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
Saturday, October 18, 2008
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
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