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Josiah's Japan Travelogue
Part 4: November 2007 |
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Friday (2nd): Not My Day | |||||||||
Ever have one of those days where, although nothing major happened, enough little things went wrong to make it an overall lousy day? Well, I had one of those days today. And, even though work is over and I'm back in my apartment now, it's not getting all that much better. Therefore, I'm not in the greatest mood and that'll probably be reflected in the rest of this post. So, I've been in Japan since the middle of August and I've been working as an ALT for a little over two months but there's still one very important question that I've been unable to find the answer to. HOW THE HECK DO SO MANY MOSQUITOS KEEP GETTING INTO MY APARTMENT? I mean seriously, I'm killing between one and three of them a day and I still get bitten just about every night. How do they keep getting in? My door and windows are closed most of the time so that can't be it and, as I already said, there's a really steady supply of the pests. Is there a mosquito spawn point in here or something? (That last sentence was video game humor, if you don't get it sorry but I'm not in the mood to explain.) Anyway, since bug spray would probably do more harm to me than the bites do (I'm rather sensitive to certain chemicals), I can only hope that, since it's been getting colder, they'll all die soon. And now for another complaint about my apartment. In Japan, lots of buildings don't have central heating and air conditioning. My apartment is one them. Such buildings use small wall mounted heating and air conditioning units that naturally only cover about one room each. Mine is mounted near the ceiling of the main room in my apartment (the living/dining/bed room). The problem is, the temperature sensor (the one that tells the thing what the current temperature is in the room so it can adjust itself accordingly) is mounted on the device. Now this wasn't horrible when I was using the air conditioning, although it did make things way colder than you wanted since cold air falls and the temp sensor is above the cold air and therefor it doesn't realize just hold cold things are on ground level where you're standing/sitting. Still, I could work with that by turning the the temperature gauge a bit higher than the actual temperature I wanted (and by shutting the thing off if it got too cold). The main problem was that, being a little wall mounted thingy, it really only hits that one room so the kitchen and bathroom were still burning up. As long as I'm in the complaining mood, here's one more. When I was ranting about my internet before, I believe I mentioned that the cable connection appears to be shared with the entire apartment building and therefor there's some lag during the evening and night when everyone is at home and online. Allow me to share how bad that lag can get. See, last night I wanted to buy a couple of MP3s so I got online, hit the link for a music store, and waited, and waited... A couple minutes later the main page came up. Wasn't sure how to spell the title of the song I wanted so I searched for the group. A couple minutes later the page loaded where I could confirm which group I wanted. Several minutes after that I finally got a song list. But it was sorted by popularity and the song I wanted wasn't up on top so I had to resort by alphabet. A few minutes later they were resorted and I realized that I would have to go to the next page... Naturally that took another couple minutes. At this point I finally found the song...but there were several versions of it and I wasn't sure which one was the original so I decided to listen to the sample clips. Yeah, that wasn't exactly instantaneous either and that's not even mentioning the time it took to go through the checkout process to buy the song or the download (which lagged out and had to be restarted several times). Fortunately the internet isn't that bad every night but it happens often enough. And that is why you really shouldn't ever have more than a few people on a single shared cable loop. Ok, that's all for now. I could probably mention a few other things but I'd kinda like to do something besides complain about stuff tonight so I'm off. |
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Sunday (4th): Tokyo Shopping Day | |||||||||
Despite the title, I've actually done pretty much all the serious shopping I wanted to do since coming to Japan. However, after reading the list I did a few posts ago about stuff I missed from the US, my uncle and a friend of mine who lives in Northern Japan suggests some places where I could find some of the things on that list. In addition, there were a few places in Tokyo I'd been wanting to stop at in the near future anyway. Unfortunately, it wasn't a great day for photos but I did get a few. First off, I noticed that the always cool O-keibo-jo Flea Market was being held that day so I figured that, as long as I was in the area, I might as well stop by and take a look. Like the last two times I was there, it was fun and there was a huge variety of stuff for sale (clothes, old toys, antique stuff, tools, electronics, video games, books, music, etc, etc, etc...). I picked up a few old classic Gameboy platformer games (Mario Land 2, Kirby's Dreamland, and Kirby's Dreamland 2) for a grand total 300 yen, which was a great deal, especially since those game have hardly any text in them so language isn't an issue (and Nintendo's handheld game systems aren't region locked). I also found some stuff my dad wanted. Next stop was Shibuya where I went to a Kinokunya bookstore, a chain that both my uncle and friend said carried some English books. They didn't have a ton but they did have a lot more than any other regular Japanese bookstore chain I've been in and the prices were actually pretty equivalent to the US prices so I got a few for when I need something to read. While I was there, I discovered that Hachiko (which I talked about on a previous visit to Shibuya) isn't the only statue outside the station, there's also this weird thing. I also should probably tell Silver and Kaida (who are hopefully reading this), that I found One Piece! Oh wait...darn. So close... So instead of a ton of pirate treasure I get a British style cafe. Who would have thought there'd be such a big difference between One and Two? Next up I headed to an area not too far from Shibuya to check out a grocery store my uncle had mentioned that sold imported food. It didn't have anything I was looking for but while I was walking around the area I stumbled across a health food store where I was able to find decent peanut butter, among other things. I didn't get a lot (both cause of the price and cause there was a limit to how much stuff I wanted to lug around Tokyo) but what I did get should last a while and it'll certainly be nice to have. Next stop was Jimbocho (FYI: this photo is of a side street, not the main road). Kinda like Akihabara is the electronics area of Tokyo, Jimbocho is the book area, although the size and scope is really nothing like Akihabara. I went there to look around a little, both cause I like books and cause Jimbocho is a key location in the R.O.D. anime, which I've been watching lately. Anyway, there's a lot of bookstore ranging from tiny places crammed full of books to larger fancier shops. Some stores focused on a particular type of book (I saw one that was all graphic novels) and others were more random. Many seemed to focus on old books, some of which are no doubt pretty rare. Of course, if you can't read Japanese or don't collect rare books then most of the stores probably won't interest you too much although I did find one store that specialized in English books (mostly of the old and somewhat rare variety but there was some newer stuff too) and since I only went in a few of the stores, I wouldn't be surprised if there's another English bookstore or two somewhere in the area. Finally, I headed to Akihabra. I didn't do a whole lot of browsing this time. As much as I enjoy it, I didn't want to get home too late and my backpack (stuffed with several books and the stuff I got at the health food store) was putting a serious kink in my back (note to self: if I ever need to buy food in Tokyo again, try and make it the last stop). Anyway, last time I was there I'd seen some posters for the then upcoming Final Fantasy Trading Arts Mini figurine set and wanted to get a few. And, while I was looking for those, I stumbled across the new and extremely cool Final Fantasy Tactics Trading Arts set, which I liked so much that I got the entire set. Too bad there's hardly any decent spots in my apartment to put figurines. I miss my AZ apartment, or even my room at my parents' house (well, before it got filled with boxes when I moved back there from AZ, it's pretty cramped right now, although there I've got the entire rest of the house as well so it's still pretty good). And, aside from getting dinner at the food court in Yodobashi Camera, that's about it. Not a particularly exciting day but I got a lot done and found some useful places. |
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Wednesday (7th): Nogi Elementary Halloween Party | |||||||||
Did I mention that Japanese people like Halloween? Or at least they like the decorations and themed stuff at shops and restaurants that goes up a couple of weeks before. There's no trick or treating although I think there are some costume parties (Japan is the home of cosplay and tons of crazy fashion styles so they do like dressing up). A lot of schools have Halloween parties but they don't seem to be too picky about the dates. I don't think of the schools in Nogi actually had their party on Halloween (heck, one decided to wait and combine it with their Christmas party). Anyway, Veronica-sensei (one of the other Nogi ALTs) came over to help me with my party. We did all six grades pretty much back to back (it was a really busy morning). Cause of time and space constraints, we split each grade into two groups, Veronica and I each took one group for about ten minutes then switched. After that we gave the kids their candy and quickly straightened things up for the next grade. Speaking of candy, the kids got one piece each, which seems pretty miserly compared to back home. But when you consider that the Nogi Board of Education only gave us 1300 yen per school for candy (about $10), the kids were lucky were we able to get enough cheap candy for everyone (I feel sorry for the ALTs at the bigger schools, they probably had to pay for extra candy out of their own pockets). Veronica ran a sort of Halloween matching game for the kids. I'd tell you how it worked but I really have no clue since she planned that one herself and I was way too busy running my game to take a look (the picture was taken by one of the teachers, who I passed my camera off to for a little while). I was also running around too much to take pictures myself. I did manage to snap one of the 4th graders (the only grade that really got into the costume thing) but once again this was a rush rush type of thing so I snapped it really quick and caught about half of them completely off guard. My game was a modified version of fruits basket. Um, now that I think about it, do they play fruits basket in the US? Basically there's a circle of chairs with one less chair than there are people. Each person has a card (there's usually several different types like apples, oranges, cherries, and grapes). The person in the middle calls out a couple of types of cards and people with those cards have to get up and try to grab a new chair before they're all taken (the person in the middle is trying to do the same). It's a game that gets used in a lot of my lessons although it's not always 'fruit' basket (there's been vegetable basket, school items basket, etc). Anyway, aside from making the game Halloween basket (with black cats, witches, jack-o'-lanterns, and bats) I decided to make things more interesting by randomly removing chairs. If multiple people were left chairless they had to play rock paper scissors with the loser getting knocked out of the game. Last two people won. Simple enough but the kids had a lot of fun with it. Here's a couple of pictures of the game. You can spot me in both of them in my Halloween getup, which I got during my visit to Tokyo Disneyland. |
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Friday (9th): Janken & All About Restaurants | |||||||||
Random Japan Comment: Janken Random Japan Comment: Restaurants Redox |
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Sunday (11th): Earthquakes | |||||||||
So, I had this whole day trip planned out for Sunday but the weather report was showing a 90% chance of rain for pretty much the entire day and since a lot of my trip involved walking around outside, I decided to put it off for a week. Instead, I hung out at my apartment most of the day. It was a nice break and I got a lot of things done that I'd been meaning to do for ages but it doesn't make for a very interesting post here so I guess it's time for a Random Japan Comment. Random Japan Comment: Earthquakes |
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Wednesday (14th): A Bit About Wednesdays | |||||||||
I just got a package from back home with some stuff I'd asked my brother to get for me (since I can't buy it over here). I got DBZ Season 3, and Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea for my PSP, all things I've been looking forward to for quite a while. So I'm gonna keep things short and just talk a little bit about what I do on Wednesdays. Like every Wednesday, today I had a long bike ride to down town Nogi where I went to the Board of Education. Then it was off to my first preschool where I play with a bunch of three year olds for a while then give them a short English lesson. The three year olds are cute and they seem to really like me for some reason. They also love climbing all over me. It's kinda fun for a little while but I don't think I could deal with them all day every day like the teachers do. They're also a bit too young to realize that I can't understand everything they're saying, which can be both amusing and annoying at time. The class itself is really short so I do a couple of songs (ABCs and Head Shoulders Knees and Toes), a quick game, and then something short and easy like directions or some simple body parts. After that it's off to my second preschool where I teach two classes, one of four year olds and one of five year olds. They all seem to really like me as well, but they're a bit better trained than the younger kids so they don't all jump on me. Classes are a little longer so I can do a bit more. I still do the same two songs (the Board of Education actually asked me to teach them all the same songs), quiz them on the ABCs, and then I do a couple of games. One is my surprisingly popular start and stop game which basically involves the kids moving around when I say start and stopping when I say stop. Last one to stop is out. In case you never noticed, little kids can be fiercely competitive. There's also the newer janken game which is a sort of rock paper scissors tournament (in English of course). After that I'll do some teaching. That varies by week but I'm currently doing things like body parts and colors. Next is my lunch break so I usually swing by the grocery store and grab a bento lunch (look for a RJC on those sometime) then head to the park to hang out and eat. After lunch comes the newest addition to my Wednesday schedule which involves going back to the BOE and hanging out with some special needs kids. There's only a few kids and they seem to be either older elementary school or younger junior high school students (not sure which). Not really sure why they're in special needs though, they all seem perfectly normal to me. There's always one or two Japanese teachers hanging out with the kids so I let them choose what we do, which generally involves very little in the way of teaching. Most of the time we just play games and have fun. Finally there's the weekly meeting with all the ALTs and someone from the BOE. These meetings are typically fairly pointless ("Is everything going ok? It is? That's good. How about you?") but they're usually pretty short as well and if we get done early we can go home early so I can't complain much. |
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Sunday (19th): Kawagoe | |||||||||
Since the weather improved a lot over last weekend (although the temperature took a big drop), I headed to Kawagoe. Originally I was going to go there last weekend but ended up staying home because of the rain. Kawagoe is a large town (or maybe a small city) that about an hour or so out of Tokyo. It was an important place during parts of Japanese history and is called Little Edo due to its similarities to old Tokyo (Tokyo used to be named Edo). Most of the main things to see in Kawagoe are on or around one part of the town, which turned out to be quite a ways from the train station. Fortunately, thanks to a map board outside the station and a handful of signs along the way I didn't have much trouble finding my way. I walked up a nice long shopping street on my way there (the US has malls and plazas, Japan has shopping streets (and malls and plazas too, but shopping streets are far more common)) so I got to browse a bit. There was one bookstore that had probably a thousand plus graphic novels on sale for 105 yen each (as in, less than a dollar). If my Japanese was a bit better (and I didn't have to worry about how the heck I'd get a huge stack of graphic novels back to the US) it would have been hard to resist going on a spending spree. Not that I mind graphic novel prices in the US ($8-$10 for a book seems reasonable enough) but here even the retail price for a manga graphic novel is only about 1/4th of what I pay back home. I can imagine how much money I'd save...or more likely how many more graphic novels I'd buy with that money. Anyway, back to Kawagoe... My first stop was the Kurazukuri area. Kurazukuri are an old type of storehouse building made primarily out of clay (I think). They used to be really popular a few hundred years ago. Now there's only around 30 or 40 left, most of which have been converted into shops and the like. It's a nice area to walk around and there's also some other things to see like an old bell tower and some museums. One of the old buildings was turned into a museum, or maybe more of a walk in display so you can could go inside and see what they used to look like inside. I also went in the festival museum. Turns out Kawagoe has a pretty big festival every year. Unfortunately, I missed it but the museum gave me a good idea of what it's like. They also had some of the festival floats on display. I know the picture is a bit dark but said floats are both extremely ornate and a good two stories high. Really neat. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn my camera settings back to normal after leaving so the rest of my pics look a bit grainy. Once I'd finished up in that part of town, I headed to the nearby Kashiya Yokocho, which is a small side street full of candy shops (there was other food too but the candy is what it's known for). Since I hadn't spotted any particularly good places to get lunch nearby, I grabbed a few things and just kinda snacked instead. Didn't actually get any candy though. There was one guy selling cucumbers on a stick so I got one of those, although I had kinda been expecting a pickle, not an ordinary cucumber. I also got a couple things that I can't remember the Japanese names of. One is a fairly popular snack food, a sort of rice cracker covered with soy sauce. You can get bags of them in grocery stores but if you get them off street stands the crackers are dunked in sauce, cooked on a grill for a minute or so, then given to you with a piece of nori (the seaweed used in sushi) to hold it with. The other is a fish shaped pancake like bread that you can get stuffed with different things like cheese, chocolate, azuki, etc. I also got fu (or hu depending who you ask). Took me forever to figure out what it was. Seemed to half the stores on the street were selling it and lots of people were walking around with it but I'd never heard of fu before plus it was kinda hard to spot the name on the package. Anyway, I finally asked what it was, which was when I found out the name. According to my electric dictionary, fu is a 'breadlike substance made of wheat'. That actually sums it up pretty well. It's kinda a dry bread stuff that's slightly sweet. The fu there was also kinda sorta french bread shaped and most of it was around three feet long. So I've got about two and a half feet it sitting in my kitchen right now. Moving on, I stopped by the Kawagoe City Museum. Originally I was planning to skip it, but I was making good time and it was right on the way to my next stop so I decided to take a look. Glad I did. Unfortunately, no pictures allowed. Anyway, turns out Kawagoe has a lot of interesting history and a decent amount of the signs had been translated into English. There was also old artifacts, art, etc from various points in Kawagoe's past. Next was Honmaru Goten, the only surviving building from Kawagoe Castle. So I got to walk around inside and outside there. It's interesting how much different Japanese castle's are from European ones. In Europe you either had stone fortresses or opulent palaces. In Japan, on the other hand, they seem to go more for elegant simplicity. At least that's how the ones I've seen are. Haven't seen any of the really big Japanese castles yet so they could be different. Finally, I headed to the area around Kitain Temple. Although the original was burned down long ago, it was rebuilt shortly after using some of the buildings from Edo Castle (not sure how they transported them considering that this was hundreds of years ago). So anyway, I got to walk through that and see some things in the surrounding area like a smaller part of the temple, a flower show that was being held outside, a collection of 538 stone statues (all different), and the nearby Toshugu Shrine (kinda like the Toshugu in Nogi but not quite as impressive). After that, although I slowly made my way back to the station. Could have hung around a bit longer but I'd pretty much seen everything and the sun was going to be setting soon anyway so that's it. |
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Wednesday (21st): Grocery Stores | |||||||||
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the US. Wish I could celebrate it but Thanksgiving doesn't exist in Japan so I've got to work plus turkey and all the other Thanksgiving type foods are pretty hard to find here so I guess I'm just gonna have to skip it this year. Sigh... Anyway, I'm trying to get a whole lot of things done right now so let's do one Random Japan Comment and leave it at that. And, since I just game back from grocery shopping... Random Japan Comment: Grocery Stores |
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Friday (24th): Hanging Out With a Friend | |||||||||
As I might have mentioned before, today is Labor Thanksgiving day in Japan. No relation to US Thanksgiving day, it's actually more like Labor Day. Anyway, long story short I had the day off and spent most of it with an internet friend of mine who lives in Akita (a city several hours north of where I am). He had to come down to this part of the country for a business meeting over the weekend so he came a day early and we hung out, walked around Akihabara, etc. Didn't leave me with a whole lot of time to update the site though so I'm gonna leave it there. |
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Saturday & Sunday (25th-26th): The Ameya Beatles Club | |||||||||
This weekend was kinda interesting. As previously mentioned Friday was a holiday and I got to meet and hang out with a friend of mine who is also teaching English in Japan (although he's been doing it for years). It was fun and also pretty interesting. See, although we've been talking via e-mail and IM on and off for...*checks old chat log* a little over 8 years (wow, it really has been a long time), this was the first time we've met in person. Not often I get the chance to meet people I've only known online (since we're kinda scattered all over the planet). Although there are some friends of mine that I met in person to start with but mostly got to know online after that (once again since they live pretty far away). Wonder if I'll ever get a chance to meet my friends from the PV forums... Maybe if the comic gets really popular I could hold a convention or something. I mean, Penny Arcade does it, but they probably have a hundred times as many readers as Pebble Version does. So, if you all go out and make a hundred friends and then get each of them to read Pebble Version... Ok, moving on. I didn't do anything all that interesting on Sunday. Had been planning to but I ended up getting back to my apartment pretty late Saturday night (I'll go into the why in a bit) and I was dead tired, especially since I'd been getting to bed a bit late that entire week for a variety of different reasons. Combine that with the fact that my afore mentioned plans involved catching a really early train, and I decided to just sleep in and hang out around Koga. So I hung out, got some work done, played some games, and biked around a bit (the original plan was to go get groceries but I ended up making some other stops while I was out). Highlights (such as they were) included visiting a Denny's (my first time going to one in Japan), which was good but had a much more Japanese menu than I was expecting (not sure if I could call it Japanese food or highly Japanified American food, although there were some things that were more or less authentic), and winning another PS2 game from that claw machine at the nearby (well, kinda sorta nearby) game store. If you're curious, it was Tekken Tag. Not really sure what I'm gonna do with it since I'm not a huge fighting game fan (plus that's a pretty old version of Tekken anyway) but multi-player is kind of fun (not that I really have anyone here to play non-online games with). But enough with that, Saturday night was a whole lot more interesting than Sunday. So, as you may already know, every Saturday I go into Tokyo for religious services. This time, the congregation's guitar player invited me to go with him afterwards. He speaks hardly any English but I was able to work out the gist of where we were going (if not all the details). Long story short, he's a member of a group that call themselves The Ameya Beatles Club (Ameya is a shortened way to say Ameya Yokocho, the big market street area in Ueno that I've mentioned before). Basically, it's a bunch of Japanese people who meet (couldn't figure out how often) in a restaurant in Ameya and take turns playing and singing various Beatles songs. You kinda had to see it, or hear it anyway, so I took some videos. There was somewhere around fourteen guys. They all took turns singing and playing and ended up playing in a whole lot of different combinations. So, on with the movies (speaking of which, I decided to try posting my movies as WMVs instead of Flash movies this time around, if you have a preference feel free to let me know). Here's the opening group playing Ticket to Ride, here's the guy who invited me doing Yesterday, and another group of four doing Twist and Shout. All in all, I think this guy was the best. He also did a good Bob Dylan (actually it's a Beatles song but he was purposely doing it with a Dylan voice for some reason). Overall, the songs were kinda hit and miss. None were horrible but some were definitely a bit off. Still, it was fun and everyone (both the regulars and the people who just heard the music and came in off the street) really got into it. |
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Wednesday (28th): Tea & Bikes | |||||||||
Random Japan Comment: Tea Random Japan Comment: Biking |
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Friday (30th): Pizza in Japan | |||||||||
Random Japan Comment: Pizza |
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