Saturday, November 15, 2003
Ekiden
11/15/03
On Monday there was a Welcome Party for all of the Engineering foreign students and for the people who are assigned as their tutors. I hadn't seen my tutor all day, and I wasn't sure if he was going to show up or what, but I went to the building where it was being held and he eventually found me there. They had several tables set up with sushi, meat, yaki soba, and fruit. They also had a bunch of beer, and a few bottles of juice and water. After the opening remarks, they left us to eat and socialize. They'd removed all the chairs, so we had to stand. I ended up walking around the room several times visiting the tables to get food, but mainly only talked with my tutor. Since he was wearing a name tag I was finally able to learn his name (Sawada-san). I've had little success with learning the names of the people in my lab so far, and since I've been here for a month and a half now I feel a too embarrassed to ask them what their names are. Anyway, the food disappeared all too quickly. After a while, they did a quiz game called "How well do you know about Tohoku and Japan" (yes, the used incorrect grammar). They would ask a question and give three possible answers. You would go to the right side of the room if you thought it was the first answer, the back for the second answer, and the left for the third answer. I knew almost none of the answers (evidently the pheasant is the national bird, not the ibis). During this time I grabbed the last few scraps of food from each table we passed. I saw several others doing the same. There really wasn't enough food by American standards, but Sawada-san was really impressed with how much I ate.
Tuesday, after my Kanji class, I saw Christian, and asked if he wanted to return with me. I told him I was planning on stopping by the Seiyu on my way back, but since he was in a hurry he decided not to go with me. Lane, however, hadn't ever gone the route I was going to go, and he didn't know about that Seiyu, so he decided to come with me. He seemed quite happy to know about that place, especially since it has an ATM and a post office right next door. I'd never noticed either one before.
Tuesday I also finally got my co-op card in the mail. You can put money onto it and then use that to pay for stuff from the co-op store and the cafeterias. You don't save any money or anything, it's just a convenience. This card, I pointed out to Joey, will make it easier for people like him not to go hungry. If you put the money you need for food onto the card, you can't use it to buy PDAs and stuff like that, with the result that you don't spend the money you need for food on other things (like Joey did). I put 10,000¥ on my card, and since Wednesday (today is Saturday) I've used more than 2,000¥ of that.
Earlier in the week I'd been asked to run in the Ekiden, which is a big relay race that the labs do every year. The entire route is 10km (and includes going down and then back up the mountain), and each team has 10 runners, but the legs vary from 200m to 2.4km. I was asked to run one of the 200m legs, so I said sure. On Wednesday some of the guys decided to practice (I'd seen other teams practicing all month), so I went with them. I ended up running one of the 2km legs with the guy I was talking with, and discovered that it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.
Later on Wednesday one of the guys who sits across from me in the lab (Iwamoto-san?) asked if I'd like to come see his presentation. Since I'd never seen one here before and I have to present on Friday, I said yes. We went down to the floor below us, where he proceeded to give his presentation. Most of the people from the lab ended up showing up. He'd just gotten the microphone adapter for his iPod, and was planning on using it to record the presentation and Yoshizawa-sensei's comments, but he forgot to hit the record button. During the presentation, there was another earthquake. When it started he slowed down, and then stopped talking, but after a few seconds started up again. Throughout the presentation Yoshizawa-sensei kept asking questions, and if I understand correctly he shot down the whole experiment that Iwamoto-san was planning on doing. I hope they go easy on me.
After the presentation, Yoshizawa-sensei told me that I should ask questions about anything I don't understand. I didn't ask any questions, because I understood too little to be able to ask anything. At this moment I also realized that the presentation I give will probably have to be in Japanese.
On Thursday, right after my Kanji class, I got picked up to a Bible Study that some missionaries here in Japan are hosting. It's run by a guy named Jim, who is a professor of some sort at Tohoku. The woman who picked me up is Rosanne, who is associated with the Bible Reading Club that I went to a few weeks ago. The night was actually split into 3 categories: food, games, and Bible study. The food was OK, but that's to be expected when you have one person (Jim's wife) preparing dinner for a bunch of people (I think that this week there were about 18 people there, which Jim said was a small group). We played two games. The first was Telephone, with English phrases, so it was good English practice for all the Japanese students there. The second was sort of like Telephone, except that instead of using words you had to pass on the sentence using gestures, which was hard but fun. The sentence we had to pass on was "taking your first driving lesson" (he told us to turn the gesture into a -ing phrase). For the study we split up into 3 groups of about 6 people, and went through the passage in our groups. One of the ladies in my group was really impressed by Jesus, and was quite excited. She kept saying the Japanese equivalent of "Jesus is so cool!"
After the study I got a ride back to campus (since my bicycle was there) with a Biochemical Engineering student and his fiancé. I ended up getting back to my room after 10 PM. That morning I'd gotten an email from a friend of mine named Seth asking about my cell phone, so I got out my user manual and tried to look up some information about it. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find much that I think would be useful to him, but I did discover that my phone has the ability to do data transfer using a bluetooth adapter. Since my laptop has bluetooth built in, I would be able to transfer data between my phone and my laptop. I'll try to go to Yodabashi camera sometime to see how much an adapter like that costs.
Friday I went to the Bible Reading Club, and when I got there Hirooka-san was the only other person there. Rosanne told me that she wouldn't be coming this week, so I thought that it might be the two of us again this time. However, around 5 o'clock (it started at 4:30) several more people showed up, so that by the end we had a total of 8 people The study went fairly well (although this one was in Japanese so I had a fair amount of difficulty understanding most of the discussion). After the study most of us went to the cafeteria and ate dinner together.
Friday night I finally did laundry again. I was down to 2 changes of clean clothes. I've got all the newly washed clothes (I can't call them clean clothes) hanging in my room now, and so the humidity in there is fairly high. Someone told me that if I complained to the desk they'd get me a dehumidifier. I may do that if I find that they aren't drying fast enough.
Saturday morning I got up at 7:50 to go down to campus and meet my team for the Ekiden. I think that there were around 70 teams or so (54 actual teams, and a bunch of "open" teams). My lab's team was an "open" team, which meant that our team didn't fit the rules for who could run (evidently the real teams have to have 2 professors as members). The winning team completed it in 48:55. I have no idea how we did, but we were pretty far back.
Oh, I forgot to tell you. They decided that I was fast, so they switched me with Iwamoto-san so that I ended up running the anchor leg, which was 1.8km instead of the second leg which was only 200m. By the time I got the "baton" (it was actually a strip of cloth you put around your neck) I'm pretty sure the first teams had already finished. I managed to overtake 6 people while I ran though.
I'd decided that even though this didn't really count since we were an open team, and even though we were so far behind, I was going to do my very best. Which I did. After crossing the finish line I couldn't stand up anymore, and I was probably more exhausted than I've ever been after a race (even after cross country in high school). They were planning on taking a picture of me coming in, but didn't expect me to come so soon and thus weren't ready for me. I wish I'd timed myself.
Anyway, after the race we all went back to the lab and had an odon party. Basically, they had a pot with all sorts of things in it. I have no idea what most of them were, but one thing looked like a rice cake and another one looked like part of an octopus. There were shishkabobs which I was told were cow-something, but I didn't understand what the something was. It looked and tasted like fat. All in all it was pretty good.
It is now quarter to 9, and I think my body has healed enough for me to be able to walk again without too much pain. After the race it was really painful and difficult to walk. I've also got a headache, which I almost always get after a race, so I'm going to go home, get something to eat, and go to bed.
On Monday there was a Welcome Party for all of the Engineering foreign students and for the people who are assigned as their tutors. I hadn't seen my tutor all day, and I wasn't sure if he was going to show up or what, but I went to the building where it was being held and he eventually found me there. They had several tables set up with sushi, meat, yaki soba, and fruit. They also had a bunch of beer, and a few bottles of juice and water. After the opening remarks, they left us to eat and socialize. They'd removed all the chairs, so we had to stand. I ended up walking around the room several times visiting the tables to get food, but mainly only talked with my tutor. Since he was wearing a name tag I was finally able to learn his name (Sawada-san). I've had little success with learning the names of the people in my lab so far, and since I've been here for a month and a half now I feel a too embarrassed to ask them what their names are. Anyway, the food disappeared all too quickly. After a while, they did a quiz game called "How well do you know about Tohoku and Japan" (yes, the used incorrect grammar). They would ask a question and give three possible answers. You would go to the right side of the room if you thought it was the first answer, the back for the second answer, and the left for the third answer. I knew almost none of the answers (evidently the pheasant is the national bird, not the ibis). During this time I grabbed the last few scraps of food from each table we passed. I saw several others doing the same. There really wasn't enough food by American standards, but Sawada-san was really impressed with how much I ate.
Tuesday, after my Kanji class, I saw Christian, and asked if he wanted to return with me. I told him I was planning on stopping by the Seiyu on my way back, but since he was in a hurry he decided not to go with me. Lane, however, hadn't ever gone the route I was going to go, and he didn't know about that Seiyu, so he decided to come with me. He seemed quite happy to know about that place, especially since it has an ATM and a post office right next door. I'd never noticed either one before.
Tuesday I also finally got my co-op card in the mail. You can put money onto it and then use that to pay for stuff from the co-op store and the cafeterias. You don't save any money or anything, it's just a convenience. This card, I pointed out to Joey, will make it easier for people like him not to go hungry. If you put the money you need for food onto the card, you can't use it to buy PDAs and stuff like that, with the result that you don't spend the money you need for food on other things (like Joey did). I put 10,000¥ on my card, and since Wednesday (today is Saturday) I've used more than 2,000¥ of that.
Earlier in the week I'd been asked to run in the Ekiden, which is a big relay race that the labs do every year. The entire route is 10km (and includes going down and then back up the mountain), and each team has 10 runners, but the legs vary from 200m to 2.4km. I was asked to run one of the 200m legs, so I said sure. On Wednesday some of the guys decided to practice (I'd seen other teams practicing all month), so I went with them. I ended up running one of the 2km legs with the guy I was talking with, and discovered that it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.
Later on Wednesday one of the guys who sits across from me in the lab (Iwamoto-san?) asked if I'd like to come see his presentation. Since I'd never seen one here before and I have to present on Friday, I said yes. We went down to the floor below us, where he proceeded to give his presentation. Most of the people from the lab ended up showing up. He'd just gotten the microphone adapter for his iPod, and was planning on using it to record the presentation and Yoshizawa-sensei's comments, but he forgot to hit the record button. During the presentation, there was another earthquake. When it started he slowed down, and then stopped talking, but after a few seconds started up again. Throughout the presentation Yoshizawa-sensei kept asking questions, and if I understand correctly he shot down the whole experiment that Iwamoto-san was planning on doing. I hope they go easy on me.
After the presentation, Yoshizawa-sensei told me that I should ask questions about anything I don't understand. I didn't ask any questions, because I understood too little to be able to ask anything. At this moment I also realized that the presentation I give will probably have to be in Japanese.
On Thursday, right after my Kanji class, I got picked up to a Bible Study that some missionaries here in Japan are hosting. It's run by a guy named Jim, who is a professor of some sort at Tohoku. The woman who picked me up is Rosanne, who is associated with the Bible Reading Club that I went to a few weeks ago. The night was actually split into 3 categories: food, games, and Bible study. The food was OK, but that's to be expected when you have one person (Jim's wife) preparing dinner for a bunch of people (I think that this week there were about 18 people there, which Jim said was a small group). We played two games. The first was Telephone, with English phrases, so it was good English practice for all the Japanese students there. The second was sort of like Telephone, except that instead of using words you had to pass on the sentence using gestures, which was hard but fun. The sentence we had to pass on was "taking your first driving lesson" (he told us to turn the gesture into a -ing phrase). For the study we split up into 3 groups of about 6 people, and went through the passage in our groups. One of the ladies in my group was really impressed by Jesus, and was quite excited. She kept saying the Japanese equivalent of "Jesus is so cool!"
After the study I got a ride back to campus (since my bicycle was there) with a Biochemical Engineering student and his fiancé. I ended up getting back to my room after 10 PM. That morning I'd gotten an email from a friend of mine named Seth asking about my cell phone, so I got out my user manual and tried to look up some information about it. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find much that I think would be useful to him, but I did discover that my phone has the ability to do data transfer using a bluetooth adapter. Since my laptop has bluetooth built in, I would be able to transfer data between my phone and my laptop. I'll try to go to Yodabashi camera sometime to see how much an adapter like that costs.
Friday I went to the Bible Reading Club, and when I got there Hirooka-san was the only other person there. Rosanne told me that she wouldn't be coming this week, so I thought that it might be the two of us again this time. However, around 5 o'clock (it started at 4:30) several more people showed up, so that by the end we had a total of 8 people The study went fairly well (although this one was in Japanese so I had a fair amount of difficulty understanding most of the discussion). After the study most of us went to the cafeteria and ate dinner together.
Friday night I finally did laundry again. I was down to 2 changes of clean clothes. I've got all the newly washed clothes (I can't call them clean clothes) hanging in my room now, and so the humidity in there is fairly high. Someone told me that if I complained to the desk they'd get me a dehumidifier. I may do that if I find that they aren't drying fast enough.
Saturday morning I got up at 7:50 to go down to campus and meet my team for the Ekiden. I think that there were around 70 teams or so (54 actual teams, and a bunch of "open" teams). My lab's team was an "open" team, which meant that our team didn't fit the rules for who could run (evidently the real teams have to have 2 professors as members). The winning team completed it in 48:55. I have no idea how we did, but we were pretty far back.
Oh, I forgot to tell you. They decided that I was fast, so they switched me with Iwamoto-san so that I ended up running the anchor leg, which was 1.8km instead of the second leg which was only 200m. By the time I got the "baton" (it was actually a strip of cloth you put around your neck) I'm pretty sure the first teams had already finished. I managed to overtake 6 people while I ran though.
I'd decided that even though this didn't really count since we were an open team, and even though we were so far behind, I was going to do my very best. Which I did. After crossing the finish line I couldn't stand up anymore, and I was probably more exhausted than I've ever been after a race (even after cross country in high school). They were planning on taking a picture of me coming in, but didn't expect me to come so soon and thus weren't ready for me. I wish I'd timed myself.
Anyway, after the race we all went back to the lab and had an odon party. Basically, they had a pot with all sorts of things in it. I have no idea what most of them were, but one thing looked like a rice cake and another one looked like part of an octopus. There were shishkabobs which I was told were cow-something, but I didn't understand what the something was. It looked and tasted like fat. All in all it was pretty good.
It is now quarter to 9, and I think my body has healed enough for me to be able to walk again without too much pain. After the race it was really painful and difficult to walk. I've also got a headache, which I almost always get after a race, so I'm going to go home, get something to eat, and go to bed.
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