kimeta

So today I received an answer from my counselor back at U of A and as it works out if I take japanese pop culture class and any Chinese studies class this summer I will fulfill all of my requirements for my degree. Well with the exception of my senior capstone class, which is not offered at all over the summer. I really wanted to just have my degree a month after I got back but this isn't too bad of a situation either. Its not really a class, for my capstone but rather I have a senior project that I work with a teacher with so, I think, I just have to keep a teacher updated on my progress of some project and I won't have a set class that meets at a set time.

So in other words after a month summer class I am freed up time wise. That means that I can start searching for a new job and not be constrained on what hours I can work (the main reason I stayed at walmart for so many years, they let me work the bare minimum when it was best for me). Now if I had my bachelors it would be much easier to find a job for sure but I have an associates, I have two computer certifications, hopefully a Japanese language certification so hopefully that will peak someone's interest enough to at least get an interview. Of course I won't quit walmart before I have the next job lined up but I can honestly start looking even a little before I come back.

In some sense I am picky, I really don't want to do retail, I want at least $10/hr, and I want Mon-Fri 9-5. I have good reasons for this too. I've done 6 years of retail, I'm just fed up with it. I make $9.40 at walmart I think I am worth at least another .60 cents, and I want to work that time so I can be freed up to have a good social life. Mainly I want to be really active in the single adult activities. I've come to this understanding that if I do what God wants me to do, God will give me what I want. God wants me to go to church actives, I want to find a wife, its a pretty obvious answer of what I should do then.

So if I got school out of the way, a descent job, I'm really thinking about getting a car and an apartment in Tucson. I really want to be close enough to church so that I can easily go to everything and I can invite people over. I definitely wouldn't want to move out right away because I miss living with my awesome family but I really think this is something I should do. I think it would be awesome to live with Cameron because we get along really well, we would be in the same ward, and almost all of our friends are mutual friends. The thing with Cameron though is I don't want to be the cause in any sense of preventing him from going on a mission. Right now he is living with his sister and, he says, that he keeps having to bail her out financially and thus can't save money. His parents place is way too small of the amount of people in it already so he's going to be paying rent some where. But that part is a little too far away to plan at the moment.

So I'm really glad that finally I have a plan again. Before I knew about the summer classes I couldn't even come close to making any plans and it was kind of upsetting, but at any rate I should talk some more about Japan. Last Saturday I took the train to Kyoto and just tried to get lost. Kyoto has a completely different atmosphere about it then Osaka has. Everything is more spacious, it sort of feels more like a regular US city. However it has more Japan-ish (in Japanese its a real word nihonteki) things. There are tons of temples all over the place, a geisha district, rickshaw pullers, and more Japanese style houses. I started at one point, just kind of walked to a big tower in the skyline (its in a lot of the pictures I took) then I arrived in front of the JR station, which I had used before, so I suddenly knew where I was. I was actually disappointed by that and just walked past that and up some more. I kept walking until I ended up in this little park in what seemed like a some what poor area, but not scary, part of town. There I just took a few moments to take in the scenery but also the fact that just some guy from Arizona was standing in this tiny little park in Kyoto, Japan. At this point in the program its kind of hard to get those, “holy crap Im in Japan!” moments but I definitely had one that day.

Classes are really revving up. I just had my religion mid term which I think I got a good grade on but was some what tough. Tomorrow we have a kanji test, next week Japanese midterms, then the week after that the Jtest (Japanese proficiency test). Now for the interview test next week its ridiculous! We have to read three “dear abby” letters from a newspaper and talk about what advice we would give the people. The first one is the person can't seem to form a strong opinion on politics or the economy and wants to know how to learn that kind of stuff. The second one is upset because hes short. The third one feels that because her husband is so devout in a religion that she doesn't really feel strongly in that its becoming a wall in their marriage. Its like geez I cant give advice for those situations in English, why do they think I could do it in Japanese?

I wish I could say I've made friends in Japan but that just not the case. Things are getting better with people at church because there is a set time and place to meet people and talk, when I come back I'm definitely going to consider church the main way of meeting people.

Oh also there was a going out of business sale at this used manga store by my school. At first it was ½ off some manga, then 70% and then for the last few days it went down to 10 yen a piece. I got 50 volumes for under $5! Some stuff I picked up just because it was cheap but some stuff looks really cool. I know have around 100 volumes (some are final fantasy game guides though), its not too heavy all things considering so hopefully I can mail it back to the states with out negating the bargain I got them at. I really want to send my gundams back soon but I still need to finish zeta gundam and justice gundam. Justic I started to spray paint so I need to finish but the weather has been kind of hit and miss lately so I have to wait for a good day. I think I'll mail the manga later because it is good reading practice that doesn't feel like studying.

I've complained a lot here about my host family but I really think I have a pretty normal host family now. Host families that people get along really well and are more like friends are the exception rather then the rule I think. One person had to change host families already and a lot of people say there is, usually a host brother/sister, that is just intolerable. And a large part of it is my fault. I don't talk as much as I really should to them.

I guess thats all there is to say at the moment, aside from what I said things are pretty futsuu. I do have one funny little story though. There is one ryugakusei who is studying at hawaii but came from mississippi. He asked another ryugakusei from hawaii if there was a beach on the west coast! She said “its an island!” I said “you said COAST!”

samui yo

I'd like to start this blog off with retelling a children book I read in my Japanese class the other day.

It's called, "why jellyfish have no bones"

once apon a time in an underwater kingdom lived a king and a queen. One day the queen got very sick. They tried all sorts of medicine but in the end the doctor said the medicine they needed wasn't in the ocean, it was a monkey's heart.

The king didn't know what to do so he asked the turtle for help. The turtle came up with an idea and went to an island where he found a monkey. "Mr. monkey, would you like to come to the castle? Its a lot of fun and there is lots of delicious food". The monkey quickly hopped onto the turtles back and went down to the ocean.

When they got to the castle the turtle went to go tell the king. While the monkey waited he met a jellyfish. The jellyfish said "its really nice of you mr.monkey to give your heart for the queen". The monkey was surprised and ran back home.

When the turtle saw what happened he told the king that it was the jellyfish that told the monkey the truth. So the king ordered his servants to just beat the living tar out of the jellyfish with baseball bats over and over. And that is why jellyfish don't have bones.

Isn't that just a wonderful story for little kids to read?

So I signed up for this thing called the j-test. Its like the Japanaese Language Proficiency Test, which is kind of the standard requirement for Japanese related jobs. The difference between the two tests is that the J-test can go way beyond the difficulty of the JLPT. But for me all that matters is that I pass with atleast the lowest level. Its out of 1000 points and if you score 900 or above they say thats interpreter level (not just translator), 700 points is level 1 of the JLPT and 500 is level 2 of the JLPT. So I'm shooting for 500 points. I took a practice test and I scored 420. This is good in one sense because you can say that its only 80 points shy of what I want but how exactly I go about getting those 80 points is the problem. This test is over the Japanese language so there isn't really any restrictions on what grammar or vocab I'll run in to so I can't really study for this test itself I can only try and improve my Japanese as a whole. Its also interesting to think about how it all works out because each of the 8 sections start out at around my skill level and move up to fluent level. So its like if I were to get only the points that are my difficulty then my its like the points are cut in half. In other words I have to get all of the questions that are at my difficulty correct or make up for it by guessing on harder difficulty ones. I've started to study a lot extra stuff in my free time now because of the test.

So I've written about this before but what exactly I do after I come home is really up in the air. There are so many variables I just can't get anywhere planning anything out. College is a big variable, when exactly can I graduate? I have a feeling that I'm not going to be able to graduate after a summer semester so that means another whole semester of college and another 10 months from now until I have a degree. I need a mere 7 credits so do I just take that? Maybe I should take extra classes so that I am a full time student and thus get grant money.

Another big variable is trying to find a wife. I really need to marry a good mormon girl and that means I really need to be very active in every singles ward activity I possibly can. But how does living in sahuarita, going to school, and working (thats a whole nother thing too) allow time to do stuff like that? If I could graduate in the summer then I could probably find some sort of decent 9-5 monday-friday job and move to Tucson, but if I have school thats hard to squeeze that all in.

I wish I could say "oh what ever happens happens" but I'm already 25 I really want to get my adult life started.

I am really enjoying church here. There are two sets of married couple missionaries and they are responsible for the free english lessons and organizing youth activies and family home evening and what not. They are trying their best to learn Japanese but they are just beginners right now so it can be really tough for them. Yesterday at first it was just me and a Japanese guy ( I forgot his name) and throughout the lesson brother Tanner would try and say something in really broken Japanese and half English and then I would translate it back to the Japanese guy (in my not so good Japanese). It was cool to finally be in that situation where I'm talking to someone who someone else can't and the other person keeps asking "what he say?". After words more people came and we played badminton and ping pong. Just lots of fun.

Tomorrow we are going to a Japanese high school on a field trip, I'm very excited

Quick update

I just wanted to put some links up to direct folders in my web album

First off is the things I bought folder I just put some pictures there of the insane deals I got on manga from this store near my school's closing sale

Also pictures from Kobe folder

and pictures from Osaka folder

and of course you can check out the rest of the pictures from the links there or on the side

hima sugiru

Last week we had the entire week off because of the nyugakushiken (entrance exams for freshmen) and today was some random holiday, normally vacation time is nice but right now its just way too much. I'm really bored. Last week like I said in the last post I built the wing zero custom perfect grade gundam, and despite some set backs and having to heavy duty gluing some parts its done and taking up the last bit of space I have in this room. But besides two days thats all I did last week.

Last Thursday I wanted to find out how far it would take to walk from my house to my friends house who also lives in nagata (its a ward, like the one subdivision below a city). I had an idea of how to get there so I grabbed by camera and just headed off in the direction that seemed right. It was a really pretty day and the whole time I kept thinking "why haven't I done this sooner?". Japan's city scape just has this certain charm about it that I was really taking in. I posted all of the pictures I took that day in my picasa account under "kobe". I particularly like the way the power lines in here are just so crazy and all over the place, there were a lot of pictures of those. It turns out that it was a good 35 min walk and I sent her an email asking if she wanted to do anything but I ended up just seeing how far I could walk. By following the train tracks I got to downtown kobe and saw so much there I hadn't noticed before. I got to pretty much the spot where I bored the train going home and it takes about 40-45 mins to get home so I was pretty tired after several hours of walking.

Saturday I decided to do the same thing but this time in Osaka. I arrived in Umeda (again ward, this is one of the major ones) and looked at a map, figured out which direction was south and just started to walk. I ended up walking for about 5 hours but I wasn't worried about getting lost because all I had to do was find a train track of a subway entrance, which are everywhere in Japan, and I could easily get back to Umeda and thus home. I again took some really cool pictures and they are under the folder "osaka". The main street I followed was interesting because it was mostly buisness and government office type buildings but on the other side of the street going parallel was this incredibly long shopping hall. I say shopping hall because I don't know what else to call them. Its like a wide ally with a roof and shops of all sorts on both sides. These shopping halls go on for miles!, or kilometers!, and before I knew it I was in Nanba (a ward I go to a lot), so I instantly knew where I was. Even though I wanted to do some new exploring I thought this might be a good time to really take a lot of pictures of my beloved den den town (den means electricity and its like the osaka akihabara, maybe half the size). Stores usually don't like you taking pictures of their stores so I only took pictures from outside but I got most of the stores so maybe someone looks at it they can kind of get an idea of what its like.

I spent more time there then I had intended and then went south from den den town and there was a drastic change in Osaka from that point. Up until den den town it was very close and tall buildings everywhere but it quickly dropped off to smaller more home like places. Like if I had to compare it its like new york quickly becoming tucson. I don't know if I can really explain it but it was a really interesting feeling.

Sunday I went to church and ended up having lunch with the missionaries and an investigator. There was a fireside that night so I just killed some time until then and we had some dinner and got to socialize a little. I talked to these other missionaries for a while and one of them was really obsessed with smash brothers brawl but he was on his mission when it came out so he couldn't play it. He kept asking me all of the particular questions about how each character was. I hadn't played the game in 5 months and didn't pay too much attention to that stuff when I was playing it anyways. The fireside was about the history of the church in Kobe, of course in Japanese. My Japanese has defiantly improved a lot but I still suck at listening. What happens is I hit a little streak of parts I don't understand, loose my place then kind of space out, thus forgetting what little I did get and suddenly I have no idea whats going on.

Monday nothing amazing happened except I got a compliment from the mean Japanese teacher. In the thing we read it was a story about how this ryugakusei's host mom was upset because she didn't recieve a letter from the ryugakusei's real mom and the teacher asked me what I thought about it, and I said "its like Japanese people are thought of as kids even when they are college students but in America as soon as your 18 your thought of as an adult so the parents have nothing to do with the host family, also sending letters is a little annoying now a days". The teacher said I said it really well but she didn't like my opinion.

I know my reading skills have improved for sure, I've now read 16 volumes of manga. I don't get all of the plot points but I'm still pretty impressed with myself. I really wanted to watch gundam 0083 because I got the models from the series but all my friend could find was a Chinese subbed version so I just watched that. I was able to understand enough to enjoy the show but when it got towards the end the plot got way too hard to understand. 0083 was made in 1990 so its so different from current animation but it felt very nostalgic. There is just something about cel animation that I really like.

Today I did nothing at all. I wanted to go to Kyoto and walk around but left foot hurt for some reason. I worked on a gundam model for a bit played some final fantasy 6 on my psp but thats about it.

So as I read the Book of Mormon it really amazes me the faith the ancient people had in Christ. They had faith that he would come and all we have to have faith in is that he will come again. Jesus of Nazarath was 100% a real person that actually lived and actually did something to upset the Jewish leaders to get crucified. There is historical evidence of it. The apostles saw the resurrected Christ, testified of that fact, and dedicated their life to telling people about it. The catholic church started up 2000 years ago because of the apostles (Peter right?). Like that in itself ought to be enough for us as humans to believe in Christ but God gave us a second book that aligns perfectly and testifies to the same thing. Its like how much more evidence does God need to give us for stubborn people like us?

Well like always when I think I have nothing to say I end up writting tons so later yall

Setsubun video

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vacation week

Well we ryugakusei have this week off of school. Even though our semester just started the Japanese student's semester just ended so this week is actual the entrance exam for all of the freshman. So for some reason we aren't allowed on campus even, and we have this week off. I honestly I don't have any plans. Right now its Wednesday and I don't have anything to do besides work on this freaking crazy perfect grade gundam (more on that later) and I don't really have plans for the rest of the week either. I want to do something just so that my host mom doesn't make all these comments about me being a hermit or what not.

Starting off though Tuesday was awesome! Me, Julienne, Courtney, Lela, and Val went to the Setsubun festival in Nagata jinja. Setsubun, or season divide, is a festival that was originally meant to appease the oni so they wouldn't bring misfortune but at some point became a festival of chasing off the oni. I made a video and I'll try and upload it as soon as I can but with my really inconsitent internet connection I don't know when I'll be able to. In a nut shell some people from the community put on 400 year old oni (demon) costumes and perform ritual dances while holding a straw torch. There is also a part where beans are thrown at the oni but we may have missed it. It was raining that day so these poor men dancing without shoes in the cold rain for like an hour. The rain was a mixed blessing kind of because it meant that a lot of people had umbrellas making it harder to see (as you can tell in the video) but that meant that there were a lot less people this year.

The BEST part of the day was going back to Courtney's host family's house and having dinner. Courtney has a 4 year old host brother who is so adorable and all of use spent hours playing with him, we didn't want to leave at 10pm but Lela had to catch the last bus home. Kota (the kid) was just so cute and silly. He would randomly say random English words like out of the blue he just said "stomach!" and other times he says random math like he dad was wrestling with him and he just yells out 49 plus 2! And Courtney's host parents are so nice and sweet and easy to talk to. Its really funny actually Courtney speaks only in English (she knows Japanese she is in my class) and her mom only speaks Japanese (but understands English). A very interesting linguistic situation. I feel so jealous now. I wish I got that host family so badly! Coming home to this place afterwords just kind of felt kind of crappy.

So I started the wing zero custom perfect grade gundam model the other day and wow it really is a challenge. There are so many moving parts and it just takes so much time. And I had a huge problem with the shoulder gear. So the shoulder section sits inside the main body and with like 5 different parts allows the shoulder to move back and forth a little bit. Well they use this spring pins which are really hard to get in so I got it all put together but when I attached the shoulder bit to the core a spring was out too much and was causing it to push up and stress the plastic so I tried to push it in more and I snapped the plastic in half! So I tried to super glue the two halfs back but just a little bit wouldn't work so I used a lot more which caused another moving part to fuse together with something meaning that even if I could some how get the broken peieces back together it wouldn't be able to move anymore. So as I tried to move something into place so that I could have some sort of movement a few tiny bits from an arch piece just fell apart, and soon several pieces did. It was like the plastic was corroding in my hands. I somehow got the pieces back and when I thought I would have again a tiny bit of movement something else broke a tiny bit of the arch off. So as I held it in my hand contemplating what to do, I dropped it on my floor and lost it forever(because my desk is too low to really sit under it for some reason). So ultimately what I ended up doing was taking a bit from the plastic runners glued it over some bits, sanded it down so it all fit then finished up the core. So now one arm has normal movement and the other doesn't but I don't think its too big of a deal.

So Friday the teachers apparently got our evaluations for their class from last semester (before we got our grades back which doesn't seem right to me) and they didn't seem too happy. I've written many times about my opinions of these classes but I think if we really look at it from a "whole is greater then the some of the parts" kind of idea they really aren't that bad. Like my history class for example; I went in there hoping to learn a basic of overall Japanese history and more specifics about bushido, what I got was two field trips to two castles and a bunch of detailed random information about Japanese history. I think the same can be said of my complaints about the program at whole because yes its not perfect and has things that could easily be better the fact that I've seen and done so many things that most people back home will never even dream of really ought to outshine not having many Japanese friends. This semester I started out really dreading the Japanese religion class but its actually really cool because he tells us all of this information about the festivals that we have a chance to go to while in Japan.

Well I guess thats it, I feel like I should get out today but I really don't know what I would do or where I would go.

ichi go ichi ei

Well its February now and nothing incredibly huge has happened. Classes are so so, the japanese religion class is actually getting pretty cool because its at a point where he tells us all about a matsuri that is going on in a few days so we are all prepared for it. In the Japanese language class we finished our first novel! Its called moonlight shadow and I personally didn't care for the story. I was all excited for starting a new book but apparently we are taking a detour in February to focus on grammar points used in the JLPT level 2 test so thats pretty good too.

My birthday wasn't too bad. On the 22nd, Thursday, I ate yakisoba with the missionaries, who are really cool people. On Friday me a few foreign exchange friends and one Japanese guy, kanada, went to nishiyoma gardens (new mall) and ate at a Hawaiian restaurant. I got a really good "american size" burger and Kanada ordered a birtday desert and they sung happy birthday and it said my name in chocolate. We then walked around the mall for a bit and Jay got a terabyte external hard drive for 12,000 yen ($120). In the states you can get them at about the same price but its so hard to even wrap my mind around a terabyte. Like it was a few years ago that a terabyte was an impossible number like you might as well say bajillion or something like that.

I have really enjoyed going to church here. Its a really small ward (we had a record today of 53 people) but that just means everyone is so much closer to each other. And the missionaries, especially elder Bohman, are a real inspiration to me and I actually, for the first time in my life I think, bore my testimony for fast Sunday today.

I decided that Its kind of unreasonable to try and spray paint all of the models I have left to build before I go home with the awkward way I have to do it that I'm just going to build them as quickly as possible and do all of the painting at home once I buy a airbrush. I really need to go this way because I ended up buying three more the other day. I bought one because I wanted to try and hand paint it and then I got the wing gundam one because I have wing zero and wing zero custom so I wanted a set and I bought the zeta gundam because it was only 1200 yen! Like Japan is an expensive country for sure but when it comes to manga and anime goods its really amazing.

I'm past the half way mark on this trip and before I know it I'll be home, its starting to become kind of mixed feelings. I keep having dreams of being home and seeing everyone and other dreams of coming home too early and missing out on everything back in Japan. I think I'm going to be really frustrated in my life for a few years. There are things I like and dislike about both countries so while I'm in America I think I'll miss Japan a lot and if I come back to Japan I'll want to go back to America. I hope I can find some happy middle ground somewhere.