The next day I felt better but still had some discomfort so I called in sick and just layed in bed most of the day. I watched like 20 episodes of gundam seed destiny I think, I'm almost done. I didn't take a nap just sat around all day. When I went to school this morning I was really happy to finally get out of that house.
So the semester is really close to being over, here is what I have left; Thursday: kanji test and reading comprehension, Friday: grammar and listening test, Sunday: field trip to Kyoto, and Monday and Thursday: meaning less Japanese history class since the final is done. Then it's off to Tokyo to take lots of pictures and spend lots of money.
Oh also I'm hanging out with one of my penpals tomorrow. I don't know if it is a date or not though. I've seen her pictures and she's really cute and were having dinner and seeing the lights for the luminaria festival. It's always hard to know what is and isn't a date. I think as long as you don't call it a date there isn't much pressure. Oh well heres hoping things work out.
Now for the rants. First that Gundam arcade game. The game is called Mobile Suit Gundam: Bonds of the battle field (kidou senshi gundamu: senjou no kizuna) and it is a giant dome pod that you enter in and sit inside. The game uses a projector to give you a giant hemisphere view from within the mobile suit. You have two flight sticks and two peddals. The flight sticks control movement, left, right, forward, turhing, etc and the buttons on the sticks control lock on and meele or long range weapon. The peddals control dash and jump. It is really easy to get the hang of the controls and it really feels like you are piloting a giant robot! The hemisphere view really brings it all together as you will see stuff in your peripheral vision and since the controls are the way they are you do more normal movements, none of the crazy stuff that main characters do in the show but things that the regular troops do, which is what you play as. I don't think I'm doing a very good job explaining it but the way the whole presentation comes together it feels like you understand what the anime characters are actually doing.
But this game has some huge problems. The first is the graphics suck. Like you can play the game online with other arcades across Japan, so the graphics are held back for that but this really looks like a dreamcast game. I never understood why they can't just put a freaking PS3 into these are arcade games to get decent graphics. Second the projector is pretty low quality. I mean it is kind of understandable since they are high mass production and run pretty much 24/7 but its a really low resolution image, making kanji nearly unreadable, and it has really bad screen door effect which takes away some of the experience. The game is also kind of pricy. Its 500 yen for 2 plays and each play lasts for 3 or 4 mins, so compared to other arcade games its not a terrible yen to min rate but its not something I think I could justify playing everyday, atleast with all of my other vices. Also you have to buy an ID card to play. The ID card is cool because you choose your character's costume, voice and default mobile suit and it prints out this card with your name and an emblem and stores all of your win records on it. But at 300 yen it means your first play costs 800 yen.
Now more gundam rants. At gamers what I decided to buy was the 1/60 scale wing 0 gundam. I kept going back and forth on this because I am going to tokyo and didn't want to waste all my money before I went but these 1/60 scale are kind of rare and Gamers has a sort of ware house or budget store kind of vibe in their gundam section so I thought when that thing is gone its gone for good. So going with that mind set I HAD to buy it. I've yet to start it but I am glad I bought it because for 2500 yen it has a light up chest. Whats really cool is that you build the little light circuit yourself they just give you some wire pieces already bent the right way. I'm really looking forward to having that one finished. With this one I also decided that I'm finally going to start buying spray paint and painting the models. I sprayed some of my completed ones with this top coat stuff which adds a hint of flat metalic look to them in addition to protecting the decals. With wing 0 I can get by with just buying white, red, blue and gold. And white red blue are colors that tons of gundams use so it won't really be a waist.
The problem with spray painting them is how do I keep the pieces organized. What I plan to do is cut out all of the pieces, trim them, sand them (since I am painting them the extra scratches wont show up) spray them, ink them then assemble them all. On the 1/60 models the pieces are simple and big enough it should be ok but on the 1/100 master grades there are somewhere around 200 pieces and a lot of them are really small. Just digging through a box of parts could take forever.
Lets see what else do I have to rant about. I'm playing castlevania order of eclessia on DS right now. I like the main character being a strong non girly female and the weapon system is really good but I'm at the end game part right now and I'm just stuck with nothing to do but keep leveling up, and leveling up in this game usually breaks down to you running into a room killing 1 monster running back out then back in so that he spawns once more. Normal castlevania games make mosters lower the amount of exp the give as you level up but in this one they stay the same. Which is good and bad. It kind of encourages me just to kill the same thing 1000 times. At any rate once this is done I'm going to try and burn through Phoenix Wright 3, so that I can do nothing but Dissidia when that comes out on the 18th.
Well theres another long blog for you all, bye
So I went home and from that point until Sunday night I was just going between playing DS, watching Gundam Seed Destiny on youtube, messing with my PSP to get new programs isntalled, and a little studying here and there. By late sunday I was really regretting staying home all day and was really looking forward to going to school just to get out of that house. For dinner we had this hamburger thing, it was just the meat with some sauce on it. It tasted fine but my stomach started to hurt right after I got about half way through. It was pretty light and it was more like a pressure so I thought I was full. After dinner I just laid on my bed but slowly it got worse and worse and when I tried to go to sleep the pain kept me up pretty late. It wasn't excruciating or anything like that it just felt like there was a lot of pressure on my insides.
In the morning I felt like crap but I had to go to school because I had two finals. I was barely able to eat some yogurt and headed off to school. The walk to the station felt so terrible. I really didn't want to go on anymore. On the train wasn't too bad because I could find some sort of sitting position that didn't hurt as much. At school I just felt really bad. I kind of bombed the conversation test because I just didn't know the new vocab I needed to talk about the story and I could use notes but looking at that totally throws you off. I got an 82 on it which is much better then I thought. I tried to eat some ice cream and fruit for lunch but couldn't get it all down. The history test wasn't too bad I thought. If this was a real class I would have worried because I didn't put college level answers to the questions but since this is make-believe-joke-of-a-college class and there was extra credit I'm sure I'll get a good grade.
Right after I turned in the test I hurried home and the walk from the station to the house was so terrible, I wanted it to be over so badly. I some how made it and fell right asleep. I woke up for dinner and had enough of an appetite to eat dinner. I messed around online for a bit then went to sleep at like 11 or something. The next day I felt better but still had some discomfort so I called in sick and just layed in bed most of the day. I watched like 20 episodes of gundam seed destiny I think, I'm almost done. I didn't take a nap just sat around all day. When I went to school this morning I was really happy to finally get out of that house.
So the semester is really close to being over, here is what I have left; Thursday: kanji test and reading comprehension, Friday: grammar and listening test, Sunday: field trip to Kyoto, and Monday and Thursday: meaning less Japanese history class since the final is done. Then it's off to Tokyo to take lots of pictures and spend lots of money.
Oh also I'm hanging out with one of my penpals tomorrow. I don't know if it is a date or not though. I've seen her pictures and she's really cute and were having dinner and seeing the lights for the luminaria festival. It's always hard to know what is and isn't a date. I think as long as you don't call it a date there isn't much pressure. Oh well heres hoping things work out.
Now for the rants. First that Gundam arcade game. The game is called Mobile Suit Gundam: Bonds of the battle field (kidou senshi gundamu: senjou no kizuna) and it is a giant dome pod that you enter in and sit inside. The game uses a projector to give you a giant hemisphere view from within the mobile suit. You have two flight sticks and two peddals. The flight sticks control movement, left, right, forward, turhing, etc and the buttons on the sticks control lock on and meele or long range weapon. The peddals control dash and jump. It is really easy to get the hang of the controls and it really feels like you are piloting a giant robot! The hemisphere view really brings it all together as you will see stuff in your peripheral vision and since the controls are the way they are you do more normal movements, none of the crazy stuff that main characters do in the show but things that the regular troops do, which is what you play as. I don't think I'm doing a very good job explaining it but the way the whole presentation comes together it feels like you understand what the anime characters are actually doing.
But this game has some huge problems. The first is the graphics suck. Like you can play the game online with other arcades across Japan, so the graphics are held back for that but this really looks like a dreamcast game. I never understood why they can't just put a freaking PS3 into these are arcade games to get decent graphics. Second the projector is pretty low quality. I mean it is kind of understandable since they are high mass production and run pretty much 24/7 but its a really low resolution image, making kanji nearly unreadable, and it has really bad screen door effect which takes away some of the experience. The game is also kind of pricy. Its 500 yen for 2 plays and each play lasts for 3 or 4 mins, so compared to other arcade games its not a terrible yen to min rate but its not something I think I could justify playing everyday, atleast with all of my other vices. Also you have to buy an ID card to play. The ID card is cool because you choose your character's costume, voice and default mobile suit and it prints out this card with your name and an emblem and stores all of your win records on it. But at 300 yen it means your first play costs 800 yen.
Now more gundam rants. At gamers what I decided to buy was the 1/60 scale wing 0 gundam. I kept going back and forth on this because I am going to tokyo and didn't want to waste all my money before I went but these 1/60 scale are kind of rare and Gamers has a sort of ware house or budget store kind of vibe in their gundam section so I thought when that thing is gone its gone for good. So going with that mind set I HAD to buy it. I've yet to start it but I am glad I bought it because for 2500 yen it has a light up chest. Whats really cool is that you build the little light circuit yourself they just give you some wire pieces already bent the right way. I'm really looking forward to having that one finished. With this one I also decided that I'm finally going to start buying spray paint and painting the models. I sprayed some of my completed ones with this top coat stuff which adds a hint of flat metalic look to them in addition to protecting the decals. With wing 0 I can get by with just buying white, red, blue and gold. And white red blue are colors that tons of gundams use so it won't really be a waist.
The problem with spray painting them is how do I keep the pieces organized. What I plan to do is cut out all of the pieces, trim them, sand them (since I am painting them the extra scratches wont show up) spray them, ink them then assemble them all. On the 1/60 models the pieces are simple and big enough it should be ok but on the 1/100 master grades there are somewhere around 200 pieces and a lot of them are really small. Just digging through a box of parts could take forever.
Lets see what else do I have to rant about. I'm playing castlevania order of eclessia on DS right now. I like the main character being a strong non girly female and the weapon system is really good but I'm at the end game part right now and I'm just stuck with nothing to do but keep leveling up, and leveling up in this game usually breaks down to you running into a room killing 1 monster running back out then back in so that he spawns once more. Normal castlevania games make mosters lower the amount of exp the give as you level up but in this one they stay the same. Which is good and bad. It kind of encourages me just to kill the same thing 1000 times. At any rate once this is done I'm going to try and burn through Phoenix Wright 3, so that I can do nothing but Dissidia when that comes out on the 18th.
Well theres another long blog for you all, bye
Saturday, November 29, 2008
November is already over!
Wow before you know it 3 months have gone by since I got here in Japan. I am 1/3 of the way done with this program. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. I really want to see my friends and family and as great as Japan is I kind of get sick of it some times. But any ways lets see what did I do this week.
Starting on Thursday there was a gakuensai(school festival). It was really weird to see actually the main walk ways up to school was just packed with food vendors from clubs. Now normally you could just walk past all of that stuff but these people get right up in your face and try to get you buy their stuff. It was actually really annoying. But I ate lunch from the vendors and they had a stage up with little student bands playing and one group did an amazing cover for high way star. But we had class still so after I think I just went home, honestly I don't remember if I did anything else.
Friday I went with Emily tomomi and tomoko (unrelated just similar names) to osaka for shopping. That day I decided to take a bunch of short videos with my camera so that people could see what its on just a normal day going to osaka. I apologize for the shakiness and the shots of my feet I was just doing it as kind of an after thought. We started out at Hep 5 in Umeda. Its a mall but as you would expect in Japan its very narrow and very tall. When you go in there is a giant whale suspended from the ceiling and on the top of the building there is a ferris wheel you can ride. We looked at a few things but ended up going to this haunted house in the arcade. This was really different from a normal haunted house because after a short little intro video you go into this little room with a wooden table, a giant doll attached to the wall and head phones. You put the head phones on and the lights go out and just listen. They some how did perfect surround sound with these head phones and it felt like this creepy old lady was whispering into your ear and was moving from shoulder to shoulder. It was all in Japanese but just the way everything was said was so freaky. Things like lights flashing or the seats dropping a few inches suddenly throw in extra shock but it was really all about the audio.
We then took the subway to nanba and looked at more shops but ultimately we got to Den Den town. I was on a quest to get a portable hard drive and ram for my laptop. I got those at a pretty decent price but I also picked up another gundam model. It was the 1/60 scale Strike Gundam from Gundam Seed. it looks a little plane but it was 2500 yen and I didn't even know they made more 1/60 non perfect grade models besides the exia I picked up.
I ended up staying later then everyone else then headed back home. The reason I got the computer parts was so that I could play world of warcraft at school. I got the game up and running on my tiny PC which in itself is a pretty amazing thing. Its really slow but totally playable. So that Saturday I went to school and used the internet there so I could download the 2 gigs of patches needed to get back up to speed. But after I got it all patched I found out that the internet connection there blocks the ports wow uses. So I was a little frustrated about that. I was feeling that I couldn't get anything I wanted to work the way I wanted it to do that. But I ultimately found a port I could use a lan cable to connect and get pass the blocked ports. that made me feel really good actually because its like something I always did at home. Recently I found out I can use the computer lab and just plug in my hard drive and play with really good graphics so I'll probably be doing that.
That night I got a text message from kentaro (some I met at the welcome party) and he invited me to a Nou performance that his club was doing. I said yes even though I didn't want to go. You really have to work with building a social life so I take any chance I can get. So I go and its really boring I can't understand anything and sometimes I think they are just making sounds. Onces its over I hung out with Kentaro and his friend for a few hours. We ate lunch and checked out the class rooms that were decorated for the clubs. When you enter they ask you sign this book then they give you a big pamplet about their club after a few rooms I had a big stack in my hand. I felt bad because I was just going to throw them away. I was actually going to use the bins at school by Kentaro said to do it at the station. The most interesting room I saw was the American studies club. In the center of the room was a badly made white house over a half black half white united states map and a life size lincoln being assasinated by john wilks booth. They also had a famous black people section and it was Michal Jordan, Obama and Michal Jackson. It was a real WTF moment.
Then we hung out the Nou club's house and it was pretty cool, Kentaro was like "oh hes a gundam otaku" "he's a baseball otaku" "he's a tokusatsu otaku" so definitely interesting people there. Me and Kentaro talked about pokemon actually. He has like 250 hours in his pearl game!
I was invited for all night karaoke so I went home, ate dinner, then took a little nap. That was a lot of fun and it was only like 1050 yen for the whole night because someone had a coupon.
Because of that I was really tired on Monday and just slept in. I then finished my Exia model. I put the final decals on it. These decals are so hard to use. You have to cut them out of the sheet you want, soak them in water for 3 seconds then slide them off of the paper onto the piece you want and some how dry it with out moving it. I messed up one of the major ones I wanted and had to use something else that didn't look as cool I think. I really wish I had somewhere I could spray paint, I really want to add a finishing coat to give it a more metalic look but I don't know where or how I could do that exactly. Hmm well I just thought of something as I wrote that. I could just go walk and find some where that is out in the open and no one goes to and spray there. But I have to be careful so it doesn't look like I'm there to graffiti or something. I'll let you know how that works next time.
Um Tues, Wed, and Thur nothing particular happened except I started getting really home sick. Once thanksgiving came I was really sad. Although I got my tuff guy persona I need to uphold I will admit I was getting pretty teary eye thinking about everyone back home and how much I miss them all. So me Emily, Christy and Zoe decided to go out for Kobe Beef because we all missed out on a great meal back home. So we get there and the restaurant has gates on the booths so you can kind of close yourself off from the rest of the place and there was a grill pit in the center of the table. There werent any pictures on the menu so we worked our way through in Japanese on ordering and we were all surprised how little raw meat our 1480 yen bought. It was like half a pound I think, I dunno it was like 8 grams I think maybe. But it was SOOOOO good. you grill it yourself then dip it in this sauce. Its one of those you just do it once for the experience. We were all still hungry so we went to the bakery bought some really nice rolls and such then went to karaoke for two hours while we ate. I sang cha la head cha la (DBZ japanese opening) and dekaranger theme song. Me and emily also sung rock lobster. It was great.
Saturday me and Emily were invited to walk around the old part of Kyoto by Shinichi. He really put a lot of effort in planning it out, he even printed out maps and plotted a course. I took a lot of pictures because the fall colors were just breath taking. The pictures really speak for themselves so I'll just upload those. But one really cool part was that there was a little bridge, normally nothing note worthy except that there was a little sign explaining that this bridge has been here for hundreds of years and there was a very old drawing of that very same bridge. Its so mind blowing for things to be the same as they have been for hundreds of years.
Well I've got more goofing off to to do and more gundams that need building so I'll write later
bye
Starting on Thursday there was a gakuensai(school festival). It was really weird to see actually the main walk ways up to school was just packed with food vendors from clubs. Now normally you could just walk past all of that stuff but these people get right up in your face and try to get you buy their stuff. It was actually really annoying. But I ate lunch from the vendors and they had a stage up with little student bands playing and one group did an amazing cover for high way star. But we had class still so after I think I just went home, honestly I don't remember if I did anything else.
Friday I went with Emily tomomi and tomoko (unrelated just similar names) to osaka for shopping. That day I decided to take a bunch of short videos with my camera so that people could see what its on just a normal day going to osaka. I apologize for the shakiness and the shots of my feet I was just doing it as kind of an after thought. We started out at Hep 5 in Umeda. Its a mall but as you would expect in Japan its very narrow and very tall. When you go in there is a giant whale suspended from the ceiling and on the top of the building there is a ferris wheel you can ride. We looked at a few things but ended up going to this haunted house in the arcade. This was really different from a normal haunted house because after a short little intro video you go into this little room with a wooden table, a giant doll attached to the wall and head phones. You put the head phones on and the lights go out and just listen. They some how did perfect surround sound with these head phones and it felt like this creepy old lady was whispering into your ear and was moving from shoulder to shoulder. It was all in Japanese but just the way everything was said was so freaky. Things like lights flashing or the seats dropping a few inches suddenly throw in extra shock but it was really all about the audio.
We then took the subway to nanba and looked at more shops but ultimately we got to Den Den town. I was on a quest to get a portable hard drive and ram for my laptop. I got those at a pretty decent price but I also picked up another gundam model. It was the 1/60 scale Strike Gundam from Gundam Seed. it looks a little plane but it was 2500 yen and I didn't even know they made more 1/60 non perfect grade models besides the exia I picked up.
I ended up staying later then everyone else then headed back home. The reason I got the computer parts was so that I could play world of warcraft at school. I got the game up and running on my tiny PC which in itself is a pretty amazing thing. Its really slow but totally playable. So that Saturday I went to school and used the internet there so I could download the 2 gigs of patches needed to get back up to speed. But after I got it all patched I found out that the internet connection there blocks the ports wow uses. So I was a little frustrated about that. I was feeling that I couldn't get anything I wanted to work the way I wanted it to do that. But I ultimately found a port I could use a lan cable to connect and get pass the blocked ports. that made me feel really good actually because its like something I always did at home. Recently I found out I can use the computer lab and just plug in my hard drive and play with really good graphics so I'll probably be doing that.
That night I got a text message from kentaro (some I met at the welcome party) and he invited me to a Nou performance that his club was doing. I said yes even though I didn't want to go. You really have to work with building a social life so I take any chance I can get. So I go and its really boring I can't understand anything and sometimes I think they are just making sounds. Onces its over I hung out with Kentaro and his friend for a few hours. We ate lunch and checked out the class rooms that were decorated for the clubs. When you enter they ask you sign this book then they give you a big pamplet about their club after a few rooms I had a big stack in my hand. I felt bad because I was just going to throw them away. I was actually going to use the bins at school by Kentaro said to do it at the station. The most interesting room I saw was the American studies club. In the center of the room was a badly made white house over a half black half white united states map and a life size lincoln being assasinated by john wilks booth. They also had a famous black people section and it was Michal Jordan, Obama and Michal Jackson. It was a real WTF moment.
Then we hung out the Nou club's house and it was pretty cool, Kentaro was like "oh hes a gundam otaku" "he's a baseball otaku" "he's a tokusatsu otaku" so definitely interesting people there. Me and Kentaro talked about pokemon actually. He has like 250 hours in his pearl game!
I was invited for all night karaoke so I went home, ate dinner, then took a little nap. That was a lot of fun and it was only like 1050 yen for the whole night because someone had a coupon.
Because of that I was really tired on Monday and just slept in. I then finished my Exia model. I put the final decals on it. These decals are so hard to use. You have to cut them out of the sheet you want, soak them in water for 3 seconds then slide them off of the paper onto the piece you want and some how dry it with out moving it. I messed up one of the major ones I wanted and had to use something else that didn't look as cool I think. I really wish I had somewhere I could spray paint, I really want to add a finishing coat to give it a more metalic look but I don't know where or how I could do that exactly. Hmm well I just thought of something as I wrote that. I could just go walk and find some where that is out in the open and no one goes to and spray there. But I have to be careful so it doesn't look like I'm there to graffiti or something. I'll let you know how that works next time.
Um Tues, Wed, and Thur nothing particular happened except I started getting really home sick. Once thanksgiving came I was really sad. Although I got my tuff guy persona I need to uphold I will admit I was getting pretty teary eye thinking about everyone back home and how much I miss them all. So me Emily, Christy and Zoe decided to go out for Kobe Beef because we all missed out on a great meal back home. So we get there and the restaurant has gates on the booths so you can kind of close yourself off from the rest of the place and there was a grill pit in the center of the table. There werent any pictures on the menu so we worked our way through in Japanese on ordering and we were all surprised how little raw meat our 1480 yen bought. It was like half a pound I think, I dunno it was like 8 grams I think maybe. But it was SOOOOO good. you grill it yourself then dip it in this sauce. Its one of those you just do it once for the experience. We were all still hungry so we went to the bakery bought some really nice rolls and such then went to karaoke for two hours while we ate. I sang cha la head cha la (DBZ japanese opening) and dekaranger theme song. Me and emily also sung rock lobster. It was great.
Saturday me and Emily were invited to walk around the old part of Kyoto by Shinichi. He really put a lot of effort in planning it out, he even printed out maps and plotted a course. I took a lot of pictures because the fall colors were just breath taking. The pictures really speak for themselves so I'll just upload those. But one really cool part was that there was a little bridge, normally nothing note worthy except that there was a little sign explaining that this bridge has been here for hundreds of years and there was a very old drawing of that very same bridge. Its so mind blowing for things to be the same as they have been for hundreds of years.
Well I've got more goofing off to to do and more gundams that need building so I'll write later
bye
Sunday, November 16, 2008
kanazawa
I just got back from my field trip to kanazawa so I wanted to write this down before I forgot the details. Ok so the plan was to meet saturday morning. It was at 8:30 so I thought thats about the time I arrive at school normally I'll just leave a little bit earlier so while on the train I noticed that the paper said to meet at 8:15. I was really worried at this point but ridding a train you can't do anything about it. I started to run once I left the station (even though it was still like 8:07) and only stopped when I saw other ryugakusei. I worry so much about being late to things. So as always we waited around and didn't leave even close to our scheduled time, one ryugakusei pak (big afro guy in the pictures, really fun guy by the way) was really late so we waited for him.
The bus was one of those really tall buss where you can put luggage and what not in the bottom. There was a section in the back where like 8 people could sit around a table me, emily, and erin (I hang out with those two a lot) plus a few other people sat back there and we had so much fun. We tried to get 4 players going at final fantasy crystal chronicles but it would keep getting disconnected for some reason. We were playing the pirated rom version but still we were confused as to why we couldn't get there. I felt a little bad because that game can only do 4 players and emily wanted to play something wifi but just played phoenix wright instead. While on the trip we played a lot of mario kart and tetris (courtney is really freaking good at tetris and kicked our buts) and I started to read batman the dark knight returns on my mini laptop.
(forgot this part and added it later) We stopped for lunch in the same town as the temple and it was a traditional Japanese style restaurant. It had tatami floors, and we sat on the square pillows and had the square trays. It was various vegetables and cold tempura and some soba. My taste buds must just not have adjusted the same way other's have because the food was barely edible, some of it just wasn't. Some people really liked it, I dunno why. After we ate we had a few mins at the gift shop on the first floor. I saw something so bad their, it was a cross with Jesus on it but then it had skulls with red eyes around it and the key chain package said horror series. Its so crazy how few Christians there are here and even how little Japanese people know about it. At the scheduled time most of us gathered up but two people Healy and Patrick ran off on their own somewhere. Those two can really frustrate me sometimes. Healy is the stereotypical California bimbo and Patrick is the stereotypical gay guy. Separate they don't annoy me, Patrick is even in my Japanese class and not a bad guy, but together ugh its painful. Truth be told I don't know why they annoy me but the example of them just going off on their own when we are supposed to be a group and stuff is a good example. If you just think of those stereotypes you'll understand.
We first arrived after a few hours to eiheiji which means temple of eternal piece. It was a really cool temple but was really cool was the amazing fall colors (kouyo), I took a lot of pictures but was worried about my camera's battery running out when I needed it so I held back taking a crazy amount of them. The word temple might not be the best translation the more I think about it. It feels very much like a tourist trap in my opinion. You can buy little souvenirs from the temple and talismans things like that. It is a place where there are statues and pictures of gods and Buddhas but their isn't a very strong sense of reverence. I really want to learn more about Buddhism because I don't even know if you can really call it a religion in a Western sense, its like its just about discovering your own mind through meditation rather then your actions having any consequences.
Any ways after we were rushed out of that we headed towards this amazing sea shore and took a boat ride. The sight was breathtaking but because we were behind schedule they rushed us down to the boat for the boat tour. This shore has these very particular shape rocks that are only found in 3 places in the world. The boat ride was very cool, espically since I haven't really been out on the ocean since I was very little living in Washington. The pictures really speak for themselves at this part so I won't try and describe it in vain. After the boat ride we were once again rushed along back to the boat, even though we all tried to steal a few more pictures.
We rode for another hour or so until we arrived at our hotel in Kanazawa. This was the weirdest hotel I've ever seen. We all got individuals (because apparently its the cost per person regardless of amount of rooms) and it was very small but functional I suppose. The bathroom was really small and slightly off the ground so you had to step into it. The way the whole thing felt it was like being in an airplane bathroom. Also it was a regular key, not a card key, and they gave you toothbrush and toothpaste. When you enter the room you have to insert the stick attached to the key into this hole in the wall for the lights to work.
So every dropped their stuff off and we went off to get some food because we were starving. Kanazawa isn't as packed as even sannomiya is so it had just that normal city vibe which is kind of nice every once in a while. We wanted to go to the conveir belt sushi place but their was a big group of us and lots of people in front of us so me emily and erin ended up eating at a Chinese restaurant. After that lunch we wanted something with a lot of meat and it was pretty good despite the gunsa being too buttery for some reason. After that we walked around a bit and saw some really cool lights and some modern art statues but didn't go too far away from the hotel. We ended up turning in like around 9 and I layed in bed until 11 reading more of that batman comic. My little laptop works really well for it resolution wise. I couldn't sleep very well last night, the AC wasn't working right, the pillow was really bad and stuff like that.
We had breakfast at this buffet called the olive garden (no relation to the state one) and it was pretty lack luster, I just had some scrambled eggs and bread. After the usual lateness of everyone we turned in all of our keys and headed off, one group was going to the geisha district the other was going to this kimono painting place. It was raining of course and would continue until we went home. At the kimono place they gave us this handkerchief with a flower design on it and using stencils we painted in the color. None of us really understood the explanation apparently because if you swirl the brush around it works much better so everyone's first leaves looked terrible. We all wanted to use different colors and mix them but the lady was really against it. If we wanted to change the color we made sure she wasn't around. Mine turned out ok, I just wish I could have had a practice one first. So they had a cool shop with this fancy cloth paint on it, most of it crazy expensive though.
After some walking and getting distracted we ended up at the big park, and after waiting for the other group we finally got to see some of this park with a guide. The place is huge and so beautiful and I did my best with my camera to take decent pictures but I dunno, that camera kind of sucks and I kind of want to get a better one (but I doubt I will).
We then had free time from 11:30 to 1:45, Christy made reservations at this ninja temple but it was at 12:00, we would have had to take a taxi, and we couldn't find Christy so that didn't happen. After more waiting around for people we got some food and did a little shopping before it was time to head back. At starbucks I saw these two girls in their Lolita clothes and I asked to take a picture and they let me but they were really shy about it. I don't get, don't you put all of that time and money into the costume so that you will get attention from strangers?
From there it was time to go home and the bus ride was fun, we played SO much mario kart. And Les kept calling bullet bill, billy the bullet and every time someone got that item we would yell it out to freak out all of the other players. It was a lot of fun. All in all it was a really fun trip but now I only have a little bit of time to do some homework, geez chotto iya ne
The bus was one of those really tall buss where you can put luggage and what not in the bottom. There was a section in the back where like 8 people could sit around a table me, emily, and erin (I hang out with those two a lot) plus a few other people sat back there and we had so much fun. We tried to get 4 players going at final fantasy crystal chronicles but it would keep getting disconnected for some reason. We were playing the pirated rom version but still we were confused as to why we couldn't get there. I felt a little bad because that game can only do 4 players and emily wanted to play something wifi but just played phoenix wright instead. While on the trip we played a lot of mario kart and tetris (courtney is really freaking good at tetris and kicked our buts) and I started to read batman the dark knight returns on my mini laptop.
(forgot this part and added it later) We stopped for lunch in the same town as the temple and it was a traditional Japanese style restaurant. It had tatami floors, and we sat on the square pillows and had the square trays. It was various vegetables and cold tempura and some soba. My taste buds must just not have adjusted the same way other's have because the food was barely edible, some of it just wasn't. Some people really liked it, I dunno why. After we ate we had a few mins at the gift shop on the first floor. I saw something so bad their, it was a cross with Jesus on it but then it had skulls with red eyes around it and the key chain package said horror series. Its so crazy how few Christians there are here and even how little Japanese people know about it. At the scheduled time most of us gathered up but two people Healy and Patrick ran off on their own somewhere. Those two can really frustrate me sometimes. Healy is the stereotypical California bimbo and Patrick is the stereotypical gay guy. Separate they don't annoy me, Patrick is even in my Japanese class and not a bad guy, but together ugh its painful. Truth be told I don't know why they annoy me but the example of them just going off on their own when we are supposed to be a group and stuff is a good example. If you just think of those stereotypes you'll understand.
We first arrived after a few hours to eiheiji which means temple of eternal piece. It was a really cool temple but was really cool was the amazing fall colors (kouyo), I took a lot of pictures but was worried about my camera's battery running out when I needed it so I held back taking a crazy amount of them. The word temple might not be the best translation the more I think about it. It feels very much like a tourist trap in my opinion. You can buy little souvenirs from the temple and talismans things like that. It is a place where there are statues and pictures of gods and Buddhas but their isn't a very strong sense of reverence. I really want to learn more about Buddhism because I don't even know if you can really call it a religion in a Western sense, its like its just about discovering your own mind through meditation rather then your actions having any consequences.
Any ways after we were rushed out of that we headed towards this amazing sea shore and took a boat ride. The sight was breathtaking but because we were behind schedule they rushed us down to the boat for the boat tour. This shore has these very particular shape rocks that are only found in 3 places in the world. The boat ride was very cool, espically since I haven't really been out on the ocean since I was very little living in Washington. The pictures really speak for themselves at this part so I won't try and describe it in vain. After the boat ride we were once again rushed along back to the boat, even though we all tried to steal a few more pictures.
We rode for another hour or so until we arrived at our hotel in Kanazawa. This was the weirdest hotel I've ever seen. We all got individuals (because apparently its the cost per person regardless of amount of rooms) and it was very small but functional I suppose. The bathroom was really small and slightly off the ground so you had to step into it. The way the whole thing felt it was like being in an airplane bathroom. Also it was a regular key, not a card key, and they gave you toothbrush and toothpaste. When you enter the room you have to insert the stick attached to the key into this hole in the wall for the lights to work.
So every dropped their stuff off and we went off to get some food because we were starving. Kanazawa isn't as packed as even sannomiya is so it had just that normal city vibe which is kind of nice every once in a while. We wanted to go to the conveir belt sushi place but their was a big group of us and lots of people in front of us so me emily and erin ended up eating at a Chinese restaurant. After that lunch we wanted something with a lot of meat and it was pretty good despite the gunsa being too buttery for some reason. After that we walked around a bit and saw some really cool lights and some modern art statues but didn't go too far away from the hotel. We ended up turning in like around 9 and I layed in bed until 11 reading more of that batman comic. My little laptop works really well for it resolution wise. I couldn't sleep very well last night, the AC wasn't working right, the pillow was really bad and stuff like that.
We had breakfast at this buffet called the olive garden (no relation to the state one) and it was pretty lack luster, I just had some scrambled eggs and bread. After the usual lateness of everyone we turned in all of our keys and headed off, one group was going to the geisha district the other was going to this kimono painting place. It was raining of course and would continue until we went home. At the kimono place they gave us this handkerchief with a flower design on it and using stencils we painted in the color. None of us really understood the explanation apparently because if you swirl the brush around it works much better so everyone's first leaves looked terrible. We all wanted to use different colors and mix them but the lady was really against it. If we wanted to change the color we made sure she wasn't around. Mine turned out ok, I just wish I could have had a practice one first. So they had a cool shop with this fancy cloth paint on it, most of it crazy expensive though.
After some walking and getting distracted we ended up at the big park, and after waiting for the other group we finally got to see some of this park with a guide. The place is huge and so beautiful and I did my best with my camera to take decent pictures but I dunno, that camera kind of sucks and I kind of want to get a better one (but I doubt I will).
We then had free time from 11:30 to 1:45, Christy made reservations at this ninja temple but it was at 12:00, we would have had to take a taxi, and we couldn't find Christy so that didn't happen. After more waiting around for people we got some food and did a little shopping before it was time to head back. At starbucks I saw these two girls in their Lolita clothes and I asked to take a picture and they let me but they were really shy about it. I don't get, don't you put all of that time and money into the costume so that you will get attention from strangers?
From there it was time to go home and the bus ride was fun, we played SO much mario kart. And Les kept calling bullet bill, billy the bullet and every time someone got that item we would yell it out to freak out all of the other players. It was a lot of fun. All in all it was a really fun trip but now I only have a little bit of time to do some homework, geez chotto iya ne
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
mo ichi do
Well lets see I've had a little over a week since my last blog entry and I'll try to remember what happened. Last Friday there was a welcome party for the ryugakusei, now 2 months after we get here is hardly a "welcome party" but it was pretty fun actually. It was a big event and probably 60 or 70 people went. They had name tags for the ryugakusei, food, and group games. Some of my friends didn't go because no one told us any details about it we just saw the fliers around school. I got to talk to quite a few people and got some phone numbers from some actual otakus!
It actually was nice that it was later because my Japanese has improved and I was able to carry out some pretty decent conversations. I'm still far from fluent and even far from where I want to be with my Japanese at this point, but I can definitely have a conversation in Japanese. So we are doing a sort of group conversation and I'm standing next to one of my classmates and he sees another classmate come in and he says "oh great now someone else who can speak Japanese is here" meaning he was the only one before not me and him. I'm going to take a little break and rant about this guy.
His name is Matt Groover and he is THE example as to why homeschooling is a bad idea. Matt never went to high school he just studied for his GED and he has watched so much anime over 8 years that he only took one Japanese language class and is in the highest level at Konan (with me). In all of his classes he is constantly correcting everyone and only slightly indirectly puts everyone else's Japanese ability down. During orientation we had a book with everyone's name and face and he went through and marked how good their Japanese is compared to his. And this "I'm better then everyone" attitude extends beyond Japanese ability as he was even watching over my shoulder and trying to coach me when we were playing tetris on the DS. And to top it all off he is so sterotypical american in the way he wont try new things, even though he flew half way across the world. He will pick out parts of the food when we eat, and he keeps telling us how he tries to get his host family to do things his way, I feel really bad for them. But I'm not being the jerk to him that I think in all right I should be because 1, regardless of what I think about him I have to spend a LOT of time with him in this program so best not burn any bridges and 2, he is a good guy inside, he is willing to help anyone out and he burned me a whole bunch of dvds. He just doesn't have the social skills you need in the real world.
Anyways back to the party. There was one Japanese guy who was like "Hi I'm so and so, I'm interested in Zero Tolerance" which is like a very weird topic starter I think. Something about that bowling for columbine movie, which I don't know why on earth Japaense people would care about documentaries like that. Then there was this other guy who is really an otaku but doesn't talk to much. And he was saying he knows the haruhi dance so he and his female friend start doing it, and it was the lamest thing I've ever seen. I dunno they were barely moving and so not into it. When we got into the main room we did this game where the projector posted a question like "which is the Japanese flag A or B"(in japanese of course) and you would walk to either the left or right side of the room, then before they gave the answer they roped off the sides and whoever was wrong was eliminated from the game. Then there was a not so interesting game of align the group by longest hair, or height or things like that. They also had this weird cardboard gundam thing but for the head it was like badly sculpted like a human and it had hair. The music was so loud though it was hard to have a good conversation.
After the party a lot of people went out to drink but me, one of the Japanese guys I had been talking to, and this ryugakusei from Egypt tried to find the station in this part of town no one really knew. Its really cool to think of people from three very different countries being able to communicate like that. I talked to the guy on the train ride home and he knows a lot of English but the way they teach Japanese students English puts no focus on actual spoken skills so he just needs more practice.
Saturday their was a field trip to Kyoto for the Art History class. I'm not taking Art History but if I paid my own way I could go, I felt like doing something more then just building gundam models that day so I decided to go. It was one of those things were it was hurry wake up rush out the door then wait around while everyone go there. And apparently there is a much faster and cheaper way to get to Kyoto then the last time I went. It was like around an hour for 500 yen, really not that bad. It was on and off raining all day and it was cold. The weather made me feel miserable all day. We first went to a museum that was all about the Portuguese who came to Japan, it was a some what interesting mixture of the two art styles and products. But the giant koi in the fountain outside was much more interesting. We also got hot chocolate from the vending machine, that was really good.
Then we went to a temple that was across the street. At first I was thinking "oh great ANOTHER temple" but this one was crazy. It had over 400 Buddha statues! And they were all around 800 years old. You would just look down that hall and it would last forever. There was one GIANT Buddha, 28 (I think) gods, and 400 of some praying one. The 28 gods were incredibly well sculpted the muscles looked so freakishly real. Its a shame photos are prohibited. We then ate at this mom and pop Japanese restaurant and some of the people were thinking about getting the bento but didnt really know what was in it and they saw that the table next to us was eating it and they lady brought the thing over and showed everyone what came with it, they were so friendly. Whats interesting about that place though was the music playing in the background, it was like 50s dinner music, like regular American music. American music is everywhere in Japan.
Next we went into this really big department store/train station and saw a ikebana(flower arangement) exhibit. There were something like 200 and it was crazy the stuff they did with these things. I thought ikebana was like just putting a rose over on this side of the pot and cutting away the ugly leafs but if that was ikebana then this was the extreme sports version because there were crazy colors and shapes, oh man it was incredible. I'm kicking myself that I didn't have my camera with me, I took some on my cell phone and lots of the other ryugakusei took pictures so maybe I can get some of the best ones uploaded.
After that we were free in Kyoto, we messed around for a bit trying to find a cafe for us to all sit down, then we went to an arcade. We played taiko drum masters, aparently in this version their is the go-onja theme song. I played an older version of some gundam game, I put it on easy and was surprised how long I lasted, usually arcades here are just how fast can you put money into it. Then I played this sega shooter game where you had a target onscreen so it was like a wii game and you had a pedal so you could move left or right and all the game was was one on one fights that lasted 30 seconds. It had a cool artistic edge to it but I would have liked a full game instead. At the arcade though Erin was hilarious she played the Rambo shooter game and she was just shooting like crazy and there was this part where Rambo has to shoot an helicopter down with a bow and arrow so it shows the cut scene then shows the game with the arrow and you had to wait for the helicopter to get in range but she just fired right away, missed, but the cut scene still showed it hitting it. Then she played that game where the alligators come out and you have to hit them with the foam mallet, but she was REALLY getting into it and letting out so much frustration on these poor alligators. Oh man great.
Then we walked around the shopping area, looked at souvenirs and found not only a batman and robin (the bad movie) wallet but also models from it. Really random. Max was with us and he wanted to get some cool shoes but they didn't have his size. Its so hard to find shoes in Japan. We ended up eating at some random place, I had tempura shrimp set. Then got home pretty late.
Sunday was cold. I woke up late and started working on my history paper, I have some stuff to say about my history class. This paper was the single worst paper I have written in college, I just retold the events, I didn't make any argument, I didn't quote anything, I didn't add any analysis, I just wrote until I got 1000 words and stopped. Normally I would be really ashamed with myself but with this class I know my teacher wont care. She wouldn't give us a straight answer when people would ask questions about the report and the class itself really is just a joke. In fact aside from the linguistics class, all of the classes are jokes here. The teachers don't know how to teach however they don't know how to grade harshly either. I've really become a bad student because the class doesn't really encourage learning. In the end a credit is a credit and it is better then the opposite of having insanely hard classes, but still I worry about going back to U of A and having to be a real student again.
So after my paper was done I pretty much stayed inside all day. At some points I would want to play my DS so I would have 2 sweaters, a jacket, and be under the blanket and not want to stick my fingers our enough to press the buttons. My host family gave me a heater now but I was just really cold.
Sunday I also worked on my 1/60 scale Exia gundam model. The brand name for gundam models is Gunpla and I've developed quite the obsession with them as of late. Currently I have 1/144 virtue gundam, 1/144 gundam throne drei, 1/144 dreadnought gundam, Unit 00, 1/144 00 gundam, Gurren Laggen, and 1/100 Musha Gundam. The Musha Gundam is really awesome. Its also a "master grade" so I put a lot of time into making it, probably 15 hours or something like that. I didn't even paint that much, just a few pieces to make it look like wood. When I'm making them I really wish I was home so that I could spray paint them because I want to get more serious about building them, it really drives me crazy to see all of the little mistakes I have made on them. I'm currently working on 1/60 Exia gundam model (from gundam 00, which is awesome by the way).
1/60 is pretty big like its the size of those power ranger robots I've got. I was a little disappointed with the model at first because its like just a big "high grade" model while since its priced the same as "master grade" I thought it would be something closer to that. But even still it's taken a lot of time to put together and I still have a lot to do. Right now it just has enough of its legs built so that it can stand and it looks kind of odd. Since there are so many big spots with out anything going on I was thinking about adding more panel lines myself (the dips in the model that you ink to highlight and make it look more anime machine like) but the guides recommend using an exacto knife which if you mess up its going to show up so much. I might try just making small marks with the pen by itself and letting it dry. I am going to have to hit it up with decals though, I actually bought an extra sheet of decals made just for 00 gundam. Also I bought the 1/100 "master grade" freedom gundam from gundam seed. This one comes with a stand so it should look pretty awesome whenever I get around to making it. Oh well I said bought but actually I just redeemed my yodobashi points from my laptop and got it for free.
Oh also let my explain the gunpla titles. "first grade" is the cheapy ones for kids that cost under 500 yen then there is "high grade" which what most of them are and the 1/144 size those usually cost 800 to 1400 yen then there is "master grade"which those can very from 1600 to 10000 yen, those are 1/100, the two master grades I got were 3000 yen. Then there is "perfect grade" and those are 1/60 and range from 10000 yen to 30000 yen. Then to make it even more confusing there are some models that are either 1/100 or 1/60 but not marked as a certain grade, that I don't understand.
Monday I went out to eat with this girl I met online from an English penpal site. Shes nice but really short and can't hold a conversation that well. Also I think she likes me but its not mutual. She sent me an email "ben ha watashi no koto dou omou no?" basically "what do you think of me?" This is the first a girl has made an interest in me here in Japan, I just wish she was more my type. She is taking an English class now but its so hard to get her to speak any English. I dont get it.
Oh yeah I forgot, Monday we started a manga translation club. Its like a book club but we help each other understand the Japanese being used line by line and keep each other motivated to keep reading it. Lets hope it works out.
Tuesday we saw Iron man in the theaters here. Eigakan's are pretty expensive here but it was girls day apparently so Erin and Emily got in for 1000 and apparently if you go as a couple its cheaper for the guy too so mine was only 1200 rather then then 1500 because they thought we were a couple. Also get this movie theaters in Japan have reserved seats, crazy huh. Also they have movie merchandise booths, so you can buy stuff like a cool iron man key chain or a walle plushie right after seeing the movie. Its a great idea, I am always really psyched about movies right after seeing them.
Wednesday Japanese class was pretty awesome, Tanaka sensei has let the class dissolve into just hang out and chat in Japanese hours, which its like its not that hard anymore. Its just knowing more words so you don't have to describe around everything. At 4 we also decided to start a movie watching club so we are using someone's laptop and we have this big old projection TV, so I thought I could grab an S video cable at 100 yen shop but all they have are composite so I took the train to sannomiya and tried a few diffrent places but they either didn't have it or wanted way too much. I ended up going to donkihodi and got an s video and a sound adapter for like 1200 yen but the whole thing took like under 2 hours. I forgot the name of the movie that we watched but it was done by miyazaki's son and was much more serious then most of miyazaki's movies but still had that mystical charm. I liked it. We had a pretty good turn out too, I was surprised.
This week my host mom has been in Tokyo so I've been eating out a lot and talking a tiny bit to my host dad, he is so hard to understand. She comes back tomorrow so finally I can have good food with out having to pay a lot for it.
Ok this is one monster of a post, wow I didn't realize I had this much to say. bikkurishita! This weekend we have a field trip to kanazawa so I'll have even more to write about then. Well ok bye
It actually was nice that it was later because my Japanese has improved and I was able to carry out some pretty decent conversations. I'm still far from fluent and even far from where I want to be with my Japanese at this point, but I can definitely have a conversation in Japanese. So we are doing a sort of group conversation and I'm standing next to one of my classmates and he sees another classmate come in and he says "oh great now someone else who can speak Japanese is here" meaning he was the only one before not me and him. I'm going to take a little break and rant about this guy.
His name is Matt Groover and he is THE example as to why homeschooling is a bad idea. Matt never went to high school he just studied for his GED and he has watched so much anime over 8 years that he only took one Japanese language class and is in the highest level at Konan (with me). In all of his classes he is constantly correcting everyone and only slightly indirectly puts everyone else's Japanese ability down. During orientation we had a book with everyone's name and face and he went through and marked how good their Japanese is compared to his. And this "I'm better then everyone" attitude extends beyond Japanese ability as he was even watching over my shoulder and trying to coach me when we were playing tetris on the DS. And to top it all off he is so sterotypical american in the way he wont try new things, even though he flew half way across the world. He will pick out parts of the food when we eat, and he keeps telling us how he tries to get his host family to do things his way, I feel really bad for them. But I'm not being the jerk to him that I think in all right I should be because 1, regardless of what I think about him I have to spend a LOT of time with him in this program so best not burn any bridges and 2, he is a good guy inside, he is willing to help anyone out and he burned me a whole bunch of dvds. He just doesn't have the social skills you need in the real world.
Anyways back to the party. There was one Japanese guy who was like "Hi I'm so and so, I'm interested in Zero Tolerance" which is like a very weird topic starter I think. Something about that bowling for columbine movie, which I don't know why on earth Japaense people would care about documentaries like that. Then there was this other guy who is really an otaku but doesn't talk to much. And he was saying he knows the haruhi dance so he and his female friend start doing it, and it was the lamest thing I've ever seen. I dunno they were barely moving and so not into it. When we got into the main room we did this game where the projector posted a question like "which is the Japanese flag A or B"(in japanese of course) and you would walk to either the left or right side of the room, then before they gave the answer they roped off the sides and whoever was wrong was eliminated from the game. Then there was a not so interesting game of align the group by longest hair, or height or things like that. They also had this weird cardboard gundam thing but for the head it was like badly sculpted like a human and it had hair. The music was so loud though it was hard to have a good conversation.
After the party a lot of people went out to drink but me, one of the Japanese guys I had been talking to, and this ryugakusei from Egypt tried to find the station in this part of town no one really knew. Its really cool to think of people from three very different countries being able to communicate like that. I talked to the guy on the train ride home and he knows a lot of English but the way they teach Japanese students English puts no focus on actual spoken skills so he just needs more practice.
Saturday their was a field trip to Kyoto for the Art History class. I'm not taking Art History but if I paid my own way I could go, I felt like doing something more then just building gundam models that day so I decided to go. It was one of those things were it was hurry wake up rush out the door then wait around while everyone go there. And apparently there is a much faster and cheaper way to get to Kyoto then the last time I went. It was like around an hour for 500 yen, really not that bad. It was on and off raining all day and it was cold. The weather made me feel miserable all day. We first went to a museum that was all about the Portuguese who came to Japan, it was a some what interesting mixture of the two art styles and products. But the giant koi in the fountain outside was much more interesting. We also got hot chocolate from the vending machine, that was really good.
Then we went to a temple that was across the street. At first I was thinking "oh great ANOTHER temple" but this one was crazy. It had over 400 Buddha statues! And they were all around 800 years old. You would just look down that hall and it would last forever. There was one GIANT Buddha, 28 (I think) gods, and 400 of some praying one. The 28 gods were incredibly well sculpted the muscles looked so freakishly real. Its a shame photos are prohibited. We then ate at this mom and pop Japanese restaurant and some of the people were thinking about getting the bento but didnt really know what was in it and they saw that the table next to us was eating it and they lady brought the thing over and showed everyone what came with it, they were so friendly. Whats interesting about that place though was the music playing in the background, it was like 50s dinner music, like regular American music. American music is everywhere in Japan.
Next we went into this really big department store/train station and saw a ikebana(flower arangement) exhibit. There were something like 200 and it was crazy the stuff they did with these things. I thought ikebana was like just putting a rose over on this side of the pot and cutting away the ugly leafs but if that was ikebana then this was the extreme sports version because there were crazy colors and shapes, oh man it was incredible. I'm kicking myself that I didn't have my camera with me, I took some on my cell phone and lots of the other ryugakusei took pictures so maybe I can get some of the best ones uploaded.
After that we were free in Kyoto, we messed around for a bit trying to find a cafe for us to all sit down, then we went to an arcade. We played taiko drum masters, aparently in this version their is the go-onja theme song. I played an older version of some gundam game, I put it on easy and was surprised how long I lasted, usually arcades here are just how fast can you put money into it. Then I played this sega shooter game where you had a target onscreen so it was like a wii game and you had a pedal so you could move left or right and all the game was was one on one fights that lasted 30 seconds. It had a cool artistic edge to it but I would have liked a full game instead. At the arcade though Erin was hilarious she played the Rambo shooter game and she was just shooting like crazy and there was this part where Rambo has to shoot an helicopter down with a bow and arrow so it shows the cut scene then shows the game with the arrow and you had to wait for the helicopter to get in range but she just fired right away, missed, but the cut scene still showed it hitting it. Then she played that game where the alligators come out and you have to hit them with the foam mallet, but she was REALLY getting into it and letting out so much frustration on these poor alligators. Oh man great.
Then we walked around the shopping area, looked at souvenirs and found not only a batman and robin (the bad movie) wallet but also models from it. Really random. Max was with us and he wanted to get some cool shoes but they didn't have his size. Its so hard to find shoes in Japan. We ended up eating at some random place, I had tempura shrimp set. Then got home pretty late.
Sunday was cold. I woke up late and started working on my history paper, I have some stuff to say about my history class. This paper was the single worst paper I have written in college, I just retold the events, I didn't make any argument, I didn't quote anything, I didn't add any analysis, I just wrote until I got 1000 words and stopped. Normally I would be really ashamed with myself but with this class I know my teacher wont care. She wouldn't give us a straight answer when people would ask questions about the report and the class itself really is just a joke. In fact aside from the linguistics class, all of the classes are jokes here. The teachers don't know how to teach however they don't know how to grade harshly either. I've really become a bad student because the class doesn't really encourage learning. In the end a credit is a credit and it is better then the opposite of having insanely hard classes, but still I worry about going back to U of A and having to be a real student again.
So after my paper was done I pretty much stayed inside all day. At some points I would want to play my DS so I would have 2 sweaters, a jacket, and be under the blanket and not want to stick my fingers our enough to press the buttons. My host family gave me a heater now but I was just really cold.
Sunday I also worked on my 1/60 scale Exia gundam model. The brand name for gundam models is Gunpla and I've developed quite the obsession with them as of late. Currently I have 1/144 virtue gundam, 1/144 gundam throne drei, 1/144 dreadnought gundam, Unit 00, 1/144 00 gundam, Gurren Laggen, and 1/100 Musha Gundam. The Musha Gundam is really awesome. Its also a "master grade" so I put a lot of time into making it, probably 15 hours or something like that. I didn't even paint that much, just a few pieces to make it look like wood. When I'm making them I really wish I was home so that I could spray paint them because I want to get more serious about building them, it really drives me crazy to see all of the little mistakes I have made on them. I'm currently working on 1/60 Exia gundam model (from gundam 00, which is awesome by the way).
1/60 is pretty big like its the size of those power ranger robots I've got. I was a little disappointed with the model at first because its like just a big "high grade" model while since its priced the same as "master grade" I thought it would be something closer to that. But even still it's taken a lot of time to put together and I still have a lot to do. Right now it just has enough of its legs built so that it can stand and it looks kind of odd. Since there are so many big spots with out anything going on I was thinking about adding more panel lines myself (the dips in the model that you ink to highlight and make it look more anime machine like) but the guides recommend using an exacto knife which if you mess up its going to show up so much. I might try just making small marks with the pen by itself and letting it dry. I am going to have to hit it up with decals though, I actually bought an extra sheet of decals made just for 00 gundam. Also I bought the 1/100 "master grade" freedom gundam from gundam seed. This one comes with a stand so it should look pretty awesome whenever I get around to making it. Oh well I said bought but actually I just redeemed my yodobashi points from my laptop and got it for free.
Oh also let my explain the gunpla titles. "first grade" is the cheapy ones for kids that cost under 500 yen then there is "high grade" which what most of them are and the 1/144 size those usually cost 800 to 1400 yen then there is "master grade"which those can very from 1600 to 10000 yen, those are 1/100, the two master grades I got were 3000 yen. Then there is "perfect grade" and those are 1/60 and range from 10000 yen to 30000 yen. Then to make it even more confusing there are some models that are either 1/100 or 1/60 but not marked as a certain grade, that I don't understand.
Monday I went out to eat with this girl I met online from an English penpal site. Shes nice but really short and can't hold a conversation that well. Also I think she likes me but its not mutual. She sent me an email "ben ha watashi no koto dou omou no?" basically "what do you think of me?" This is the first a girl has made an interest in me here in Japan, I just wish she was more my type. She is taking an English class now but its so hard to get her to speak any English. I dont get it.
Oh yeah I forgot, Monday we started a manga translation club. Its like a book club but we help each other understand the Japanese being used line by line and keep each other motivated to keep reading it. Lets hope it works out.
Tuesday we saw Iron man in the theaters here. Eigakan's are pretty expensive here but it was girls day apparently so Erin and Emily got in for 1000 and apparently if you go as a couple its cheaper for the guy too so mine was only 1200 rather then then 1500 because they thought we were a couple. Also get this movie theaters in Japan have reserved seats, crazy huh. Also they have movie merchandise booths, so you can buy stuff like a cool iron man key chain or a walle plushie right after seeing the movie. Its a great idea, I am always really psyched about movies right after seeing them.
Wednesday Japanese class was pretty awesome, Tanaka sensei has let the class dissolve into just hang out and chat in Japanese hours, which its like its not that hard anymore. Its just knowing more words so you don't have to describe around everything. At 4 we also decided to start a movie watching club so we are using someone's laptop and we have this big old projection TV, so I thought I could grab an S video cable at 100 yen shop but all they have are composite so I took the train to sannomiya and tried a few diffrent places but they either didn't have it or wanted way too much. I ended up going to donkihodi and got an s video and a sound adapter for like 1200 yen but the whole thing took like under 2 hours. I forgot the name of the movie that we watched but it was done by miyazaki's son and was much more serious then most of miyazaki's movies but still had that mystical charm. I liked it. We had a pretty good turn out too, I was surprised.
This week my host mom has been in Tokyo so I've been eating out a lot and talking a tiny bit to my host dad, he is so hard to understand. She comes back tomorrow so finally I can have good food with out having to pay a lot for it.
Ok this is one monster of a post, wow I didn't realize I had this much to say. bikkurishita! This weekend we have a field trip to kanazawa so I'll have even more to write about then. Well ok bye
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Himeji Castle
Well today I had another field trip. It was with the history class this time so it wasn't the whole crew and we went to Himeji castle. Now Himeji isn't actually that far away, I heard that if you just fall asleep on the train you'll end up their on accident but I still hadn't gone. I have been to Osaka castle before so I had an idea of what to expect. You have the majestic castle towering over the vast tree line, the ancient architecture, and the sense of history but what makes the two castles different is that himeji is an actual castle. Osaka castle was destroyed in World War 2 and rebuilt several times before that, the one that is standing now is just a museum on the inside. Himeji managed to survive WW2 with the help of people covering it with black cloth so night raids would think it was a lake or something.
After seeing Himeji I understand just how hard it would have been to take a Japanese castle in ancient times. You have large gates with stone walls, followed by large areas where you could easily be ambushed by arrow fire, followed by more gates and more ambush points mixed in with dead ends and confusion as to how close you actually are to the castle door. The inside was fairly large and with the sliding doors you could easily change the amount and sizes of rooms on a whim. One interesting part is that their are four wooden pillars that run the entire height of the castle, and they are one solid piece.
After the castle we went to kokoen which was a special garden established in 1992 I believe. It was really beautiful, it didn't have the flowers like I was expecting from the word garden but when you think Japanese garden, it was it. Words don't do it justice so please look at the pictures. There also were giant koi fish, and tons of them. very cool
After all of that we split off into groups and me, emily, pac, erin, lela, and laura walked around Hemeji a little and ate dinner. We really had the giggles because we couldn't help ourselfs from the obnoxious laughter which I'm sure was bothering all of the japanese people even if they wouldn't say anything. At the okonomiyaki place we sat at the low table so we took our shoes off and when we were done I teased Emily about how long she takes to tie her shoes and she goes "ok fine teach me how to time my shoes correctly" so Erin crouches down and starts doing it for her and she goes "oh dear God don't do it for me" because here was this 20 year old woman getting her shoes tied for her. We laughed so hard. Then later Lela said that she needed to use the bathroom and I pointed to the train station bathroom and said "I used it, it wasnt terrible" and Emily goes "yeah but you didn't have to take a sh@t" and we all just were silent for a second and started laughing. She thought in her head "you didn't have to sit" but it crossed in her brain as "sh@t" and then added "take a". Oh man I'm laughing just thinking about it. I really do have some good friends here, I wish they were Japanese but they are really fun people.
After seeing Himeji I understand just how hard it would have been to take a Japanese castle in ancient times. You have large gates with stone walls, followed by large areas where you could easily be ambushed by arrow fire, followed by more gates and more ambush points mixed in with dead ends and confusion as to how close you actually are to the castle door. The inside was fairly large and with the sliding doors you could easily change the amount and sizes of rooms on a whim. One interesting part is that their are four wooden pillars that run the entire height of the castle, and they are one solid piece.
After the castle we went to kokoen which was a special garden established in 1992 I believe. It was really beautiful, it didn't have the flowers like I was expecting from the word garden but when you think Japanese garden, it was it. Words don't do it justice so please look at the pictures. There also were giant koi fish, and tons of them. very cool
After all of that we split off into groups and me, emily, pac, erin, lela, and laura walked around Hemeji a little and ate dinner. We really had the giggles because we couldn't help ourselfs from the obnoxious laughter which I'm sure was bothering all of the japanese people even if they wouldn't say anything. At the okonomiyaki place we sat at the low table so we took our shoes off and when we were done I teased Emily about how long she takes to tie her shoes and she goes "ok fine teach me how to time my shoes correctly" so Erin crouches down and starts doing it for her and she goes "oh dear God don't do it for me" because here was this 20 year old woman getting her shoes tied for her. We laughed so hard. Then later Lela said that she needed to use the bathroom and I pointed to the train station bathroom and said "I used it, it wasnt terrible" and Emily goes "yeah but you didn't have to take a sh@t" and we all just were silent for a second and started laughing. She thought in her head "you didn't have to sit" but it crossed in her brain as "sh@t" and then added "take a". Oh man I'm laughing just thinking about it. I really do have some good friends here, I wish they were Japanese but they are really fun people.
Halloween in Japan
Happy Halloween everyone, I just finished my Halloween and it was one of the best ones I've ever had. My costume was a generic red ranger (of course), I got a stretchy spiderman esq ranger mask then red sweats and a red sweater so when I took the mask off it was normal clothes. I didn't wear the mask to school but when I got there everyone put them on. Someone was in like this cute pikachu pajama thing someone had a big afro (he was going as one of the other ryugakusei) and someone else was going was a sexy devil, when the teacher came in she fell to the ground laughing. It was so funny to see her reaction. She took pictures of us later. During the break right next door was the other Japnaese class and they had some other costumes but the best was a monkey costume. Since our windows had a little balchony Les (monkey suit) went from his class and just came through the window that our sensei was at, oh man it was another fantastic expression.
Walking around school you could see the greatest reactions from Japanese people because like they really wanted to stare but would try and hold them selves back from doing it and everywhere you go you hear (ah bikurishta! Surprised) or (ah halloween ne). In the elevator I could tell just how uncomfortable the people felt with us in it. Then after class we all took the train to sannomiya. It was a big group like 25 some odd people in costume we even had a few pictures taken. At sannomiya we spent some time getting everyone together then we walked to this restaurant/bar it was an okay size for a Japanese place but with all of us crazy foreigners it was probably pretty freaky for the staff working there. We talked a lot, played some darts and waited forever for our food.
Then we set out for karaoke. We originally wanted to do a small group but everyone said they wanted to go but no one was ready when we wanted to go and people couldn't make up their mind on anything so we didn't get to the karaoke place until like 9 when we wanted 8. There was a person out side the karaoke place who talks to people on the street to pull them in and I asked how much it was and they said 200 yen, which would have been okay but when we were getting set up all of us got confused at how much it was so when we had to pay it was double what we were all expecting. We all were getting frustrated and angry about it but when I think back on it, the sign did clearly say it. It was just with the sales person pushing us and everyone fighting no one was able to think it out clearly apparently. Lesson learned the hard way I guess.
A few of us left sannomiya at 11:00, we have a filed trip to himeji castle today but also the trains stop running sometime around 12:30 which is really annoying if you want to have fun. In the states I would stay over at a friends house until like 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning then drive home, here you have to be very concerned about how late you stay out other wise you take an expensive taxi or crash at an internet cafe (they are actually private rooms with TV, computer and access to showers and a giant manga library, I have yet to go myself though)
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Another week
Well that small laptop I was thinking about I ended up buying. Its really cool and convenient. It weighs less then a text book and is smaller then one too so its really easy to carry it around with me wherever I go. I can download anime while I'm at school (internet sucks at home), I can use it as a dictionary, and I can watch videos on the train ride home. It was 29,800 yen and I got 3,600 yen credit on my next purchase so its not too bad of a deal actually.
This week kind of went by pretty fast but this week I have midterms. Its only midterms for the Japanese language class and its three days of tests. Its retarded. A day where we are going to be tested over like 300 kanji and one for a conversation test and another for grammar. Its going to suck.
You always here how much better Japanese food is for you but the giant dinner my mom makes and all of the great snacks around I feel quite a bit fatter. There is a gym on campus that I can use but I have to have a pair of shoes just for the gym and I don't know where I can get shoes that are like under $40, so I have to do more searching I need a gym setting to exercise.
Thursday as I was walking home I just found a sega saturn on the street. It was in its original box with the manual, all of the cables and looked like it was hardly used at all. This was amazing like you never just find things you actually want for free like that.
Saturday me and a few people went to yodobashi, pokemon center and den den town. Pokemon center was a little disappointing as it was just a medium size store and didn't have a whole lot of incredibly rare pokemon things or stuff like that. But Zoe really seemed to enjoy going. Yodobashi wasn't that exciting today for some reason. I was looking for a video adapter for my laptop so I can play my game systems but what they had just felt too expensive. Den Den town I picked up like 7 more Saturn games dirt cheap (including Panzer Dragoon RPG but that was 500 yen) I also got some manga for 50 yen each (I thought the book store near school was cheap but those start at 105 yen and go up)and I got two more models. I really enjoy gundam models here.
Well at some point I have to do a presentation on the battle of sekigahara so I'll get going on that, catch you later everyone
This week kind of went by pretty fast but this week I have midterms. Its only midterms for the Japanese language class and its three days of tests. Its retarded. A day where we are going to be tested over like 300 kanji and one for a conversation test and another for grammar. Its going to suck.
You always here how much better Japanese food is for you but the giant dinner my mom makes and all of the great snacks around I feel quite a bit fatter. There is a gym on campus that I can use but I have to have a pair of shoes just for the gym and I don't know where I can get shoes that are like under $40, so I have to do more searching I need a gym setting to exercise.
Thursday as I was walking home I just found a sega saturn on the street. It was in its original box with the manual, all of the cables and looked like it was hardly used at all. This was amazing like you never just find things you actually want for free like that.
Saturday me and a few people went to yodobashi, pokemon center and den den town. Pokemon center was a little disappointing as it was just a medium size store and didn't have a whole lot of incredibly rare pokemon things or stuff like that. But Zoe really seemed to enjoy going. Yodobashi wasn't that exciting today for some reason. I was looking for a video adapter for my laptop so I can play my game systems but what they had just felt too expensive. Den Den town I picked up like 7 more Saturn games dirt cheap (including Panzer Dragoon RPG but that was 500 yen) I also got some manga for 50 yen each (I thought the book store near school was cheap but those start at 105 yen and go up)and I got two more models. I really enjoy gundam models here.
Well at some point I have to do a presentation on the battle of sekigahara so I'll get going on that, catch you later everyone
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Nothing particular
Well since koyo san nothing particular has happened. Of course everyday I see new things but all and all nothing huge. I have recently goten into models, when you go to an anime store there are so many really cool models everywhere I can't help myself. I am a pretty thrifty shopper though so its not a real dangerous hobby. The gundams I buy I like to keep in the $10 range and since I got the paint markers and the filer it takes me a few hours to put one together so its not too bad.
I'm still thinking about the electronic dictionary but now I'm kind of leaning towards the acer eee pc instead. Its around $300 so its the same price as the den shi jisho and I already have a great dictionary software with 700,000 entires. The eee pc is an ultra light weight 7" screen laptop. I played with the demo at midori, the keyboard is of course small but not impossible to take notes with, the screen is very usable but I would much rather use my regular laptop to watch movies on. Its like I have the money and I dont. I get $800 a month and even with my terrible spending habbits I normally spend under $400 so its not like I'll run out of money here but money I have left over I need to put towards that student loan so its like money I don't save I'll have to make up for with cash in the future.
at any rate I only have one japanese friend right now who is like "hey lets go hang out" but there are japanese people who are sort of friends with the whole ryugakusei group, if that makes sense. I know I'll make more friends its just going to take more time. Which thats another thing that is a little frustrating is that I know that I'll be fleunt in Japanese at some point this year, I just dont know when.
Saturday about 20 or so of ryugakusei and japanese students hung out at a park for a few hours, that was really fun. Everyone is always so busy it felt really nice. Aftewards I went with my host mom and stephen (the canadian who lives with us, cool guy) went to my host mom's daughters apartment. We had some nice temaki (hand roll) sushi and talked for a long time, well I didn't say too much but tried my best to follow allong in the conversation. The daughter knows a little english and she said it in really silly ways (shes a silly person in japanese too) and we had this cake with chest nuts in it and she said very strongly CHEST nut and then "you like it? your FAVORITE?" but I also said something stupid in Japanese as they were talking about how suki and ai mean diffrent kind of things to the english word love and they asked me what I thought and I wanted to say its hard to translate (yakushinikui) but I thought that the verb was yaku not yaku suru so I said yakinikui which means grilled meat. So love is a grilled meat.
anyways I love and miss all of you
I'm still thinking about the electronic dictionary but now I'm kind of leaning towards the acer eee pc instead. Its around $300 so its the same price as the den shi jisho and I already have a great dictionary software with 700,000 entires. The eee pc is an ultra light weight 7" screen laptop. I played with the demo at midori, the keyboard is of course small but not impossible to take notes with, the screen is very usable but I would much rather use my regular laptop to watch movies on. Its like I have the money and I dont. I get $800 a month and even with my terrible spending habbits I normally spend under $400 so its not like I'll run out of money here but money I have left over I need to put towards that student loan so its like money I don't save I'll have to make up for with cash in the future.
at any rate I only have one japanese friend right now who is like "hey lets go hang out" but there are japanese people who are sort of friends with the whole ryugakusei group, if that makes sense. I know I'll make more friends its just going to take more time. Which thats another thing that is a little frustrating is that I know that I'll be fleunt in Japanese at some point this year, I just dont know when.
Saturday about 20 or so of ryugakusei and japanese students hung out at a park for a few hours, that was really fun. Everyone is always so busy it felt really nice. Aftewards I went with my host mom and stephen (the canadian who lives with us, cool guy) went to my host mom's daughters apartment. We had some nice temaki (hand roll) sushi and talked for a long time, well I didn't say too much but tried my best to follow allong in the conversation. The daughter knows a little english and she said it in really silly ways (shes a silly person in japanese too) and we had this cake with chest nuts in it and she said very strongly CHEST nut and then "you like it? your FAVORITE?" but I also said something stupid in Japanese as they were talking about how suki and ai mean diffrent kind of things to the english word love and they asked me what I thought and I wanted to say its hard to translate (yakushinikui) but I thought that the verb was yaku not yaku suru so I said yakinikui which means grilled meat. So love is a grilled meat.
anyways I love and miss all of you
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
koyo san
Well this weekend we went on our first field trip to mt. koyo, the spiritual center of a major japanese buddhist sect. It was created 1200 years ago by The buddhist leader kukai. Being 1200 years old is really crazy, I really cant fully comprhend how many people have been there over that time. There was this grave yard, not really a grave yard in the usual sense because there werent any corpses buried there only the tomb stone, but there were over 300,000 tombs. There were small one of course but most were pretty big and there were a lot of enormous ones. And only in modern times was there something like a cable cart to get to the top of the mountain, people carried these giant stone monuments up the mountain.
We stayed in a very traditional Japanese house with tatami and futon. The weather ontop of the mountain was cold but it almost felt like inside was colder. I don't know how people survived in olden times if this was traditional. The next morning we had to sit through two meditation sessions, my legs hurt so much. For dinner and breakfeast we had vegetarian meals, which there are good japanese dishes like yakisoba that dont use meat but what we had was really weird and crazy stuff. For lunch we got to eat out and everyone was dying from some meat.
On tuesday I started my audited regular konan class. It was pretty interesting, its a large lecture class so I don't have to worry about being called on for questions but I think I only understood maybe a 1/4 of what the teacher was saying. They then passed out this questionare (on GIANT pieces of paper I dont get japanese printers) and it was interesting because there is the normal kanji for blue, but there are also older ones that arent used very often and it asked you like when you see blue kanji 1 do you think of blue skies or blue water or blue paint and when you see blue kanji 2 do you think of this etc... I of course only saw the first one so I couldn't really do much of it. The teacher also came up to me and said hi and asked my name, he also gave me the text book. I was really surprised at that. There isn't any furigana (small text in the alaphabet like script that is put above the kanji so you can pronounce it without knowing it) so its going to be very difficult if not impossible to read but I'll give in my best shot. I've been thinking I need to get one of the electronic japanese dictionaries, I have this DS software that is a dictionary but its pretty limited I'm often finding that the word I'm looking for isn't in there and it doesn't always give actual definitions. The stand alone electronic dictionaries (denshi jisho) are expensive, like $300 so I need to be a little cautious. I get $800 a month and want to stay around $400 in spending so I can come back home with some savings to pay off loans
well thats it for now
We stayed in a very traditional Japanese house with tatami and futon. The weather ontop of the mountain was cold but it almost felt like inside was colder. I don't know how people survived in olden times if this was traditional. The next morning we had to sit through two meditation sessions, my legs hurt so much. For dinner and breakfeast we had vegetarian meals, which there are good japanese dishes like yakisoba that dont use meat but what we had was really weird and crazy stuff. For lunch we got to eat out and everyone was dying from some meat.
On tuesday I started my audited regular konan class. It was pretty interesting, its a large lecture class so I don't have to worry about being called on for questions but I think I only understood maybe a 1/4 of what the teacher was saying. They then passed out this questionare (on GIANT pieces of paper I dont get japanese printers) and it was interesting because there is the normal kanji for blue, but there are also older ones that arent used very often and it asked you like when you see blue kanji 1 do you think of blue skies or blue water or blue paint and when you see blue kanji 2 do you think of this etc... I of course only saw the first one so I couldn't really do much of it. The teacher also came up to me and said hi and asked my name, he also gave me the text book. I was really surprised at that. There isn't any furigana (small text in the alaphabet like script that is put above the kanji so you can pronounce it without knowing it) so its going to be very difficult if not impossible to read but I'll give in my best shot. I've been thinking I need to get one of the electronic japanese dictionaries, I have this DS software that is a dictionary but its pretty limited I'm often finding that the word I'm looking for isn't in there and it doesn't always give actual definitions. The stand alone electronic dictionaries (denshi jisho) are expensive, like $300 so I need to be a little cautious. I get $800 a month and want to stay around $400 in spending so I can come back home with some savings to pay off loans
well thats it for now
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
otaku-ness
For this blog I'm going to talk a little about the otaku culture in Japan.
I live in nagata, kobe, it is on the western half of town. In the center of town is a district called sannomiya, sannomiya is the place to shop in Kobe. Right next to the station is a big mall like place, I say mall like because it doesn't have exact enclosures besides the roof and doesn't have a definitive beginning and ending, it kind of blurs together with the rest of town. Anyways I've been there several times and for the first few weeks I couldn't find any anime stores until I stumbleded across Gamers in the basement floor.
Now Gamers is actual very close to a store that I originally mistook for Gamers. I don't know the name of the first store but it is a model speciality store. They have gundams, lots of them. As you enter you see very large glass cases crammed with beautifuly assembled super high end gundam models. They have a good half of the store coverd with display casses of models of all sorts. Mecha, sentai, anime, chibi, disney everything. And again its big I wanna say 4-5 times the size of a normal store in a mall. Gamers itself is slightly bigger then the gundam place, and has a good section of gundam themselves. But Gamers has the regular anime stuff, manga, dvds, wall scrolls, collectable figures, all those nick nacks that you can't get outside of a con.
When I found this place I was pretty blown away, but a few days later a friend showed me on the third floor (well first that there was a third floor) even more anime stores. Enormous ones! Anything you can imagine there is a figure of it. And so many diffrent stores, I think we saw like 10 of them or something.
And along all of these stores are pocket change's worst enemy, capsule toys. We have capsule toys in the US but because no one wants to put in two dollars in coin into a machine and the stigma attechted to fandom (I'll touch more on that later) they are no where near what they are like in Japan. What they do is that there are series produced by various companies and stores buy them from them, put in the label and fill them up themselves. For example there would be an evangelion set 1 and it would have shinji, asuka, rei, gendo ikari, and misato. Now you really can't honestly think "oh well which ever I get is fine I like them all" no everyone has a favorite, you are always thinking "I really want rei, asuka is good too but I would perfer that rei" so when you don't get the one you want, the urge to try again is so strong. You didn't have any eva figures before and now you have asuka but now you really really want that rei. Maybe you finally get that rei but now you have 5 out of 6 of them or something, might as well complete the set. But that last one is espically rare, what do you do? You can just buy the one your missing from a store, for an increased price. Yeah its hard to really understand. Stores buy cases of capsule toys, repackage them with simple bags and price them according to thier rarity. Sounds crazy I know but there are entire stores that do nothing but this.
But that raises the question "why the interest in toys? Just because you like a show why buy toys for it?". Its a good question and I think I am beginning to understand. So as awesome as the stores in Sannomiya are, my freind kou showed me an anime store in Osaka. Wow. The girl at the counter was cosplaying for crying out loud. They had the exact sailor mars costume angie made from scratch and soooooo many toys. I found the japanese voltron! it was called lionbots. I wanted to take a picture but kou said I shouldn't. And I also found the gekiranger toys I specifically wanted to buy in Japan. rinlion, gekibat and gekiwolf. So a year from now when I get home I can form the coolest robot name ever geki-rin-bat-wolf-touja! But when I found it I didn't decide right away. I felt really childish buying these toy robot animals, and I didn't want to be super nerdy infront of kou but when I went to pay I saw two busy men buying some anime figures and paying a lot for them. I guess there really isn't any reason at all to feel nerdy or childish about giving into otaku-ness so much, which is a reason I really love this country.
We then went to yodobashi. Yodobashi is one of the world's largest electronic stores. I say that only because I can't possibly imagine a store being much bigger. Imagine the largest best buy and stack 6 of them on top of each other. On the 5th floor of yodobashi is the video game and toy section. They have a regular kid toy section and they have I guess big kid toy section. The big kid toy section had pallets stacked chest height of gundam models being grabbed left and right. Expensive ones $30, $40!
So my working thesis on to why it is ok to send a weeks paycheck on plastic figurines of fictional robots is that Japan never lets things not be cool. Dragonball is the best example of this. Dragonball Z started in 1992 I believe and ended in like 1997. So Dragonball Z is very old but you still see dragonball z figurines, dolls, posters, dvds everywhere you go. The DBZ opening was even playing on the display TVs at yodobashi, you can't escape it! In the US DBZ was cool for a while but then cartoon network stopped giving it prime time viewing, the toys let up a little bit, there weren't many DBZ games out for a while and the fandom died off and moved on, so when it started back up it just couldn't regain its popularity. Since I'm sure the first episode of DBZ there has been capsule toys and DBZ ads in Japan non stop. The DBZ fandom in Japanese otakus is constantly being reinforced. Gundam is much the same way every year a new gundam with new models to buy and because it never lets up there isn't a stigma against liking it past a certain age. It would be an interesting social experiment to see if you ran toy commercials on pre-teen shows if you could get them to stay interested in toys.
Wow I've typed a lot and I haven't even goten to the most important part, I went to Toei Uzumasa Eiga Mura! This was THE thing I wanted to do in Japan and there were a few things that were really cool I'm glad I got to see but the rest was very disapointing. First the good. I saw a kamen rider show. I'm going to upload the video you might want to skip around I recorded like half of it and some parts have long dialog. The fights were so cheesy I couldn't belive it. But thats what the live shows are all about. Kamen rider is famous for his motorcycle but since this is a live show KR Den-o came in on a bicycle. Oh man so silly. They did do some cool flips and a KR kiva did signature poses. Really check out the video its worth it.
Second awesome part I saw the super sentai museum! Again I took pictures of everything but wow the gods from majirangers, were so freaking cool and well just look at the pictures. I think these were the stunt double costumes because they look a little cheaper then the show. They also had the history of J-hero time line starting from the 50s. I wish I could get a printed copy of that or something. After we were done there I felt like my otaku-ness had reached a whole new level. Really blew me away.
But if you aren't staying in Kyoto I don't recommend making a special trip just for this place. It doesn't have enough content to last all day, maybe 2-3 hours tops. They film samurai tv dramas here so that means that large section of an already small amusement park are cut off. They had little presentations like mock sword fighting and sound effects with this ninja battle but they were rather lame, crowded and we only caught the last half of them. There just wasn't anything to really do. Oh there was the, sfx corner and it was a freaking animatronic dinosaur that would come out of the water and spray a mist out of its mouth. The mouth didn't move just the head rose above the water. It was just retarded. I was really expecting some place that you could get lost in because there were so many houses and having tons of extras walking around. There was an episode of deka rangers where they went here and it was just nothing like that. We didn't really get to see much of kyoto but its much more spread out and open as compared to osaka. Kyoto is more like a regular american city I think.
Wow wow wow, I talked a lot okay I got to study some kanji bye everyone
I live in nagata, kobe, it is on the western half of town. In the center of town is a district called sannomiya, sannomiya is the place to shop in Kobe. Right next to the station is a big mall like place, I say mall like because it doesn't have exact enclosures besides the roof and doesn't have a definitive beginning and ending, it kind of blurs together with the rest of town. Anyways I've been there several times and for the first few weeks I couldn't find any anime stores until I stumbleded across Gamers in the basement floor.
Now Gamers is actual very close to a store that I originally mistook for Gamers. I don't know the name of the first store but it is a model speciality store. They have gundams, lots of them. As you enter you see very large glass cases crammed with beautifuly assembled super high end gundam models. They have a good half of the store coverd with display casses of models of all sorts. Mecha, sentai, anime, chibi, disney everything. And again its big I wanna say 4-5 times the size of a normal store in a mall. Gamers itself is slightly bigger then the gundam place, and has a good section of gundam themselves. But Gamers has the regular anime stuff, manga, dvds, wall scrolls, collectable figures, all those nick nacks that you can't get outside of a con.
When I found this place I was pretty blown away, but a few days later a friend showed me on the third floor (well first that there was a third floor) even more anime stores. Enormous ones! Anything you can imagine there is a figure of it. And so many diffrent stores, I think we saw like 10 of them or something.
And along all of these stores are pocket change's worst enemy, capsule toys. We have capsule toys in the US but because no one wants to put in two dollars in coin into a machine and the stigma attechted to fandom (I'll touch more on that later) they are no where near what they are like in Japan. What they do is that there are series produced by various companies and stores buy them from them, put in the label and fill them up themselves. For example there would be an evangelion set 1 and it would have shinji, asuka, rei, gendo ikari, and misato. Now you really can't honestly think "oh well which ever I get is fine I like them all" no everyone has a favorite, you are always thinking "I really want rei, asuka is good too but I would perfer that rei" so when you don't get the one you want, the urge to try again is so strong. You didn't have any eva figures before and now you have asuka but now you really really want that rei. Maybe you finally get that rei but now you have 5 out of 6 of them or something, might as well complete the set. But that last one is espically rare, what do you do? You can just buy the one your missing from a store, for an increased price. Yeah its hard to really understand. Stores buy cases of capsule toys, repackage them with simple bags and price them according to thier rarity. Sounds crazy I know but there are entire stores that do nothing but this.
But that raises the question "why the interest in toys? Just because you like a show why buy toys for it?". Its a good question and I think I am beginning to understand. So as awesome as the stores in Sannomiya are, my freind kou showed me an anime store in Osaka. Wow. The girl at the counter was cosplaying for crying out loud. They had the exact sailor mars costume angie made from scratch and soooooo many toys. I found the japanese voltron! it was called lionbots. I wanted to take a picture but kou said I shouldn't. And I also found the gekiranger toys I specifically wanted to buy in Japan. rinlion, gekibat and gekiwolf. So a year from now when I get home I can form the coolest robot name ever geki-rin-bat-wolf-touja! But when I found it I didn't decide right away. I felt really childish buying these toy robot animals, and I didn't want to be super nerdy infront of kou but when I went to pay I saw two busy men buying some anime figures and paying a lot for them. I guess there really isn't any reason at all to feel nerdy or childish about giving into otaku-ness so much, which is a reason I really love this country.
We then went to yodobashi. Yodobashi is one of the world's largest electronic stores. I say that only because I can't possibly imagine a store being much bigger. Imagine the largest best buy and stack 6 of them on top of each other. On the 5th floor of yodobashi is the video game and toy section. They have a regular kid toy section and they have I guess big kid toy section. The big kid toy section had pallets stacked chest height of gundam models being grabbed left and right. Expensive ones $30, $40!
So my working thesis on to why it is ok to send a weeks paycheck on plastic figurines of fictional robots is that Japan never lets things not be cool. Dragonball is the best example of this. Dragonball Z started in 1992 I believe and ended in like 1997. So Dragonball Z is very old but you still see dragonball z figurines, dolls, posters, dvds everywhere you go. The DBZ opening was even playing on the display TVs at yodobashi, you can't escape it! In the US DBZ was cool for a while but then cartoon network stopped giving it prime time viewing, the toys let up a little bit, there weren't many DBZ games out for a while and the fandom died off and moved on, so when it started back up it just couldn't regain its popularity. Since I'm sure the first episode of DBZ there has been capsule toys and DBZ ads in Japan non stop. The DBZ fandom in Japanese otakus is constantly being reinforced. Gundam is much the same way every year a new gundam with new models to buy and because it never lets up there isn't a stigma against liking it past a certain age. It would be an interesting social experiment to see if you ran toy commercials on pre-teen shows if you could get them to stay interested in toys.
Wow I've typed a lot and I haven't even goten to the most important part, I went to Toei Uzumasa Eiga Mura! This was THE thing I wanted to do in Japan and there were a few things that were really cool I'm glad I got to see but the rest was very disapointing. First the good. I saw a kamen rider show. I'm going to upload the video you might want to skip around I recorded like half of it and some parts have long dialog. The fights were so cheesy I couldn't belive it. But thats what the live shows are all about. Kamen rider is famous for his motorcycle but since this is a live show KR Den-o came in on a bicycle. Oh man so silly. They did do some cool flips and a KR kiva did signature poses. Really check out the video its worth it.
Second awesome part I saw the super sentai museum! Again I took pictures of everything but wow the gods from majirangers, were so freaking cool and well just look at the pictures. I think these were the stunt double costumes because they look a little cheaper then the show. They also had the history of J-hero time line starting from the 50s. I wish I could get a printed copy of that or something. After we were done there I felt like my otaku-ness had reached a whole new level. Really blew me away.
But if you aren't staying in Kyoto I don't recommend making a special trip just for this place. It doesn't have enough content to last all day, maybe 2-3 hours tops. They film samurai tv dramas here so that means that large section of an already small amusement park are cut off. They had little presentations like mock sword fighting and sound effects with this ninja battle but they were rather lame, crowded and we only caught the last half of them. There just wasn't anything to really do. Oh there was the, sfx corner and it was a freaking animatronic dinosaur that would come out of the water and spray a mist out of its mouth. The mouth didn't move just the head rose above the water. It was just retarded. I was really expecting some place that you could get lost in because there were so many houses and having tons of extras walking around. There was an episode of deka rangers where they went here and it was just nothing like that. We didn't really get to see much of kyoto but its much more spread out and open as compared to osaka. Kyoto is more like a regular american city I think.
Wow wow wow, I talked a lot okay I got to study some kanji bye everyone
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Another week
It's been a week or so since the last post and I guess there hasn't been anything too major happen. After having monday off for senior citizen day classes were in full swing and my frustration of my classes goes all over the place. I'm in the highest Japanese language class somehow and everyday it goes from "I hate life" to "that wasn't so bad". I have two teachers tanaka-sensei and morikawa-sensei. morikawa-sensei is fun energetic person who while speaking difficult Japanese understands that we aren't fluent so tries to talk accordingly. Tanaka-sensei is not as animated as morikawa but for some reason thinks she needs to talk in that high pitched anime school girl voice. It's really annoying, like nails on the chalk board. Tanaka-sensei also just seems to talk completly normal japanese so I have a really hard time understanding here. Sometimes I'll go like 5 mins without understanding anything then she asks me a question and I'm completely stumped whats going on.
The grammar, the vocab and homework are all ok so I know I can get a decent grade in the class atleast but in class it is really stressful. I think I would like to move to the lower class but thats not possible. Because so many people moved from C class to D class that no one from E class can move down to D. Which isn't fair, also I'm getting a little screwed on it because at U of A I get credit for the next two Japanese language classes which use the same text book as C. So even though I am taking a really high level class I am only getting an intermediate level course credit. Oh well I guess.
Oh also I'm going to audit a real Japanese class. Like a class for Japanese students taught in Japanese. It's really scarry, thats an incredibly high language level and I probably wont be able to follow any of it in class or be able to read any of the assignments. But it is an audit so I can't fail it, the teacher can drop me if things get really bad I suppose but I really need to do this becauase its such a rare opportunity. How many people can say they really know what its like to be a Japanese college student. Also great way to make freinds who don't use English a lot.
Oh yeah freinds! I'm finally starting to create some sort of social life outside of the ryugakusei (foreign exchange studnets) I went to this online penpal place and put in a profile saying I live in Kobe, speak moderate Japanese and if freinds want to practice thier english thats cool and I got tons of emails. I made one freind who goes to Konan as well, his name is Kou and he is really cool. He came along with me and some other ryugakusei to sannomiya (I guess the shopping center of kobe) and one guy wanted to get a cell phone and he stuck around for 2 hours while we got it all squared away. Another ryugakusei called Matt is insanely good at Japaneses and he actually did most of the translating but Kou helped here and there, it was really nice of him. Kou's kind of funny because he wants to get an american girl freind but worries he's too shy. I keep telling him that the ryugakusei girls want to talk to Japanese guys and I know in general that those otaku girls LOVE japanese guys. So I'll help him get a girl maybe he'll return the favor.
Also we had a ryugakusei/konan student party. There is this thing called the big brother and sister program where konan students emailed us and we talked throughout the summer. My sister Eriko couldn't come (I've yet to meet her actually) but I spent like 5 hours talking to people in half english half japanese. It was so much fun. And there is one girl named Aya who started to text me last night so thats pretty nice too. One Japanese guy said he was really jealous that all of the ryugakusei get attention from girls just becasue they are gaijin (foreigner). I told him he looks white he should just pretend to not understand Japanese very well.
Also also on Friday I meet with someone from the kyudo club. It was really windy because a typhoon was passing through Japan so practice had been cancelled but he expalined everything to me and two other ryugakusei. He spoke only Japanese so it was a little ackward but we got through the conversation and all of our questions asked. This is an expensive hobby and he didn't know if we should buy all of the stuff if we are only going to be here 9 months. The paper he gave us put the estimate at around $800 for the bow, arrows, hakama, uniform, gloves, casses, stuff like that. We don't have to buy anything at first but I'm thinking I'm okay with buying most of the stuff and maybe trying to rent something or just paying the $800. Because while I'm in Japan I want to do something very Japanesey and kyudo is definately something cool like that, and also unlike kendo, kyudo isn't all that well known in the states so its something extra special
Finally (much longer post then I thought) I went to a No play last night. I could not understand anything that was going on or a single word that was being said. I really thought they were speaking Chinese at first. There was a whole lot of that traditional japanese background sounds, like the stuff you see in a samurai anime or something and a lot of odd jagged movements. Its not something I would ever want to watch again, and I don't think its something that most Japanese people enjoy either because the audience was like 90% elderly people. Most Japanese people aren't that short in reality but the elderly just shrink a lot. So I really felt like a giant there.
Gosh I thought I didn't have anything to talk about this week but I ended up writting tons, whew well see ya later
The grammar, the vocab and homework are all ok so I know I can get a decent grade in the class atleast but in class it is really stressful. I think I would like to move to the lower class but thats not possible. Because so many people moved from C class to D class that no one from E class can move down to D. Which isn't fair, also I'm getting a little screwed on it because at U of A I get credit for the next two Japanese language classes which use the same text book as C. So even though I am taking a really high level class I am only getting an intermediate level course credit. Oh well I guess.
Oh also I'm going to audit a real Japanese class. Like a class for Japanese students taught in Japanese. It's really scarry, thats an incredibly high language level and I probably wont be able to follow any of it in class or be able to read any of the assignments. But it is an audit so I can't fail it, the teacher can drop me if things get really bad I suppose but I really need to do this becauase its such a rare opportunity. How many people can say they really know what its like to be a Japanese college student. Also great way to make freinds who don't use English a lot.
Oh yeah freinds! I'm finally starting to create some sort of social life outside of the ryugakusei (foreign exchange studnets) I went to this online penpal place and put in a profile saying I live in Kobe, speak moderate Japanese and if freinds want to practice thier english thats cool and I got tons of emails. I made one freind who goes to Konan as well, his name is Kou and he is really cool. He came along with me and some other ryugakusei to sannomiya (I guess the shopping center of kobe) and one guy wanted to get a cell phone and he stuck around for 2 hours while we got it all squared away. Another ryugakusei called Matt is insanely good at Japaneses and he actually did most of the translating but Kou helped here and there, it was really nice of him. Kou's kind of funny because he wants to get an american girl freind but worries he's too shy. I keep telling him that the ryugakusei girls want to talk to Japanese guys and I know in general that those otaku girls LOVE japanese guys. So I'll help him get a girl maybe he'll return the favor.
Also we had a ryugakusei/konan student party. There is this thing called the big brother and sister program where konan students emailed us and we talked throughout the summer. My sister Eriko couldn't come (I've yet to meet her actually) but I spent like 5 hours talking to people in half english half japanese. It was so much fun. And there is one girl named Aya who started to text me last night so thats pretty nice too. One Japanese guy said he was really jealous that all of the ryugakusei get attention from girls just becasue they are gaijin (foreigner). I told him he looks white he should just pretend to not understand Japanese very well.
Also also on Friday I meet with someone from the kyudo club. It was really windy because a typhoon was passing through Japan so practice had been cancelled but he expalined everything to me and two other ryugakusei. He spoke only Japanese so it was a little ackward but we got through the conversation and all of our questions asked. This is an expensive hobby and he didn't know if we should buy all of the stuff if we are only going to be here 9 months. The paper he gave us put the estimate at around $800 for the bow, arrows, hakama, uniform, gloves, casses, stuff like that. We don't have to buy anything at first but I'm thinking I'm okay with buying most of the stuff and maybe trying to rent something or just paying the $800. Because while I'm in Japan I want to do something very Japanesey and kyudo is definately something cool like that, and also unlike kendo, kyudo isn't all that well known in the states so its something extra special
Finally (much longer post then I thought) I went to a No play last night. I could not understand anything that was going on or a single word that was being said. I really thought they were speaking Chinese at first. There was a whole lot of that traditional japanese background sounds, like the stuff you see in a samurai anime or something and a lot of odd jagged movements. Its not something I would ever want to watch again, and I don't think its something that most Japanese people enjoy either because the audience was like 90% elderly people. Most Japanese people aren't that short in reality but the elderly just shrink a lot. So I really felt like a giant there.
Gosh I thought I didn't have anything to talk about this week but I ended up writting tons, whew well see ya later
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Osaka
Well yesterday was an adventure, we went to Osaka! We all met up at okamoto then took the train to umeada. The train ride wasn't too long maybe 40 mins ish or something like that. In the US when you go between cities you have long stretchs of nothing, this wasn't the case, it was buildings along the entire way, there wasn't a distinct line where one city ends and another begins. We get off at the station, and its much bigger then the one at Sannomiya, we get everyone situated (we traveled in a large group) and headed of to yodobashi electronic store.
Yodobashi is freaking huge! Imagine a best buy, fill it with twice as much stuff, then stack 5 more of them on top of each other. Oh man it had everything, an entire floor for cell phones, a floor for cameras (which everyone was so sure they were getting a better deal there but I dont think so), one for TVs, computer parts, and then one for video game and toys. The video game toy floor was crazy. They had hundreds of gundam models (even a 5 foot tall display by the enterance) and all of the kamen raider, sentai, transformers stuff you could ever imagine. I even found a model for the car voltron ( I forget what it was called in Japanese). I really wanted to buy a lot of the stuff there but it came down to, I don't want to carry it all day and I don't have that much room in my room for little nick nacks and I don't know how I would get it back to the states. But in the game section I found a DS stylus pen that I had wanted and lots of other cool things like the wii neo-geo fighting stick. Also today the newest version of pokemon came out, platinum, came out so lots of kids had those paper burger king esc hats on but for the new pokemon in the game. In the cell phone section I found this really cool cell phone decale. It is the nerve logo in shiny metal and it looks really nice on my phone.
From there we decided to head off ot Osaka castle. We had a little adventure getting a big group of people from varrious stations on the subway but when we got there it was pretty breath taking. Osaka, like all of Japan, is very crowded but in the center is a giant park that the castle creeps up over the tree line. We walk for a while and see many really cool things that I took pictures of but when we finally get to the castle itself, it kind of takes you back how big it really is. The inside is actually a museum, which is still pretty cool. There were lots of things that made me wish I knew more about Japanese history because they had things like THE sword used by some famous samurai. The view from the top was pretty amazing, I took pictures but I dont know if they even do justice to have awesome everything was.
After words we headed back the way we came and got to the umeda stations. The problem with big groups happened as we ended up waiting half and hour because some one got seperated for some reason. I don't quite know two people were kind of taking over as leaders so I was just following along but even with cell phones we couldn't keep track of everyone. I started to read this manga I picked up for 105 yen at that book store and was really impressed with myself that if I don't worry about looking up every word I can have a pretty good reading comprehension. Eventually we all ended up in this shopping plaza and had some over priced food before going up to the ferries wheel.
The ferries wheel was also very awesome, my camera for some reason simply could not take usable pictures at all. It was really cool seeing Osaka from that angle at night, really amazing. From there I just headed back home, it took about an hour from station to station. It was a really cool day.
Yodobashi is freaking huge! Imagine a best buy, fill it with twice as much stuff, then stack 5 more of them on top of each other. Oh man it had everything, an entire floor for cell phones, a floor for cameras (which everyone was so sure they were getting a better deal there but I dont think so), one for TVs, computer parts, and then one for video game and toys. The video game toy floor was crazy. They had hundreds of gundam models (even a 5 foot tall display by the enterance) and all of the kamen raider, sentai, transformers stuff you could ever imagine. I even found a model for the car voltron ( I forget what it was called in Japanese). I really wanted to buy a lot of the stuff there but it came down to, I don't want to carry it all day and I don't have that much room in my room for little nick nacks and I don't know how I would get it back to the states. But in the game section I found a DS stylus pen that I had wanted and lots of other cool things like the wii neo-geo fighting stick. Also today the newest version of pokemon came out, platinum, came out so lots of kids had those paper burger king esc hats on but for the new pokemon in the game. In the cell phone section I found this really cool cell phone decale. It is the nerve logo in shiny metal and it looks really nice on my phone.
From there we decided to head off ot Osaka castle. We had a little adventure getting a big group of people from varrious stations on the subway but when we got there it was pretty breath taking. Osaka, like all of Japan, is very crowded but in the center is a giant park that the castle creeps up over the tree line. We walk for a while and see many really cool things that I took pictures of but when we finally get to the castle itself, it kind of takes you back how big it really is. The inside is actually a museum, which is still pretty cool. There were lots of things that made me wish I knew more about Japanese history because they had things like THE sword used by some famous samurai. The view from the top was pretty amazing, I took pictures but I dont know if they even do justice to have awesome everything was.
After words we headed back the way we came and got to the umeda stations. The problem with big groups happened as we ended up waiting half and hour because some one got seperated for some reason. I don't quite know two people were kind of taking over as leaders so I was just following along but even with cell phones we couldn't keep track of everyone. I started to read this manga I picked up for 105 yen at that book store and was really impressed with myself that if I don't worry about looking up every word I can have a pretty good reading comprehension. Eventually we all ended up in this shopping plaza and had some over priced food before going up to the ferries wheel.
The ferries wheel was also very awesome, my camera for some reason simply could not take usable pictures at all. It was really cool seeing Osaka from that angle at night, really amazing. From there I just headed back home, it took about an hour from station to station. It was a really cool day.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Things are good but...
I'm feeling a little pessimistic right now but try not to take it as not being grateful for this really amazing experience but I do have a few complaints to vent.
The first is with my host family. They are really nice people, Okasan is willing to do anything to help me out and does all of the housework. However I can't get much of a conversation going with her. The language barrier is one thing, speaking Japanese is by far my weakest point and I'm really disappointed with myself in that regard but I think if she spoke English we wouldn't talk all that much more either. She's just one of those people that like there isn't a huge personallity click or something. Like I feel like I'm living with an astranged aunt or something. So when I hear how much people are having with their host familes, playing games, talking a lot, doing things, etc I get really jealous.
This jealousy wouldn't be so bad if I could meet some Japanese people, which leads me into my second point. The foreign exchange program is offset of the regular school schedule by 3 weeks. That means until like the 19th or something the school is pretty dead and none of the clubs have started up. I appreciate that we could have some time to get to know the campus before it became crowded but I think it was a pretty annoying move on the schools side. I do have 2 penpals that I have talked to for like 3 months and both of them are too busy to hang out. I'm getting pretty frustrated about that I mean I flew 14 hours to get here and you can't take 2 hours out of your day to show me around this foreign city?
That ends my rant but I do have more to talk about. By some bizzare stroke of luck I somehow managed to get into the highest difficulty Japanese class. Seriously I don't know how it happend. The first day everyone took the same test. The next day 7 people took test 3 while everyone else, myself, took test 2. If you took test 3 you were supposed to go to class D or E and test 2 people were A B or C. I'm really confused about it. This class is advanced Japanese, we are reading news articles, I don't know if I can do it. I never actually took an intermediate class, I only read the book for it. In the class I am for sure the bottom 3 on speaking ability, like I know I can study well enough to score high on the tests but in class it is stressful. We have two teachers, because its too many hours a week for one teacher to have or something like that, and they are both nice but one talked much simpler and slower then the other. Also there are two French guys there who are near fleunt (pera-pera) but their French accent is so strong I can not understand anything they say.
I got a cell phone and opened a bank account. Cell phones are really weird in Japan, you get a really crappy amount of out going calls but get unlimited incoming. Also everyone emails rather then SMS because SMS only go the company your on. I ended up going with AU because the only other feasable one, softbank, could only do a one year contract at a single store in sannomiya and you had to buy the phone right out. I really wanted a nice TV phone or something like that but I ultimately decided that for 9 months it wasn't worth the money to get a cool phone. Oh also two cool things Japanese phones do, the first is that they have a barcode reader. In Japan on advetisements you see square barcodes, you use the camera on your phone and the phone will display information like a web link, phone number, etc and you can store that in your address book right away. The second thing is IR sending. You can send info about your phone, such as number, name, info, picture of you, birthdate to someone by just point the phones at each other and pressing send. Its way easier then typing it all in and creates a sort of social event of collecting phone numbers.
Well I've talked too much and should get back to studying, bye everyone
The first is with my host family. They are really nice people, Okasan is willing to do anything to help me out and does all of the housework. However I can't get much of a conversation going with her. The language barrier is one thing, speaking Japanese is by far my weakest point and I'm really disappointed with myself in that regard but I think if she spoke English we wouldn't talk all that much more either. She's just one of those people that like there isn't a huge personallity click or something. Like I feel like I'm living with an astranged aunt or something. So when I hear how much people are having with their host familes, playing games, talking a lot, doing things, etc I get really jealous.
This jealousy wouldn't be so bad if I could meet some Japanese people, which leads me into my second point. The foreign exchange program is offset of the regular school schedule by 3 weeks. That means until like the 19th or something the school is pretty dead and none of the clubs have started up. I appreciate that we could have some time to get to know the campus before it became crowded but I think it was a pretty annoying move on the schools side. I do have 2 penpals that I have talked to for like 3 months and both of them are too busy to hang out. I'm getting pretty frustrated about that I mean I flew 14 hours to get here and you can't take 2 hours out of your day to show me around this foreign city?
That ends my rant but I do have more to talk about. By some bizzare stroke of luck I somehow managed to get into the highest difficulty Japanese class. Seriously I don't know how it happend. The first day everyone took the same test. The next day 7 people took test 3 while everyone else, myself, took test 2. If you took test 3 you were supposed to go to class D or E and test 2 people were A B or C. I'm really confused about it. This class is advanced Japanese, we are reading news articles, I don't know if I can do it. I never actually took an intermediate class, I only read the book for it. In the class I am for sure the bottom 3 on speaking ability, like I know I can study well enough to score high on the tests but in class it is stressful. We have two teachers, because its too many hours a week for one teacher to have or something like that, and they are both nice but one talked much simpler and slower then the other. Also there are two French guys there who are near fleunt (pera-pera) but their French accent is so strong I can not understand anything they say.
I got a cell phone and opened a bank account. Cell phones are really weird in Japan, you get a really crappy amount of out going calls but get unlimited incoming. Also everyone emails rather then SMS because SMS only go the company your on. I ended up going with AU because the only other feasable one, softbank, could only do a one year contract at a single store in sannomiya and you had to buy the phone right out. I really wanted a nice TV phone or something like that but I ultimately decided that for 9 months it wasn't worth the money to get a cool phone. Oh also two cool things Japanese phones do, the first is that they have a barcode reader. In Japan on advetisements you see square barcodes, you use the camera on your phone and the phone will display information like a web link, phone number, etc and you can store that in your address book right away. The second thing is IR sending. You can send info about your phone, such as number, name, info, picture of you, birthdate to someone by just point the phones at each other and pressing send. Its way easier then typing it all in and creates a sort of social event of collecting phone numbers.
Well I've talked too much and should get back to studying, bye everyone
Monday, September 8, 2008
Starting to get used to this place
Well it seems like life here is starting to normalize. Nothing incredible amazing happened this weekend. I did spend a lot time inside watching TV with host-mom, only news type shows but all of Japanese tv is weird. Also I went to Sannomiya by myself on Sunday.
I gotta say something about the tv first. Non stop the news has been covering a story about this one particular sumo wrestler and I couldn't figure out what he did until I asked kasan(host mom) and she said he test positive for marajuna use. I was pretty shocked. Like in America I'm pretty sure only possesion is a crime and tons of celebraties and politicians have admited to trying pot and here in Japan the fact that a somewhat famous person used pot is big enough news that it needs 24 hour coverage. Just crazy.
Getting to Sannomiya it self was pretty easy, I took the kobe line from maruyama station to shinkaichi station (last station everyone gets off) then follow the signs towards Osaka and get on. Sannomiya is a really nice shopping center with hundreds of small and large stores very close to each other. I checked out a book store and thought it was a pretty small one or something but was really surpised when I saw that it was 6 stories tall and each floor was enourmous. I think in all it was bigger then the u of a library. The manga section was also huge, like atleast 10 giant isles just jam packed. I ended up getting shounen eesu (one of those various manga in one giant book things), a faimatsu magazine (gaming) and terebikun (tokusatsu magazine designed for kids). I also went to an electronic store and found a really cool video game section with a giant MGS4 old snake statue and all sorts of new and old games and I also saw that the TVs are like twice the price here, I don't get that.
On the way back I did get lost because from sannomiya station I did take the wrong direction train, realized it then got off after a few stations waited for the one going back the right direction found one, got on it then it stopped again at sannomiya. I waited a bit then it went backwards to the wrong direction again. I got off at the first station and asked this japanese girl and she was really helpful, apparently you have to take the express train to go back, I don't know how I'm supposed to know stuff like that but oh well.
I gotta say something about the tv first. Non stop the news has been covering a story about this one particular sumo wrestler and I couldn't figure out what he did until I asked kasan(host mom) and she said he test positive for marajuna use. I was pretty shocked. Like in America I'm pretty sure only possesion is a crime and tons of celebraties and politicians have admited to trying pot and here in Japan the fact that a somewhat famous person used pot is big enough news that it needs 24 hour coverage. Just crazy.
Getting to Sannomiya it self was pretty easy, I took the kobe line from maruyama station to shinkaichi station (last station everyone gets off) then follow the signs towards Osaka and get on. Sannomiya is a really nice shopping center with hundreds of small and large stores very close to each other. I checked out a book store and thought it was a pretty small one or something but was really surpised when I saw that it was 6 stories tall and each floor was enourmous. I think in all it was bigger then the u of a library. The manga section was also huge, like atleast 10 giant isles just jam packed. I ended up getting shounen eesu (one of those various manga in one giant book things), a faimatsu magazine (gaming) and terebikun (tokusatsu magazine designed for kids). I also went to an electronic store and found a really cool video game section with a giant MGS4 old snake statue and all sorts of new and old games and I also saw that the TVs are like twice the price here, I don't get that.
On the way back I did get lost because from sannomiya station I did take the wrong direction train, realized it then got off after a few stations waited for the one going back the right direction found one, got on it then it stopped again at sannomiya. I waited a bit then it went backwards to the wrong direction again. I got off at the first station and asked this japanese girl and she was really helpful, apparently you have to take the express train to go back, I don't know how I'm supposed to know stuff like that but oh well.
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