I have finally finished with all my tests this past week, Kanji, Grammar, Speech class, and another larger Kanji test. It wasn't to bad, but haven't really had much time to do anything really interesting these last 2 weeks.
One major thing has happened here though. Originally I was going to only be living here for 5 months, September till January. This has recently changed thanks to Alec, one of the other students from GSU that's here. He set into motion him and me attending another semester here at Soka University. So, I will still be returning to America in February, but at the end of March, will be flying back to Japan for the spring semester after a 7 week break, hopefuly where I will be able to go and see family and others, but unfortunately it will be during the school semester so it might be difficult. This will last from beginning of April until the end of July. Then I return in August and take another semester at GSU and will be able to graduate. My main reason for doing this was because GSU has recently been severely lacking in Japanese Studies courses, aside from the languages, so this will allow me to graduate substantially faster than if I took more classes at GSU. After that I will look at Graduate Schools for some graduate degree that related to international things with Asia probably. Like business or foreign policy, but haven't really decide what subject yet. I'm going to wait until Chrisite(girlfriend) has gotten into one of the Med Schools she applied to, and probably pick a college around where she goes. Hopefully it will all work out in the end.
Other than that nothing major has happened, but soon will be doing some fun things. This weekend a group of us are going to Takao-san, a pretty big mountain near by, and climbing it. Then next week I have multiple things I might do. Wednesday is a holiday, its the Japanese equivalent of labor day, so will probably go somewhere that day. Then that weekend I have a couple options. There is a large toy festival going on in Akihabara, showing off a lot of the new toys and stuff coming out for Christmas and the 1st quarter of 2012, there is a group of people going to Fuji-Q one of Japan's largest amusement parks full of roller coasters and the worlds 2nd largest haunted house, or I can go with a group of people from the CPP club to a local park for a large group lunch. I am currently leaning towards one of the first 2 options since my CPP partner isn't going to the park lunch. But will have to wait and see untill then.
This kind of sucks. Last week was pretty exciting. A Halloween party, a trip to Kamakura, a Taiko drumming class, a birthday party, and then another Halloween party. Only problem is for some reason my camera decided to delete all the pictures I took of these events before I could upload them to my computer. Not entirely sure why, but it happened sometime during the 2nd Halloween party. So not much I can do about all that. I went with a group to Kamakura and to the birthday party, so I just asked them for a bunch of their pictures, but for all the other events I haven't found anyone I can ask for pictures yet. Also since the pictures I took from the people aren't all organized like my other ones (cause the camera I have does most of that automatically) I just uploaded them all to online albums and will give the links instead of in bedding them all into this entry. Not just because I'm lazy, but because I have to study for the 5 tests we have in the upcoming 2 weeks and organizing them manually would take to much time. So here we go.
Halloween party #1:
-This one took place on October 30th. It was a party for the entire dormitory. It was in our cafateria. There were snacks, costumes, and a contest. It was pretty fun.
Kamakura:
- November 3rd was a national holiday. So no school. A bunch of us decided to go to Kamakura, a large tourist spot full of old temples, shrines, a little shopping town, etc etc. The town part, full of all the different shops reminded me a lot of Gattlinberg and Pigeon Forge. It had almost the exact types of shops as well. Even the shops that sell cheap knock off samurai swords. The main thing we saw was the Daibutsu (Giant Buddha). Basically a big statue of the Buddha that you can actually go inside of. This is the main tourist attraction in Kamakura apparently. After that we went to the beach, which was pretty nasty. The beach in Kamakura was covered in dead fish, stingrays, star fish, etc. It seemed that anytime high tide came in and left, a bunch of things got left behind. You could even watch the birds pick at the dead fish. Definitely not a bring your kids to play and build a sand castle kind of beach. Then after that we walked around the shops, and had really overpriced Chinese food for dinner. Here the photo album with all the pictures a friend took. Kamakura Album
Taiko Drumming:
-The most recent culture class was on Taiko drumming. It was actually pretty fun, and I had video of me trying it out, but its gone now. I've decided to go check out the school's Taiko club, since I am not allowed to join the Kyudo club for some reason. It is also apparently a good work out for your arms, and a couple of the people who do it say it build a lot of arm strength up.
Birthday Party:
-Friday night was a Birthday party of Ellie, one of the foreign exchange students. It was in what I think is an Internet cafe on crack. You pay by the hour for usage, but the place has a whole game area with pool tables, ping pong, dart boards, slot machines, etc. All of which are included when you pay for an hour, no extra charge for darts, or pool equipment. Also they have tones of free drinks, ice cream, smoothies, soup, etc. We were there until about 2:00am, and then hung out for another 2 hours at a 24 hour restaurant. It was a really cool place. Apparently during the day they also have TV rooms where you can watch movies or play video games.
Here is the album for the pictures taken. Birthday party album
2nd Halloween Party:
- The 2nd Halloween party I went to was on the 5th. It was a party for one of the groups I joined on campus. The CPP group. The Conversation Partner Program, its a group where I am assigned a Japanese person who volunteers to meet with me every week and help me with my Japanese. It s pretty useful practice. The party was for everyone who joined the group. A bunch of guys went as the Crazy 88 from Kill Bill. I joined them since I didn't want to buy a costume(they are really expensive here) and I already had a suit anyway. My conversation partner, Max, also did the same. Though there were only 7 of us so it was more the Crazy 7. Also we went and bought cheap 1$ swords and spent a lot of our time whacking each other with them
The only picture that was left on my picture was the group picture of everyone that went to the party.
Who knows maybe the person who I got to take the picture accidentally deleted everything else, or I left the camera when putting it in my pocket, and since its touch got a touch screen, it moving around in my pocket just so happened to have hit the format memory option. Believe it or not this has happened before with the GPS I had back in Georgia. Any time I wasn't using it I would have it in my glove box, but since it was always plugged into my cigarette lighter, anytime the car turned on so did the GPS. Then one day I pull it and see a message saying that I have formatted the memory.
This coming week is going to be pretty busy. I have multiple tests coming up. Tuesday one in my Speech class, Wednesday a Kanji reading test, Friday a Grammar test, and the upcoming Wednesday a big Kanji writing test. So I'm going to be pretty busy studying this week. I'm pretty sure I have another test somewhere in all of that mess, but I don't have my schedule in front of me. So because of all that I won't be doing much these next two weeks.
Another active weekend has past here, it is going on 2 month that I have been gone.
Friday was slightly different from other Fridays. We had a campus wide earthquake drill.
We got a whole booklet with a little card to fill out that we are supposed to carry with us at all times.The actual guidelines for what to do in case of an emergency were luckily translated for us.
Look at that awesome looking chicken scratch I have.
Then we learnt how to hide under our desks.
It was a rather traumatic experience for some
Yup trauma.
Then we filed outside to the large track at Soka University. I assume this is where we are supposed to all head for after the initial quakes have died down.
I'm not sure because the English translation stopped at the little booklet they gave us. In the field they gave a couple different demonstrations of different scenarios during an earthquake.
Like if you are stuff on top of a building how to get onto a cherry-picker coming to rescue you.
How repelling down a building works? I think
And fire hose stuff.
Then a guy got up on a stage and talked to us. Couldn't understand a lot of it, but one of the people said he basically said in emergency situations do whatever you can to survive. Everything else he said was praising us for how orderly and calmly we walked to the field. As if an earthquake hadn't happened at all.
Then we all filed back to the main campus for lunch.
SURVIVAL FOOD.
At least it was a free "lunch"
A bag of instant rice, some canned food, and drink.
The lunch of of survivors.
The rice didn't taste to bad. And who wants to guess what was in the can?
The name in Japanese actually rhymes with can
Plus with the little thing they gave us to open it it took about 15 minutes to open.
IT'S A MUFFIN
Well actually it is supposed to be pan(bread). It didn't taste all that bad, but then again it didn't really taste at all.
Quick was a lucky bastard. He got in a different line and ended up getting a Hotdog.
Then classes continued as normal. The upcoming class only had about 40 minutes left but we went anyway. It was the Culture class which is usually interesting. This week was going to be Shodo, Japanese Calligraphy. But because we only had 1/3 the time that we usually do all we learnt about was how to prepare the materials.
Then class ended before we could learn about writing, but we will be doing that this Friday. That was the end of stuff on Friday.
I spent most of Saturday being lazy. At night me and a group of others went to a local bar that serves nothing but horse meat.
The thing on the right was a free energy drink they were giving out that night (no idea why), the center thing was a free appetizer of horse meat, and on the right was my first drink of the night. Forgot what it was called, but was pretty strong with lots of alcohol. I think it was some kind of plum wine. Then after that the multiple types of horse meat came.
This was apparently Korean Style. It is raw horse meat, with a raw egg cracked on top.
These are horse sausages. each one was a different part of the horse.
Hard to tell what this is just by looking at it because of the low lighting but this is raw horse meat. 5 different parts of the horse. Leg, neck, back, stomach, and something else.
This was a tempura fried horse meatball thing.
This was my favorite dish of the night. It raw horse meat mixed with avocado in a kind of sauce, then you put it on a cracker, or a little piece of bread. Very tasty.
This was just a giant rice ball.
This was fried horse meat.
Then more sake came.
It was fun going there with a bunch of the guys from our dorm.
All in all the horse meat was ok. When it was cooked it was hard at times to distinguish the taste from other meats like chicken or pork. Maybe it was over cooked or something. But when raw, and when they served us the different parts of the horse you could taste the difference, not only from different meats, but each part of the horse tasted distinctly different. Plus it wasn't very filling. But still enjoyable. For 6 of us the price came out to be around 16000yen, or around $180us. So it came out to about $30 a person, and that was with everyone drinking sake and beer. I would definitely go there again, they had a whole 3 page menu of horse dishes and we only tried 6. Plus when I told some of the people from Quebec that we had gone here they got all excited saying they wanted to go, because its hard to find horse meat outside of Quebec and France.
Then after eating a couple of us walked around some of the video arcades in the area.
Everyone was trying to win these little claw games, and were failing and wasting quite a bit of money, one guy spent like 800yen ($10) trying to get one thing, and bare in mind, the claw machines here are 100yen each, not .50cents like most in America.
Then I got this on my first try. It some weird anime (shin-chan I think) character in a horse suit. He is now strapped to the back of my bike. Because almost all bikes here look the same and it takes forever to find mine in a group.We got home around 12:30am
Then Sunday came and I slept in till about 11:00am. Went shopping for some stuff, and spent the rest of the day doing some studying and being kind of lazy. Nothing big is happening this week to my knowledge, but no one has made any plans for the weekend yet. I know some people are doing stuff for Halloween, but there is no trick or treating or things like that here. Its more just used as an excuse to party. I did hear that the park where the "Ringu" movie was partially filmed at was actually within walking distance of the dorms. Its the area where the creepy girl climbs out of the well. bare in mind this is the original, much better Japanese horror movie, not the crappy American remake. Here a scene with the area I'm talking about. Here a scene from the movie off youtube.
I can't say I have every believed in ghosts, or supernatural things like that. And I haven't been scared by a horror movie since I was a lot younger. But I hear this place is pretty creepy so who knows what will happen. So who knows.
I was supposed to make a post about the SoDaiSai festival back a week and a half ago, but never had any time. The festival ended Monday night, Tuesday was a cleaning day, then the next week has been spent catching up on the three days of school that were canceled for the event. And on top of all that I have a huge Kanji test coming up this Wednesday, and unfortunately it is a writing and reading test. At GSU we only every really focused on reading, very little with writing, so I've been spending most of my spare time teaching myself to write Kanji, Luckily last summer I had some private tutoring for Japanese and she taught me to write about 100 Kanji, but I got about 400-500 more to learn. So this will probably be a fairly brief post about SoDaiSai.
SoDaiSai was pretty fun, Spent all of Sunday going around checking out all the different food booths.
These are all pictures from the International Students section of the festival. I bought a ticket for every one of the food items so I could try them all. Also put a picture of the booths, and the actual tickets. I liked just about everything, except for the weird soup in a cup thing, it just tasted like badly cooked red bean, and the apple french toast I got was under cooked so I only was able to eat about 1/3 of it.
Then after that I went to the Japanese student part of the festival. They were also selling a bunch of food, but you had to pay in cash instead of using a ticket like at the International Student part. This is because the proceeds from what the International students sell don't go directly to the International students, like with the Japanese students who use this time as a kind of fund raising for their individual clubs.
There were about 4 Churro places and 3 hot dog places. But other than that everything was varied. The Churro places all had lines that were about 50 people deep. But they were worth the wait.
There were also various shows going on around the festival. I took a video of one of them. The Light Music Club.
Then at night time there was a huge concert in the International Student section of the festival. Each of the different International groups played a different song. I took videos of most until my camera died from being used all day. Note that it gets progressively darker so my camera occasionally had trouble focusing because there was little light.
Many of them sound kind of bad, but do bare in mind most people only had about 4 weeks to learn these songs by heart so they could play at the festival. Plus they seemed to have troubles with the sound equipment, either peoples instruments are to loud, to low, and same with the singers as well. But all in all it was an enjoyable evening.
Then on Monday I volunteered to work at the Freedom Group booth. This was the group consisting of American, Canadian, and Australian international students. We were doing hot wings, and the day started with us making the sauce.
The Sauce consisted of 3 things.
4 Large Jars of Mayo
3 Bottles of Chili Sauce
And about 9 bottle of hot sauce.
Then we began cooking and preparing the wings.
We basically fried them, put 3 in a cup, covered them in sauce, and handed them out. A lot of people were surprised when we said you had to eat them with your hands "American Style" But they were pretty popular. We Started around 10am and completely sold out around 4pm.
Oh yeah I also had a pink apron and a yellow bandanna that I stuck up.
Then after that I went home. I decided not to stay for the concert since it was the same as the one that happened Sunday night.
After that Tuesday was a cleaning/relaxing day. I ended up going shopping for some stuff. Then Classes started Wednesday and its been busy since then. Things will probably start to calm down around Thursday after the first big Kanji test. This weekend some of us hope to goto Yokohama to see the beach before it gets to cold.
