Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Thanksgiving
Now that I'm really far behind on my journals, I think I'll make another attempt to catch up. Don't expect any updates between Dec. 23 and Jan. 6, since that's our winter break and I don't know if I'll be going to the lab during that time (if I don't go to lab I can't upload entries).
On with the show.
11/27/03 - Thursday
This is Thanksgiving in the US. Some of us Americans decided to have our own Thanksgiving celebration (although we had quite a few of our non-American friends there), so someone reserved the meeting room in the kaikan for this evening. It was going to be a potluck affair, but since I have no cooking skills and since I don't get out of class until 5:50 PM on Thursdays I bought 2 1.5L (that's the largest I've seen in Japan) bottles of soda to bring, and then I went and helped others prepare food. I ended up rolling and cutting a lot of sushi.
Most of the food we ended up having was Japanese. Joey made some fried egg thing and some fried rice, Tim made potato sauce (this was the only "traditional" food we had there), Lane baked a loaf of pumpkin bread, Haesung made some sort of Korean fried rice, Mitsu made another type of fried rice/noodle dish, Pontus made Swedish meatballs, and there was more stuff there that I can't remember anymore. All in all, we had a good amount of food, all of which tasted good.
There was some deep fried stuff that Jason made (he's the guy who organized this whole thing and whose sushi I helped roll). Joey happened to be in the room during the time that sushi was being rolled and things were being fried, and he decided to deep fry some sushi. I didn't get to taste it because he only made a few, but according to the people who ate it it tasted really good.
I don't remember exactly why it happened anymore, but Lane's pumpkin bread ended up being quite burned. I think he may have forgotten about it. In any case, if I understand correctly the oven is run on gas and you control the heat by adjusting the flame. Thus it's a bit difficult to get the right temperature for baking. Thankfully, once the hard shell was peeled off the bread the inside was fine, and actually tasted really good.
We sent someone to invite the security guard to have some food, and the plan was for everyone to scream "Supplies!" when he came into the room. We found this fairly amusing. The reason we were going to say "supplies" is that the Japanese have a really hard time distinguishing between the letter L and the letter R. In Japanese, they have a sound that is sort of both combined, so mixing those letters up in English words is quite common. Thus, "supplies" is a "Japanese" way of saying "Surprise!" A good example of this mixup that I saw today (Dec. 16) was a picture someone (Jeff?) had taken of an advertisement for an "Ilish Pub."
Once we had finished feasting, Norm brought his game cube and a Soul Caliber II "tournament" was started. Shortly thereafter Lane brought his TV into the room (SCII was being played on the TV that belongs in the meeting room) and Mitsu brought his game cube and Mario Kart Double Dash. Andy (I think that's who it was) kept pestering me about DDR (several other people had also asked me about it), so eventually I went back to my room, ripped them off the floor, and brought them up. We played for a little while using my laptop, and then tried hooking my laptop up to the TV to get better sound since my speakers weren't loud enough. Unfortunately, my laptop wouldn't acknowledge that there was a TV connected and thus wouldn't send the video signal. Andy then went and got his laptop, and that also failed. I think for some reason that TV isn't doing something it's supposed to do, since I've never had any problems outputting to other TVs (both here in Japan and back in the US).
All in all, as parties go, it was quite fun. However I was a bit disappointed because it really didn't seem like a Thanksgiving party at all. It didn't seem to be any different from your standard potluck party type of deal. I think this may be due to that fact that no one seemed to even be thinking about being thankful to God (or being thankful at all, for that matter), which is what Thanksgiving is supposed to be about.
11/28/03 - Friday
Not much to report about today other than some very *interesting* things that were said in my Japanese Business class. We somehow got onto the topic of Christmas in Japan, and one of the Swedish girls in the class asked the professor if he celebrated Christmas. He said "No, I celebrate Devil Day." At this point, the room fell silent while everyone tried to figure out if they had misunderstood what he said. He then said that when he dies he wants to go to Hell, because he thinks Heaven would be too boring for him. An awkward silence filled the room for about a minute, at which point he resumed the lecture from where we'd gotten off track. Later during the lecture he said that the way he sees it, in Japan's future about 1/3 of the old people will have to work, 1/3 will be able to be cared for by their families, and the last 1/3 will have no choice but to die. Thinking about this lecture again still feels a bit creepy even though it's been more than two weeks since then.
11/29/03 - Saturday
For breakfast I made what my family calls "egg in bread." I've heard someone else call it "egg in the hole," so in case you don't know what it is I'll describe it for you. Basically, you take a piece of bread and cut a hole in the middle of it. You then put it in the frying pan, and crack an egg into the hole. It's really quite good.
Today was a day for watching TV and movies. In the morning I slept, but in the afternoon I watched the rest of the episodes of Last Exile. The ending wasn't all that good, but all in all I liked that anime. Shortly after finishing it, I was flipping through the channels or something and stumbled across a channel that was playing "Hikaru No Go" ("Hikaru's Go" in English), which is about a kid who plays the game of Go. It sounds really boring, but it's actually a very good anime series. It was quite popular when it first aired in Japan, and has created a significant increase in the number of Japanese young people who play Go. I was watching this series when I was in Austin this summer, and I ended up reading parts of some Go books in the bookstore and I even went to the Go club 2 or 3 times. Anyway, I really like the series, so I've been trying to watch it on TV every Saturday now. I'm surprised at how much of the dialog I understand without it being subtitled. This is probably partly due to the fact that I watched it subtitled this summer though.
After HNG the same channel showed an episode of Full Metal Alchemist, an anime I'd heard of but didn't know anything about. I think it was episode 9 or something like that, and without knowledge of the characters or the story line I didn't find it all that interesting.
As soon as that finished, I went to the Lobby of the kaikan, where they were showing movies. The first movie was a Harry Potter movie ("Chamber of Secrets" or something to that effect). I missed the first half hour or so of it because it started at the same time as Full Metal Alchemist. I sat in the very back, and for the first few minutes I had trouble figuring out if what language the audio was in. I eventually realized that it was in British. Because it was fairly hard to hear from the back, and because it was in British, I sometimes didn't understand some of the lines until I read the Japanese subtitles. Being able to read a fair amount of the Japanese subtitles surprised me. I didn't think I knew that much Japanese yet.
I thought Harry Potter was OK, but not all that great. It probably didn't help that I haven't seen any of the other movies, haven't read any of the books, and missed the first half hour of this movie.
After Harry Potter they showed "Catch me if you can," which I found very interesting. It's based on a true story about a kid who ran away from home, started forging checks, and eventually traveled the world by pretending to be an airline pilot. Eventually they caught him, but it took quite a while and he didn't really do much to try to keep from getting caught. Eventually, he got hired by the government to work in check fraud, since he's evidently now known as the world expert on check fraud. I think they said that he's designed checks and possibly bills for several large companies and countries.
When I got back to my room I turned on the TV, and caught the end of a movie called "Unbreakable," which I watched in English. It seems that quite a few broadcasts here have dual language tracks (I've seen them for news, American TV shows, and American movies) and on your TV you can set which one (or both if you want) is played. I missed probably the first hour or so of the movie, so I'm not really sure what was going on. It was about this guy who finds out that he's got super hero powers. The movie ends when he finally is convinced that he has them.
On with the show.
11/27/03 - Thursday
This is Thanksgiving in the US. Some of us Americans decided to have our own Thanksgiving celebration (although we had quite a few of our non-American friends there), so someone reserved the meeting room in the kaikan for this evening. It was going to be a potluck affair, but since I have no cooking skills and since I don't get out of class until 5:50 PM on Thursdays I bought 2 1.5L (that's the largest I've seen in Japan) bottles of soda to bring, and then I went and helped others prepare food. I ended up rolling and cutting a lot of sushi.
Most of the food we ended up having was Japanese. Joey made some fried egg thing and some fried rice, Tim made potato sauce (this was the only "traditional" food we had there), Lane baked a loaf of pumpkin bread, Haesung made some sort of Korean fried rice, Mitsu made another type of fried rice/noodle dish, Pontus made Swedish meatballs, and there was more stuff there that I can't remember anymore. All in all, we had a good amount of food, all of which tasted good.
There was some deep fried stuff that Jason made (he's the guy who organized this whole thing and whose sushi I helped roll). Joey happened to be in the room during the time that sushi was being rolled and things were being fried, and he decided to deep fry some sushi. I didn't get to taste it because he only made a few, but according to the people who ate it it tasted really good.
I don't remember exactly why it happened anymore, but Lane's pumpkin bread ended up being quite burned. I think he may have forgotten about it. In any case, if I understand correctly the oven is run on gas and you control the heat by adjusting the flame. Thus it's a bit difficult to get the right temperature for baking. Thankfully, once the hard shell was peeled off the bread the inside was fine, and actually tasted really good.
We sent someone to invite the security guard to have some food, and the plan was for everyone to scream "Supplies!" when he came into the room. We found this fairly amusing. The reason we were going to say "supplies" is that the Japanese have a really hard time distinguishing between the letter L and the letter R. In Japanese, they have a sound that is sort of both combined, so mixing those letters up in English words is quite common. Thus, "supplies" is a "Japanese" way of saying "Surprise!" A good example of this mixup that I saw today (Dec. 16) was a picture someone (Jeff?) had taken of an advertisement for an "Ilish Pub."
Once we had finished feasting, Norm brought his game cube and a Soul Caliber II "tournament" was started. Shortly thereafter Lane brought his TV into the room (SCII was being played on the TV that belongs in the meeting room) and Mitsu brought his game cube and Mario Kart Double Dash. Andy (I think that's who it was) kept pestering me about DDR (several other people had also asked me about it), so eventually I went back to my room, ripped them off the floor, and brought them up. We played for a little while using my laptop, and then tried hooking my laptop up to the TV to get better sound since my speakers weren't loud enough. Unfortunately, my laptop wouldn't acknowledge that there was a TV connected and thus wouldn't send the video signal. Andy then went and got his laptop, and that also failed. I think for some reason that TV isn't doing something it's supposed to do, since I've never had any problems outputting to other TVs (both here in Japan and back in the US).
All in all, as parties go, it was quite fun. However I was a bit disappointed because it really didn't seem like a Thanksgiving party at all. It didn't seem to be any different from your standard potluck party type of deal. I think this may be due to that fact that no one seemed to even be thinking about being thankful to God (or being thankful at all, for that matter), which is what Thanksgiving is supposed to be about.
11/28/03 - Friday
Not much to report about today other than some very *interesting* things that were said in my Japanese Business class. We somehow got onto the topic of Christmas in Japan, and one of the Swedish girls in the class asked the professor if he celebrated Christmas. He said "No, I celebrate Devil Day." At this point, the room fell silent while everyone tried to figure out if they had misunderstood what he said. He then said that when he dies he wants to go to Hell, because he thinks Heaven would be too boring for him. An awkward silence filled the room for about a minute, at which point he resumed the lecture from where we'd gotten off track. Later during the lecture he said that the way he sees it, in Japan's future about 1/3 of the old people will have to work, 1/3 will be able to be cared for by their families, and the last 1/3 will have no choice but to die. Thinking about this lecture again still feels a bit creepy even though it's been more than two weeks since then.
11/29/03 - Saturday
For breakfast I made what my family calls "egg in bread." I've heard someone else call it "egg in the hole," so in case you don't know what it is I'll describe it for you. Basically, you take a piece of bread and cut a hole in the middle of it. You then put it in the frying pan, and crack an egg into the hole. It's really quite good.
Today was a day for watching TV and movies. In the morning I slept, but in the afternoon I watched the rest of the episodes of Last Exile. The ending wasn't all that good, but all in all I liked that anime. Shortly after finishing it, I was flipping through the channels or something and stumbled across a channel that was playing "Hikaru No Go" ("Hikaru's Go" in English), which is about a kid who plays the game of Go. It sounds really boring, but it's actually a very good anime series. It was quite popular when it first aired in Japan, and has created a significant increase in the number of Japanese young people who play Go. I was watching this series when I was in Austin this summer, and I ended up reading parts of some Go books in the bookstore and I even went to the Go club 2 or 3 times. Anyway, I really like the series, so I've been trying to watch it on TV every Saturday now. I'm surprised at how much of the dialog I understand without it being subtitled. This is probably partly due to the fact that I watched it subtitled this summer though.
After HNG the same channel showed an episode of Full Metal Alchemist, an anime I'd heard of but didn't know anything about. I think it was episode 9 or something like that, and without knowledge of the characters or the story line I didn't find it all that interesting.
As soon as that finished, I went to the Lobby of the kaikan, where they were showing movies. The first movie was a Harry Potter movie ("Chamber of Secrets" or something to that effect). I missed the first half hour or so of it because it started at the same time as Full Metal Alchemist. I sat in the very back, and for the first few minutes I had trouble figuring out if what language the audio was in. I eventually realized that it was in British. Because it was fairly hard to hear from the back, and because it was in British, I sometimes didn't understand some of the lines until I read the Japanese subtitles. Being able to read a fair amount of the Japanese subtitles surprised me. I didn't think I knew that much Japanese yet.
I thought Harry Potter was OK, but not all that great. It probably didn't help that I haven't seen any of the other movies, haven't read any of the books, and missed the first half hour of this movie.
After Harry Potter they showed "Catch me if you can," which I found very interesting. It's based on a true story about a kid who ran away from home, started forging checks, and eventually traveled the world by pretending to be an airline pilot. Eventually they caught him, but it took quite a while and he didn't really do much to try to keep from getting caught. Eventually, he got hired by the government to work in check fraud, since he's evidently now known as the world expert on check fraud. I think they said that he's designed checks and possibly bills for several large companies and countries.
When I got back to my room I turned on the TV, and caught the end of a movie called "Unbreakable," which I watched in English. It seems that quite a few broadcasts here have dual language tracks (I've seen them for news, American TV shows, and American movies) and on your TV you can set which one (or both if you want) is played. I missed probably the first hour or so of the movie, so I'm not really sure what was going on. It was about this guy who finds out that he's got super hero powers. The movie ends when he finally is convinced that he has them.
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