A Song of Ice and Snow

Saturday was a nice, sunny day. That evening, I was to go to Olga's boarding house for dinner. However, I had more time that day, so I headed for the Posful area.

I got to Posful and went to the game store. They, too, didn't have FFXI. The guy I talked to said they could order it, but it'd take a couple of weeks to get here. He then suggested that I try to order online. I had already been thinking about that option sadly, so I just nodded my head and wandered off. I did pause to grab some really cool-looking advertizements for upcoming games, then realized I had another question for the guy: where can I buy a keyboard? Playing any MMORPG tends to involve some chatting, and I was pretty sure I didn't want to be using the software keyboard with a controller. He directed me to a store called 100-Man Volts ("Man" being written in kanji and meaning 100,000,000), about as far away from the big Geo store as Posful was, though in another direction. Since the network of cross-walks in this busy section of town was a little weird, I decided to hit 100-Man Volts before Homac (where I intended to buy a coaxle cable).

100-Man Volts is clearly the place for electronics in Kushiro. They had TV's, computers, cell phones, washing machines (don't picture an American washing machine; these are about two feet wide, three feet long, and two feet tall, designed to go on a countertop), and a whole bunch of other stuff. I found the computer accessories department, netting myself: a webcam w/ microphone and cheapy headphones; a mouse for my computer (since touchpads suck); a USB keyboard for the PS2; a router so that both PS2 and laptop could be online at the same time; and (after getting help in finding them) a coaxle cable for the TV. Score!

I left the store and paused to put most of the stuff in my bookbag. At that point, I realized that my router hadn't left the store with me. I vaguely recalled one of the two guys handling my order at the cash register (there were two people at every register) had said something about the router and "outside", then circled it with a red pen on the receipt. So I grabbed the attention of one of the store's traffic monitors, and with his help I discovered that some items were received through a second part of the store that is accessed from an outside door. So I went there, gave 'em my receipt, took a number, and after a few minutes was given my router. Yay!

After that, I had no reason to go to Homac, so I headed home. At one point, I was waiting for the light to turn at an intersection so I could cross the road, and figured that if I turned left, I would be able to make my way home, so... I tried it. It turned out that that that was not the case. About the time I realized that I wasn't gonna be able to meet with Olga in time if I backtracked, I came across a large Co-op on a large hill and realized that although I had ended up on the right side of the Kushirogawa, I had been somehow travelling away from the college and my apartment. I got some help from the workers at a nearby gas station in calling a cab (I hadn't thought to learn any cab numbers) and took the cab home.

I had about half an hour before I needed to leave, so I figured I'd set up the TV and the mouse. Mouse went fine -- its scroll wheel even lights up! However, although the TV was set up with a coaxle attachment, the wall has something else. That struck me as explaining why there were like three kinds of TV cables at the store.

So I ordered FFXI via Amazon.co.jp and went to meet Olga. Se walked up to her boarding house, where I met a couple of the other people living there and discovered that they're all students at my school. Tomoki (the guy whose name I had thought started with Tama, and who paid for the eating/drinking the previous Sunday) was also invited to dinner that evening. We ate and talked, and it was good. After dinner, we kept talking, and in fact talked until after Chie's husband came home, right up to about 11:30 PM. It was a lot of fun. ^^

Back to 100-Man Volts

Turned out that Olga also needed to go to 100-Man Volts. Her grandmother has an American diabetes machine that goes on her wrist and uses AAAA batteries. You can't get AAAA batteries in Russia, so she wanted to see if she could get some here. So we walked to 100-Man Volts on Sunday. It was nice having company. However, none of my pants were dry, so I was wearing a skirt and unfortunately for me, it was the first day with snow around here. There was also wind, so my legs got really cold.

When we got to 100-Man Volts, I exchanged my cables and we went looking for the batteries she needed. That was where the fact that the Japanese have a different naming system for the same batteries turned out to be really, really bad. Neither Olga nor I knew what exactly an AAAA battery looked like. She ended up buying what I thought was correct, with me promising to check the internet when I got home. We then took a bus towards the train station, figuring that that was closer to our domiciles than the shopping district and thus a much shorter walk home.

Buses in Japan work differently from American ones; you don't pay a flat fee when you get on and then go however far. You get on at the back of the bus and take note of the electric sign at the front. It's got a list of numbers, 1-something (24 on the buses here), and under each number is another number. The first number represents what stop you boarded on; the second number is how much you can expect to pay for how long you've ridden. There's a minimum price, and after a while the tab goes up, depending on how far you've gone. You pay as you get off. In case you don't have change, 1,000 yen bills can be exchanged for coins automatically at the front of the bus, from which you pay the correct amount.

Olga and I split near the school, headed for our respective domiciles. When I got home, I looked up those batteries and found out that they were indeed the wrong kind. I then hooked up my TV and started cleaning in preparation for the next day. Somewhere in the middle of cleaning, I went looking at tables at Mega Outlet (nearby furniture store) and discovered that they were more expensive than I wanted to pay.

Monday... and Posful AGAIN. Blarg.

Hiroko came over yesterday morning so that I could help her find out the course request numbers and times for the classes she wanted to take at UAF. We did that, and then (as suggested by the above title) I went back to Posful. On Saturday, I had seen that one of the stores there was selling tables like what I was looking for for 1,980 yen -- a much better deal than the tables at Mega Outlet.

This time, I decided to go by bus. The snow that had fallen on Sunday had been about as wet as snow can get and still be snow, and a combination of weather patterns had led to massive amounts of ice -- as I had suspected would happen. So I went towards downtown and made my way to the bus stop Olga and I had gotten off at the day before. We hadn't actually gone as far as the station, because we didn't need to. I located the bus stop across the street and affirmed with a couple of other ladies waiting for the bus that it did, indeed, pass by Posful. Yay!

Took the bus to Posful, got the table, got a couple of folders to use for holding stuff like receipts and bills, and went back to the bus stop to go home. I was glad I was taking the bus; I had thought the table top was plastic, but it turned out to be wood. That's good, because it means the table is sturdier, but that makes it heavier, too.

I spent yesterday evening goofing off instead of doing kanji homework like I should have. Yay!

Japanese Town-Building

So today I had two classes, geography and traditional music. Traditional music was about like it always is (though I feel like I'm becoming more proficient with the koto). This week, because of the weather (it rained and hailed today on top of the ice), we didn't go anywhere. The teacher told us about Kyoto.

Kyoto, in case you don't know, was the capitol of Japan before Tokyo was. It wasn't the first capitol of Japan, either. For some reason, Japan has a history of moving its capitol around. And when the Japanese choose a location for a capitol, they base it on Feng Shui (pronounced fuusui by the Japanese). We got a lesson in the basics of fuusui today, as well as a description of how it came into play with the building of Kyoto. We then watched a cheesy, informative video on it.

I came home between the two classes instead of going to the Gaiken room, because Amazon indicated that my FFXI would get here between today and Thursday. Even if I hadn't arranged it to be COD, I don't think they'd have left it in the mailbox, so I'd like to be here when the package gets here. ^^ That way I can get it and start installing ASAP.

Now that it's past the time when they'll deliver mail, it's time for me to go get more food supplies.

Realizations of the Period

1) Japanese dramas are more like what we'd call melodramas.
2) Japanese kids' shows are pretty much the same as American kids' shows, but sometimes they get a little scary. To be fair, the same could be said of some American kids' shows.
3) I need taller shoes, like hiking boots or something, if I am gonna walk around in snow.
4) Japanese cheesy, informative videos also include cheesy, brightly colored 3D renders they use to give you a virtual walkthru of whatever the topic is, just like American ones.

Thanksgiving == Christmas?

Wednesday was a Japanese holiday. I had a class in the morning, but my sleep schedule is currently bunk, so I overslept. Got up in time for the Gaiken first and third years' konpa. A konpa is a let's-get-to-know-each-other-better party. We all got together in a room in the dormitory and sat in a circle for it, with the first years ending up on one side, the third years on the other, and the guys and girls grouped together as well (I'm still not sure if that was purposeful or not). There was no alcohol because the person organizing it didn't know what the first years would want, which suited me... it started at noon, which is considerably earlier than I'm interested in drinking. There was food, though; a hearty potato and vegetable soup with konkyaku in it and curry udon.

Taste-O-Meter!

Konkyaku: 3
I'm not sure what this is. The texture was fine, with the hardness of a cooked vegetable, but none of a vegetable's texture. It was slick, but not slimy, so I had no problem with the texture. I can't really describe the taste. I asked what it was in English, and the question travelled halfway around the circle before Yuuji said he though it was just konkyaku.

Curry Udon: 5
In addition to the taste of udon not going as well with tuna as somen, it turns out that udon is intended to be cooked for a long time in a sauce, soaking up lots of moisture and taste. Result: Mm, mm, better. (Udon noodles in potato soup sauce still makes a good meal, though.)

Once everyone had food and a toast had been made there was enough time given for people to get through most or all of that first serving (there was a lot of food, everyone got more). Then started the jiko shoukai (self introductions). They started with the first years, then moved to me, then the third years. Person introduces self, people get to ask some questions. The third years' introductions were more fun, because they all know each other a lot better. I also knew them better, having talked to many of them at the post-gakusai party.

One question that got asked often was "What kind of guys/girls do you like?" with guys/girls being the opposite gender of the person in question. The first question asked of one of the third years, Hiroshi, was what kind of guys he liked. He managed to delicately evade the question by saying he liked guys like Jack (nickname of one of the others), only to have someone else ask what kind of girls he liked... at which point the guy (whose name I have completely forgotten) who asked what kind of guys he likes interrupted with "Manly ones, yes?" It was good, laughter-inducing fun.

After the introductions were done, people dug into more food, drank more tea and juice, and divided into random groups for chatting. A group formed around me, which mostly ended up being a discussion of some cultural differences and a lot of linguistic differences. I was asked what order I was taught different elements of Japanese grammar in and answered as best as I could from memory. I then offered to show them the textbooks I'd brought with me from America sometime. I have my third-year Japanese textbook and the book from my first kanji class. Which reminds me... I need to go stuff those in my bookbag...

Anyway, I'd been told by Keina that we had sadoubu that day, but I am thinking she thought I meant Friday instead of Wednesday, 'cause the room where sadoubu is held was dark and locked when I got there. *sigh*

Thanksgiving

I completely forgot about Thanksgiving. Maybe it's the lack of eggnog in stores (which makes me rather sad... it's great stuff to dip Pocky in). Yesterday, however, I was contemplating my pocketbooks and my phone and gas bills. The gas bill was about 2400 yen, which is fine, except that the guy had come along to collect before I expected. I didn't have any cash on hand when he showed up on Tuesday, and I haven't seen him since. Regardless, I had come to the conclusion that I had just enough money to pay that and still have enough in my account for the automatic withdrawal of my phone bill with a few hundred yen left over.

So I went to the bank and pulled a couple of thousand yen out of the savings account there to put into the post office account. I was five minutes too late for the bank's hours (the banks close at 3PM on weekdays), so I had to use the ATM, which meant I couldn't get out the amount I wanted (I wanted 3400 yen, but you can only get multiples of 1000) and would have to come back the next day to pull out the amount I needed for the gas bill without going below 0 on the account. I then walked next door to the post office and used the post office ATM to deposit the money in the post office account. I looked at the passbook (any transaction at an ATM or at the counter that alters your money is automatically entered into the passbook via computer) to verify that there was enough in the account.

That was when I discovered that my scholarship came in on Tuesday.

Hooray!

I decided that it was time to go blow some money on myself and get a PS2 and everything I needed to play FFXI. I got a PS2 at the recycle shop called Hard Off over by Coach and Four (the book store). I also checked out their supply of games, finding some nifty stuff but not buying any since I mainly wanted FFXI. I then walked to Coach and Four because they had a section that sold games, but they didn't have either hard drives (which in Japan, at least, is called the BB Unit) or FFXI. Urk. On the plus side, I found out that the first few models of the PS2 in Japan didn't have expansion bays, and that in Japan the bios number (starting with SCPH) is a good thing to know about your PS2. Everywhere I've seen PS2's around here, there's been a piece of paper taped to it announcing the bios number. Mine is SCPH-50000.

So... I walked the 20-minute walk back to my place, dropped the PS2, and headed to the area of Posful -- a 45-minute walk in another direction. I got myself a Teriyaki McBurger at Posful (after running into Ryoko and bragging about having bought a PS2), then went to Geo, a "media store" (read: games, CD's, DVD's, the like). I looked at their selection of games for a bit, not seeing FFXI, but seeing the hard drive. Went to the desk and asked them about it. According to their inventory, they had neither FFXI nor hard drive. I bought the hard drive that was on the shelf after being all o.O and taking the guy to it, but was still FFXI-less.

So I went to Homac and got me a TV. It's a 14" TV (which I know for a fact because somehow, despite the fact that this country runs on centimeters, is written in English on the front) with good old-fashioned CRT technology. I had no intention of carrying it home. I went to the taxi stop outside of Posful and hopped a taxi home.

The taxi driver was fairly awesome; just like American taxi drivers, he was talkative. He was impressed with my Japanese pronounciation skills. He didn't know exactly where my apartment was, but I was able to give him directions. Muahahaha! Anyway, got inside the house and sat down with my loot. TV and PS2 both powered on fine, though I discovered that TV is apparently not broadcast through the air here; I need a coaxle cable to get television, for which I'll have to go back to Homac, 'cause no stores around here sell those. Also, although I couldn't really read the directions, I quickly realized that there was no way to connect the PS2 hard drive to the PS2 without a network adapter... which I had forgotten to get.

So there I was. Brand-new TV, not-so-brand-new PS2, and a PS2 hard drive. No video games. No TV channels. No way to plug the hard drive in.

How lame is that?

Not much I could do about it, though. Hard Off was closed, and I didn't want to pay the money for a new game at Coach and Four. I didn't think the nearby Geo, a much smaller outlet on the other side of the Kushiro river, would be open at10:30-ish. So I did stuff at home, deciding that Friday would be a good day to pull out some more money to pay rent and do more shopping with, for me if I could find what I needed, and to try to finish getting stuff for Nacilik after that.

Friday

It started out like a normal Friday. My screwy sleep schedule continued, and I woke up around 11:30. Did random cleany-stuff and some other things before grabbing a 7-11 Bacon-Mayo Roll breakfast and heading to the library for a bit of pre-class kanji studying. Then I went to Japanese class. I have trouble understanding this teacher's accent for some reason, but he's a very nice guy, and I'm learning quickly from him in spite of only understanding like half of what he says.

Class got out and sadoubu was to start at 4, though I knew that Keina or Ryoko would be there earlier, getting things set up so that when Ikajima-sensei arrived we could just go to work, so I took that opportunity to go to the post office. I also went to the bank to get some information I needed to finish setting up a Japanese-based Paypal account for transferring money to and from people in the states. When I got back to the school, I ran into Sato and chatted with her for a few, then headed to the tatami room.

Lo! Sensei was already there, and it wasn't even 3:30. I got to have some more of the thick tea (not as thick as the stuff made for 5 people, but thicker than the stuff I've been taught to make thus far). It's so delicious. I helped Keina in putting a lot of the equipment away after I had my go at the ceremony, then realized we were putting stuff up early. More entrance exams tomorrow, apparently... no wonder sensei was early. Gar!

So, as I had planned and dressed for before leaving the house that morning, I headed immediately for Hard Off. Maybe I can't have FFXI yet, but I can have something! I bought two games, Fantavision and Tales of Destiny, for about 500 yen each, and a PS1 memory card with a spiffy cactaur sticker for about 800 yen. I also hit the nearby grocery store for some snacks and some necessities and came home. I followed that up with a trip to the nearby Geo store, which did not have FFXI, but did have the PS2 network adapter. Yay!

So now I have two games, a PS1 game w/ a memory card and a PS2 game w/o a memory card. Luckily, the non-memory card game is a puzzler. I also have installed the PS2 hard drive (whose software made the PS2 menu even spiffier-looking than it started and improved the music playback feature). It's 5 AM on Saturday; now I sleep, and after I wake, I am going to the game store in Posful to see if they have FFXI and to Homac for a coaxle cable.

I'm reconsidering purchasing a bike.

Farewell.

Realizations of the Period

1) DUH! The Japanese are trendy people... with the new slimline PS2's out, no one wants a bloody PS2 hard drive or any game that requires it. God damnit! The nearest place I know for sure sells FFXI is Sapporo!

Foreigners

Day before yesterday, I went with Olga and her boarding house Mom (Chie) to the International center (where we met Sasha, Tolia, and Jyun). They were having a "beginning of winter" party for the foreigners in town. (Quotations used because there's still a severe lack of snow here.) I found out that I'm one of like 4 Americans, including a guy who's lived here with his Japanese wife for over 15 years. I got "business cards" from like 10 middle school kids in exchange for talking English with them for a few minutes. I also met a woman named Julia from Hong Kong.

She was awesome; she, a girl from Romania who works at the local 7-11, and I started off the dancing when the rock band started playing in the corner. We tried to get a snake going, but it didn't work so well. We managed to get the middle school boys dancing, and one of 'em turned out to have some really nice moves including a couple of Russian things I know how to do and can't, thanks to my acting lessons of so long ago.

The rest of the time was spent talking to random people and snacking on sushi, sandwiches, and candy set out on all the tables. It turned out that there were a boat load of people from other Asian countries. A big boat, too. We of non-Asian countenances were few and far between.

As the event wound down around 2:30 (it had started at noon), Tolia, Olga, Jyun, another Japanese guy whose name I don't quite remember, and I decided to take our time and go for a walk. Chie, Olga's boarding house Mom, drove herself home, not wanting to deal with the weather. The rest of us ended up spending like an hour and a half sitting and chatting in the nearby MOO building's indoor park/greenhouse place before we decided to go drinking. I told them I was gonna have to head home due to lack of moneyage, but the guy whose name I don't quite remember offered to pay, so... I went.

It turned out that we were a bit early for the drinking places to open. The one we headed to opened at 5 PM, but we got there like 25 minutes early. We walked back past the international center to the one guy's car, which we rode to a parking garage across the street from the place we intended to go drinking at. The parking garage was awesome. Narrow, just like every parking lot I have seen in Japan, but when we got to the machine that gives you the tickets, it had an electric board showing which levels of the garage were full. How useful is that? :D

The place was called Wara Wara, which consisted, in Japanese, of the kanji for laughter twice. It was a nice place, with the table sunk into the floor like the yakiniku place I went to with the sadou girls after the gakusai. Olga didn't want to drink too much because Chie hates alcohol, so she, Jyun, and I started out sharing a bottle of sake. The one guy (who I'm gonna call Taka from here because I know his name started with Taka) had a cocktail, and Tolia had orange juice. I asked if he didn't like Alcohol, but got a vague, "I've drunk alcohol before," for an answer before Olga declared that she was "ashamed of him as a Russian." It was good fun; talk and food abounded.

Taste-O-Meter!

Tako: 4
At first, when Jyun asked me if I like tako I thought he meant the good old-fashioned Mexican taco. Tako is octopus, chopped up into little bits and marinated in something. The texture was ok, and the taste was a teensy bit reminiscent of like the food that "tasted a little bit like Hell" in Sapporo. Olga and Tolia didn't want any, but Jyun, Taka, and I chowed down.

Gyojya: 5
This was pretty much the Japanese version of a potsticker.

Deep Fried Chicken Cartilage: 5
Way tastier than it should have been. I never realized you could eat cartilage before; just goes to show what I know. I definitely need to try chicken skin on a stick.

The other stuff we ate was stuff like vegetables and sushi. Olga and I ate a lot of sushi, actually. There ended up being a second round of drinks as well; Olga refrained so that her breath wouldn't end up smelling of alcohol and Tolia had more orange juice. Taka said he wanted to "see me drunk" so he bought me a glass of whiskey; Jyun ordered a nice big bottle of warm sake, from which I also partook some. I didn't end up drunk, though.

From there I went home; I ended up playing board games online with Ozymandius, until I realized that it was time for me to take a bath and get to bed... so I did.

Skip Yesterday, it Was Boring. Here's Today.

Got up late this morning. Again. My sleep schedule is running about two hours late at the moment. I've been trying to fix it by getting up on time early, but I'm having alarm clock problems. So I got up just in time for a new class.

I had thought the Nihon Jijou schedule was being switched around for some reason, but it was actually a geography class. I showed up late because I'd been told it was in room 401, when it was really in 401A (meaning a different building altogether). When I got there, the teacher had copied maps of Kushiro to paper for us. He told us a little bit about Kushiro and its economics: Kushiro is the last place in Hokkaido with an undepleted coal mine; at one time, Kushiro brought in more fish than any other port in Japan, and it's still the best in Hokkaido but is now third in Japan; there are a crapload of paper mills; there are two ports, one on either side of the river mouth, with the north one being newer and bigger; Kushiro gets a lot of imports from New Orleans (oh snap, hurricane).

After that, he took us for a drive around town to show us some of the stuff he'd pointed out, officially making this the coolest Geography class ever. During the course of my explorations of Kushiro, I've found a couple of the spots mentioned for tourism; the first place we went to on the drive was another one, a short lighthouse overlooking the ocean. We went there because it was the best view of the port in town, not because it was a tourist spot. We could see both ports, a great deal of ocean, a great deal of town, and the breakers out in the bay. It was awesome, if cold and windy.

After that, we stayed in the car. He showed us a number of things, including a house in the oldest part of town that's been standing for like 100 years -- impressive with typhoons and earthquakes and all. We also saw a jinjya (Shinto shrine) that was dedicated to the gods of the sea. We then made our way to and all around both ports. We got to see some rather large piles of coal and wood chips. The former was awaiting shipment to Yokohama by boat, the latter to a paper plant to be turned into paper. The fishing boats had the kind of fish they go out for written in large letters on the sides of their cabins, and all around the fishing boats were the biggest seagulls I have ever seen. They're 2-3 times the size of Alaskan ones.

After we got back to the school, we discussed going to other places to check out other things in the future. Olga had a preference as to where to go, but I'm cool with going anywhere. We then broke off to go wherever; I went to the Gaiken room to do some kanji studying, then went to the koto class, then came home and wrote this. Yay!

Realizations of the Period

1) I think I'm gonna have to rotate my sleep schedule forward to fix it. Bah!
2) I really need a table.

Agh, Kanji! ><

I woke up late this morning (which is to say around noon) due to a dream I liked and can't remember. I went to my 1 o'clock class, in which I was given yet more kanji to study. Yay! The teacher is settling down into a routine now, and I'm learning quite a bit. The class focuses on learning kanji and improving our reading and writing skills.

The title of this post comes from the fact that we've had an average of 100 kanji a week thrown at us thus far. I'm now to the point where I seriously need to study them every day. I like kanji, but dear god, that's a lot to get at once. I am prificient with about a third of the kanji we've been handed so far, and vaguely recognize some of the others. I'm currently in the process of going through my kanji dictionary and pinning down the meaning of each of these kanji to make sure I know what I am looking at; today I spent 158 yen to get a kanji practice book, and once I'm done pinning down meanings, I'm gonna start practicing in earnest, then using the graph paper that came with me from America to make random sentences. Woo! (Read: Oh god, this is hard. And time comsuming. Why did I come to a total immersion school, again?)

Had sadoubu today. I learned another setup. It's another shelf setup, but this shelf has one more... uh... shelf than the kind I learned about last time. It's a bit different, but I'm starting to pick up the general change in the pattern of the ceremony that comes with using a shelf.

I've also decided that there's a list of things that no longer get Taste-O-Meter! ratings; it can be assumed they are all along similar lines and rate about the same. Pretz, korokke, and tea ceremony candy are currently on the list.

Also, before I went to class, I hopped by 7-11 to grab some breakfast. They were out of bacon-mayo rolls, so I got...

Taste-O-Meter!

Sausage Donut: 4
I don't know what image that name pulled up in your head, but I'm pretty sure you got it wrong. It was a sausage which looked like a hot dog in the middle of a piece of bread about the size of a fist cut in half long-way. (Hot dog style?) The bread wasn't as sweet as you think of with the word "donut", but the texture of the bread was very donut-y.

Realizations of the Period

1) Beer and pretzels go very well together, even if the beer isn't all that tasty.
2) I can get Sky Blue here, if I'm willing to walk 20 minutes to get it. I didn't see any cases/six packs, though, and I found a Japanese beer I like anyway... which I can get at the local convenience stores.
3) I've been looking for Milky Way bars for like a week now. I've found M&M's, Kit Kats, and Snikers, but no Milky Way. Gar!

Places of Learning

I've decided that if I'm gonna spend a couple of hours bent over a few pieces of paper working on learning kanji, I need a table. Since I can't afford one at the moment, that means finding a place to practice that comes with its own table. I've done a bit at the donut shop and in the library, but today I decided that I would do so in the Gaiken's room. There's a room for international students to study in, but since there are a few reasons behind my choice:

1) There are only like six international students, total. If I go to the Gaiken room, there's generally a steady flow of people, and since they're all native Japanese speakers, I get listening practice.
2) I'm more comfortable using my broken Japanese around native Japanese people who know what it's like to learn a foreign language than I am around the other foreign exchange students. (I don't know why. It's not as if they don't know what it's like to be learning a foreign language. I am definitely the worst speaker of Japanese among us, though).
3) The international students' room has a lot of stuff that's really good for learning Japanese with, but it's all low- to mid-level textbooks. I find that at the point I'm at, those don't help much anymore. The Gaiken room has a number of books covering various things about linguistics and languages in both English and Japanese, as well as a huge stack of Shonen Jump magazines in the corner.

It's a good place to work, and I intend to do more there in the future. ^^ I like my fellow foreign language majors here.

Speaking of fellow foreign language majors... the Gaiken's other Lena (same pronounciation, though if you transliterated from Japanese kana to English it'd be spelled Rina) is also a third-year, also in sadoubu, and lived in the apartment building I now live in before she went on exchange to Australia. I've almost decided she's my Japanese Evil Twin, and if it turns out she lived in the same exact apartment, I'll be sure of it.

Last time I went food shopping, I picked up some soup mix. It's instant powdered cream of potato soup -- add boiling water and let it sit for a minute. Well, when I opened the box, I found out that it contained three small single-serving packets instead of the one family serving I'd expected. If I'm gonna have soup for dinner, I want a family size serving, since it's fairly insubstantial stuff. Since I also had three portions of udon noodles remaining uncooked, I decided to try making the potato soup with about half as much water as suggested and using it as a sauce for udon noodles.

Taste-O-Meter!

Udon in Cream of Potato Soup Sauce: 5
This is really tasty stuff. I'm glad I tried it. Even when I can afford more expensive stuff, I think this will still be something I eat fairly regularly. I am still looking forward to having money to buy random stuff whose labels I can't read off the shelf to cook with, though.

I also sent off a package to Nacilik today. Shipping wasn't as bad as I thought -- 16 manga books, about 3500 yen. Granted, it's the cheapest shipping I could get and with the Christmas shipping going on he's not getting the package for a while. But it's shipped.

I've found the most awesome on-computer d20 character sheet ever. It was originally created for D&D multi-classing, but the way this guy has put it together, you should be able to use it for just about any d20 game setting with some tweaking. It's an Excel spreadsheet that does most of the calculating for you, making it perfect for game masters making NPCs, as well as people who just have trouble with the game mechanics. You can define your own classes in the sheet, too, allowing you to use non-standard or tweaked classes. The down side is that it doesn't work with OpenOffice. I can't afford Microsoft Office right now; even if I could, I probably can't use the Japanese version with the English OS, and I am not paying for the shipping on getting the English version. Another downside for the college student gamer is that the sheet itself is shareware. It's $20 Canadian, so I think it's well worth it, but... you know, lack of money.

Realizations of the Period

1) Apparently a lot of random ad banner services on the 'net use your location to determine what ads to toss at you instead of what language the site you're viewing is in.

The Annals of Stupid Foreigner Mistakes

When I was putting together yesterday's blog post, I completely forgot something which is funny enough that I must correct my error.

I glanced around the arcade yesterday at Posful and found a nifty litte drumming game I wanted to try out. It was a lot more simple than the Konami one, so I figured, "Why not? I'll play it once." Well, game starts, and a name entry screen pops up. It took me a moment to figure out what it was, but when I did, I was like, "Oh, OK," and tried to put my name in. I messed up on the controls for that and ended up putting in を as the first character of my name -- a character which you never, ever see in names.

I was gonna try to fix it, but decided not to bother after trying to navigate the Japanese alphabet and just hit enter three times on the character I landed on. The result was をっっっ. Not, for those of you who can read this, をつつつ, but をっっっ. For those of you who can't read this, all I can tell you is that this is about the most ridiculous thing I could put in for a name. It doesn't even have a real pronunciation; the closest I could come would be an exceptionally crappy kung-fu yell.

I then accidentally picked beginner mode and proceeded to rape the top score. I almost doubled it, subsequently earning をっっっ a place on that arcade machine for a long, long time, if not forever.

Carrying on to today, I elected to spend some time this afternoon watching 24. The DVD players were as badly off as I recalled, and I didn't feel like moving to the big TV, so I ended up watching broadcast television. I didn't know I could access that in the library until today, when I turned the TV on and realized I needed to hit the TV/Video button to see the DVD. When I first started watching TV, it was all commercials, being right around the change of the hour. I eventually settled on a random station and kept working on some NPCs for my D&D world (as I'd been doing during my failed attempt to watch 24).

The TV show ended up being coverage of someone's post-wedding interview. Boring, I thought, and went to change the channel. The next channel had the same exact thing. As did the next. And the next. Only one channel wasn't covering this wedding, and that had a sumo tournament. I was tempted to watch the sumo tourney, but decided that since this wedding was on every channel, I may as well try to figure out what was up with it. Turns out that it was the Japanese princess's wedding. Oho. After the live broadcast of the interview was over, the different channels turned to discussing various things related to the princess and/or her wedding. Some of them talked about various gifts she received, including a [beautiful] set of 5 cups costing a total of 100,000 yen. I also got to see some footage of her from when she was around middle-school age; she had glasses and acne. Proof positive that royalty are still people.

The random channel I'd settled on resolved to some womens' show before I left. They had a guest who had discovered a way to make food that wasn't gyoza, but amazingly tasted like gyoza. I don't know why it was so amazing, but for some reason her way of making a food that tasted like gyoza without being gyoza was awesome.

After that I got off to koto class. ^^ I'm getting much better at reading the music (all in kanji) and the lyrics (hiragana and katakana) at the same time than I used to be. Makes me happy. Unfortunately, the range of the instrument doesn't fit the range of my voice very well; the top two strings are a little to high if I sing in my upper range, and I can't sing in my lower range as unthinkingly as I can my upper range. Bah! Humbug.

Anyway, off to watch some Firefly. Woooo-hoo!

Rearranging the Room / Advent Ah-Don't-Think-So

Yesterday morning I woke up and decided to rearrange my room. Since getting internet, my computer has been pretty much in the exact center of the apartment, hooked to the internet on one end and the power on the other. So I decided to move the power strip to the same outlet that was powering the modem. As a result, I now also get to sit right in front of the heater, saving myself a bit of money on gas (since I can just reach over and turn it off if I'm warm). Yay!

I downloaded Advent Children a couple of days ago. I watched it with subtitles once, and have since then listened to it 1-1.5 times a day behind whatever else I've been doing for the Japanese listening practice. I'm in love with the soundtrack. The rocked-out version of One-Winged Angel is pretty much to die for, as are a couple of the other variant versions of songs on the soundtrack. The story... I like it more as I watch it more, but I don't think it was presented well. Overall, though, it was a fun romp back to the good old days of FFVII. However... we want a remake. This does not count.

I've also decided I need more things to watch. The library has a bunch of DVDs, but I can't check them out to bring home (even if I could use my laptop to watch DVDs from another region) and I can't access the internet from the room the DVDs are in. I'll likely end up spending some kanji practice time there with Mr. Incredible and the Phantom of the Opera.

Yesterday I had an idea for a photoshopped image (which isn't done yet) which required a picture of the Turks from FFVII. Since Advent Children had such nice renders available, I ended up grabbing one of those pictures, and in the process discovering that you can buy a replica of Cloud's earring from the movie. It's a pretty spiffy-looking earring, all told. The price is a bit high (a little over $50), which is a bit much, but I like the look of it, so I was almost willing to buy it (given a time frame in which I had money). However, I then discovered that it's a bloody clip-on. I'll be damned if I'm paying more than $5 for a clip-on earring. If I'm paying more than that, I want assurance that the earring won't come off, and that means that it has a post that goes through an 11-year-old hole in my ear. I mean, sure, selling a clip-on version makes sense, since most of their customers will be cosplaying fanboys who don't want to seem gay in society's eyes (...?), but it also makes sense to sell a posted version, especially at that price. (Note: I was looking for a picture of the clip on to put in here after I finished writing the blog post and found out that some enterprising cosply stuff seller has made a posted version which sells for $20. That's more like it.)

I spent today's early afternoon helping my friend Hiroko look at classes to take at UAF. The schedule for spring semester won't be out until tuesday, so we can't figure out exactly what she's gonna take, but I helped her decipher the silly descriptions in the course catalog, as well as figure out that some of the classes she'll want to take are offered every other spring, with the next offering being the semester after she leaves. I also explained the coolness that is the recreation classes and recommended a couple of other classes I thought she'd like. We also looked up Psychology prefessors at the UAF section of Rate My Professors and determined that it should be easy to find a Psychology class she'd enjoy. ^^ I'm really looking forward to seeing her again when I return to Alaska, to see what she'll have thought of Alaska and exchange by the time I return.

The rest of the afternoon I spent shopping. I got the rest of the Shannon shopping done. (Side note primarily aimed at Ash: At the moment I'm pretty much strapped for cash, so until my bills have stopped piling up so suddenly as a result of the way my scholarship works, I'll be able to get stuff for people who haven't given me money to buy stuff for them with. Patience, yo.) That was fun. I also discovered that in the maze that is Posful I missed a couple of shops the first time around.

I found this one shoe store with the most awesome flip-flops ever. So 4000+ yen awesome that I wasn't about to buy them. If you were to take a piece of white foam, cut it in the shape of a storm trooper's head, paint it like a storm trooper's head, then cut flip-flops out of it, you'd get these. It was a storm trooper's face that you could step on, take apart, and restore. I want it.

Realizations of the Period

1) Eating is expensive.

EBay is Good, But Sadou is Expensive

Spent part of today looking up the cost of sadou equipment (in the interest of possibly buying some of my own when I get back to the states). It looks like it'll take 3-6 hundred dollars depending on luck. The bulk of that is the kama (kettle for boiling water) and the furo on which it rests to be heated up. :P Gar. About what I expected, but... gar.

Day before yesterday, I had shodou class. We're quickly moving through strokes for kanji. I think the teacher plans to start on hiragana soon. I have heard from various co-students that hiragana and katakana are harder than kanji. That doesn't surprise me, but since shodou is harder than it looks, I think it'll prove to be interesting.

Yesterday I had Japanese Language class. The teacher is rapidly throwing more and more kanji at us. I care more about how my kanji look than the other exchange students, so I write slower, which is making class interesting. It also means that the time I spend outside of class on kanji is longer, as well. I need to find more stuff I can do outside of class while simultaneously working on kanji. Traditionally, I've done some video watching, but since the school library's DVD players are really in need of a lens cleaning and my laptop is set up for USA encoding... dunno. *sigh* I'll figure something out.

Yesterday was also sadoubu. Normally sadoubu runs until about 8 PM (including general club stuff after Ikajima-sensei has left), but since today was the entrance exams for potential new students to the school, the school building became off-limits at 6PM yesterday. Sadoubu started at 3 instead of 4, but only me, two other students, and Ikajima-sensei showed that early. On the plus side, I got to learn to do a new sadou setup, using a shelf. It's called Tana no Ousu. Tana = shelf; I dunno about ousu. There was also a new sweet.

Taste-O-Meter!

Nagoya no Uiro: 4
It was okay, but I've been spoiled by youkan and mochi, which are much better. It was yellowish in color, with a texture similar to mochi, though it came apart from itself much more easily.

In other news, my friend Nekram is trying to get into the JET Programme this summer. His only roadblock is that although he'll have met all the graduation requirements by that time, he won't have made them in time for graduation. He's trying to see if they'll take a letter from the school saying he's golden in lieu of their requirement of a degree. If it works, then he'll be in Japan before I leave. It'd be awesome to meet up with him in Japan, in addition to Conrad and his group. :D

Mormons

OK, so like a week after I got here some mormon missionaries showed up at my door looking for someone else. They were guys, and one of 'em was an American who's been in Japan for almost a year now. They were interesting to talk to, but the mormon missionaries have a rule agains two guy missionaries entering a house containing a lone female, so they sent some female missionaries my way.

I like the guy missionaries better, so I decided to see how many times I could set up appointments with these girl missionaries and miss them on purpose before they stopped trying. Today was the second time, but they waited for over an hour out in the cold for my return. They're determined! Agh! Now I am trying to think of good ways to offend them without seemingly trying. Any ideas?

Realizations of the Period

1) I'm perfectly fine subsisting on somen with tuna for now. Until I get more money, this allows me to save a lot on food.
2) Shipping is expensive. By expensive, I mean really friggin' expensive.

Blind People Have the Best Ears Ever

So I tried playing that shooter for blind people. I suck at it. I need to play the tutorial several more times. I've never been all that great at matching pitches at different octaves, but it looks like I'm about to get some hardcore practice. On a side note, there are no graphics -- the program brings up a window that's white with a black square border, and that's it.

Speaking of hearing, at my brother's suggestion I have switched from Winamp to iTunes. Hooray for programs that take less resources! I also like the interface better for the most part. I need to get used to avoiding the buttons that take you to the iTunes store, though.

I was late for class today. Only by a couple of minutes, but still... I need to time myself on exactly how long it takes for me to get to the school from my apartment, now that I have internet. ^^' Bloody Neopets. Too absorbing. Originally intended to occupy time for college students, it works. How about that? I wish the Plushie Tycoon prices would go where I need them -- which is LOW. Grr.

After that, I had sadoubu. I spent a lot of my time in sadoubu translating part of the sadou textbook's introduction. Yay! I could already read more of it than I expected, and there were some words for which I could read the kanji but had no clue what the meaning of the word was. That's why I had a dictionary. I didn't get very far, 'cause I also performed the tea ceremony and participated in someone else's. Eventually I decided to save it for later and went to work on a celtic knot that I had started earlier during class. It still isn't done; I'm trying to make it take up a whole page by putting random intersections on the paper and then fitting them together.

Something I haven't mentioned (didn't want to worry people) is that about a week and a half after I got here, a weird lump formed under the skin of my right shin. It didn't affect my movement any, but it did hurt if pressed on it. My lotion quest was a result of realizing that the skin over it was about as dried out as my skin has gotten. Once I got my hands on some lotion, applying it for a few days took care of the lump hurting. Yesterday morning, I realized I had had no milk whatsoever since coming to Japan and had some with breakfast. I noticed last night right after my bath and before bed that the lump was reduced in size; I had more milk this morning and it's shrunk even more. Dunno what's up with that, but it's getting better and I'm glad.

There are a number of things I've mentioned that I would like to go over in greater detail. As such, I present yet another new blog feature. There will be no more than one of these per day, and some days may not have one. (This is taking longer to write than I expected, heh. I picked a doozy to start with.) I present to you:

Bloglight Japan: Feudal Clothing

The basic staple of Japanese feudal clothing is the kimono. The kimono is still worn today for special occasions, though some people do wear them regularly as normal clothing. What most people don't realize is that the kimono is really an entire outfit, with many parts that you don't see. Guys' kimono tend to be less flashy than womens', but all kimono are put together such that the kimono is one color and everything else the person wears with it accents it in a contrasting fashion. For summer festivals and in hotels, yukata are worn. Yukata is a casual kimono made of cotton that has less layers.

To start with, you oughta take a look at JP NET Kimono Hypertext. The History of Kimono section shows the dress of varying periods (the Heian period is probably the most interesting, but I wonder how much of a pain some of that was to move around in). The other three sections are about modern kimonos and show the differences in styles, but the Kimono Encaeclopedia does a better job of showing styles for womens' kimonos and has a bigger gallery of random kimono shots.

The undermost layer is called hadajuban. The hadajuban comes in two pieces and is made of the same sort of material that slips are made of. The first part goes over your head and is pretty much a full-dress slip like you'd buy in the states. The second part is a wraparound, tie-on skirt. At this stage, one can also add padding around the waist or wherever to ensure that one's obi will work right. I don't need that, having hips and bust to spare. :P But it's doable.

The second layer is the nagajyuban. This is one piece, is made of thicker material than the hadajuban, and is pretty much identical in shape to a kimono. Female ones seem to all be pink and white; the only guy one I have seen was green and white. It's put on in the same fashion as a kimono, which is much more easily explained with visuals. I direct you to the Kimono Encaeclopedia's How to Wear a Kimono page. Their description uses a yukata, but the way it works is the same, minus the very last step with the obi-shaping thing.

On top of that comes the kimono. The kimono is put on the same way as the nagajuban. By the time you're done to that point, you've got five pieces of clothing held on with the help of 3-4 sashes.

Then comes the obi (the belt). The cardboard obi-shaping thing gets tucked into the folded-over obi (they come twice as wide as necessary). Its purpose is to prevent unsightly wrinkles from forming due to people having waists. The obi itself goes over that. The obi is tied behind one's back in one of many varied and wonderful ways (though sometimes people will tie it in front and turn it around if they have no help). I bought the kimono book in Sapporo because it had some really, really pretty ways to tie obi. I can't find any place online with a set of really good pictures, but the place I mentioned for kimono history shows a few different ties.

Some of the ties require the help of one or more obi makura (pillows) and/or some cording, but I've only seen cording on really elaborate ones. All kimono setups include another sash called the koshihimo. This is tied around the kimono above the obi, and is tucked into the obi along the top in front, but is still visible. There are some elaborate ways to tie this, too, but those are optional. The last thing that goes over the obi is the obijime, a braided cord that comes in varying colors and styles that are all about half an inch in diameter. There are really only a few ways to tie these, as each tie has a significance relating to the occasion -- a certain way for weddings, a certain way for funerals, that sort of thing.

That's putting the kimono itself on. In addition to that, it's unseemly to have long hair down when wearing a kimono, because it hides some of the grace of the kimono. Some people put a great deal of thought into how their hair is done when wearing a kimono. Accessories are also chosen to match (when I was talking to Mika and Ryoko about the gakusai and kimonos, we were joking about being all decked out in kimonos and carrying AU bags, AU being a cell phone company), including the shoes.

The shoes come in two basic types, geta and zoori. Zoori have a flat bottom; geta refers to any kind that have a separate heel, including the wooden ones that guys always wear. Both types have varieties, but all varieties of both types bear a resemblance to flip-flops. As such, the special socks that go with kimono, called tabi, have two separate toe sections; the big toe gets its own section and the other four get the other.

Now, guys' kimonos, as I mentioned, are less flashy than girls'. They tend to be a solid color, for one thing. The guys (though you occasionally see girls, most notably Shinto shrine maidens, wearing these), however, get hakama. Hakama are the really cool-looking pleated pants. A hakama goes on over a kimono, and is used mainly for really formal occasions and when participating in traditional Japanese cultural stuff like sadou and kyuudou (traditional archery). When a hakama is to be worn, the obi is tied in a bow using a specific tying method. The hakama has straps attached to the front and back of the pants that tie on in a certain way and the result covers the bow up, though you can still see the obi's color. There's a special jacket called the haori which is used for ultra-formal occasions, as well.

And that, boys and girls, is a lesson on kimono. I still want one really badly. TTFN!

Realizations of the Period

1) Someone has told me that guys' shoes in Japan get up to about 28 centimeters in length. Apparently I haven't seen any of those. I may be in luck.
2) Mormons are really good at discovering the most inconvenient times to drop by. Either I've just added noodles to boiling water or I've gotten about halfway through a several minute flash movie with no pause button.
3) There's nothing quite like dancing in your underwear when your headphones cord is barely long enough to let the headphones reach your ears when plugged into your computer on the floor.
4) A thing I've thought of; if we look at bible and evolution and try to imagine them together... if God created us in His image, does God look like a monkey?
5) I can almost sit in seiza (Japanese kneeling position) for the entire duration of a sadou performance. YES! Big improvement over the two minute-ish time frame I started with.

Catching up on Gaming

I started off the morning by trying to finally get completely caught up on the unread e-mails in my inbox -- most of which are Gamasutra newsletters. I didn't get all the way done 'cause... I didn't. I had koto class at 4:20, then went food shopping. Came back, sat down, and some mormons came by. Tenacious, they are.

After that, I started poking around the Photoshop Phriday archives on Something Awful. There are some really good ones recently (as if they weren't good all the time). You should all definitely check out the most recent one, Honest Game Titles.

So yeah, today wasn't very exciting for people who are interested in reading all about what I am doing in Japan. I did discover that the local grocery store has a small selection of youkan. And I beat Ozymandius twice at Tolouse on the Asobrain website. Tolouse is an online version of a board game called Carcasonne. The site also hosts online Settlers of Catan, as well as Set and some other game I've never played.

So, if you care, here's...

My Take on Slightly Out-of-Date Gaming News

As games get more popular, scientists find more ways to study them. Recently, there seems to have been a boom on studies of games such as DDR and their value as a form of excercise. If you've ever played it yourself, you already know that it has exercise value. I've also seen videos of some of the DDR exhibitions and tournaments that have taken place around the country, in which you'll see people doing 2-player co-op and occasionally doing things like having one guy leap over the other so they can switch pads. I've also personally seen a 9-year old in a Pokemon T-shirt take on the hardest song on a machine on the hardest setting... I don't know how he moved his feet that fast. However, you don't have to be a DDR master to get excercise out of DDR, and Konami is starting to really push the exercise aspect of the game.

Some time ago, someone told me (Kyle, maybe?) about a project to create a first-person shooter game for blind people, in which everything is based on sound. I later heard something that made me think the project had been abandoned. I don't know if it's the same project or not, but it looks like there's an early version of such a shooter right here. Another site, Audiogames, has a whole list of games made for blind people. I dunno if they have graphical interfaces or not, but I intend to try to play this stuff without looking.

Someone comes up with the latest good idea in virtual reality technology, and the military gets to use it first. Go figure. Side note: I want one.

WotC is taking a new tack with D&D advertizements. I like this because it also pokes indirectly at people who try to argue D&D as a bad thing for promoting anti-social natures. It also happens to be kinda funny.

There are a lot of people out there who don't pay much attention to news. Some of those people are not paying attention to the news because they're too busy playing video games. I present Kuma\War, a really good idea. These guys have made a completely free first-person shooter that gets new missions on a monthly basis, and every mission is based on something that actually happened recently. I don't see myself playing the game, but it's still an excellent idea, and I'd be willing to bet that the general concept of turning current events into video games could easily be broadened to include other areas of news and other genres of games.

Ever heard of Project Entropia? It's an MMORPG that is free to download and has been around for like 10 years. It's based around the idea of buying in-game money with real cash. However, you can also turn money gained in-game back into real cash. Some insane maniac recently spent $100,000 of real money to buy a space-station in the game. Sure, he has spaces to rent out to other people, potentially being able to make his money back, but damn. I mean, just damn.

My next bit can be summed up in a single sentence: "LOL, Vin Diesel is going to star in a Hitman movie." (However, a search to find a link to the Hitman web site brought this petition up on Google.)

Do you like good old-fashioned text adventures games, also sometimes called interactive fiction? They arose from D&D, and from them rose the point-and-click adventure games (like the Monkey Island series) and RPG video games. Well, someone's decided that the history of these old fashioned games is really interesting, because he's making a documentary called Get Lamp. It's something I look forward to, actually.

Realizations of the Period

1) It's fun to riddle a blog post with links.
2) I'm so gonna miss having a washing machine in my bedroom. It's one of the most convenient things ever. When your laundry hamper is full, just add soap and pick a wash cycle.

The Roof is on Fire... And so is My Internet!

I have internet again! I have stepped onto the yellow brick road that will eventually lead me back to Vana'diel, and which is such a nice place to browse in at all hours of the day besides. Hurrah!

Got up this morning knowing the guys who set up internet are supposed to show up sometime today. I don't think we ever established a set time during phone conversations, so I got to sit at home until it happened, then go shopping for Shannon and Greg in the evening. Figured I'd do a combination of homework, reading D&D material, and playing video games during the waiting portion of the day, and I started with D&D material.

Some of the D&D stuff I have on my computer is new classes and prestige classes, some is web enhancements, and some is old books from first and second edition that you can't really buy anymore. This includes the old Monstrous Compendium. I hadn't looked at the file before today, but I'm glad I finally got around to it. It was really awesome to find the Agony Beetle (an encounter I remember well from childhood, but that's another story) listed. I also looked at the old entry for the Owlbear and compared it to the current Monster Manual's version. The game statistics are very different, but some of the informational stuff is taken almost word-for-word. That was both cool and saddening; it turns out that there's a lot more information in the old Monstrous Compendium about the habitat and temperament of creatures than in the Monster Manual.

So the internet setup guy came along about the time that I was starting to work on homework. It didn't take very long, but I discovered that the setup software disk I had received before won't work with my computer -- the operating system language differences were a hurdle the CD couldn't handle. So the guy showed me how to set up an internet connection that has nothing to do with a network (I've never had to set one up before). And now, I have internet.

I spent most of the day taking advantage of the internet to finally make some ruddy headway on the current Neopets plot. >< On to Useless Crystal III, now! I also filled out some postcards, and in the evening I went to the bookstore to do some shopping. Got some stuff for Nacilik. I was gonna get stuff for Shannon, too, but I realized quickly that I had to carry stuff home and had forgotten to bring my bookbag. I had my umbrella with me, and Nacilik's books were heavy, so... I'll go back for stuff for Shannon tomorrow. *rolls eyes* Shannon is so easy to shop for, and 200 dollars of random shopping money will go along way, I think, especially when I get to dishes. As Mugendai pointed out to me, there are a LOT of Japanese-y looking dishes at the 100 yen shops.

Realizations of the Period

1) You can use a 10,000 yen note just about anywhere. The guy who came to my door today to collect on last month's gas bill for like 500 yen easily had change in his bag. It's kinda crazy.
2) The network cable that hooks me to the internet doesn't stretch to my futon. I now need a place to sit that isn't my futon.
3) I'm gonna have so much fun shopping for Shannon, and I'm not gonna tell her what I'm getting her. Hahahahah! With new year coming up, there's lots of great stuff for her. ^^

Whoo... Uh... Oops?

Yeah... I misread my clock this morning, and thought it was an hour later than it was. Got some money for breakfast from the bank, got some food, and got to the library half an hour before it opened. I had brought nothing to do, so I went up to the music department. There are some piano practice rooms up there, which is where I usually go if I need to waste some time but don't want to leave the school/use the library or whatever.

Usually, I work on songs I already know, but today (for the second time) I grabbed one of the random music books off the shelf and rifled through it. I found a really delightful Beethoven song whose name I always forget but really want to learn, so I started working on it. Another girl came along shortly to grab a few things from the practice room, and asked me to play what I had been working on for her. ^^' Turns out the books belong, not to the school as I had thought, but to students, and I was using her book. That was kind of embarassing, but she told me I could go ahead and continue to use her books, which was awesome. I still don't know her name.

When I was typing about Sapporo, I forgot something. After leaving the Esta department store and before going back to the station, I spent some time watching people at an intersection. The sidewalks were fairly busy with people out drinking, and going home, and stuff. The intersection I chose was one of the ones where either cars or going or people are; all the crosswalks go green at once. It was interesting to see how many people went caddy-corner across the intersection to get where they were going. There were a couple of people who had to wait for the next turn of the light because they followed the crosswalks instead.

There was also, at one point, a blind guy. He was walking along by himself, tap-tap-tap with his stick. He reached the edge of the curb and knocked his stick against a taxi at first, then found the appropriate spot and waited. When the cars started moving parallel to the direction he wanted to go, he started walking across the street, not realizing that it was a free-for-all crosswalk. He was on the other side of the intersection from me, or I'd have stopped him. Fortunately, a couple of young people who had just finished crossing notice and pulled him back, then waited with him until it was safe to cross. It was kind of interesting to watch, as I had had a feeling that that was the sort of thing that would happen.

I also forgot to mention that since I had some money, I walked to Kushiro's major shopping district on Monday. It was mostly a mission to see what the Posful department store had to offer, but I also wanted to hit the 100 yen store nearby to grab some more dishes and some miscellanea. I hit Posful first for two reasons. One is that I encounered it first. The other is that it had a McDonald's.

Taste-O-Meter!

McDonald's Teriyaki Chicken Burger: 5
Only available in Japan, my friend Nacilik recommended that I try it. It's the best thing to ever come out of a McDonald's, ever. I don't normally like mayonnaise, but on a bun with hot, saucy teriyakai chicken... oh man, you've gotta try it.

I also didn't expect the smell of french fries to be quite that alluring. One thing I absolutely love about the Japanese McDonald's is that you can get orange juice instead of soda with a meal without getting this tiny cup. It's a regular soft drink there.

The rest of posful mostly had clothes, but there was one store that had a wide variety of nifty hair ornaments. There was also a Claire's. Some stores on the second floor had nifty trinkets and school supplies and stuff. In one store I found this awesome character and a whole bunch of stuff related to it. The character is called O-Chan.

There are also a couple of others called Obaa-chan and the like, but the basic idea here is that it's a pun. Most if not all of you who read this should know that the Japanese have suffixes that they apply to names, one of which is -chan. The Japanese word for tea is cha, and since they like tea so much they often put O in front of it as an honorific.

Do you see where this is going?

The result: A guy who pretty much lives in a variety of tea cups (by live I mean that you see a tea cup with a head and sometimes an arm or two sticking out). There were so many variations, including different tea cups and O-chan holding a variety of things. The aforementioned Obaa-chan also lives in a tea cup, but the Japanese word for grandmother is obaasan, which is often pronounced by kids and girls as obaachan.

After that I hit the 100 yen store. I only bought a couple of dishes, but I bought a variety of other useful things, like extra chopsticks in case I have company, a bigger seive, that sort of thing. I also found lotion that wasn't ￥3500 yen a bottle. Woo! Japanese lotion isn't a cream, though, it's a liquid. I like this; it's not oily. This stuff also says on the bottle that it contains sake. It smells like it, too, so I'm inclined to believe it, but since I've always thought alcohol dehydrates... ? Weird. But hey.

Realizations of the Period

1) Sitting in a chair for 7 hours straight is hard on your tailbone.

Sapporo / Gakusai

Ah, this past week has been interesting. Yes... last Thursday and Friday I was in Sapporo having fun with other exchange students to Hokkaido. Saturday and Sunday were the student festival. It's been a lot of fun. I took about 300 pictures over the course of those four days. I can't find lithium batteries, however, so I have been going through alkaline ones like a stick of dynamite goes through fuse. Thank goodness for the 100 yen shops. On with the tale!

Wednesday Night

Even though the school provided us all with funds for the trip (￥25,000), we wanted to have as much to spend in Sapporo as possible, so we took the night bus. I met Jyun, Tolia, Olga, and Wu (Sasha took the train) at the bus terminal at 10:30 PM, and we all dished out about ￥5,000 for tickets. Olga had brought nigiri for everyone (in fact over the course of the trip she proved to be far better prepared food-wise than the rest of us). After we ate the nigiri, everyone but Olga went to the nearby Seicomart to get food for the bus ride. And for the first time (I'd been looking for a week), I found orange soda!

Taste-O-Meter!

Seicomart Brand Orange Soda: 5
Slightly different from American orange soda, but only by about as different as Crush is from orange Slice. Tasty! Satisfies orange soda craving well.

When we boarded, I was somewhat surprised; this bus was made for overnight trips, so it was kind of like an airplane on the inside. We settled in, and the bus left. Jyun and I had books to read 'cause we didn't plan to sleep soon -- I the D&D DMG 3.5 (I'm finally reading the adventuring chapter) and Jyun a Japanese-Russian phrase book. They had lights on for like ten minutes, then turned them off. That was ok, though, since there was a light on the back of the seat in front of me that I could turn on.

O SNAP -- It didn't turn on.

Baaaaah. Jyun had the same problem, but he had a window seat, so he tried to use city lights to read by, but quickly gave that up. I pulled out my cell phone and ran the batteries down a bit by using it as a flashlight for like an hour. I had a flashlight in my bookbag, but the bookbag was underneath us, in the luggage compartment only accessible from outside the bus. Fortunately, Japanese cell phones have amazing battery life.

When I started getting sick from trying to read under those conditions, I gave up and tried to sleep. Unfortunately for me, although the seats are actually quite comfortable when you're sitting up, reclining in them sucks. I kept sliding forward, which wasn't too bad except for the fact that my back is really particular about how I sleep. I slept, but poorly, and in two-hour spurts.

Hora? Sapporo!

6 AM. Woo! We're to meet with everyone else at the main college campus in Sapporo. At noon. So... breakfast! No Taste-O-Meter! here, though... we went to a Seicomart, and I had salad Pretz and Aka/Ao Apple Juice. I tried to take some pictures on the way, but this is where I discovered that my ruddy camera batteries had run out of juice. ARG!

With five and a half hours left to go, we walked to Odoori park and ate breakfast. There were a crazy number of pidgeons there, including two albino ones. I took a couple of pictures with my cell phone, but they kept coming out really blurry so I gave up.

After that, we went looking around. The old government building was spiffy (and I figured out the problem with my cell phone camera), but it was like 8 AM at that point and the place didn't open to tourists until 8:45. So we went to Kinokunia. But that didn't open until 10. Back to the old governmnet building, and it was open. Yay!

It was built in the Meiji Era (same time frame as Last Samurai), so it's a very Western-culture-looking place. There were some nice art pieces in there, and the red they used in there was a really nice color. There were some spiffy fossils, too. I had one problem with the place, and that problem was the stairs. They creaked and shifted quite noticeably under my weight. Those of you who know me well know that I don't handle such things well. I almost had a panic attack coming down the stairs.

After that, we went to Kinokuniya. For those of you who don't know, it's a major Japanese book store chain. The first time I heard of Kinokuniya was when I found out in high school that there's a big one in Seattle, though I think the Seattle one also sells other Japanese goods. Either way, Kinokunia was excellent. Two floors of a variety of books, with the sections labeled in both Japanese and English.

They had, among other things, a world literature section. I recognized a lot of the books, either because their titles were in English, I could read the katakana, or because the picture was the same. A display case showed off some spiffy Lord of the Rings sets. I've also come to the conclusion that I can't get away from The DaVinci Code, even though I have no intention of reading it.

I found a spifftastic kimono book over by the sadou books -- the back part has instructions for putting a kimono on properly. The rest of it shows off a variety of kimono/obi (the belt)/accessory combinations (excellent pictures for a scrapbook or collage or something) as well has having a variety of beautiful ways to tie the obi on. I tried like three times to put the book away, but I ended up losing to its appeal and bought it. I also got a pack of postcards, since I finally found some having pictures of Japan. The ones I'd seen up to then were all either Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, or kittens.

It Starts

After that, we hopped a train across town to the university. When we got there, the others had lunch; I've taken to skipping lunch, so I just had some water and browsed my kimono book. Then we met up with Hiruta-sensei and Sasha, and headed to the room where we were to meet up with everyone.

They had assigned everyone to mixed groups to keep everyone from just sticking with people they already knew. (Completely unrelated side note; I almost typed that sentence in Japanese. Hahahahaha!) My group actually included a guy I know somewhat from UAF named Aemon. There were six groups of about 10 people each; a huge number of them were Chinese, four from UAF (including myself and Aemon), at least one from Mongol, two Brits, one Canadian, at least two people from Norway, and some Koreans. I don't know if there was anyone from any other countries, but I do know that that wasn't all the exchange students in Hokkaido; at least one from this university didn't go, and I'm sure such was true at the other universities, as well.

So, from there we went to a Jinja (Shinto shrine). That was really cool. The old man priest that explained how things went to us knew some English, which was nice. The ceremony itself was short, but interesting. It involved some praying, some blessing, and a traditional song played on flute with a drum accompaniment while a shrine girl danced with a short sword. It was spiffy. After that, we had the opportunity to drink some of the shrine's sake (after which we were given a bottle of the stuff).

(At this point, I'd like to mention that Sasha's a hoot and a holler. He tried to get them to give him two cups of the sake, using the fact that it was his birthday as a reason. He's generally fun to be around.)

We then got a short lesson in the history of Shinto and then were given an opportunity to obtain Omamori. That's the pieces of paper detailing your luck. I didn't have ￥200 in coins on me, though, so I got another piece of paper costing ￥100 that I haven't gotten around to reading yet due to being busy. ^^'

From there we went to a museum. I thought that the only camera requirements were no flashes allowed, but it turned out that cell phones were also not allowed. So I only got pictures of the stuff on the first floor. I got even more irritated with my camera's lack of batteries on the second floor. There were some really nice pieces of glasswork up on the second floor, too, which made me even more vexed with my camera. After that, we went to the hotel.

Hotel

When I found out that I had three roommates at the hotel, I was kind of saddened. From my understanding, most Japanese hotels offer few if any rooms with two beds, so I had been entertaining the hope that in spite of the cost they must be expending on this trip, I'd get my own room. However, all my unhappiness at having roommates disappeared when I got to my room.

They were putting us up in a ryokan.

The ryokan tend to be the most expensive hotels in Japan. Every bedroom is a tatami room; when you arrive, tea and candy are waiting for you. While you are enjoying a really nice, all-traditional-Japanese-foods meal with the rest of your party in a large communal tatami room, maids come into your room to set up fluffy futons for you. Most ryokan are built on top of hot springs, and this one was no exception.

We had some time before dinner. I could have gone swimming in the pool in the basement, but I elected to explore instead. The lobbies and carpets were wonderful, and I was drawn to the Super Famicom Box area of the main lobby. (Read: TV's hooked to paid "Super Famicom Boxes" that were loaded with Super Mario Kart and Star Fox, among other things.) I managaed to avoid playing the SNES boxes until I was bored the next morning, though.

One side of the main lobby was given over to a large gift store. I bought some milk chocolate cookies and some of the sweets that had been available in our room. I planned to offer those sweets as omiyage (souvenier) to the sadoubu. I wish I'd gotten two boxes of those, so I'd have one to myself 'cause they were really tasty, but... oh well. It was the hotel specialty.

There were two basement floors. The first had a pizza/beer restaurant, an arcade, and a zen rock garden. The second had the pool and one of the bath areas. (The other bath area was on the roof.)

After that came dinner. I've had some people complain about the fact that they didn't think I'd tried any "real" Japanese food. How about Nigiri? :P This, however, was "real" Japanese food at it's "real"-est. Before I dive into the Taste-O-Meter! I must define sashimi: raw fish. Sushi is rice, sashimi is raw fish.

Taste-O-Meter!

Shrimp Sashimi: 1
I love shrimp. I really, really do. Shrimp sashimi doesn't have a very good taste, but by itself, that only rates a 3. Combined with the texture... it made me want to throw up. That made me rather sad.

Three Other Kinds of Sashimi: 3
Didn't like the texture so much, but they tasted fine.

Daikon Radish: 4
Tasty, as vegetables go. It's a variety of radish, so if you like radishes, you'll probably dig it.

Egg Pudding Stuff: 3
I call it egg pudding 'cause it was quite obviously an egg dish, but it had the consistency of pudding.

Rice with Chicken and Some Kind of Japanese Mushroom: 5
I've never had that kind of mushroom before, but it was tasty. I ended up not finishing the rice, because there was really a lot of food on the table and I got full. That made me kind of sad.

Seaweed in [What I Think was] Egg Whites: 2
This stuff didn't taste too bad, but I couldn't really chew it... it slid down my throat in a rather disgusting way.

Squid in Some Red Sauce: 3
Before we got started, the Brit in my group, Drew, was telling me and Aemon about this stuff. He'd been to Japan and to a ryokan before. He informed us (in a British accent, making it rather funny), that this stuff tasted "a little bit like Hell." I don't agree with him, but it was a funny opinion and I could see why it's not something most would like. He also told us that it tasted kind of like metal, which was true. Coppery. Maybe the sauce was made from some kind of blood?

Soup with Potstickers and Tofu and Corn: 4
I didn't like the tofu, but the rest was fine. I just kind of avoided the corn.

During dinner, they had everyone go up by group and introduce themselves. That was rather irritating, since I was in group one, and they started as soon as there had been a toast. We were all hungry, and it took a while because they had a list of things they insisted each person address. By the time all six groups were done, most people had finished eating and they started some games. They were the sort of games actors play and some of 'em turned out really funny, but I'm not going to go into details here 'cause I don't feel like it. Maybe later.

After dinner, just about everyone went to the baths. There were, of course, baths in the hotel rooms, but communal bathing is fun, so most people took part. My roommates and I went to the baths on the roof. That was good. Not as good as going to a hot spring when it's -30 F out, but still good. Then I did a bit more exploring and picture-taking before bed. My Chinese roommate went with me and we got some pictures of each other. The top floor of the hotel was obviously suites and the like; there was more art there and stuff.

The Next Day

Everyone had breakfast vouchers for the hotel's breakfast buffet. My stomach wasn't very happy with the choices I saw -- I listed the shrimp sashimi first on the Taste-O-Meter! but it was actually one of the last things I ate, and I didn't want to start the day off badly, so I had rice and sausage. It took me a while to find the water dispenser -- there were two small dispensers on a table at about waist height under a sign with the kanji for water on the wall, and it was hard to find 'cause of how crowded it was.

After that was grab-stuff-and-meet-in-the-lobby time. Did so, and was a bit early, so I spent 20 minutes playing Star Fox (and discovered that my skills have rusted so badly). Then we all hopped on the buses again and went to a museum of Ainu culture. The Ainu were the natives of Hokkaido before the Japanese came along. I've never been huge on spending lots of time at museums, and it was a guided tour, so I got bored rather fast. I got some super spiffy pictures, though.

After that, the people going back to the university hopped one bus and the rest of us hopped the other. The guy in charge of the whole thing was on our bus, and ended up asking us (from my university) how we got to Sapporo. He was shocked. A lot of people were, actually. It was kind of funny. Anyway, we got off at the station, grabbed some convenience store lunch, then proceeded to go do karaoke. Sasha left early to catch his train, but the rest of us were at it until like 6 o'clock.

(By the way, a very tall Russian singing Smells Like Teen Spirit at the top of his lungs is pretty awesome.)

After that, the rest of us went food hunting. Sapporo is apparently famous for Ramen, so Wu and Jyun wanted to go to a ramen shop. We found several at the station, and picked one. Olga doesn't like ramen, so she had rice-something. After that... we didn't really know what to do. I wanted to go window shopping, the others didn't. We ended up splitting until 10, which was fine with me, as I prefer to not be tied to a large group of people.

I browsed the wares in the hall outside a kimono shop under the station, as well as looking through a jewelry store. I didn't buy anything from the kimono shop because the stuff I could afford at the time would need to be color matched to a kimono I don't yet own, though I am thinking that I would like a bright blue one. I also checked out the two department stores connected to the station, but they were nothing but clothes... and I can't really wear Japanese clothes due to size difference.

So I opted to hit one of the department stores across the street. It's called Loft, and had a wonderful array of household goods. It also closed about 15 minutes after I got there, so I didn't get to see much... I did, however, find some stuff I'd have liked to have gotten for people if I'd had the money. It was a pretty awesome place, overall. Lots of nifty stuff I'll have to browse again when I go back to Sapporo.

I had not expected it to close so early, being right close to the biggest train station in the biggest city on the northern island of Japan. As such, I decided to immediately hit the next department store over, Esta. Esta had Namco written in big letters on the side, so I decided to check the place out. I got in there and discovered that it was a department store we'd wandered through the day before. I didn't see any stairs, so I decided to take the elevator to the top and work my way down. Inside the elevator was a written description of what was on each floor. The top floor was a food court, and 9th floor said Namco in katakana. Ahaha!

Getting off the elevator landed me in an arcade. Most of the games had Namco written on them, though some had no names. I looked for the seated Mario Kart Double Dash games I have heard about, but didn't see them. Then I discovered that the arcade wasn't the only thing on this floor. There was a shop full of nifty trinkets... and a geek store.

Comics, video game and anime paraphernalia, video game and anime soundtracks (oh, the collection they had!), and a wall of CCG cards. They even had tables in the back for people to play card games on, and I saw Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic games in progress.

Then I got pissed off. If I had gotten my scholarship on Wednesday like I'd been told to expect, I could have gotten all of Nacilik's shopping done in like five minutes. I had actually checked my post office account that afternoon to see if it had come in, too.

Nothing I could do about it, and I was running out of time, so I worked my way down the building. The closer I got to ground level, the less cool it was; the other 8 stories of the 10-story building were full of electronics stuff, and there's really only so much of that in the world. Impressively, one floor was almost entirely storage media -- burnable CD's and jump drives and the like. It was pretty crazy.

The only other thing of note that I got to see was another building in Sapporo -- it wasn't probably only like 6 stories, but the whole building was pachinko and slot machines. Yowza.

So I met up with everyone and we went to a convenience store to get food for the bus, then went to the bus station, yadda yadda yadda. Got home Saturday morning. I slept for like 4 hours, then got up to go help with the gakusai (school festival).

Gakusai, Day 1 (Or Mmmm, Potatoes)

The school has a gakusai once a year. It's pretty much a food-eating, hanging-out, fund-raiser fest. Students from given departments have booths, clubs have booths. The first day I spent mostly in a classroom on the ground floor helping prepare food to be cooked at the booth of the Gaikokugo Kenkyuusei (meaning foreign language majors, and hereafter referred to as the Gaiken).

I started out peeling potatoes, and discovered two things. One is that Japanese potato peelers are configured differently than American ones; American ones are set up so that the length of the blade runs the same direction as the length of the handle, while Japanese ones run perpendicular. I was not proficient in use of the Japanese-style potato peeler. It was when I got fed up with the potato peeler and asked for a knife that I discovered there were no knives small enough for peeling potatoes -- and that I don't even think I've seen a knive small enough for peeling potatoes that wasn't either a butter knife or a youji (tiny tea ceremony knife intended for cutting sweets and not sharp enough to peel potatoes anywho).

After peeling potatoes, I helped prepare karikari cheese. That would have been simple if they hadn't insisted I wear over-large disposable gloves. It was pretty much like making eggrolls, so I had practice with the basic motions, and that helped a lot. While helping make the karikari cheese, I got to try the food we were working on. I also took a break in there to check out the rest of the festival and got to try the food at the Ongaku Kenkyuusei (music majors') booth for free, since I knew like half the people there from koto class.

Taste-O-Meter!

Imodango (Potato cakes): 5
They were good without the sauce, but the sauce made them better. I need to find out what's in the sauce. I know how to make the cakes themselves, but I need to find out if that's something my friend Bob can eat -- there are three ingredients: water, mashed potatoes, and katakuri powder... but no one could tell me what katakuri is.

Karikari Cheese: 5
Take a circular, three-inch diameter eggroll wrap and wrap it around a piece of cheese, then deep fry it. Yeah, it's tasty.

Kimuchi: 4
This is a kind of soup that I tried at the music majors' booth. Good stuff, but a little spicy.

After that we of the Gaiken cleaned up the room we had been using. The president/secretary (haven't figured out what Takashi's title is, but she seems to keep track of the paperwork) reported the profits and everyone but me discussed how to improve them, because I couldn't understand everything they said. After that, most of us went back to Sayaka's apartment building (which also happens to be the building that the Gaiken's Shiba, Ayaka, and Mina live in, though I dunno about anyone else) to prepare food for the next day ahead of time.

I ended up at Mina's place. We first peeled and mashed potatoes for more imodango. Then we got chicken and started making gyozangi. I never got to taste the finished product because it's another thing you're supposed to deep fry, but take those same eggroll wraps from the karikari cheese and fold 'em like potstickers over chicken that's been cooked in a soy and ginger sauce and it tastes good even without being fried properly. We ended up having way more chicken than eggroll wraps, so we got to eat quite a bit of chicken.

I had to leave about the time that was done, as I had some things to do before going to bed and needed to get up early on Sunday for gakusai day 2 with the sadoubu.

Gakusai, Day 2 (Or Trials and Kimonos)

I overslept. Not by much, but by enough that everyone who'd had to show up at 6:30 to start putting kimonos on couldn't make use of my spiffy kimono book's obi-tying methods. I also found out that not only was the school's back door (the one closest to both my place and the tatami room) was not open. After going all the way around the school and all the way through school to the tatami room... I discovered I had forgotten my fukusa basami. (Fukusa is the cloth used in sadou. I don't know what basami means, since I'm under the impression that "bag" is "fukuro", but it's a small pouch in which one puts one's sadou stuff. On a side note, the word for "hand" is "te", and gloves are te + fukuro = tebukuro.)

By the time I got my fukusa basami and got back to the tatami room, I was a little early still, but sensei had already gotten there. She was providing kimonos for all of the exchange students (including the one from Okinawa, who also had no kimono) to wear. Olga looked absolutely gorgeous in the maroon one. Tolia got a blue one, which was made of a different material and had a hakama (old-style Japanese pants). Mini had a white one with a pretty pattern, but the knot in her obi kept wanting to go crooked all day.

The kimono I got had been modified. It was an old one of sensei's, and she's much smaller than I am, so... it didn't fit. ^^' I'm just too big around. It was also orange, which isn't really my color. I was still grateful for getting to borrow it, though, and it made me want my own kimono even more. I really do love feudal clothing.

Anyway... once we were all dressed, we hightailed it (as fast as possible in zoori, the kimono shoes) over to the lobby beneath the library entrance. Benches, an umbrella, and a table for doing tea ceremony were already set up, as was a table for taking admission fees and a screen behind which we could work our tea-magic. If the person performing the ceremony made tea for everyone, it could take a very long time, so as soon as the person starts actually mixing the tea, people behind the screen start whipping up bowls for everyone else in the audience. When the first guest has received their bowl and started to drink, a small army of kimono-wearing foo's comes out bring tea to everyone. It's awesome. :D

I was the only one exchange student who got to perform the tea ceremony. I'm the only one who's practiced enough to be able to just do it. However, I wasn't quite ready the first of the two times that I did it in front of guests... I pretty much bungled the first time, as well as having problems with my kimono coming open while I sat on the stool. I'm pretty sure that even if I never get to be in another play ever again, the amount of acting training I've had will always find ways to do me well. No embarrasment, though I was a little bit angry with myself for a couple of the things I forgot to do. I spent a good portion of the time before my next turn going over the ceremony in my head, and the second time went fine. Other than that, I helped carry and retrieve bowls and sweets. I also stopped by the Gaiken booth at some point to show them me in a kimono.

Real quick: apologies to people, I forgot my camera and so have no pictures of me in a kimono. *dodges a tomato* I'll make sure to get plenty when I have my own, which should be next mont- *gets hit in the face with a tomato*

Anyway, sadou got done around 3 o'clock, after which I changed out of my kimono in the tatami room and then went back to help pack stuff up before meeting the Gaiken for a post-gakusai party. Woo!

The Gaiken's Post-Gakusai Party (In Which Many People Besides Me Get Drunk)

The gaiken, as well as having food, had the first-year students do a show. It was pretty much souped-up karaoke -- with lots and lots of confetti. They had like six boxes of confetti, and they weren't afraid to use it. There was a 2-3 minute period in between each song where a couple of other people stood on the stage in front of the curtain to entertain the audience while you could hear brooms shoving confetti back into boxes.

The partying started off with a special edition of the show. It was a little more rowdy, in good old-fashioned cast party tradition, as well as having everyone from the previous songs dancing on stage with the people for the new songs instead of staying off stage like for the previous performances. After every song, the people for that song introduced themselves, starting with thier student number and their name. There were bottles of water and juice all over the stage, and there was a lot of chugging from them. I discovered that the Japanese clap in rhythm and say "Hai-hai!" where Americans would just shout, "Chug!

After all that was over, there was a drinking contest. First-years vs. Second vs. Third vs. Fourth-years. I'm a junior, and therefore a third-year. I discovered that most of the people I'd made friends with, including Sayaka, were second years. The way the contest worked was that there were four giant bottles of alcohol, each about two feet tall and 7-8 inches in diameter below the neck. Every person on a team had to drink from the bottle at least once, and the goal was to finish first. I was last in line, and didn't quite understand the rules, so... I could have just slugged down the last third of the bottle that was given to me, but I thought I had to pass it on and didn't. If I had just slugged it down, we might have won, but we lost to the fourth-years. Now I know for a potential next time.

The first-years lost and got to finish the cleanup we'd all started before the drinking contest. Everyone else started heading toward Aquaveil, a building in town. We went to like the third floor and entered a room made for dinners such as this one. There were several tables with food and bottles of beer (large ones, since Japanese tradition is to pour alcohol for other people). The seats were all numbered, and they had us draw numbers. They were trying to make sure that cliques didn't form.

There was some talking that I don't remember very well, punctuated with drinking as excuses for it came up. It was a lot of fun. Eventually, people started milling around. The songs from the show were played again, with almost everybody going up on stage to dance and sing. A couple of people sought me out to ask a bit about Alaska and America.

I got called up on stage at one point to introduce myself -- that was fun. There was an unspoken rule that to be onstage one must have a glass of beer in one hand so that if people called for you to drink you could do so. I started off by saying that I was the no-student-number-exchange-student Lena, in fun imitation of the introductions from earlier. I also surprised Sayaka by publicly thanking her for helping me get used to Japan.

After that, most of us hopped off to another place. This place exists for big groups of people to go drinking at. Instead of chairs and tables, the place was full of modular tatami rooms (they could change the sizes to accomodate different-sized groups of people), so we dropped our shoes off in lockers at the door and went in. There were other parties going on around us, but I didn't venture far. I learned a lot of names at this party. It was fun. I never got more than buzzed. After that, I could have gone to karaoke with some people if I'd had money, but I didn't. That sucked.

Taste-O-Meter!

Sapporo Beer: 3
Not a bad beer, but I don't like beer much.

Asahi Beer: ?
By the time I got to the Asahi beer at the second place, I'd had enough beer that beer tasted OK.

Plum Wine: 5
That was some really good stuff, which I totally didn't expect.

Some Kind of Bread with Meat in the Middle: 3
The meat reminded me of vienna sausages, but it was a really good idea.

I don't really remember what I ate other than that, except for karokke, but I've already covered that. So.

During the Week

Since the weekend, it's been pretty much business as normal. Thursday was a holiday, so I took advantage of the day to clean and use the internet. Didn't get as much done on the 'net as I would have liked for chatting, but hey -- you win some you lose some. (And sometimes, you win half. ;) )

Yesterday was Friday, so there was sadoubu. I'm no loger working on the table setup that I was studying before; since winter is upon us (it feels weird saying that when there's no snow anywhere), it's time to switch to the type that's set into the floor. There's always been a weird little square in the tatami mats on the floor of the damashitsu (tatami room), and I found out that that square lifts out to reveal a hole for sadou. The textbook that Ikajima-sensei (sadoubu teacher) gave me during the gakusai is the lower level one and doesn't include this setup, but I got to run over it once on Wednesday and am more familiar with the ceremony in general, so Ikajima-sensei was able to focus more on showing me how to do the motions properly.

A now-graduate, past-member of the club has been visiting this week, and she got to show us some upper-level sadou-ness. The normal tea we create is called usacha; what Chiyaki did is called koicha. The order in which she performed each task was different, and instead of one bowl being tea for one person, the one bowl was tea enough for five people.

Taste-O-Meter!

Koicha: 5
There was so much tea-powder in this that it was really more like a sludge than a drink. I loved it.

Omochi in Anko Sauce: 5
Today's main sweet. The omochi was stiff before immersion in the sauce; after immesion in the sauce, it didn't want to be separated into chunks by either chiopsticks or teeth. But it was soooooo good.

Meika: 4
A traditional sweet much like youkan. I didn't like the texture quite as much, but it tastes just as good.

After sadoubu, I went to the library to check on a couple of things on the internet, then went back to the damashitu. We were all going to a yakiniku place. When we got there, I discovered that yakiniku is pretty much like robata, except a little more restauranty and a little less free-for-all. The selection of food was also more along the lines of meat and less along the lines of fish and seafood. I had trouble reading the menu (mostly 'cause I was just slow at it), but I eventually figured it out. I'm not gonna Taste-O-Meter chicken and beef, but a couple of things get it.

Taste-O-Meter!

Choregi Ceasar Salad: 5
I am not sure what choregi means, but they told me it's a Korean word. It had lettuce, small croutons, salad dressing, and cheese. Tasty. I'm getting to like salad dressing, as long as the salad isn't drenched in it.

Ebisu Beer: 4
This one is actually not half-bad. Maybe I'm getting acclimated to beer? *wrinkles nose* The name of this was written Ebisu in katakana, but the roomaji (Japanese language written in English letters) on the glass I got was Yebisu.

So yeah. It was a much more reserved post-gakusai party than the Gaiken one had been, but no less fun in its own way.

Realizations of the Period

1) I really do love feudal clothing, both western and asian. I love the look of it, and the feel of wearing it.
2) Never, ever, ever turn a camera off at a cast party. Ever.
3) I have a much higher tolerance for alcohol than Japanese people do.
4) My right shoe's sole is coming off the rest of the shoe. My feet are about half a centimeter bigger than the biggest shoe size you can get here. I'm in trouble.
5) I need to find out where to buy youkan.
6) Really, if I try to show all the pictures I take on the blog... insanity. Inserting them into the blog takes longer than I expected it to. So. Here's the gallery where all the pictures are. >.> Sorry, folks. More pictures need uploading, too, but this library connection really is horrible.