Okay so bright and early I left to go take the Jtest, I got there early and waited. This test was a nightmare. It was so hard and so long and so confusing my brain was just jelly at the end. I've explained it before but its out of 1000 points, I was shooting for 500. Now this is in some ways a good way and others a not of testing a person ability in Japanese. There are questions in there that are at several different difficulty levels. So the idea is that D level people should be able to get ALL of the D level questions and anything they get right by luck on the higher levels will be bonus or make up for the ones they missed. Since its really unrealistic to get all of your level questions right, to get the appropriated certificate you need to just get lucky with the harder questions. While the JLPT has level 2 and level 1 tests and you only need like 70% to pass. So in a nut shell I think the JLPT level 2 would have been a much easier test for me and would have been a sure pass.
So after that I decided to do some more exploring/picture taking. Before I talk about that though I should explain my area. My city is Kobe, my ward or district (I forget which it is but its Ku in Japanese) is Nagata. Kobe is a port city so from my train station I can see the ocean, but Japan is also crazy mountainous so my house is on the edge of a mountain kind of. Since Kobe is in between mountain and ocean it is kind of a tunnel shape. This is really helpful for walking around because the two main train tracks run right through the middle of that.
Now Japan is actually very slanted when you look at a map so I'm not actually sure where north is but in my cognitive map north is where the mountains are and south is where the ocean is. I use Hankyu train line (the other is JR)and it runs from Shinkaichi (which is about 30-40 min walk from my house) until Umeda(most north western part of the concentrated Osaka). My school is in Okamoto, which is somewhere near the middle but closer to shinkaichi on the hankyu line. Two other places of interest on the hankyu line are sannomiya and nishinomiya. Both of these places have big shopping centers. Also Nishinomiya is has two stops between it and Okamoto. If your ride an express going from shinkaichi to umeda takes probably around 40-45 mins. My normal route for school is I walk to my station called maruyama (takes about 7 mins) then transfer at shinkaichi and get on the main hankyu line.
Okay so now that I got that part explained I arrived at Okamoto, bought a bunch of batteries, then headed out. Since Kobe is so close to the ocean I thought Okamoto would be too so I walked south for a bit but I saw no signs of it. This brought me into a very residential area with a lot of what the Japanese people call "mansions". Japanese uses incorrect English as part of official Japanese all of the time, its actually a very tall and big apartment complex. (another good example of bad english in Japanese is maikaa "my car" it doesn't mean any one particular's car just a personal car as compared to a bus or taxi or something like that.). I saw a bunch of parks and school yards with kids practicing baseball and what not. From there I really traveled around, I maintained my idea of where I was in comparison to the train station but not that long into it I was wondering where was I. I didn't really have a good grasp on how far away nishinomiya really was, and also that there are only two stations in between. I got really exhausted but just kept going.
The scenery really changes once you get away from the big shopping centers and this area has a real different atmosphere about it then other residential areas I've seen. Its like this giant road that just keeps going on and on, there is plenty of stuff to see for sure but in some sense it starts to all look the same. I did manage to some how make it back home in one piece but it was a real adventure. I thought I'd write more but I'm just tired now. I did upload the pictures already and put comments so if you watch them in order you can kind of get an idea of where I went.
Also since my picasa now filled up I created another one, I also uploaded the rest of the new camera pics on there as well.
So from here on out the new pics will be at
http://picasaweb.google.com/benkpomeroy2/
http://picasaweb.google.com/benkpomeroy2/JourneyToNishinomiya#
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