Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Starting Classes
I haven't updated this for a while, so I probably should get this stuff down before I forget it all.
Wednesday night I stayed up way too late playing Golden Sun. Thursday was my birthday, and thinking that I'd be up my family called at 7:30 AM Japanese time to wish me a happy birthday. Unfortunately, I was not up yet, and so they felt rather bad for waking me. They sang happy birthday for me, and then hung up so that I could go back to sleep. After they hung up I realized that I'd been planning to get up at 7:45 anyway and should have talked with them.
At 10 we were having our Japanese language placement test. I got to campus early (about 9:15) and had to wait for a while. They let us into the room at about 9:30, and didn't start the test till 10:15 or so. The room was so full that they had to take all the people who'd taken the test before and put them in another room. I think that without those people we filled every single desk in the room.
The test was all multiple choice, which makes it really easy (at least for me) to guess the correct answer, which probably means I'm going to be placed into much too high a level. It consisted of several sections:
- Listen and select the correct picture
- Listen and select the correct answer
- Select the grammatically correct portion to put into the sentence
- Select the culturally correct answer to a question (I don't think I did very well on this; if I did it was pure luck).
- Select the correct reading for the given Kanji (this was surprising, because I can sometimes figure out the reading without having any idea of the meaning. Also, someone said all of the Kanji were engineering specific, which explains why I didn't actually know any of them)
- Read a passage and select the correct sentence to insert into it
- Read a passage and select the correct answer to a question about it.
The test was timed, and I had to leave a few question blank because I had no idea how to even guess at the answer, and I took all the time they gave us to go through it. They called time as I was starting to read the last passage.
Some people walked out after a few minutes, because they didn't have nearly enough Japanese to take the test. I checked my score the next day, and they've placed me into Level IV, with the possibility that I may be asked to take certain portions of the class at a lower level. I'm thinking I'll take the Japanese 3 class, even though they said it may be too easy for me.
After the test I walked up the mountain to my lab, and spent a few hours on the net, trying to catch up on all the news, email, etc. that I've missed without an internet connection. I then rode my bicycle down to the Ward office, and paid 300¥ to get another Certificate of Alien Registration, since the university took ours and kept them. I needed this to go get a cell phone.
I went back to the cell phone place (the store was called "Media Center") and tried to get the free cell phone. Unfortunately, not only were they out of the free ones, they were also sold out of the less expensive phones, so I ended up paying almost 4,000¥ for my phone. I got an au phone (made by Toshiba, model A1304T). It does email, cmail (like email except less expensive and I can only use it to mail other au phones), web browsing, pictures, music, etc. I'm fairly pleased with it, but since it's the first phone I've ever had I don't have much to compare it to. The guy who had me fill out the forms noticed that it was my birthday, and said "Happy Birthday" in English.
I bought a few things at the 100¥ shop near the phone place, and then rode my bicycle back to the Int. House. There I tried to figure out how to use my phone, since all the manuals (it came with 3 or 4) are in Japanese, and I can't read well enough to decipher them. The guy at the store changed the menus to English for me, but I still have no idea what things like "Secret Mode" are. Also, all of the online stuff (email preferences, web stuff, etc.) is only in Japanese, since it's not part of the phone but part of a web page. I don't know why they don't make an English version of the web page.
After fooling with my phone for a while I went down the hall to Mitsu's room to give him my phone number. Lane was there, and informed me that Mitsu had figured out how to change my phone's email address, so I had him change it so that it wasn't a random string of numbers and letters.
Friday I had my first class: Japanese Business. The professor was a really old Japanese guy who's English was fairly understandable. He said that we wouldn't have a text book (only his lecture notes) and that we'd have a final at the end of the semester. He didn't say anything about homework or a project, so it may be that the final is the only grade we get. He basically talked about the economic future of Japan, and seemed to feel that it wasn't very good. He blamed a lot of it on China and the Japanese Government. He said the worst industry in Japan right now is the banking industry, because it's all about connections with the government instead of being about customer service. The banks are protected by the government, and run by people who studied law or politics or something. The most difficult thing I've had to deal with involving banking here in Japan is that the bank ATM machines are only open from about 8AM to about 5PM and only on weekdays.
The post office runs it's own ATM system, which is much better, but that also has limited hours. At least I can withdraw money from my UWCU account at the postal ATM. This seems to be the best way to get money, since I pay no fees and I get the same exchange rate a bank would get. Having cash in Japan is very important, because almost everything here is expensive and only very few places take credit cards.
After the lecture I went to the International Student Office to try to get the first part of my scholarship, but they said it wasn't ready and I should come back on Tuesday. I then went to my lab, and was given a quick introduction to all the projects people there are working on. This lab is geared toward medical advances, and some of the projects are research about artificial hearts or devices to automatically control paralyzed limbs, or using Virtual Reality for rehab and such. I'm going to chose a project to join, and right now I'm leaning toward doing VR.
On Saturday Group Mori gave a welcome party at SS30 for all of us. The food was really good, but I think they didn't realize how to serve a big group or how much food foreigners eat. They set up tables with the food, but put plates in several locations, with the result that there were people getting in line at all different places and going both directions. Also, I think we ran out of food.
After that, Monica, Joey, me, and 2 other people took the train one stop south in the city, and went to "The Mall." It's a mall named "The Mall." Across the street, they have another building named "The Mall Part Two." At "The Mall" we looked around the bookstore there for a while (I spent a fair amount of time looking through their anime DVDs, wishing they were cheap enough to buy. Most were about 4,500¥) and then we rode the train back to Sendai Station.
At the station we saw a big group of people gathered, and went to see what was going on. Turns out this weekend is a holiday called "Michinoku Yosakoi." They had a bunch of dance groups from all around Japan giving performances. Everyone except Joey stayed to watch it until it was over. They had quite an interesting mix of traditional and contemporary music that they danced to. Most of the songs were written for this holiday, and contained both styles of music.
After it was over, we went to a park downtown where they were also celebrating Yosakoi and had a bunch of food stands set up. I got some yaki soba for 300¥, and the others got some other stuff including snow cones and some sort of bread thing with cow tongue in it. Evidently cow tongue is a local specialty. Two guys bought pork shish kabobs, and the guy gave them 100¥ back for burning the onion and then gave us an extra one for free. Another vendor gave us some free balls of something, which had really hot mustard on it. I don't think you'd be able to get free stuff like this at a carnival in the US. Americans are much too greedy, or may be worried about lawsuits if the food makes someone sick.
Some of the other booths were selling gaming systems (Gameboy Advance, PS2, etc.) and games.
After eating we went and watched more dancing on the big stage they had set up in the park. It was much better than what we'd seen at the station, and they had better lighting, speakers, and more space. A few of the groups were ones we'd seen at the station, but most were new. After the last dance they removed the tarps that people had been sitting on and invited the audience to come dance. A few people did, and since we thought this was a once in a lifetime chance we went as well. It was fun, but we stuck out quite a bit since we didn't know the motions and are taller than most Japanese people. After this dance stopped, they had everyone who danced sit down and they served us cold beer or tea. I took tea. The had us give several toast (I didn't understand what any of them were except that one was for our families), and then told us to come back on Sunday if we wanted to dance again.
We caught the last bus home, and agreed to go again tomorrow and bring more people. It was quite a bit of fun, and the dances were good enough that I'd have been willing to pay to see them.
Sunday I slept in, and then did laundry for the first time. I was told that the driers are worthless because they only use air (not heat), so instead of drying my clothes I hung them up in my room on a clothes line I'd gotten at the 100¥ shop. I would have hung them outside, but it was raining.
At 5:30 PM I caught the bus to church. The pastor was in China this week, so the drummer preached. His sermon was about prayer, and I agreed with everything he said, but his presentation left much to be desired. It sounded like he'd written an essay on prayer for a class and was reading the essay out loud.
Someone announced that her boss is giving away a bunch of stuff (futons, blankets, kitchen stuff, etc.) and someone else said they had a TV for anyone who would come pick it up. I got the contact info for both, and then went to join my friends (Lane, Yuta, Monica, Nick, and Zen) at the park for Yosakoi.
Since I hadn't eaten before church, I went back to the same stand I'd gotten my yaki soba from, and got the same thing for 200¥ since they'd reduced the price. I guess they were trying to get rid of it now that the festival was almost over.
I managed to find the others in the crowd, and saw the last 3 dances. Then we went and danced (this time almost none of the crowd joined in), and they had us dance the same dance 5 or 6 times. They didn't give us anything to drink afterwards though, which was a disappointment.
We walked to the bus stop to take the bus back, only to discover that the last bus on Sunday came at about 8:30 (it was about 9:15 at the time). Since we were going to have to walk back or take a cab back anyway, we decided to hang out downtown for a while first. We walked around, and found that most of downtown was dead, since it was Sunday. At about 10 PM we ended up going to a Korean restaurant to get something to eat.
The restaurant was nothing like any restaurant I've been to before. You order your meat, and they give you a sort of grill with hot coals in it for you to cook your meat on. They ordered a variety of things, including roasted garlic and cow tongue. I ate very little (I said I wasn't going to eat but they made me try some of the stuff. I think I had 1 clove of garlic and 4 pieces of meat, including cow tongue), since I'd already eaten and didn't want to pay for anything more (especially since the food was fairly expensive). I ended up having to pay 700¥, which was less than half of what each of the others paid.
After the restaurant we started walking back, and encountered some of the Swedes who were out drinking. We said hi, and kept going. We found ourselves walking through a sort of red light district (there were hookers and guys from the Yakuza on all the corners). It wasn't much of a district (I think it was a few blocks of one street), and since we were a group of 6 we felt pretty safe.
When we got back to the Int. House, we went to Nick's room and played a card game called Mao (it's sort of like Uno, but has more rules, and you aren't told the rules ahead of time. Whoever wins a round gets to add a new rule, but doesn't tell anyone what it is. You get a card as penalty every time you break a rule, and everyone can enforce the rules they know). Lane was the only one who'd played before, so he won the first round. The next two rounds were won by Monica, who forgot to add a rule each time. I won the three rounds after that, and people were having trouble figuring out my rules (Monica said she'd figured it out), but I had only made a rule that said "do A if B happens" and since they didn't like penalties they started doing A all the time.
After I'd won the third time they decided to play Psychiatrist. It's a game where someone leaves the room, and the rest of the people decide what their disorder is. The person who left then comes in and has to figure out what the disorder is. Zen was the Psychiatrist, and it took him forever to figure out that our disorder was that we were the person to our left (when asked a question we answer how we think the person to our left would answer). After he figured it out we went to bed, since it was already 3:30 AM.
On Monday I slept in till about eleven (it was National Sports and Health Day, so no school), and then called the lady who was giving away all the free stuff. I got an answering machine, so I hung up and tried calling the lady with the free TV. She was there, so I took the subway up to the end of the line and walked to her apartment. She covered it in a bag, since it was raining, and gave it to me. She'd gotten a bigger TV, and said she'd been offering her old TV to people for about 6 months, but even though people said they would no one ever came to pick it up.
I carried it back to the subway station, and took the subway down town so that I could catch a bus back to the Int. House. By the time I got back my arms were really sore from carrying it, and I was a bit wet from the rain, but I was glad to have a TV. Unfortunately she only gave me the TV and the remote control, but no antenna cable, so I had to go back downtown to buy one.
The bus downtown dropped me off at Sendai station, so I went in to see if DDR was the music game of the week at the video game arcade there. It wasn't, but I decided to play anyway. It cost me 400¥ to play doubles. I played Silent Hill, Still You're in my Heart, and Paranoia KCET, and failed Paranoia KCET right before the end because I was to exhausted. It felt really good to finally play doubles again.
While at the station, I picked up a free map of Sendai at the information center. It's quite detailed, and is in English. I'm surprised that they're giving out such a good map for free.
Right by the station is a used book store called "Book Off" which I'd heard was good, so I decided to go in and have a look. The store was on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors of the building. The first floor was entirely dedicated to manga (Japanese comic books). I'm told that the smaller stores only have manga. I got the first volume of Yaiba and Ranma 1/2 for 100¥ each. I've watched part of the anime series for each and like them both. There are some other series I'd like to read, but I didn't know how to find them (and they had Yaiba and Ranma 1/2 volumes in several places, so I'm not sure if they had a system anyway). The 3rd floor is normal books in Japanese. The 4th floor had magazines, video games, DVDs, and lots of CDs. I looked through the games and DVDs, but most of the stuff I'd consider buying cost 3,000¥ or more (that's like $30 for a used CD!), which I thought was too much. I can likely get them in the US in English for that price or perhaps even less. I grabbed a CD off of the 100¥ table, since I sort of wanted to get something but didn't want to pay the expensive prices they had for the stuff that interested me. I figured that if I liked the CD I'd be happy, and if I didn't I'd only wasted about a dollar. I like the CD, even though I can't understand most of the lyrics. It's a CD of ballads.
I then went to Daiei, and got a 3m cable for 1,600¥ or so. I also bought some groceries, and a plate of sushi for dinner. Daiei has fresh food for sale, and toward 7:30 or 8:00 PM they give 10% or 30% discounts on a bunch of their stuff.
When I got back I discovered that in my room the TV jack was behind my bed, and not behind my desk like in the other rooms I've seen, so right now I'm using my kitchen table as a TV stand. I connected the TV to my laptop, and then put iTunes on the TV screen and used it to listen to a CD I'd bought at Book Off. The TV has stereo speakers that sound better than my laptop speakers.
Once again I stayed up late, but this time it was because I was channel surfing Japanese TV. One channel had a show for learning Italian, and another had an old English movie with Japanese subtitles.
Tuesday morning I had my second class. It's a math class called "Introduction to Numerical methods in Science and Engineering," and is being co-taught by 3 engineering professors. Two are from the Chemical Engineering Department. We didn't do anything the first lecture other than find out what the class was going to cover, how it was going to be graded, and what the definitions of "round off error" and "truncation error" are. Our grade will be 60% from homework and 40% from the final. The prof. is going to photocopy the pages of the textbook we need and give them to us. We have 14 lectures (counting this one), and will cover 22 chapters. It'll be quite fast paced. Before class I went back to the Int. Student Office and picked up the first part of my scholarship. I they gave me 25,000¥ in cash, and will deposit 80,000¥ into my bank account at the end of each month.
After class I went to the lab, where I did audio chat with my parent for a while. At 1:00 PM everyone went down to the river for an imoni party. It's a tradition in this region. Basically, you take a big pot, put it on a fire, and cook up a stew. There were several kinds of vegetables in it, and my lab made 3 different varieties. One was miso flavored, and had beef in it. One was soy sauce flavored, and had chicken in it. I'm not sure what the third flavor was, because I didn't get a chance to try it. I also had half of a fish they'd grilled on the fire (it tasted ok when I drowned it with soy sauce), a potato, and what I think was probably a sweet potato. Most of them drank beer and sake, but I had diet Pepsi Twist since I don't drink. It was cold and overcast, so at about 4:00 PM we headed back to the lab. I enjoyed the meal and the fellowship. I stayed until about 10 PM, catching up on email, surfing the web, and getting my accounts set up here in the lab.
Unfortunately it had started raining shortly after we got back, and was still raining when I left to go home, so I got soaked.
At home I turned on the TV again, and one of the channels was showing a movie where the characters spoke German sometimes and Japanese sometimes. It was really confusing, because I know a bit of both languages.
Wednesday morning (today!) I slept in again, since I don't have class on Wednesdays. I tried calling the lady with the free stuff again, and found out that she was in Tokyo and wouldn't get back till this evening. Hopefully I can contact her before she throws it all away.
I rode my bicycle to campus, and arrived at around 1:00. On the way, my breaks squeaked like crazy. The back break uses a drum instead of the rubber break pads we have back home.
I chatted with my father for a while, then looked at digital cameras online for a while, and have been typing this journal entry for maybe 2 hours now. It's almost 10 PM, so I'll try to finish quickly and then post it and go home.
Some more random thoughts about Japan:
- At the stores they don't have shopping carts. They do have carts you can put your shopping basket on though.
- The cashier takes stuff out of your basket, scans it, and puts it into another basket. Then she (I've seen only a few male cashiers) gives you a plastic bag for you to put the stuff in. I don't see why they make you bag it when they could just as easily put it into a bag themselves instead of putting it into another basket.
- All the gas stations I've seen are full service. They don't have pumps sticking up out of the ground. The guy motions to someone, and they lower the hose down and he pumps your gas for you and then they raise it up again.
- I can't find folders in any of the stores here that sell school supplies. They sell binders, loose leaf paper, and plastic sheets to put pages in, but not folders. The only folder I've seen my entire time hear is one that they gave us at orientation with all our forms in it.
- Japanese use cash for everything, but don't like to hand money directly to people. If you get money, it's always in a money envelope. At the stores, you put your money into a tray and the clerk picks it up. If there's change, they put it on top of the receipt and hand that to you.
- The subway system seems better than the bus. You go farther for less money, and the subway comes more often. The only problem is that it doesn't go to as many locations.
Wednesday night I stayed up way too late playing Golden Sun. Thursday was my birthday, and thinking that I'd be up my family called at 7:30 AM Japanese time to wish me a happy birthday. Unfortunately, I was not up yet, and so they felt rather bad for waking me. They sang happy birthday for me, and then hung up so that I could go back to sleep. After they hung up I realized that I'd been planning to get up at 7:45 anyway and should have talked with them.
At 10 we were having our Japanese language placement test. I got to campus early (about 9:15) and had to wait for a while. They let us into the room at about 9:30, and didn't start the test till 10:15 or so. The room was so full that they had to take all the people who'd taken the test before and put them in another room. I think that without those people we filled every single desk in the room.
The test was all multiple choice, which makes it really easy (at least for me) to guess the correct answer, which probably means I'm going to be placed into much too high a level. It consisted of several sections:
- Listen and select the correct picture
- Listen and select the correct answer
- Select the grammatically correct portion to put into the sentence
- Select the culturally correct answer to a question (I don't think I did very well on this; if I did it was pure luck).
- Select the correct reading for the given Kanji (this was surprising, because I can sometimes figure out the reading without having any idea of the meaning. Also, someone said all of the Kanji were engineering specific, which explains why I didn't actually know any of them)
- Read a passage and select the correct sentence to insert into it
- Read a passage and select the correct answer to a question about it.
The test was timed, and I had to leave a few question blank because I had no idea how to even guess at the answer, and I took all the time they gave us to go through it. They called time as I was starting to read the last passage.
Some people walked out after a few minutes, because they didn't have nearly enough Japanese to take the test. I checked my score the next day, and they've placed me into Level IV, with the possibility that I may be asked to take certain portions of the class at a lower level. I'm thinking I'll take the Japanese 3 class, even though they said it may be too easy for me.
After the test I walked up the mountain to my lab, and spent a few hours on the net, trying to catch up on all the news, email, etc. that I've missed without an internet connection. I then rode my bicycle down to the Ward office, and paid 300¥ to get another Certificate of Alien Registration, since the university took ours and kept them. I needed this to go get a cell phone.
I went back to the cell phone place (the store was called "Media Center") and tried to get the free cell phone. Unfortunately, not only were they out of the free ones, they were also sold out of the less expensive phones, so I ended up paying almost 4,000¥ for my phone. I got an au phone (made by Toshiba, model A1304T). It does email, cmail (like email except less expensive and I can only use it to mail other au phones), web browsing, pictures, music, etc. I'm fairly pleased with it, but since it's the first phone I've ever had I don't have much to compare it to. The guy who had me fill out the forms noticed that it was my birthday, and said "Happy Birthday" in English.
I bought a few things at the 100¥ shop near the phone place, and then rode my bicycle back to the Int. House. There I tried to figure out how to use my phone, since all the manuals (it came with 3 or 4) are in Japanese, and I can't read well enough to decipher them. The guy at the store changed the menus to English for me, but I still have no idea what things like "Secret Mode" are. Also, all of the online stuff (email preferences, web stuff, etc.) is only in Japanese, since it's not part of the phone but part of a web page. I don't know why they don't make an English version of the web page.
After fooling with my phone for a while I went down the hall to Mitsu's room to give him my phone number. Lane was there, and informed me that Mitsu had figured out how to change my phone's email address, so I had him change it so that it wasn't a random string of numbers and letters.
Friday I had my first class: Japanese Business. The professor was a really old Japanese guy who's English was fairly understandable. He said that we wouldn't have a text book (only his lecture notes) and that we'd have a final at the end of the semester. He didn't say anything about homework or a project, so it may be that the final is the only grade we get. He basically talked about the economic future of Japan, and seemed to feel that it wasn't very good. He blamed a lot of it on China and the Japanese Government. He said the worst industry in Japan right now is the banking industry, because it's all about connections with the government instead of being about customer service. The banks are protected by the government, and run by people who studied law or politics or something. The most difficult thing I've had to deal with involving banking here in Japan is that the bank ATM machines are only open from about 8AM to about 5PM and only on weekdays.
The post office runs it's own ATM system, which is much better, but that also has limited hours. At least I can withdraw money from my UWCU account at the postal ATM. This seems to be the best way to get money, since I pay no fees and I get the same exchange rate a bank would get. Having cash in Japan is very important, because almost everything here is expensive and only very few places take credit cards.
After the lecture I went to the International Student Office to try to get the first part of my scholarship, but they said it wasn't ready and I should come back on Tuesday. I then went to my lab, and was given a quick introduction to all the projects people there are working on. This lab is geared toward medical advances, and some of the projects are research about artificial hearts or devices to automatically control paralyzed limbs, or using Virtual Reality for rehab and such. I'm going to chose a project to join, and right now I'm leaning toward doing VR.
On Saturday Group Mori gave a welcome party at SS30 for all of us. The food was really good, but I think they didn't realize how to serve a big group or how much food foreigners eat. They set up tables with the food, but put plates in several locations, with the result that there were people getting in line at all different places and going both directions. Also, I think we ran out of food.
After that, Monica, Joey, me, and 2 other people took the train one stop south in the city, and went to "The Mall." It's a mall named "The Mall." Across the street, they have another building named "The Mall Part Two." At "The Mall" we looked around the bookstore there for a while (I spent a fair amount of time looking through their anime DVDs, wishing they were cheap enough to buy. Most were about 4,500¥) and then we rode the train back to Sendai Station.
At the station we saw a big group of people gathered, and went to see what was going on. Turns out this weekend is a holiday called "Michinoku Yosakoi." They had a bunch of dance groups from all around Japan giving performances. Everyone except Joey stayed to watch it until it was over. They had quite an interesting mix of traditional and contemporary music that they danced to. Most of the songs were written for this holiday, and contained both styles of music.
After it was over, we went to a park downtown where they were also celebrating Yosakoi and had a bunch of food stands set up. I got some yaki soba for 300¥, and the others got some other stuff including snow cones and some sort of bread thing with cow tongue in it. Evidently cow tongue is a local specialty. Two guys bought pork shish kabobs, and the guy gave them 100¥ back for burning the onion and then gave us an extra one for free. Another vendor gave us some free balls of something, which had really hot mustard on it. I don't think you'd be able to get free stuff like this at a carnival in the US. Americans are much too greedy, or may be worried about lawsuits if the food makes someone sick.
Some of the other booths were selling gaming systems (Gameboy Advance, PS2, etc.) and games.
After eating we went and watched more dancing on the big stage they had set up in the park. It was much better than what we'd seen at the station, and they had better lighting, speakers, and more space. A few of the groups were ones we'd seen at the station, but most were new. After the last dance they removed the tarps that people had been sitting on and invited the audience to come dance. A few people did, and since we thought this was a once in a lifetime chance we went as well. It was fun, but we stuck out quite a bit since we didn't know the motions and are taller than most Japanese people. After this dance stopped, they had everyone who danced sit down and they served us cold beer or tea. I took tea. The had us give several toast (I didn't understand what any of them were except that one was for our families), and then told us to come back on Sunday if we wanted to dance again.
We caught the last bus home, and agreed to go again tomorrow and bring more people. It was quite a bit of fun, and the dances were good enough that I'd have been willing to pay to see them.
Sunday I slept in, and then did laundry for the first time. I was told that the driers are worthless because they only use air (not heat), so instead of drying my clothes I hung them up in my room on a clothes line I'd gotten at the 100¥ shop. I would have hung them outside, but it was raining.
At 5:30 PM I caught the bus to church. The pastor was in China this week, so the drummer preached. His sermon was about prayer, and I agreed with everything he said, but his presentation left much to be desired. It sounded like he'd written an essay on prayer for a class and was reading the essay out loud.
Someone announced that her boss is giving away a bunch of stuff (futons, blankets, kitchen stuff, etc.) and someone else said they had a TV for anyone who would come pick it up. I got the contact info for both, and then went to join my friends (Lane, Yuta, Monica, Nick, and Zen) at the park for Yosakoi.
Since I hadn't eaten before church, I went back to the same stand I'd gotten my yaki soba from, and got the same thing for 200¥ since they'd reduced the price. I guess they were trying to get rid of it now that the festival was almost over.
I managed to find the others in the crowd, and saw the last 3 dances. Then we went and danced (this time almost none of the crowd joined in), and they had us dance the same dance 5 or 6 times. They didn't give us anything to drink afterwards though, which was a disappointment.
We walked to the bus stop to take the bus back, only to discover that the last bus on Sunday came at about 8:30 (it was about 9:15 at the time). Since we were going to have to walk back or take a cab back anyway, we decided to hang out downtown for a while first. We walked around, and found that most of downtown was dead, since it was Sunday. At about 10 PM we ended up going to a Korean restaurant to get something to eat.
The restaurant was nothing like any restaurant I've been to before. You order your meat, and they give you a sort of grill with hot coals in it for you to cook your meat on. They ordered a variety of things, including roasted garlic and cow tongue. I ate very little (I said I wasn't going to eat but they made me try some of the stuff. I think I had 1 clove of garlic and 4 pieces of meat, including cow tongue), since I'd already eaten and didn't want to pay for anything more (especially since the food was fairly expensive). I ended up having to pay 700¥, which was less than half of what each of the others paid.
After the restaurant we started walking back, and encountered some of the Swedes who were out drinking. We said hi, and kept going. We found ourselves walking through a sort of red light district (there were hookers and guys from the Yakuza on all the corners). It wasn't much of a district (I think it was a few blocks of one street), and since we were a group of 6 we felt pretty safe.
When we got back to the Int. House, we went to Nick's room and played a card game called Mao (it's sort of like Uno, but has more rules, and you aren't told the rules ahead of time. Whoever wins a round gets to add a new rule, but doesn't tell anyone what it is. You get a card as penalty every time you break a rule, and everyone can enforce the rules they know). Lane was the only one who'd played before, so he won the first round. The next two rounds were won by Monica, who forgot to add a rule each time. I won the three rounds after that, and people were having trouble figuring out my rules (Monica said she'd figured it out), but I had only made a rule that said "do A if B happens" and since they didn't like penalties they started doing A all the time.
After I'd won the third time they decided to play Psychiatrist. It's a game where someone leaves the room, and the rest of the people decide what their disorder is. The person who left then comes in and has to figure out what the disorder is. Zen was the Psychiatrist, and it took him forever to figure out that our disorder was that we were the person to our left (when asked a question we answer how we think the person to our left would answer). After he figured it out we went to bed, since it was already 3:30 AM.
On Monday I slept in till about eleven (it was National Sports and Health Day, so no school), and then called the lady who was giving away all the free stuff. I got an answering machine, so I hung up and tried calling the lady with the free TV. She was there, so I took the subway up to the end of the line and walked to her apartment. She covered it in a bag, since it was raining, and gave it to me. She'd gotten a bigger TV, and said she'd been offering her old TV to people for about 6 months, but even though people said they would no one ever came to pick it up.
I carried it back to the subway station, and took the subway down town so that I could catch a bus back to the Int. House. By the time I got back my arms were really sore from carrying it, and I was a bit wet from the rain, but I was glad to have a TV. Unfortunately she only gave me the TV and the remote control, but no antenna cable, so I had to go back downtown to buy one.
The bus downtown dropped me off at Sendai station, so I went in to see if DDR was the music game of the week at the video game arcade there. It wasn't, but I decided to play anyway. It cost me 400¥ to play doubles. I played Silent Hill, Still You're in my Heart, and Paranoia KCET, and failed Paranoia KCET right before the end because I was to exhausted. It felt really good to finally play doubles again.
While at the station, I picked up a free map of Sendai at the information center. It's quite detailed, and is in English. I'm surprised that they're giving out such a good map for free.
Right by the station is a used book store called "Book Off" which I'd heard was good, so I decided to go in and have a look. The store was on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors of the building. The first floor was entirely dedicated to manga (Japanese comic books). I'm told that the smaller stores only have manga. I got the first volume of Yaiba and Ranma 1/2 for 100¥ each. I've watched part of the anime series for each and like them both. There are some other series I'd like to read, but I didn't know how to find them (and they had Yaiba and Ranma 1/2 volumes in several places, so I'm not sure if they had a system anyway). The 3rd floor is normal books in Japanese. The 4th floor had magazines, video games, DVDs, and lots of CDs. I looked through the games and DVDs, but most of the stuff I'd consider buying cost 3,000¥ or more (that's like $30 for a used CD!), which I thought was too much. I can likely get them in the US in English for that price or perhaps even less. I grabbed a CD off of the 100¥ table, since I sort of wanted to get something but didn't want to pay the expensive prices they had for the stuff that interested me. I figured that if I liked the CD I'd be happy, and if I didn't I'd only wasted about a dollar. I like the CD, even though I can't understand most of the lyrics. It's a CD of ballads.
I then went to Daiei, and got a 3m cable for 1,600¥ or so. I also bought some groceries, and a plate of sushi for dinner. Daiei has fresh food for sale, and toward 7:30 or 8:00 PM they give 10% or 30% discounts on a bunch of their stuff.
When I got back I discovered that in my room the TV jack was behind my bed, and not behind my desk like in the other rooms I've seen, so right now I'm using my kitchen table as a TV stand. I connected the TV to my laptop, and then put iTunes on the TV screen and used it to listen to a CD I'd bought at Book Off. The TV has stereo speakers that sound better than my laptop speakers.
Once again I stayed up late, but this time it was because I was channel surfing Japanese TV. One channel had a show for learning Italian, and another had an old English movie with Japanese subtitles.
Tuesday morning I had my second class. It's a math class called "Introduction to Numerical methods in Science and Engineering," and is being co-taught by 3 engineering professors. Two are from the Chemical Engineering Department. We didn't do anything the first lecture other than find out what the class was going to cover, how it was going to be graded, and what the definitions of "round off error" and "truncation error" are. Our grade will be 60% from homework and 40% from the final. The prof. is going to photocopy the pages of the textbook we need and give them to us. We have 14 lectures (counting this one), and will cover 22 chapters. It'll be quite fast paced. Before class I went back to the Int. Student Office and picked up the first part of my scholarship. I they gave me 25,000¥ in cash, and will deposit 80,000¥ into my bank account at the end of each month.
After class I went to the lab, where I did audio chat with my parent for a while. At 1:00 PM everyone went down to the river for an imoni party. It's a tradition in this region. Basically, you take a big pot, put it on a fire, and cook up a stew. There were several kinds of vegetables in it, and my lab made 3 different varieties. One was miso flavored, and had beef in it. One was soy sauce flavored, and had chicken in it. I'm not sure what the third flavor was, because I didn't get a chance to try it. I also had half of a fish they'd grilled on the fire (it tasted ok when I drowned it with soy sauce), a potato, and what I think was probably a sweet potato. Most of them drank beer and sake, but I had diet Pepsi Twist since I don't drink. It was cold and overcast, so at about 4:00 PM we headed back to the lab. I enjoyed the meal and the fellowship. I stayed until about 10 PM, catching up on email, surfing the web, and getting my accounts set up here in the lab.
Unfortunately it had started raining shortly after we got back, and was still raining when I left to go home, so I got soaked.
At home I turned on the TV again, and one of the channels was showing a movie where the characters spoke German sometimes and Japanese sometimes. It was really confusing, because I know a bit of both languages.
Wednesday morning (today!) I slept in again, since I don't have class on Wednesdays. I tried calling the lady with the free stuff again, and found out that she was in Tokyo and wouldn't get back till this evening. Hopefully I can contact her before she throws it all away.
I rode my bicycle to campus, and arrived at around 1:00. On the way, my breaks squeaked like crazy. The back break uses a drum instead of the rubber break pads we have back home.
I chatted with my father for a while, then looked at digital cameras online for a while, and have been typing this journal entry for maybe 2 hours now. It's almost 10 PM, so I'll try to finish quickly and then post it and go home.
Some more random thoughts about Japan:
- At the stores they don't have shopping carts. They do have carts you can put your shopping basket on though.
- The cashier takes stuff out of your basket, scans it, and puts it into another basket. Then she (I've seen only a few male cashiers) gives you a plastic bag for you to put the stuff in. I don't see why they make you bag it when they could just as easily put it into a bag themselves instead of putting it into another basket.
- All the gas stations I've seen are full service. They don't have pumps sticking up out of the ground. The guy motions to someone, and they lower the hose down and he pumps your gas for you and then they raise it up again.
- I can't find folders in any of the stores here that sell school supplies. They sell binders, loose leaf paper, and plastic sheets to put pages in, but not folders. The only folder I've seen my entire time hear is one that they gave us at orientation with all our forms in it.
- Japanese use cash for everything, but don't like to hand money directly to people. If you get money, it's always in a money envelope. At the stores, you put your money into a tray and the clerk picks it up. If there's change, they put it on top of the receipt and hand that to you.
- The subway system seems better than the bus. You go farther for less money, and the subway comes more often. The only problem is that it doesn't go to as many locations.
Comments:
Post a Comment
