Sunday, October 05, 2003
Starting to get settled
Well, I’ve been fairly busy. On Friday we went downtown and fill out our forms for alien registration, national health care, and then opened accounts at the bank. Group Mori was a bunch of Japanese ladies (the Japanese men are probably all working and so couldn’t take part. I wonder if there are any men in the group?). They helped us fill out the forms and treated us to lunch at a small restaurant in the SS30 building. SS30 is Sky Symphony 30, which is a 30 story building downtown. We had a great view of the city from up there. My ears popped when we went up the elevator. Anyway, they let us each chose something that was no more than 1,000¥. They had a free “salad bar” which had some salad ingredients, but didn’t have any lettuce, and a free soup bar, which had 3 kinds of soup. We all ordered Teriyaki Beef with Saffron rice. I ordered extra rice (which was also free) but they never brought it. The meal was served with lemon water to drink. It tasted very good, but unfortunately in Japan people can smoke in restaurants. People can also smoke in parts of the international house, so I sometimes have to smell it as I walk the halls or sometimes when I’m in my room. Anyway, after the meal they served you your choice of coffee, tea, or juice. I guess that was supposed to be desert or something.
After the meal we walked back to the bank to pick up our bank books. They said they’d mail us our “cash card” in about a week so that we can use the ATMs here in town. They misspelled my middle name for my account, so I told them. They took the bank book away for a few minutes, and when they brought it back they had crossed out the printed name and rewritten it correctly in pen. I hope they changed it in their computer system as well.
During this time I met a few more people. Lin is a guy from China whom I met at the Ward Office, and Lars is a guy from Düsseldorf in Germany. Lars and Vaughn and I went to the 100¥ shop, and bought a bunch of stuff. I spent 1,050¥ (sales tax is 5%), and got a bowl, pan, Tupperware-type of container, sponges, dish soap, place mats (I think that’s what they are. I bought them thinking they were dish towels), a male-male composite video cable (for my laptop), two garbage cans (we have to separate plastic, recyclable trash, and combustible trash), and then a can of fruit drops (it looked just like the one the little girl in “Grave of the Fireflies” had, so I just had to buy it). We then headed to Daiei (an 8 story department store downtown; this is where the guys bought their alarm clocks a few days ago) where I bought a pillow (980¥, the cheapest non-bean bag pillow they had) and we looked at bedding (currently we’re renting ours). After Daiei, Vaughn said he wanted to head back to meet some people to go buy a bicycle (in Japan “bike” means motorbike), but Lars and I tried to find one of the free internet access places downtown. After walking around for a while, trying to match the map up to what we saw, we finally found the place. It’s on the fifth floor of a building called “AER.” Here you can use a computer with internet access for free, with a time limit of 30 min. Lars and I signed up for a computer. The computers were Japanese laptops that were chained to the tables. They have Japanese keyboard layouts, which are based off of the QWERTY keyboard, but have more keys and have the non-letter characters in different places. Some keys have as many as 4 different things that key will type, but I can’t figure out how to get some of them. While Lars was typing an email, he accidentally hit a key that would be part of the space bar on a normal keyboard. This key changed the language setting so that everything you type gets turned into kanji (the Chinese characters). We couldn’t figure out how to change it back, but quitting the browser and then restarting it again reverted the setting. I replied to a few emails, but didn’t type much because there wasn’t much time left and because I use the Dvorak keyboard layout and I didn’t know how to switch the keyboard on these machines.
When we got back to the international house I dropped off my purchases and then headed to a nearby supermarket (Japanese call them “supa”) that Lars told me about. I bought a 1.5 L bottle of orange Qoo, some ramen, and a 4-pack of day-old croissants. It cost me about 1,000¥ for the lot. I had the ramen for dinner, which made Friday the first day I’d had more than 1 meal. Saturday I ate all 4 croissants for breakfast, and then went to look for a bicycle with Vaughn. He’d seen a bicycle shop nearby, so we walked there but all their bicycles were way too expensive. The one in the window was more than 17 thousand yen, which is about $170. We ended up going to Daiei, where we’d seen some bicycles for 6,980¥. They were having a “10% off” sale, so I bought one of those bicycles (a red one, since most of the ones I’ve seen around are silver), and Vaughn bought a more expensive one. Mine came with a light and a basket and has only one gear. Almost all of the bicycles I’ve seen in town are this same model. The one Vaughn bought is smaller, but has dirt tires and is foldable. It also doesn’t have a basket (he wouldn’t buy one with a basket) but his doesn’t have a light. We’re not sure if you’re required to have a light if you ride at night. I think his cost about 13,000¥.
We rode our bicycles back to the International house, which took quite a while because the map we have only has about 3 city streets named, and there are only visible street signs on a few of the major streets. We got back at about 2:30 PM, and were pretty hungry. Vaughn wanted to try a Japanese McDonald's (here they call the place “McDonald’s Hamburger”), so we took the bus back downtown. We stopped at the 100¥ shop while trying to find McDonald's (we knew there was one somewhere in the arcade, but didn’t know where). I got a basin to do dishes in, and a “face towel” to use as a dish towel. I didn’t see any dish towels.
McDonald's was interesting. They didn’t have much of a menu posted (and some of the things they sold, like the deserts, weren’t on the menu). All of the stuff there seemed to be normal McDonald's food, except that they didn’t have anything like the Quarter pounder. They did have a “Teriyaki McBurger.” They also didn’t have anything like the “Super-size” option, and all of their “Large” sized stuff was what we would probably call a medium. The drink selection was interesting: Grape Fantana, Coca-Cola, Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and a different flavor of Qoo (it was green, but I don’t know what flavor it was supposed to be, since I got the ginger ale). Vaughn went back to get another large fries (which the Japanese call “fry potato”) because he was so hungry.
After McDonald's we decided to head to the electronics store. It’s called “Yodabashi Camera,” but it’s a huge store with all sorts of electronics. The store had two levels, and had about the floor area of the West Towne Best Buy, but it had maybe 2 or 3 times the number of electronics. Stuff was packed in everywhere; it was really amazing. They had some of the smallest, thinnest laptops I’ve ever seen. One was only about 2 cm thick when it was closed. I’d be afraid that I’d break it in half if I had one. They also had a good selection of Apple computers. I looked at their electronic dictionaries and their rice cookers, but didn’t get either one yet. I’d like to do more research before I do. Vaughn bought some speakers for his walkman (he’d wanted to buy a CD player, but I suggested that if he had a walkman he could just buy speakers and save money) for 3,000¥. Since we were in the area, we went back to the internet place (it’s called “Net-U!” but when they spell it in Japanese they spell it with the “!” before the “t” for some reason) and checked our email. Vaughn spent about 25 min. trying to type an email. He kept on hitting the “change to Kanji” key instead of the space bar (the space bar is only about 2.5 keys wide on those keyboards). Eventually he succeeded it sending one email, which he sent to everyone he was going to send email to. Tomorrow we get a tour of campus, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to get an internet connection there for my laptop. Someone said that they had an unprotected wireless network at the International Student Office on campus, so I may try to use that. If things don’t work out, I may end up paying for wireless dial-up access. It goes at 36 Kb modem speeds, but is wireless (it uses a personal information network, or something like that that they’ve got set up here in Japan. It’s a different system than the cell phones use). That, however, costs about 5,000¥ ($50) a month.
Today is Sunday, so I’m going to try to find a church to go to. There are several churches on the map that Group Mori gave us, and according to the information on the map the Sendai Baptist Church has a service in English at 6:00 PM, so I’m going to try to go to that.
This afternoon I played DDR a bit using a controller I brought from home, and then John stopped by and we played ping-pong. Several Swedes joined us for a while, and Lars stopped by. After ping-pong we went to John’s room and watched Sumo wrestling for a bit. I then took the bus to church.
Evidently the map was a bit off; it said that Sendai Baptist Church had an English service at 6:00 PM. In reality, the building belongs to the Sendai Baptist Church, which is a Japanese church that has services in the morning. What’s at 6 is the Sendai English Fellowship.
The English Fellowship was a pleasant surprise. I knew all of the worship songs we sang, and the sermon (evidently they’ve been going through Ephesians, but starting today the pastor is going to interrupt that with a mini-series on “What we believe” and giving a reason for it) wasn’t all that disappointing. I think I’ll go there a few weeks more at least to see how much I really like it. It’s pretty small; there were only about 20 people there. I met a girl named Karin (pronounced kah-RIN) who is part of the JET program and arrived about 2.5 weeks ago. It was about 2/3 westerners and 1/3 Japanese people. The Japanese I met seemed to be there for English practice. I don’t think they were Christians. I think that the sermon was at such a high level that they wouldn’t have been able to get anything out of it unless they already knew English really well, which is too bad. The pastor said he’d been reading some books on the topic, but couldn’t remember the titles (he did remember that one was by Ravi Zacharias) and his preaching seemed to just be paraphrasing the books. It sounded like notes from a textbook.
One interesting thing that I’ve noticed but keep forgetting to write is that our neighborhood seems to have a barber pole everywhere you look. There seems to be one about every block. Another thing is the size of the cars. Most of the cars and trucks here are miniature size. The mini-vans and even trucks would fit just fine in the compact car parking spaces back home. These things usually have really small tires, no trunk, and tend to be really boxy. Curves waste too much space.
The busses here are also interesting. When they stop for more than about 30 seconds (like for a stop light or some bus stops) they turn off their engines. I remember being told years ago that school busses, trucks, and other diesel powered vehicles use up a lot of gas when they start and that it’s more efficient to keep them running, so I’m a bit confused about this. I would assume they are doing this to try to conserve gas, but if that’s true then one of these countries is seriously mistaken.
Payment for the bus can be made with cash or prepaid cards, and fares are different depending on how far you travel. When you get on (in the middle of the bus) you either take a number or you run your card through the machine. When you get off you go to the front of the bus, and if you’re using the card you run it through the machine there and it deducts the fare from the card and prints the balance on the back. If you are paying with cash you look at the big sign at the front to see how much the fare from that number to the current stop is. You then drop the coins and the number into a little box next to the driver. I’m not exactly sure yet how to figure out where to stand to get on the bus if I’m not at Sendai Station or the International House, since there are usually several stops on one city block and different busses stop at the different stops. Not all of the busses that come to the correct stop are the correct bus, but it’s a bit hard for me to figure out what the correct bus is because all the signs are in Kanji. People stand in a single file line at the stop when they are waiting for the bus. We don’t have enough people in Madison taking the busses to need that kind of organization. Perhaps they do it here because there are so few seats on the bus. Except for the back of the bus, there is only one seat on each side of the bus for each row of seats, with the majority of the space left open for people to stand.
When I got back from church I stood around in the hall watching some of the guys cook and eat a bunch of dishes. They gave me some left over Udon after they were done. They offered food earlier, but I didn’t want to take it because I hadn’t provided anything. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to join in later and learn how to cook. I made ramen earlier in a wok that I bought at the 100¥ shop. I don’t think you’re supposed to use a wok that way, but it worked out much better than I had hoped. Unfortunately, after I washed my wok it started to rust. I guess I got what I paid for.
Tomorrow is a tour of campus. I’ll probably take my laptop with me to see if I can get internet access there.
I find myself wondering if I’m over jet lag or something. I’ve been waking up between 4 and 7 AM (sometimes I’ve been able to go back to sleep), but that would be like waking up between 2 and 5 PM in Madison. Also, I’ve been ready to drop to sleep the moment I hit the bed when I’ve gotten back to my room the last few nights, even though I’ve been getting back between about 6 to 9 PM (4 to 7 AM in Madison). It’s as if I’ve got reverse jet lag or something. I wonder if it may just be some noise or something that wakes me up, and that the exhaustion of trying to live in a different country is making me tired. The sun here comes up early in the morning, and it gets dark really early in the evening.
After the meal we walked back to the bank to pick up our bank books. They said they’d mail us our “cash card” in about a week so that we can use the ATMs here in town. They misspelled my middle name for my account, so I told them. They took the bank book away for a few minutes, and when they brought it back they had crossed out the printed name and rewritten it correctly in pen. I hope they changed it in their computer system as well.
During this time I met a few more people. Lin is a guy from China whom I met at the Ward Office, and Lars is a guy from Düsseldorf in Germany. Lars and Vaughn and I went to the 100¥ shop, and bought a bunch of stuff. I spent 1,050¥ (sales tax is 5%), and got a bowl, pan, Tupperware-type of container, sponges, dish soap, place mats (I think that’s what they are. I bought them thinking they were dish towels), a male-male composite video cable (for my laptop), two garbage cans (we have to separate plastic, recyclable trash, and combustible trash), and then a can of fruit drops (it looked just like the one the little girl in “Grave of the Fireflies” had, so I just had to buy it). We then headed to Daiei (an 8 story department store downtown; this is where the guys bought their alarm clocks a few days ago) where I bought a pillow (980¥, the cheapest non-bean bag pillow they had) and we looked at bedding (currently we’re renting ours). After Daiei, Vaughn said he wanted to head back to meet some people to go buy a bicycle (in Japan “bike” means motorbike), but Lars and I tried to find one of the free internet access places downtown. After walking around for a while, trying to match the map up to what we saw, we finally found the place. It’s on the fifth floor of a building called “AER.” Here you can use a computer with internet access for free, with a time limit of 30 min. Lars and I signed up for a computer. The computers were Japanese laptops that were chained to the tables. They have Japanese keyboard layouts, which are based off of the QWERTY keyboard, but have more keys and have the non-letter characters in different places. Some keys have as many as 4 different things that key will type, but I can’t figure out how to get some of them. While Lars was typing an email, he accidentally hit a key that would be part of the space bar on a normal keyboard. This key changed the language setting so that everything you type gets turned into kanji (the Chinese characters). We couldn’t figure out how to change it back, but quitting the browser and then restarting it again reverted the setting. I replied to a few emails, but didn’t type much because there wasn’t much time left and because I use the Dvorak keyboard layout and I didn’t know how to switch the keyboard on these machines.
When we got back to the international house I dropped off my purchases and then headed to a nearby supermarket (Japanese call them “supa”) that Lars told me about. I bought a 1.5 L bottle of orange Qoo, some ramen, and a 4-pack of day-old croissants. It cost me about 1,000¥ for the lot. I had the ramen for dinner, which made Friday the first day I’d had more than 1 meal. Saturday I ate all 4 croissants for breakfast, and then went to look for a bicycle with Vaughn. He’d seen a bicycle shop nearby, so we walked there but all their bicycles were way too expensive. The one in the window was more than 17 thousand yen, which is about $170. We ended up going to Daiei, where we’d seen some bicycles for 6,980¥. They were having a “10% off” sale, so I bought one of those bicycles (a red one, since most of the ones I’ve seen around are silver), and Vaughn bought a more expensive one. Mine came with a light and a basket and has only one gear. Almost all of the bicycles I’ve seen in town are this same model. The one Vaughn bought is smaller, but has dirt tires and is foldable. It also doesn’t have a basket (he wouldn’t buy one with a basket) but his doesn’t have a light. We’re not sure if you’re required to have a light if you ride at night. I think his cost about 13,000¥.
We rode our bicycles back to the International house, which took quite a while because the map we have only has about 3 city streets named, and there are only visible street signs on a few of the major streets. We got back at about 2:30 PM, and were pretty hungry. Vaughn wanted to try a Japanese McDonald's (here they call the place “McDonald’s Hamburger”), so we took the bus back downtown. We stopped at the 100¥ shop while trying to find McDonald's (we knew there was one somewhere in the arcade, but didn’t know where). I got a basin to do dishes in, and a “face towel” to use as a dish towel. I didn’t see any dish towels.
McDonald's was interesting. They didn’t have much of a menu posted (and some of the things they sold, like the deserts, weren’t on the menu). All of the stuff there seemed to be normal McDonald's food, except that they didn’t have anything like the Quarter pounder. They did have a “Teriyaki McBurger.” They also didn’t have anything like the “Super-size” option, and all of their “Large” sized stuff was what we would probably call a medium. The drink selection was interesting: Grape Fantana, Coca-Cola, Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and a different flavor of Qoo (it was green, but I don’t know what flavor it was supposed to be, since I got the ginger ale). Vaughn went back to get another large fries (which the Japanese call “fry potato”) because he was so hungry.
After McDonald's we decided to head to the electronics store. It’s called “Yodabashi Camera,” but it’s a huge store with all sorts of electronics. The store had two levels, and had about the floor area of the West Towne Best Buy, but it had maybe 2 or 3 times the number of electronics. Stuff was packed in everywhere; it was really amazing. They had some of the smallest, thinnest laptops I’ve ever seen. One was only about 2 cm thick when it was closed. I’d be afraid that I’d break it in half if I had one. They also had a good selection of Apple computers. I looked at their electronic dictionaries and their rice cookers, but didn’t get either one yet. I’d like to do more research before I do. Vaughn bought some speakers for his walkman (he’d wanted to buy a CD player, but I suggested that if he had a walkman he could just buy speakers and save money) for 3,000¥. Since we were in the area, we went back to the internet place (it’s called “Net-U!” but when they spell it in Japanese they spell it with the “!” before the “t” for some reason) and checked our email. Vaughn spent about 25 min. trying to type an email. He kept on hitting the “change to Kanji” key instead of the space bar (the space bar is only about 2.5 keys wide on those keyboards). Eventually he succeeded it sending one email, which he sent to everyone he was going to send email to. Tomorrow we get a tour of campus, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to get an internet connection there for my laptop. Someone said that they had an unprotected wireless network at the International Student Office on campus, so I may try to use that. If things don’t work out, I may end up paying for wireless dial-up access. It goes at 36 Kb modem speeds, but is wireless (it uses a personal information network, or something like that that they’ve got set up here in Japan. It’s a different system than the cell phones use). That, however, costs about 5,000¥ ($50) a month.
Today is Sunday, so I’m going to try to find a church to go to. There are several churches on the map that Group Mori gave us, and according to the information on the map the Sendai Baptist Church has a service in English at 6:00 PM, so I’m going to try to go to that.
This afternoon I played DDR a bit using a controller I brought from home, and then John stopped by and we played ping-pong. Several Swedes joined us for a while, and Lars stopped by. After ping-pong we went to John’s room and watched Sumo wrestling for a bit. I then took the bus to church.
Evidently the map was a bit off; it said that Sendai Baptist Church had an English service at 6:00 PM. In reality, the building belongs to the Sendai Baptist Church, which is a Japanese church that has services in the morning. What’s at 6 is the Sendai English Fellowship.
The English Fellowship was a pleasant surprise. I knew all of the worship songs we sang, and the sermon (evidently they’ve been going through Ephesians, but starting today the pastor is going to interrupt that with a mini-series on “What we believe” and giving a reason for it) wasn’t all that disappointing. I think I’ll go there a few weeks more at least to see how much I really like it. It’s pretty small; there were only about 20 people there. I met a girl named Karin (pronounced kah-RIN) who is part of the JET program and arrived about 2.5 weeks ago. It was about 2/3 westerners and 1/3 Japanese people. The Japanese I met seemed to be there for English practice. I don’t think they were Christians. I think that the sermon was at such a high level that they wouldn’t have been able to get anything out of it unless they already knew English really well, which is too bad. The pastor said he’d been reading some books on the topic, but couldn’t remember the titles (he did remember that one was by Ravi Zacharias) and his preaching seemed to just be paraphrasing the books. It sounded like notes from a textbook.
One interesting thing that I’ve noticed but keep forgetting to write is that our neighborhood seems to have a barber pole everywhere you look. There seems to be one about every block. Another thing is the size of the cars. Most of the cars and trucks here are miniature size. The mini-vans and even trucks would fit just fine in the compact car parking spaces back home. These things usually have really small tires, no trunk, and tend to be really boxy. Curves waste too much space.
The busses here are also interesting. When they stop for more than about 30 seconds (like for a stop light or some bus stops) they turn off their engines. I remember being told years ago that school busses, trucks, and other diesel powered vehicles use up a lot of gas when they start and that it’s more efficient to keep them running, so I’m a bit confused about this. I would assume they are doing this to try to conserve gas, but if that’s true then one of these countries is seriously mistaken.
Payment for the bus can be made with cash or prepaid cards, and fares are different depending on how far you travel. When you get on (in the middle of the bus) you either take a number or you run your card through the machine. When you get off you go to the front of the bus, and if you’re using the card you run it through the machine there and it deducts the fare from the card and prints the balance on the back. If you are paying with cash you look at the big sign at the front to see how much the fare from that number to the current stop is. You then drop the coins and the number into a little box next to the driver. I’m not exactly sure yet how to figure out where to stand to get on the bus if I’m not at Sendai Station or the International House, since there are usually several stops on one city block and different busses stop at the different stops. Not all of the busses that come to the correct stop are the correct bus, but it’s a bit hard for me to figure out what the correct bus is because all the signs are in Kanji. People stand in a single file line at the stop when they are waiting for the bus. We don’t have enough people in Madison taking the busses to need that kind of organization. Perhaps they do it here because there are so few seats on the bus. Except for the back of the bus, there is only one seat on each side of the bus for each row of seats, with the majority of the space left open for people to stand.
When I got back from church I stood around in the hall watching some of the guys cook and eat a bunch of dishes. They gave me some left over Udon after they were done. They offered food earlier, but I didn’t want to take it because I hadn’t provided anything. Perhaps I’ll have a chance to join in later and learn how to cook. I made ramen earlier in a wok that I bought at the 100¥ shop. I don’t think you’re supposed to use a wok that way, but it worked out much better than I had hoped. Unfortunately, after I washed my wok it started to rust. I guess I got what I paid for.
Tomorrow is a tour of campus. I’ll probably take my laptop with me to see if I can get internet access there.
I find myself wondering if I’m over jet lag or something. I’ve been waking up between 4 and 7 AM (sometimes I’ve been able to go back to sleep), but that would be like waking up between 2 and 5 PM in Madison. Also, I’ve been ready to drop to sleep the moment I hit the bed when I’ve gotten back to my room the last few nights, even though I’ve been getting back between about 6 to 9 PM (4 to 7 AM in Madison). It’s as if I’ve got reverse jet lag or something. I wonder if it may just be some noise or something that wakes me up, and that the exhaustion of trying to live in a different country is making me tired. The sun here comes up early in the morning, and it gets dark really early in the evening.
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