Monday, October 20, 2003
Weekend Wanderings
10/19/03
Friday night there was a note in my mailbox saying that the water would be cut off from 9 AM to 4 PM so that the water tank could be cleaned. I didn't realize that the date it was going to be cut off was Friday and not Saturday (they must have put the note in our boxes after I checked my mail on Thurs. morning), so I decided to do my laundry Friday night. I went up to the 5th floor (where the machines are) and discovered that there was no soap. Last time I did laundry someone had told me that the Int. House provided the soap that was in the corner of the room, so last time I used up what was in that box. Since there isn't any soap there and it's been a week, I think that it probably was someone else's soap and that the Int. House doesn't provide soap. I feel bad about using up someone else's soap, but perhaps it was left over from someone who moved out. The guy who was in my room before me left some extension cords and an unopened bottle of cooking oil for me when he moved out. Anyway, I bought a box of soap and did my laundry.
While I was waiting for for my laundry to finish I talked with some of the guys on my floor, and watched them play Smash Brothers for a while. It seems most of the people on my floor have either brought game systems or bought them here. Several of them are playing Final Fantasy X 2.0 in Japanese. I think I'd like to get a VCR so that I can record some of the anime that shows on TV at inconvenient times, and also perhaps a game system. Unfortunately, game systems and games are really expensive here. Used games here often cost more than the new games back home. It would be good Japanese practice though.
Saturday I slept in until exactly 11:00 AM. I then showered, ate breakfast, and watched anime until about 2:00 or so. Tim (who is in the room next to me) was cooking spaghetti sauce, so I talked with him for a while. He'd started at about 1:30, and said it would be done around 6:00. At one point he mentioned a big grocery store called Seiyu, which he said was the best grocery store in our vicinity. Since I'd never been there, I set off on my bicycle to try to find the place. It was on a hand drawn map they'd given us when we moved in, but I had trouble matching what I saw on the map with what I saw in the neighborhood. I kept going in the general direction it should be, and eventually got to a big street. From the street I could see a big Seiyu sign a few blocks from where I was, so I went in that direction and found the place.
Seiyu was probably a little bit bigger than the grocery store under Daiei, so I'll probably do most of my shopping here now. I got about 2,000¥ worth of groceries, and headed back. I tried following the map back, but was unsuccessful in tracing my path on the map. I ended up just riding in the general direction of the Int. House until I found some streets that I recognized. Hopefully I'll get better at getting back and forth between here and there.
When I got back I played ping-pong for a while with a bunch of people, and then we went into one of the lounges and played Mao for a while. At about 5:30 PM we were getting hungry, so we decided to split up to get food and planned to meet up again at 7:30 PM. Someone suggested that we buy drinks, so Jeff (our resident alcohol expert) set off with Zen to get some drinks. I ate a box of sushi I'd gotten from Seiyu, which was OK but not as good as it looked.
While I was washing my dishes after eating I turned the TV on and the channel was showing a program that teaches Japanese sign language. I found it quite interesting, since I'd never realized that sign language differed so much from country to country. One amusing thing about the program was that one of the words they were teaching was the word for "older brother." The sign for this is putting up your middle finger and then moving your hand up. They went through a whole bunch of example sentences, all of which involved them giving other people the finger. I told Norm about this, and he laughed for quite a while.
At 7:30 PM we gather in the lounge again, and Jeff and Zen had come back with a few cans of beer, a (really) cheap wine, and a huge bottle of sake (turns out the sake was 110 proof!). I brought my bottle of Lime Ginger-ale, since I don't drink. Several other people saw us and came to join the fun, bringing our numbers up to 12 or 13. Lane tried to run a drinking game, but that didn't work too well because a number of those who had joined also don't drink. We ended up playing 12 player Mao (we had 3 decks of cards shuffled together so it wasn't too bad). Lane won the first round, and thus got to make up a new rule. His rule was that every time an Ace was played, the language of the game switched between English and Japanese. If you said anything in the wrong language you got a penalty. I won the next round, and people started groaning. None of them (except Monica) had been able to figure out my rule the last time we played, even though it was really simple (much simpler than at least one of the base rules). This time I made a rule that I though would be REALLY obvious, but which was still fun. Almost everyone got it when I enforced it the second time, but there were one or two people who didn't get it until the third or fourth time. What was really amusing though is that at some points there were people who didn't remember the rule, and so they drew a card for their turn instead of playing a card that the rule allowed them to play. One time four people in a row drew cards, and when the fifth person played his card you could see the other four people kicking themselves for their stupidity.
At 10:50 PM we stopped, since they lock the lounges at 11 PM and we wanted to get the food and drinks out of the room before they came. You aren't supposed to have food or drink in the lounge, but you can smoke there. There really isn't any other place for people to gather in the building, so it's not a very good situation. Basically the only place where there's room for people to gather has a no food or drink rule.
Saturday afternoon I'd seen Lars and Fransisco as they were on their way out to go to a mall for some window shopping, and Lars told me he'd like to come to church with me on Sunday. Fransisco said he'd also like to come, and said that he'd been thinking about starting a Bible study in the Int. House. We decided to meet at 9:30 AM Sunday morning. Later on Nick said he'd also like to come to church, and I told him about the Bible study. He said he'd be there.
Sunday I woke up, was tired, and so went to sleep for a bit longer. I ended up getting up at 8:45 AM, which was barely early enough. I showered, at then turned the TV on at 9:00 to see if I'd read the TV schedule correctly. Sure enough, there was an anime show on. I'm not sure what the show is called, but it's for little kids and so I was able to understand a fair amount of it. I finished breakfast just in time. As I was walking to the lobby, where we were going to meet, I met Lars and Fransisco. I told them Nick said he'd come, so we went to the lobby and waited for a few minutes, but he didn't show up. Since the lobby was full of people preparing for the Int. Festival we went to the lounge on my floor. We prayed (each in our own language), and then looked at a passage from the first chapter of John. While we were discussing it, some of the festival people came and asked to use the room, so we relocated to Lars's room which was just down the hall. There Fransisco shared a story about how God had been working during his trip to Japan. He's from Guatemala. He took the plane to LA, and stayed the night there. At breakfast the next morning he saw some Japanese businessmen, so he said "Ohayoo gozaimasu" (good morning) to them, and they invited him to join them. One of them gave him a considerable amount of Yen. Fransisco didn't know why he'd gotten the money, but he went back to his room and got a small gift from Guatemala to give to the Japanese guy as thanks. When Fransisco checked in for his flight to Japan he was assigned to an aisle seat near the front of the plane. He asked if they could give him a window seat, and so they gave him one near the back of the plane. As they were boarding, he noticed that there was a guy sitting right by him who was reading a Bible. He asked the guy if he was a missionary, and the guy said yes. They talked for a few hours, and then the missionary gave Fransisco a CD with the Bible on it in MP3 form. As thanks Fransisco decided to give him the money he'd gotten from the businessman. The missionary was really surprised, and thanked Fransisco, and then told Fransisco that he'd been worrying quite a bit because he didn't hadn't had all of the money he needed for this missionary trip. This money, from the Japanese businessman, through Fransisco, was the answer to the missionary's prayer.
We ended by singing a short song in German that Lars taught us (based on the verse about "When two or three are gathered in my name ...") and then each prayed The Lord's Prayer in our own language. It was fun to have 3 guys from 3 different countries and 3 different languages join together as brothers in Christ. We plan to meet every Sunday.
Today is the International Festival here in the Int. House. They've got lots of booth set up outside, and will be doing presentations, dances, etc. Admission is free, but you can buy a ticket for 1,000¥ (1,200¥ at the door) which will let you sample 3 of the dishes that people from various countries have made. I got my ticket last night. Less cooking for me :)
Well, I met Lars as I was going out to get some of the food at the Festival. We got some fried bananas (I didn't know what they were when we got them, but they didn't taste very much like banana so they were edible) at the Philippine stand, and then watched a few dances on the stage. After that I got some food from the "Latin America" stand, Lars got some Iranian food, and we both got Fried Cinnamon Apples at the German stand. They were good, but I'd never seen anything like it in Germany (neither had Lars). The lady at the stand said she was German and that it really was German.
The entertainment was pretty good. We saw an interesting dance from Indonesia, where there were about 8 or 9 men kneeled down really close to each other, folded their arms across their chests, and danced with their torsos (leaning behind each other and stuff like that). I'm surprised that they didn't knock each other over. We also saw 4 Vietnamese girls sing and dance, and a group of Japanese drummers.
NTT (one of the telephone companies here) has a booth where you could get a free 3 minute call to anywhere in the world on your cell phone. They also gave you an alarm clock for signing up for it. I'm going to let one of the other guys use my phone since it's in the middle of the night in Madison right now and I can do audio chat with my parents anyway. The alarm clock is really nice. It keeps track of the year, month, date, day, and time. It also displays the temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit, and has a timer that can count up or down. You can even set the amount of time the alarm clock snoozes for when you hit snooze.
I went to church with Lars Sunday evening. We waited for Nick and Fransisco, but didn't see them. The bus was about 10 min. late in coming, and was really crowded, but even though we didn't get to church until about 6:05 (service is supposed to start at 6) they hadn't started yet. Some guy I hadn't seen before preached about the fear of God. Unfortunately, he wasn't a very good speaker (even worse than the one last week) because he was so nervous that his voice cracked and that he stuttered. He also tried to summarize several Bible stories and pull one verse out of them that applied to what he was trying to say, but his summaries weren't very good and in some cases were more speculation than fact. I'm under the impression that the guy who preached the first week is the regular pastor, so hopefully he'll preach most of the time.
Lars said that he enjoyed the service, and would like to visit again. He knew one of the songs we sang, which I found a bit surprising. I was also surprised by the number of people there; there were at least twice as many people as the first week I went.
We just missed a bus back, and didn't want to wait 25 min. for the next one, so we ended up walking back. It only took about 20 min, so I may just do that in the future unless the weather is bad.
Back at the Int. House the International Festival was having a dance party in the lobby. They were selling non-alcoholic drinks for 100¥ and alcohol for 200¥. There were quite a few people crowded in there, and despite the "No Smoking" signs some people were smoking. It was hot, crowded, loud, dark, and smoky, so I went back to my room. Most of the other people on my floor were dancing (or at least trying to pick up Japanese girls), so I ended up watching TV.
I caught what I think was the last half hour of a "One Piece" special ("One Piece" is a really long anime series), and then watched most of a movie called "Tricked" or something like that. The movie was about a girl who told some rural villagers that she was a god. There were several other people there who also called themselves gods, and the all went about doing magic tricks and card tricks to try to convince the villagers that they were the real god and the other ones were fakes. Ever time the girl did a trick or had one pulled on her the trick was explained in some fashion. I knew how about half of them worked before the explanation was given. After that ended I watched a special about Yumeji Itoshi, who evidently was part of a famous comedian duo. They showed some tapes of his routines, and it was very similar to Abbot & Costello (it relied on misunderstandings, puns, and things like that). I think I got about half of the jokes.
Friday night there was a note in my mailbox saying that the water would be cut off from 9 AM to 4 PM so that the water tank could be cleaned. I didn't realize that the date it was going to be cut off was Friday and not Saturday (they must have put the note in our boxes after I checked my mail on Thurs. morning), so I decided to do my laundry Friday night. I went up to the 5th floor (where the machines are) and discovered that there was no soap. Last time I did laundry someone had told me that the Int. House provided the soap that was in the corner of the room, so last time I used up what was in that box. Since there isn't any soap there and it's been a week, I think that it probably was someone else's soap and that the Int. House doesn't provide soap. I feel bad about using up someone else's soap, but perhaps it was left over from someone who moved out. The guy who was in my room before me left some extension cords and an unopened bottle of cooking oil for me when he moved out. Anyway, I bought a box of soap and did my laundry.
While I was waiting for for my laundry to finish I talked with some of the guys on my floor, and watched them play Smash Brothers for a while. It seems most of the people on my floor have either brought game systems or bought them here. Several of them are playing Final Fantasy X 2.0 in Japanese. I think I'd like to get a VCR so that I can record some of the anime that shows on TV at inconvenient times, and also perhaps a game system. Unfortunately, game systems and games are really expensive here. Used games here often cost more than the new games back home. It would be good Japanese practice though.
Saturday I slept in until exactly 11:00 AM. I then showered, ate breakfast, and watched anime until about 2:00 or so. Tim (who is in the room next to me) was cooking spaghetti sauce, so I talked with him for a while. He'd started at about 1:30, and said it would be done around 6:00. At one point he mentioned a big grocery store called Seiyu, which he said was the best grocery store in our vicinity. Since I'd never been there, I set off on my bicycle to try to find the place. It was on a hand drawn map they'd given us when we moved in, but I had trouble matching what I saw on the map with what I saw in the neighborhood. I kept going in the general direction it should be, and eventually got to a big street. From the street I could see a big Seiyu sign a few blocks from where I was, so I went in that direction and found the place.
Seiyu was probably a little bit bigger than the grocery store under Daiei, so I'll probably do most of my shopping here now. I got about 2,000¥ worth of groceries, and headed back. I tried following the map back, but was unsuccessful in tracing my path on the map. I ended up just riding in the general direction of the Int. House until I found some streets that I recognized. Hopefully I'll get better at getting back and forth between here and there.
When I got back I played ping-pong for a while with a bunch of people, and then we went into one of the lounges and played Mao for a while. At about 5:30 PM we were getting hungry, so we decided to split up to get food and planned to meet up again at 7:30 PM. Someone suggested that we buy drinks, so Jeff (our resident alcohol expert) set off with Zen to get some drinks. I ate a box of sushi I'd gotten from Seiyu, which was OK but not as good as it looked.
While I was washing my dishes after eating I turned the TV on and the channel was showing a program that teaches Japanese sign language. I found it quite interesting, since I'd never realized that sign language differed so much from country to country. One amusing thing about the program was that one of the words they were teaching was the word for "older brother." The sign for this is putting up your middle finger and then moving your hand up. They went through a whole bunch of example sentences, all of which involved them giving other people the finger. I told Norm about this, and he laughed for quite a while.
At 7:30 PM we gather in the lounge again, and Jeff and Zen had come back with a few cans of beer, a (really) cheap wine, and a huge bottle of sake (turns out the sake was 110 proof!). I brought my bottle of Lime Ginger-ale, since I don't drink. Several other people saw us and came to join the fun, bringing our numbers up to 12 or 13. Lane tried to run a drinking game, but that didn't work too well because a number of those who had joined also don't drink. We ended up playing 12 player Mao (we had 3 decks of cards shuffled together so it wasn't too bad). Lane won the first round, and thus got to make up a new rule. His rule was that every time an Ace was played, the language of the game switched between English and Japanese. If you said anything in the wrong language you got a penalty. I won the next round, and people started groaning. None of them (except Monica) had been able to figure out my rule the last time we played, even though it was really simple (much simpler than at least one of the base rules). This time I made a rule that I though would be REALLY obvious, but which was still fun. Almost everyone got it when I enforced it the second time, but there were one or two people who didn't get it until the third or fourth time. What was really amusing though is that at some points there were people who didn't remember the rule, and so they drew a card for their turn instead of playing a card that the rule allowed them to play. One time four people in a row drew cards, and when the fifth person played his card you could see the other four people kicking themselves for their stupidity.
At 10:50 PM we stopped, since they lock the lounges at 11 PM and we wanted to get the food and drinks out of the room before they came. You aren't supposed to have food or drink in the lounge, but you can smoke there. There really isn't any other place for people to gather in the building, so it's not a very good situation. Basically the only place where there's room for people to gather has a no food or drink rule.
Saturday afternoon I'd seen Lars and Fransisco as they were on their way out to go to a mall for some window shopping, and Lars told me he'd like to come to church with me on Sunday. Fransisco said he'd also like to come, and said that he'd been thinking about starting a Bible study in the Int. House. We decided to meet at 9:30 AM Sunday morning. Later on Nick said he'd also like to come to church, and I told him about the Bible study. He said he'd be there.
Sunday I woke up, was tired, and so went to sleep for a bit longer. I ended up getting up at 8:45 AM, which was barely early enough. I showered, at then turned the TV on at 9:00 to see if I'd read the TV schedule correctly. Sure enough, there was an anime show on. I'm not sure what the show is called, but it's for little kids and so I was able to understand a fair amount of it. I finished breakfast just in time. As I was walking to the lobby, where we were going to meet, I met Lars and Fransisco. I told them Nick said he'd come, so we went to the lobby and waited for a few minutes, but he didn't show up. Since the lobby was full of people preparing for the Int. Festival we went to the lounge on my floor. We prayed (each in our own language), and then looked at a passage from the first chapter of John. While we were discussing it, some of the festival people came and asked to use the room, so we relocated to Lars's room which was just down the hall. There Fransisco shared a story about how God had been working during his trip to Japan. He's from Guatemala. He took the plane to LA, and stayed the night there. At breakfast the next morning he saw some Japanese businessmen, so he said "Ohayoo gozaimasu" (good morning) to them, and they invited him to join them. One of them gave him a considerable amount of Yen. Fransisco didn't know why he'd gotten the money, but he went back to his room and got a small gift from Guatemala to give to the Japanese guy as thanks. When Fransisco checked in for his flight to Japan he was assigned to an aisle seat near the front of the plane. He asked if they could give him a window seat, and so they gave him one near the back of the plane. As they were boarding, he noticed that there was a guy sitting right by him who was reading a Bible. He asked the guy if he was a missionary, and the guy said yes. They talked for a few hours, and then the missionary gave Fransisco a CD with the Bible on it in MP3 form. As thanks Fransisco decided to give him the money he'd gotten from the businessman. The missionary was really surprised, and thanked Fransisco, and then told Fransisco that he'd been worrying quite a bit because he didn't hadn't had all of the money he needed for this missionary trip. This money, from the Japanese businessman, through Fransisco, was the answer to the missionary's prayer.
We ended by singing a short song in German that Lars taught us (based on the verse about "When two or three are gathered in my name ...") and then each prayed The Lord's Prayer in our own language. It was fun to have 3 guys from 3 different countries and 3 different languages join together as brothers in Christ. We plan to meet every Sunday.
Today is the International Festival here in the Int. House. They've got lots of booth set up outside, and will be doing presentations, dances, etc. Admission is free, but you can buy a ticket for 1,000¥ (1,200¥ at the door) which will let you sample 3 of the dishes that people from various countries have made. I got my ticket last night. Less cooking for me :)
Well, I met Lars as I was going out to get some of the food at the Festival. We got some fried bananas (I didn't know what they were when we got them, but they didn't taste very much like banana so they were edible) at the Philippine stand, and then watched a few dances on the stage. After that I got some food from the "Latin America" stand, Lars got some Iranian food, and we both got Fried Cinnamon Apples at the German stand. They were good, but I'd never seen anything like it in Germany (neither had Lars). The lady at the stand said she was German and that it really was German.
The entertainment was pretty good. We saw an interesting dance from Indonesia, where there were about 8 or 9 men kneeled down really close to each other, folded their arms across their chests, and danced with their torsos (leaning behind each other and stuff like that). I'm surprised that they didn't knock each other over. We also saw 4 Vietnamese girls sing and dance, and a group of Japanese drummers.
NTT (one of the telephone companies here) has a booth where you could get a free 3 minute call to anywhere in the world on your cell phone. They also gave you an alarm clock for signing up for it. I'm going to let one of the other guys use my phone since it's in the middle of the night in Madison right now and I can do audio chat with my parents anyway. The alarm clock is really nice. It keeps track of the year, month, date, day, and time. It also displays the temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit, and has a timer that can count up or down. You can even set the amount of time the alarm clock snoozes for when you hit snooze.
I went to church with Lars Sunday evening. We waited for Nick and Fransisco, but didn't see them. The bus was about 10 min. late in coming, and was really crowded, but even though we didn't get to church until about 6:05 (service is supposed to start at 6) they hadn't started yet. Some guy I hadn't seen before preached about the fear of God. Unfortunately, he wasn't a very good speaker (even worse than the one last week) because he was so nervous that his voice cracked and that he stuttered. He also tried to summarize several Bible stories and pull one verse out of them that applied to what he was trying to say, but his summaries weren't very good and in some cases were more speculation than fact. I'm under the impression that the guy who preached the first week is the regular pastor, so hopefully he'll preach most of the time.
Lars said that he enjoyed the service, and would like to visit again. He knew one of the songs we sang, which I found a bit surprising. I was also surprised by the number of people there; there were at least twice as many people as the first week I went.
We just missed a bus back, and didn't want to wait 25 min. for the next one, so we ended up walking back. It only took about 20 min, so I may just do that in the future unless the weather is bad.
Back at the Int. House the International Festival was having a dance party in the lobby. They were selling non-alcoholic drinks for 100¥ and alcohol for 200¥. There were quite a few people crowded in there, and despite the "No Smoking" signs some people were smoking. It was hot, crowded, loud, dark, and smoky, so I went back to my room. Most of the other people on my floor were dancing (or at least trying to pick up Japanese girls), so I ended up watching TV.
I caught what I think was the last half hour of a "One Piece" special ("One Piece" is a really long anime series), and then watched most of a movie called "Tricked" or something like that. The movie was about a girl who told some rural villagers that she was a god. There were several other people there who also called themselves gods, and the all went about doing magic tricks and card tricks to try to convince the villagers that they were the real god and the other ones were fakes. Ever time the girl did a trick or had one pulled on her the trick was explained in some fashion. I knew how about half of them worked before the explanation was given. After that ended I watched a special about Yumeji Itoshi, who evidently was part of a famous comedian duo. They showed some tapes of his routines, and it was very similar to Abbot & Costello (it relied on misunderstandings, puns, and things like that). I think I got about half of the jokes.
Comments:
Post a Comment
