Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Finally on Campus
Well, for the tour on Monday they sent over three busses that took us directly to campus. There they had a brief opening ceremony (they basically said a few words, had us introduce ourselves, and then introduced some of the program coordinators), after which they gave us a free lunch. Lunch was good (rice, a white sauce with mushrooms, deep fried chicken, salad, deep fried egg, and a slice of cake), and it was the biggest meal I’ve seen since leaving Madison.
The “tour” of campus wasn’t much. They put us back on the busses, then drove to the library, pointing out the names of some of the buildings we drove past. At the library we got out and were shown around the building. Evidently since we are special students we have to ask permission at the desk before we can use the library. Kind of different from the UW, where even special students get all the privileges of regular students (like access to the athletic facilities, access to the libraries, internet access, bus passes, etc.).
After they brought us back to the Int. House I filled out and handed in all the forms needed for living in the Int. House, and then 5 of us went to the post office to pay our bedding rental bill for the month. To pay the bill, you take the bill up to an ATM there and stick it in. The ATM scans it, and asks for confirmation of the info it scanned, and then asks you to insert the money. It takes both bills and coins, and gives exact change. It seemed like a nice system for paying bills (unfortunately it would only accept bills if it was in Japanese language mode and not English mode), but I think that paying with a check is probably nicer. As far as I’ve seen, the Japanese don’t have anything like checks. They pay with cash, and a few stores now accept credit cards.
Then Nick, Mitsu, Lane, and I took the bus downtown and went to Daiei. The showed me the 88¥ shop which was in the back on the 7th floor, where I spent about 1,000¥ getting more stuff that I needed. I also bought a pan from their cooking section, since the one I got from the 100¥ shop started rusting the day I got it. We also got some food down on the B2 level of the store, since it was so cheap compared to the food at our local supermarkets.
Yesterday I took the bus down to campus to meet my advisor. He basically said hello, and then took me up to the 6th floor and introduced me to one guy in my lab and left me there. That guy had all the other people there introduce themselves, and then told me that I’d actually be working for a different professor, and that that guy wasn’t in town yet so no one knew what I was supposed to be working on.
I spent a few hours there enjoying the internet access. A few guys there are Mac users, and they were jealous of my laptop. Evidently my machine would cost about 300,000¥ here (if I understood them correctly). They seemed like a pretty nice bunch of guys (and there were actually 2 girls there!).
After my laptop battery ran down I left to take the bus downtown again, but got on the wrong bus. I was a bit worried when it started heading away from town, but it ended up curving around and coming back into town from the south side (campus is on the west side of the city). I’m glad that they seem to cap the bus fares at 250¥ per ride, otherwise I would have been paying quite a bit more.
I went to 2 video game arcades, and was amazed. One had lots of multiplayer (not two-player) games. One was some sort of collectable card game where you put your cards in the arcade machine to play, and could win more cards (I think). That one was for 4 players, and had a big screen showing the status of the game. It looked a lot like the Mario Party games. Another game was an 8 player soccer game that also involved cards. Then there was this horse racing game. There was a big table with 12 spots around it, and people were inserting coins and pushing buttons on their screens to do things (I’m not sure what exactly) and these model horses on the table would race around the track. It looked sort of like people betting on horse races, except that they could affect the outcome somehow. This place also had a DDR Extreme machine, but it was 200¥ for singles and 400¥ for doubles, so I didn’t play. It seems like this place has a different music game reduced to 100¥ each week, so I’ll be checking back each week to see if I can play DDR for only double the US price.
Today we had our orientation for the JYPE (Junior Year in English Program). Basically, they gave us a bunch more paperwork, and had us fill out a ton of forms. We had to pay more money to get liability insurance and things like that. It costs more if you’re studying science or engineering than if you’re in education. I guess they figure we’re more dangerous.
We were pretty hungry at that point, so we headed over to the cafeteria for lunch. I got the same thing the guy ahead of me got (zaru soba), which turned out to be a bit of a bad idea. It cost 250¥, which was more than some of the other dishes they had, and was one of the least filling dishes they have. It was just a pile of noodles and some sauce to dip it in. The other guys got things like huge bowls of ramen or rice bowls with meat on top. It was good, but I was still hungry after eating it.
After lunch a bunch of us went to get our initial scholarship money from the international student office, but the person who was supposed to be there to take our signatures for it wasn’t there, so they said come back tomorrow. Then we walked our bicycles up the hill (it’s a pretty steep hill, and takes about 15 min. to walk up without a bicycle) to get our student ID cards. We handed in the forms, got our cards, and submitted applications to get free bus cards (we can get 5 of the 5,000¥ cards for free, but it’ll take about 2 months to get them).
While we were waiting for everyone to get their cards, Mitsu started riding around on Lane’s bicycle (Mitsu has a moped). So Lane said it was only fair to let him try riding Mitsu’s moped, so Lane rode that around the parking lot. Then Chris (a crazy guy from France) who needed to go to the Science building to get his card (we were at the Engineering building) got on the back and asked for a ride over there. Mitsu (who is Australian) didn’t hear this, but saw that there were 2 people on the moped and said, “If you want a go, do it by yourself.” So Lane got off and told Chris how to make it go, and Chris rode off. We were pretty worried, because he’d never ridden one of those things before, he didn’t have a driver’s license, wasn’t wearing a helmet, didn’t know where the building he needed to go to was, and we were on top of a mountain. Mitsu was rather distressed, because he had meant Chris could also try riding the moped around the parking lot, but Chris had misunderstood his Australian English. We waited and waited, and after about 20 minutes gave Mitsu a bicycle and he set off to try to rescue his moped. He found Chris (who I don’t think knows all that much Japanese) trying to get instructions on how to use a moped from a Japanese guy. Thankfully both Chris and the moped were undamaged, but we were seriously worried. Chris didn’t know anything about how to start the moped; all he knew was that you turn the handle to go.
Once that was taken care of, we rode our bicycles down the mountain (weee!) and managed not to kill ourselves. We went downtown to try to get cell phones with a student discount. Some people were going slower than the people I was with, and they got separated from us. We went to one store, and they said they’d give us the discount if we bought a phone there, but the cheapest phones there were 2,800¥ and we’d heard that some of the other students had gotten free or 100¥ phones, so we decided to go to another place. At that place, they said that since we were Special Students we couldn’t get the discount, and one of the guys argued with them for an hour or two. We didn’t succeed, but we got to see the Chris-effect. For the last few days, Chris has had various Japanese girls in his room, and everyone’s been talking about how quickly he picks up girls. Well, at the phone place we asked the lady who was there where she thought he was from. She said Finland, and we told her he was from France. In response to that she literally said, “Yes, you’re beautiful,” which was quite amusing. We can’t figure out how he does it. He managed to get her age, her full name, the time she gets off of work, and even got her to get him a cup of water (after she had told us that they didn’t have any water for people who are waiting when we asked about it).
While we were wasting our time listening to Lane threaten to sue them for discrimination, the slower group had gone to the Ward office, gotten another alien registration card (the University had taken ours this morning), and had gone to the first place and all gotten cell phones there. They got free phones, because evidently the place had last year’s model of the 5,800¥ phone and was giving those out for free. We saw them as we were walking out of our store, and so we went back to the place they’d been. They said that they have only 1 of the free phones left, and they told us that they aren’t really supposed to give us the discount but that since they’d given it to the others they’d give it to those of us who were there, and that we should keep it a secret. Unfortunately Chris and I hadn’t gotten a replacement copy of our alien registration, so we have to go back tomorrow to get phones. Yuta isn’t part of JYPE, so he still had his, and he got a more expensive phone but got the student discount.
We rode our bicycles back at that point, hoping to get back before dark, but even though it was only 5:30 PM it was almost completely dark when we got to our bicycles, and completely dark before we’d gone more than a few blocks. At least the bicycles we’d bought all came with lights, so we were able to see as we rode.
I made ramen again for dinner, and this time ate it with chopsticks that I bought the other night. The only food I have is ramen, cereal, some frozen vegetables, and some soba packages I got at Daiei. I asked Mitsu, and he informed me that the sealed bottle of liquid that I found under my sink when I moved in was indeed cooking oil, so I think I may try to fry up some of the soba and vegetables tomorrow with that. He said I’m the first one to get it right, so I guess other people have been asking him and haven’t gotten it right.
The “tour” of campus wasn’t much. They put us back on the busses, then drove to the library, pointing out the names of some of the buildings we drove past. At the library we got out and were shown around the building. Evidently since we are special students we have to ask permission at the desk before we can use the library. Kind of different from the UW, where even special students get all the privileges of regular students (like access to the athletic facilities, access to the libraries, internet access, bus passes, etc.).
After they brought us back to the Int. House I filled out and handed in all the forms needed for living in the Int. House, and then 5 of us went to the post office to pay our bedding rental bill for the month. To pay the bill, you take the bill up to an ATM there and stick it in. The ATM scans it, and asks for confirmation of the info it scanned, and then asks you to insert the money. It takes both bills and coins, and gives exact change. It seemed like a nice system for paying bills (unfortunately it would only accept bills if it was in Japanese language mode and not English mode), but I think that paying with a check is probably nicer. As far as I’ve seen, the Japanese don’t have anything like checks. They pay with cash, and a few stores now accept credit cards.
Then Nick, Mitsu, Lane, and I took the bus downtown and went to Daiei. The showed me the 88¥ shop which was in the back on the 7th floor, where I spent about 1,000¥ getting more stuff that I needed. I also bought a pan from their cooking section, since the one I got from the 100¥ shop started rusting the day I got it. We also got some food down on the B2 level of the store, since it was so cheap compared to the food at our local supermarkets.
Yesterday I took the bus down to campus to meet my advisor. He basically said hello, and then took me up to the 6th floor and introduced me to one guy in my lab and left me there. That guy had all the other people there introduce themselves, and then told me that I’d actually be working for a different professor, and that that guy wasn’t in town yet so no one knew what I was supposed to be working on.
I spent a few hours there enjoying the internet access. A few guys there are Mac users, and they were jealous of my laptop. Evidently my machine would cost about 300,000¥ here (if I understood them correctly). They seemed like a pretty nice bunch of guys (and there were actually 2 girls there!).
After my laptop battery ran down I left to take the bus downtown again, but got on the wrong bus. I was a bit worried when it started heading away from town, but it ended up curving around and coming back into town from the south side (campus is on the west side of the city). I’m glad that they seem to cap the bus fares at 250¥ per ride, otherwise I would have been paying quite a bit more.
I went to 2 video game arcades, and was amazed. One had lots of multiplayer (not two-player) games. One was some sort of collectable card game where you put your cards in the arcade machine to play, and could win more cards (I think). That one was for 4 players, and had a big screen showing the status of the game. It looked a lot like the Mario Party games. Another game was an 8 player soccer game that also involved cards. Then there was this horse racing game. There was a big table with 12 spots around it, and people were inserting coins and pushing buttons on their screens to do things (I’m not sure what exactly) and these model horses on the table would race around the track. It looked sort of like people betting on horse races, except that they could affect the outcome somehow. This place also had a DDR Extreme machine, but it was 200¥ for singles and 400¥ for doubles, so I didn’t play. It seems like this place has a different music game reduced to 100¥ each week, so I’ll be checking back each week to see if I can play DDR for only double the US price.
Today we had our orientation for the JYPE (Junior Year in English Program). Basically, they gave us a bunch more paperwork, and had us fill out a ton of forms. We had to pay more money to get liability insurance and things like that. It costs more if you’re studying science or engineering than if you’re in education. I guess they figure we’re more dangerous.
We were pretty hungry at that point, so we headed over to the cafeteria for lunch. I got the same thing the guy ahead of me got (zaru soba), which turned out to be a bit of a bad idea. It cost 250¥, which was more than some of the other dishes they had, and was one of the least filling dishes they have. It was just a pile of noodles and some sauce to dip it in. The other guys got things like huge bowls of ramen or rice bowls with meat on top. It was good, but I was still hungry after eating it.
After lunch a bunch of us went to get our initial scholarship money from the international student office, but the person who was supposed to be there to take our signatures for it wasn’t there, so they said come back tomorrow. Then we walked our bicycles up the hill (it’s a pretty steep hill, and takes about 15 min. to walk up without a bicycle) to get our student ID cards. We handed in the forms, got our cards, and submitted applications to get free bus cards (we can get 5 of the 5,000¥ cards for free, but it’ll take about 2 months to get them).
While we were waiting for everyone to get their cards, Mitsu started riding around on Lane’s bicycle (Mitsu has a moped). So Lane said it was only fair to let him try riding Mitsu’s moped, so Lane rode that around the parking lot. Then Chris (a crazy guy from France) who needed to go to the Science building to get his card (we were at the Engineering building) got on the back and asked for a ride over there. Mitsu (who is Australian) didn’t hear this, but saw that there were 2 people on the moped and said, “If you want a go, do it by yourself.” So Lane got off and told Chris how to make it go, and Chris rode off. We were pretty worried, because he’d never ridden one of those things before, he didn’t have a driver’s license, wasn’t wearing a helmet, didn’t know where the building he needed to go to was, and we were on top of a mountain. Mitsu was rather distressed, because he had meant Chris could also try riding the moped around the parking lot, but Chris had misunderstood his Australian English. We waited and waited, and after about 20 minutes gave Mitsu a bicycle and he set off to try to rescue his moped. He found Chris (who I don’t think knows all that much Japanese) trying to get instructions on how to use a moped from a Japanese guy. Thankfully both Chris and the moped were undamaged, but we were seriously worried. Chris didn’t know anything about how to start the moped; all he knew was that you turn the handle to go.
Once that was taken care of, we rode our bicycles down the mountain (weee!) and managed not to kill ourselves. We went downtown to try to get cell phones with a student discount. Some people were going slower than the people I was with, and they got separated from us. We went to one store, and they said they’d give us the discount if we bought a phone there, but the cheapest phones there were 2,800¥ and we’d heard that some of the other students had gotten free or 100¥ phones, so we decided to go to another place. At that place, they said that since we were Special Students we couldn’t get the discount, and one of the guys argued with them for an hour or two. We didn’t succeed, but we got to see the Chris-effect. For the last few days, Chris has had various Japanese girls in his room, and everyone’s been talking about how quickly he picks up girls. Well, at the phone place we asked the lady who was there where she thought he was from. She said Finland, and we told her he was from France. In response to that she literally said, “Yes, you’re beautiful,” which was quite amusing. We can’t figure out how he does it. He managed to get her age, her full name, the time she gets off of work, and even got her to get him a cup of water (after she had told us that they didn’t have any water for people who are waiting when we asked about it).
While we were wasting our time listening to Lane threaten to sue them for discrimination, the slower group had gone to the Ward office, gotten another alien registration card (the University had taken ours this morning), and had gone to the first place and all gotten cell phones there. They got free phones, because evidently the place had last year’s model of the 5,800¥ phone and was giving those out for free. We saw them as we were walking out of our store, and so we went back to the place they’d been. They said that they have only 1 of the free phones left, and they told us that they aren’t really supposed to give us the discount but that since they’d given it to the others they’d give it to those of us who were there, and that we should keep it a secret. Unfortunately Chris and I hadn’t gotten a replacement copy of our alien registration, so we have to go back tomorrow to get phones. Yuta isn’t part of JYPE, so he still had his, and he got a more expensive phone but got the student discount.
We rode our bicycles back at that point, hoping to get back before dark, but even though it was only 5:30 PM it was almost completely dark when we got to our bicycles, and completely dark before we’d gone more than a few blocks. At least the bicycles we’d bought all came with lights, so we were able to see as we rode.
I made ramen again for dinner, and this time ate it with chopsticks that I bought the other night. The only food I have is ramen, cereal, some frozen vegetables, and some soba packages I got at Daiei. I asked Mitsu, and he informed me that the sealed bottle of liquid that I found under my sink when I moved in was indeed cooking oil, so I think I may try to fry up some of the soba and vegetables tomorrow with that. He said I’m the first one to get it right, so I guess other people have been asking him and haven’t gotten it right.
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