Thursday, December 18, 2003
Midterm Presentation and "Bounenkai"
I find that I'm forgetting the interesting details of what's happened on the days I haven't written about yet, so in addition to writing entries for the past days I'll try to write the current entries as well. Hope this doesn't result in the past entries not getting written at all.
12/18/03 - Thursday
This morning they were testing the fire detectors in our rooms. The guy came to my room to test mine about 5 minutes before I left for class, so I got to see how he did it. He had a long stick with a hemisphere at the end that he put over the fire detector. He then pushed a button on the stick, and held it down until the light on the fire detector started flashing, at which point he said thanks and left. After that my room smelled like cigarette smoke, so I think that thing was just pumping out cigarette smoke when he pushed the button.
Today I had my midterm presentation in my lab. All of the masters students presented on Tuesday, and today all the Undergraduate Seniors presented. This time the presentation audience wasn't just other people from my lab. I think there were 2 labs there in addition to Yoshizawa Lab (my lab) and Abe Lab (the lab I was originally assigned to and which does most things together with my lab).
Presentations started at 1:00, so I had only an hour after my class got out to hike up the mountain, grab a quick lunch, and then get to my lab. I made it with about 10 min. to spare, so I was able to download my email before heading off to the building we were presenting in.
The presentations were split into two groups, with a small break half way through. I was the 5th presenter, which was the last one before the break. I got the feeling that they basically just shortened the planned break to fit me in, but that may just be my imagination. Most of the people in my lab thought that I would be presenting first. I was supposed to present for 10 min, but the rest of them were supposed to present for 15 min. and then answer questions for 5 min. They only people who asked questions ended up being the professors, and they were fairly (I want to use the Japanese word "kibishii" here and can't think of an exact English translation) mean or strict or something along those lines (after thinking for a while, I think harsh may be the closest I can get to the meaning I want). I overheard him say that to himself about one of his questions. During this time I was glad that I wasn't going to have to answer questions like that.
They were running about 8 min. late by the time it got to be my turn, and in my practice my presentation had been about 12.5 min, so I tried to talk fast. I'm told I managed to do it in 8 or 9 min, which they said was good because they were running behind schedule. Unfortunately, after my presentation, the guy running it asked if anyone had any questions for me. One person asked (in Japanese) about the size of UW-Madison, and I thought he was asking about the number of people, but I discovered afterward that he wanted to know how much area it covers. Then the professor I mentioned previously tried asking a rather "kibishii" question (in Japanese again) about my "first experiment," and I had trouble understanding what he was asking about. Yoshizawa eventually figured out that this guy thought that the paper I'd presented before was something that I'd done instead of something I'd read about, and so the guy dropped his question. All in all (I find myself using that phrase quite a bit) I think it went fairly well.
In the first part of my presentation I gave a 1 min. overview of Madison, which included some great aerial pictures of Madison that my father took. Most of the people there commented on what a beautiful place Madison is. I'll have to show the rest of the pictures I have to the people in the lab sometime. I've got quite a few pictures, since my father made a photo CD of Madison and our family for me to give to my conversation partner's family.
After the break I stayed through the next two presentations. I didn't understand much about them, but both of them involved neural networks so I wish I had been able to understand what they were presenting about. On my application to Tohoku I put down that I was interested in artificial intelligence, so that's probably why I got assigned to that lab in the first place. It probably would have been more interesting & beneficial to me to be there than where I am, but I like the people in my lab and they seem to like me so I'm not going to ask to be switched to a different lab. About a month after we'd been assigned to our labs the people running the program said that if our labs didn't fit our majors we should talk to them and they'd change us to a different lab, but I think that by that time I would have felt really bad about changing labs. I'd been there for a month, started getting to know the people, and anyway they'd been expecting me to be around. It would be like telling a friend you were coming over for dinner, and then when you get there you take a look at the food your friend prepared and say "I think I'll go eat at another friend's house."
After my kanji class I rode my bicycle downtown, since our labs were having what they call a "bounenkai." According to my dictionary that means "year-end party" but when the people in my lab talked about it in English they always said "drinking party." Guess which one is the more accurate translation :)
Downtown you aren't allowed to park you bicycle on the sidewalk (although many, many people do). The police sometimes remove bicycles parked on the sidewalks and you have to pay 1 or 2 thousand yen or so to get them back. Previously we (the people in the kaikan) have always parked on the sidewalk with all the other bicycles (figuring that I'd be fairly safe to park there since there were usually about 50 other bicycles parked there), but since Zen had his bicycle taken by the police a while ago I decided to play it safe and park in a bicycle parking area. The place I parked is under the intersection by Daiei, and since I'd never used it before I tried asking the attendant how the place was supposed to work. Unfortunately, this guy didn't know any English, and between my imperfect Japanese and his accent we had a hard time communicating. Here is what transpired:
0. I look at the sign at the entrance and think it says 50¥/day, but I'm not really sure and I can't read most of the sign anyway.
1. I walk in, go to the attendant's booth, and ask how the place works.
2. He says "Are you parking for a day or for a week?"
3. I say a day.
4. He says "So you'll pick it up tomorrow then?"
5. I say "No, only for tonight."
6. He says "That'll be 100¥."
7. I give him a 500¥ coin since I don't have any 100¥ coins on me at the moment.
8. He says "This is new. You can't use this. Is this all you have?"
9. I'm a bit confused.
10. He says "See, it's shiny. It's new."
11. I say "Oh."
12. He goes back into his booth, opens a drawer (this is the sort of drawer that you would keep scissors and glue in, not a money drawer), puts my 500¥ coin in and takes out a silver colored coin of the same size. Note that my coin and all the 500¥ coins I've seen in Japan so far have been gold colored. This is the first time I've seen a 500¥ coin that wasn't gold colored, so I find it a bit surprising that the machine wouldn't be able to take those coins.
13. He walks over to the machine on the wall, sticks his silver coin in, pushes the 50¥ button and gets a ticket and 450¥ in change. He then sticks the 50¥ in again and pushes the 50¥ button again, and gets another ticket.
14. He gives me the 400¥ in change the machine gave him.
15. He goes back into his booth, writes on both tickets, stamps one with tomorrow's date, and then hands the other one to me.
16. He comes out, and shows me how to use the rack to park my bicycle (more on this below)
17. He sticks the other ticket thing on the back of my bicycle, and tells me I can come pick it up tomorrow.
18. I look confused.
19. He says "You're coming to pick your bicycle up tomorrow, right?"
20. I say "No, I'm going home on my bicycle tonight."
21. He says "Where are you planing on going?"
22. I say I'm going to the shopping arcade (which is where the shop this party is being held at is located).
23. He says "Are you sure you're going to come back for your bicycle tonight?"
24. I say yes.
25. He says "Then it's only 50¥, and you don't need that ticket I gave you."
26. He gives me 50¥ back. I hope it's not his personal money, but I suspect it might be.
27. He says that they close the place at 9:40 (I'm fairly sure the sign outside said 10:00) so that if I want my bicycle to go home I need to come back before then.
28. He says that if I decide I want to leave my bicycle there after all I can come back and just give him the 50¥ back.
29. He shows me the stairs that go directly up to the arcade.
The parking area was a long hallway with racks for the bicycles. They have a slot on the ground and one above those. There's a bar that you pull out and down, and it has a slot for the bicycle tires. It has a nifty little part that clamps down on a wheel if it goes backward and releases the wheel if it goes forward.
After thanking the attendant I went up and walked through the mall toward the area that the map said should have the shop the party was going to be at. On the way I stopped at a 100¥ Shop and bought some wrapping paper and something I thought my sister would like. I'm probably not going to send any presents home for Christmas, but right now I plan on buying them and then bringing them back with me when I return to the US in August.
I was told that the store was near the McDonald's on the corner of 2 streets, and that although there would be some food at the party I should eat something small beforehand, so I stopped at the McDonald's and bought a hamburger. It only cost 84¥ (including 4¥ for tax), which I think may be cheaper than in the US.
Right when I walked out of McDonald's with my hamburger I saw a bunch of the people from my lab entering a shop that was only about 20 feet away. It's a good thing I saw them, because otherwise I would have walked right past it, thinking it wasn't THAT close to the McDonald's.
They had a big room prepared for us. I think we ended up being about 40 people. The place was "nomi-houdai," which means "all you can drink" (with a time limit, which in this case was 2 hours). They served a plate of meat, then a plate of chicken, then a salad, and then a fried rice. They also had lots of beer, and you could order (for no additional cost) other types of alcohol. The non-alcoholic drinks they had were: orange juice, grapefruit juice, coke, ginger ale, and Oolong tea. I drank orange juice. There was one other person near me who also wasn't drinking alcohol, but everyone else did. They tried to get both of us to drink by offering us different types of drinks. I tasted 3 of them, but I prefer the taste of orange juice to all three.
The first drink I tasted was called something like "Lemon Sour," and tasted somewhat like 50/50 (a grapefruit soda) with a tiny bit of alcohol mixed in. I didn't like it all that much, but it was better than I expected it to be. Iwamoto-san, the guy who's drink it was, was a bit disappointed about how diluted the alcohol in it was, but I guess that's what you should expect at a place that gives you all you can drink. The second one I tasted was a bright pink color and tasted like artificial grape flavor. I thought it didn't taste bad, except for the hint of alcohol. The third one I tasted was Japanese sake (which was fairly hot temperature-wise), and before I did Suzuki-san told me to be careful because it has a high alcohol content. I thought the taste was fairly good, except that I didn't like the taste of alcohol in it. I think my biggest problem with drinking is that I just don't like the taste of alcohol. I've tasted wine the times I've had a chance (like when they give free samples at Olive Garden, or at the France party I went to here), and I've never liked the taste. I probably would have been willing to drink the rest of the sake, but I really don't have any idea how much alcohol content it has or how much I can handle (I've never had more than a sip or two at a time), so I decided not to drink any more of it. Some people, like my tutor Sawada-san, drank quite a bit and turned quite red.
After a while people started moving around, and several other people came to talk with me. One was a drunken professor who didn't speak English. I had a really hard time understanding him. Kenji, the guy from France in my lab, seems to speak Japanese as well as the the rest of the people in my lab as far as I can tell, but he also had a hard time understanding the guy. I thought my difficulty in understanding was just a combination of my lack of Japanese ability, the guy being drunk, and the volume of noise in the room, but as it turns out the guy is from a northern part of Japan and evidently speaks with a heavy accent. He complimented me on how much I understood despite the accent. He tried to get both me and Kenji to drink sake with him, but we both turned him down. I told him I didn't drink, and Kenji said that he'd already had enough to drink. There was one thing he tried to tell us that we weren't able to understand though. He even asked Suzuki-san and some of the others to translate or explain the term he was using and although they knew the word they didn't have any idea of how to translate it into English or even how to make it's meaning understandable in Japanese. He said something about the Samurai era, and then said that things have changed and we should forget it. After discussing it for a while, Kenji eventually pulled out his dictionary and looked it up. It turns out it means "social obligation" or "doing something you don't want to do for the sake of human relations" or something to that effect. I think he was trying to say that we had a social obligation to drink sake with him or something like that.
During the course of the evening I was complimented on my pronunciation of Japanese, my listening comprehension, and on my ability to use chopsticks. I was told that little kids are made to pick up peas one at a time with chopsticks as practice.
Last week Seiichi-san, who organized this for us (or at least helped organize it), collected 3,200¥ from everyone to pay for this party. Thankfully, the lab has decided that for things like this the exchange students only have to pay half, so I only had to pay 1,600¥. Since I didn't really drink anything other than orange juice and the food wasn't all that great I'm glad I didn't have to pay more. It was fun, and for what I paid I'm satisfied.
At 9:00 our time was up, which was fairly good timing for me because I needed to go back and get my bicycle before they closed. Quite a few of them were heading to another store for the second party, which I hadn't known about until yesterday. I think it's just more of the same at another store and for a lower price.
When I got back to the bicycle parking area I waved to the attendant as I walked past, and he came out to talk with me. He asked me if I knew "Marukusu," which I couldn't understand. He tried several different variations of that pronunciation, and eventually said "You're from America, right?" I said yes, and then he said there was an American medicine called "Marukusu," at which point I figured out that he was trying to say "Malox." He then said that he used to work for Malox.
In the morning before class, when I'd been brushing my teeth, I'd noticed a bad smell I thought might be coming from the sink. There was a ring of white gunk around the drain, so I decided to wipe that up. When I tried, I discovered that there were 3 parts of the drain that come out easily, and all of them were covered with slime ranging from white to black in color. This slime smelled quite bad, so I started cleaning it off with paper towels, but had to stop to go to class. Thus when I got back tonight my room smelled like this slime. I cleaned up as much as I could, and think it should be OK for a while.
I then started writing this journal, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Mitsu and Tim, who told me that they just got done fighting on the roof. They used a mop and a broom, and did a mock battle. The interesting thing about it was that Tim knows how to fence and Mitsu knows Kendo, but they don't know how to fight the other style and thus didn't have any idea how they were supposed to attack or defend against the other style.
We then went into Joey's room and talked for a while. Mitsu started looking through a manga series called Rayearth (which was made into an anime, and 2 of the CDs I bought here were from that anime). He was reading out all the character names and wanted us to guess the naming scheme they used. Evidently, Nick had picked up on the scheme right away. None of us (Tim, Joey, Zen, and me) was able to figure it out. Eventually Mitsu said "think about the names and the fact that Nick got it," at which point I said "Cars," half-jokingly, since Nick knows so much about cars. If someone asked any of us "What does Nick know" we'd probably all answer "cars." Well, this turned out to be the correct answer. All of them were the names of car models, although none of us had ever heard of those models before.
After talking for a while longer I came back to my room, and spent another hour and a half finishing (I don't know how long I spent before Mitsu and Tim stopped by) this journal entry. It's now 2:15 AM, and I've got to get up for class in less than 5 hours, so I'm going to go to bed now. G'night.
Music Currently Playing: Yesterday, from the album "With Rayearth" (I mention this because I've got iTunes randomly playing through a playlist of over 4,000 songs and yet it happens to play a Rayearth song while I'm talking about Rayearth)
Random thoughts:
- There are quite a lot of commercials for Broadband cell phones and TV cell phones now. The new cell phones have video-conferencing abilities built into them.
- I've been eating a candybar/snack food thingy called "Choco Pie" ever since Lane gave me one a month or two ago when he got a box of them from his host mother. They're sort of like those Little Debbie or Hostes chocolate things (Ho-Hos?) except these aren't as sweet and these taste good.
- Lime Ginger Ale may be gone, but starting last week or maybe two weeks ago the stores have had "Orange Fizz Ginger Ale," which I've been drinking. It tastes fairly good as well.
12/18/03 - Thursday
This morning they were testing the fire detectors in our rooms. The guy came to my room to test mine about 5 minutes before I left for class, so I got to see how he did it. He had a long stick with a hemisphere at the end that he put over the fire detector. He then pushed a button on the stick, and held it down until the light on the fire detector started flashing, at which point he said thanks and left. After that my room smelled like cigarette smoke, so I think that thing was just pumping out cigarette smoke when he pushed the button.
Today I had my midterm presentation in my lab. All of the masters students presented on Tuesday, and today all the Undergraduate Seniors presented. This time the presentation audience wasn't just other people from my lab. I think there were 2 labs there in addition to Yoshizawa Lab (my lab) and Abe Lab (the lab I was originally assigned to and which does most things together with my lab).
Presentations started at 1:00, so I had only an hour after my class got out to hike up the mountain, grab a quick lunch, and then get to my lab. I made it with about 10 min. to spare, so I was able to download my email before heading off to the building we were presenting in.
The presentations were split into two groups, with a small break half way through. I was the 5th presenter, which was the last one before the break. I got the feeling that they basically just shortened the planned break to fit me in, but that may just be my imagination. Most of the people in my lab thought that I would be presenting first. I was supposed to present for 10 min, but the rest of them were supposed to present for 15 min. and then answer questions for 5 min. They only people who asked questions ended up being the professors, and they were fairly (I want to use the Japanese word "kibishii" here and can't think of an exact English translation) mean or strict or something along those lines (after thinking for a while, I think harsh may be the closest I can get to the meaning I want). I overheard him say that to himself about one of his questions. During this time I was glad that I wasn't going to have to answer questions like that.
They were running about 8 min. late by the time it got to be my turn, and in my practice my presentation had been about 12.5 min, so I tried to talk fast. I'm told I managed to do it in 8 or 9 min, which they said was good because they were running behind schedule. Unfortunately, after my presentation, the guy running it asked if anyone had any questions for me. One person asked (in Japanese) about the size of UW-Madison, and I thought he was asking about the number of people, but I discovered afterward that he wanted to know how much area it covers. Then the professor I mentioned previously tried asking a rather "kibishii" question (in Japanese again) about my "first experiment," and I had trouble understanding what he was asking about. Yoshizawa eventually figured out that this guy thought that the paper I'd presented before was something that I'd done instead of something I'd read about, and so the guy dropped his question. All in all (I find myself using that phrase quite a bit) I think it went fairly well.
In the first part of my presentation I gave a 1 min. overview of Madison, which included some great aerial pictures of Madison that my father took. Most of the people there commented on what a beautiful place Madison is. I'll have to show the rest of the pictures I have to the people in the lab sometime. I've got quite a few pictures, since my father made a photo CD of Madison and our family for me to give to my conversation partner's family.
After the break I stayed through the next two presentations. I didn't understand much about them, but both of them involved neural networks so I wish I had been able to understand what they were presenting about. On my application to Tohoku I put down that I was interested in artificial intelligence, so that's probably why I got assigned to that lab in the first place. It probably would have been more interesting & beneficial to me to be there than where I am, but I like the people in my lab and they seem to like me so I'm not going to ask to be switched to a different lab. About a month after we'd been assigned to our labs the people running the program said that if our labs didn't fit our majors we should talk to them and they'd change us to a different lab, but I think that by that time I would have felt really bad about changing labs. I'd been there for a month, started getting to know the people, and anyway they'd been expecting me to be around. It would be like telling a friend you were coming over for dinner, and then when you get there you take a look at the food your friend prepared and say "I think I'll go eat at another friend's house."
After my kanji class I rode my bicycle downtown, since our labs were having what they call a "bounenkai." According to my dictionary that means "year-end party" but when the people in my lab talked about it in English they always said "drinking party." Guess which one is the more accurate translation :)
Downtown you aren't allowed to park you bicycle on the sidewalk (although many, many people do). The police sometimes remove bicycles parked on the sidewalks and you have to pay 1 or 2 thousand yen or so to get them back. Previously we (the people in the kaikan) have always parked on the sidewalk with all the other bicycles (figuring that I'd be fairly safe to park there since there were usually about 50 other bicycles parked there), but since Zen had his bicycle taken by the police a while ago I decided to play it safe and park in a bicycle parking area. The place I parked is under the intersection by Daiei, and since I'd never used it before I tried asking the attendant how the place was supposed to work. Unfortunately, this guy didn't know any English, and between my imperfect Japanese and his accent we had a hard time communicating. Here is what transpired:
0. I look at the sign at the entrance and think it says 50¥/day, but I'm not really sure and I can't read most of the sign anyway.
1. I walk in, go to the attendant's booth, and ask how the place works.
2. He says "Are you parking for a day or for a week?"
3. I say a day.
4. He says "So you'll pick it up tomorrow then?"
5. I say "No, only for tonight."
6. He says "That'll be 100¥."
7. I give him a 500¥ coin since I don't have any 100¥ coins on me at the moment.
8. He says "This is new. You can't use this. Is this all you have?"
9. I'm a bit confused.
10. He says "See, it's shiny. It's new."
11. I say "Oh."
12. He goes back into his booth, opens a drawer (this is the sort of drawer that you would keep scissors and glue in, not a money drawer), puts my 500¥ coin in and takes out a silver colored coin of the same size. Note that my coin and all the 500¥ coins I've seen in Japan so far have been gold colored. This is the first time I've seen a 500¥ coin that wasn't gold colored, so I find it a bit surprising that the machine wouldn't be able to take those coins.
13. He walks over to the machine on the wall, sticks his silver coin in, pushes the 50¥ button and gets a ticket and 450¥ in change. He then sticks the 50¥ in again and pushes the 50¥ button again, and gets another ticket.
14. He gives me the 400¥ in change the machine gave him.
15. He goes back into his booth, writes on both tickets, stamps one with tomorrow's date, and then hands the other one to me.
16. He comes out, and shows me how to use the rack to park my bicycle (more on this below)
17. He sticks the other ticket thing on the back of my bicycle, and tells me I can come pick it up tomorrow.
18. I look confused.
19. He says "You're coming to pick your bicycle up tomorrow, right?"
20. I say "No, I'm going home on my bicycle tonight."
21. He says "Where are you planing on going?"
22. I say I'm going to the shopping arcade (which is where the shop this party is being held at is located).
23. He says "Are you sure you're going to come back for your bicycle tonight?"
24. I say yes.
25. He says "Then it's only 50¥, and you don't need that ticket I gave you."
26. He gives me 50¥ back. I hope it's not his personal money, but I suspect it might be.
27. He says that they close the place at 9:40 (I'm fairly sure the sign outside said 10:00) so that if I want my bicycle to go home I need to come back before then.
28. He says that if I decide I want to leave my bicycle there after all I can come back and just give him the 50¥ back.
29. He shows me the stairs that go directly up to the arcade.
The parking area was a long hallway with racks for the bicycles. They have a slot on the ground and one above those. There's a bar that you pull out and down, and it has a slot for the bicycle tires. It has a nifty little part that clamps down on a wheel if it goes backward and releases the wheel if it goes forward.
After thanking the attendant I went up and walked through the mall toward the area that the map said should have the shop the party was going to be at. On the way I stopped at a 100¥ Shop and bought some wrapping paper and something I thought my sister would like. I'm probably not going to send any presents home for Christmas, but right now I plan on buying them and then bringing them back with me when I return to the US in August.
I was told that the store was near the McDonald's on the corner of 2 streets, and that although there would be some food at the party I should eat something small beforehand, so I stopped at the McDonald's and bought a hamburger. It only cost 84¥ (including 4¥ for tax), which I think may be cheaper than in the US.
Right when I walked out of McDonald's with my hamburger I saw a bunch of the people from my lab entering a shop that was only about 20 feet away. It's a good thing I saw them, because otherwise I would have walked right past it, thinking it wasn't THAT close to the McDonald's.
They had a big room prepared for us. I think we ended up being about 40 people. The place was "nomi-houdai," which means "all you can drink" (with a time limit, which in this case was 2 hours). They served a plate of meat, then a plate of chicken, then a salad, and then a fried rice. They also had lots of beer, and you could order (for no additional cost) other types of alcohol. The non-alcoholic drinks they had were: orange juice, grapefruit juice, coke, ginger ale, and Oolong tea. I drank orange juice. There was one other person near me who also wasn't drinking alcohol, but everyone else did. They tried to get both of us to drink by offering us different types of drinks. I tasted 3 of them, but I prefer the taste of orange juice to all three.
The first drink I tasted was called something like "Lemon Sour," and tasted somewhat like 50/50 (a grapefruit soda) with a tiny bit of alcohol mixed in. I didn't like it all that much, but it was better than I expected it to be. Iwamoto-san, the guy who's drink it was, was a bit disappointed about how diluted the alcohol in it was, but I guess that's what you should expect at a place that gives you all you can drink. The second one I tasted was a bright pink color and tasted like artificial grape flavor. I thought it didn't taste bad, except for the hint of alcohol. The third one I tasted was Japanese sake (which was fairly hot temperature-wise), and before I did Suzuki-san told me to be careful because it has a high alcohol content. I thought the taste was fairly good, except that I didn't like the taste of alcohol in it. I think my biggest problem with drinking is that I just don't like the taste of alcohol. I've tasted wine the times I've had a chance (like when they give free samples at Olive Garden, or at the France party I went to here), and I've never liked the taste. I probably would have been willing to drink the rest of the sake, but I really don't have any idea how much alcohol content it has or how much I can handle (I've never had more than a sip or two at a time), so I decided not to drink any more of it. Some people, like my tutor Sawada-san, drank quite a bit and turned quite red.
After a while people started moving around, and several other people came to talk with me. One was a drunken professor who didn't speak English. I had a really hard time understanding him. Kenji, the guy from France in my lab, seems to speak Japanese as well as the the rest of the people in my lab as far as I can tell, but he also had a hard time understanding the guy. I thought my difficulty in understanding was just a combination of my lack of Japanese ability, the guy being drunk, and the volume of noise in the room, but as it turns out the guy is from a northern part of Japan and evidently speaks with a heavy accent. He complimented me on how much I understood despite the accent. He tried to get both me and Kenji to drink sake with him, but we both turned him down. I told him I didn't drink, and Kenji said that he'd already had enough to drink. There was one thing he tried to tell us that we weren't able to understand though. He even asked Suzuki-san and some of the others to translate or explain the term he was using and although they knew the word they didn't have any idea of how to translate it into English or even how to make it's meaning understandable in Japanese. He said something about the Samurai era, and then said that things have changed and we should forget it. After discussing it for a while, Kenji eventually pulled out his dictionary and looked it up. It turns out it means "social obligation" or "doing something you don't want to do for the sake of human relations" or something to that effect. I think he was trying to say that we had a social obligation to drink sake with him or something like that.
During the course of the evening I was complimented on my pronunciation of Japanese, my listening comprehension, and on my ability to use chopsticks. I was told that little kids are made to pick up peas one at a time with chopsticks as practice.
Last week Seiichi-san, who organized this for us (or at least helped organize it), collected 3,200¥ from everyone to pay for this party. Thankfully, the lab has decided that for things like this the exchange students only have to pay half, so I only had to pay 1,600¥. Since I didn't really drink anything other than orange juice and the food wasn't all that great I'm glad I didn't have to pay more. It was fun, and for what I paid I'm satisfied.
At 9:00 our time was up, which was fairly good timing for me because I needed to go back and get my bicycle before they closed. Quite a few of them were heading to another store for the second party, which I hadn't known about until yesterday. I think it's just more of the same at another store and for a lower price.
When I got back to the bicycle parking area I waved to the attendant as I walked past, and he came out to talk with me. He asked me if I knew "Marukusu," which I couldn't understand. He tried several different variations of that pronunciation, and eventually said "You're from America, right?" I said yes, and then he said there was an American medicine called "Marukusu," at which point I figured out that he was trying to say "Malox." He then said that he used to work for Malox.
In the morning before class, when I'd been brushing my teeth, I'd noticed a bad smell I thought might be coming from the sink. There was a ring of white gunk around the drain, so I decided to wipe that up. When I tried, I discovered that there were 3 parts of the drain that come out easily, and all of them were covered with slime ranging from white to black in color. This slime smelled quite bad, so I started cleaning it off with paper towels, but had to stop to go to class. Thus when I got back tonight my room smelled like this slime. I cleaned up as much as I could, and think it should be OK for a while.
I then started writing this journal, but was interrupted by a knock on the door. It was Mitsu and Tim, who told me that they just got done fighting on the roof. They used a mop and a broom, and did a mock battle. The interesting thing about it was that Tim knows how to fence and Mitsu knows Kendo, but they don't know how to fight the other style and thus didn't have any idea how they were supposed to attack or defend against the other style.
We then went into Joey's room and talked for a while. Mitsu started looking through a manga series called Rayearth (which was made into an anime, and 2 of the CDs I bought here were from that anime). He was reading out all the character names and wanted us to guess the naming scheme they used. Evidently, Nick had picked up on the scheme right away. None of us (Tim, Joey, Zen, and me) was able to figure it out. Eventually Mitsu said "think about the names and the fact that Nick got it," at which point I said "Cars," half-jokingly, since Nick knows so much about cars. If someone asked any of us "What does Nick know" we'd probably all answer "cars." Well, this turned out to be the correct answer. All of them were the names of car models, although none of us had ever heard of those models before.
After talking for a while longer I came back to my room, and spent another hour and a half finishing (I don't know how long I spent before Mitsu and Tim stopped by) this journal entry. It's now 2:15 AM, and I've got to get up for class in less than 5 hours, so I'm going to go to bed now. G'night.
Music Currently Playing: Yesterday, from the album "With Rayearth" (I mention this because I've got iTunes randomly playing through a playlist of over 4,000 songs and yet it happens to play a Rayearth song while I'm talking about Rayearth)
Random thoughts:
- There are quite a lot of commercials for Broadband cell phones and TV cell phones now. The new cell phones have video-conferencing abilities built into them.
- I've been eating a candybar/snack food thingy called "Choco Pie" ever since Lane gave me one a month or two ago when he got a box of them from his host mother. They're sort of like those Little Debbie or Hostes chocolate things (Ho-Hos?) except these aren't as sweet and these taste good.
- Lime Ginger Ale may be gone, but starting last week or maybe two weeks ago the stores have had "Orange Fizz Ginger Ale," which I've been drinking. It tastes fairly good as well.
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