久しぶり！

Sorry guys--I know it's been a while. I get easily distracted, and I'm sure you're all waiting anxiously for my update has has not been forthcoming :P There's not much of an excuse for my lack of updates other than that I simply forgot...

So! Have you all been wondering what I've been up to? Well, lots of studying my ass off but other things have been going on too :) Let's see if I can put this together sequentially.

On the weekend of the 20th/21st the Americans in the Japanese Culture class took an overnight trip to Kamakura to visit a shit-ton of temples, shrines, see the giant famous Buddha, go to Enoshima Island, and we all stayed at a traditional Japanese hotel (you know, the ones with paper walls and doors, tatami mat rooms and such). Being out of Tokyo and going towards the coast and a bit more out of the way was an amazing experience, and it was really gorgeous to take in the scenery. We also happened to be able to see part of a traditional Japanese wedding ceremony, and I thought it was gorgeous. Experiencing a bit of the traditional culture at the temples and shrines was a welcome break from the fast-paced life in Tokyo. The entirety of the weekend was jam-packed with stuff, and they had us tightly scheduled for the whole trip. We met at the school at 9 am Saturday, and arrived back at the school at about 7 pm Sunday night, so it definitely wasn't a slow weekend.

I pretty much immediately went to bed after returning from the trip out to Kamakura and Enoshima, but even though I was dead tired I had so much fun.

Monday I went out with my Korean, Thai, Chinese and one American to go drinking. We ending up being SO drunk. I'm told there are photos, but I don't particularly recall them... I

was that drunk. In fact, I slipped down the stairs on my way into the train station (in my defense: it was raining), slid down half the flight on my butt, and sat there giggling for a minute. I think I'm done with the drunk thing from now on :P At leas the whole over-doing it thing, anyway. That being said, it was great to let loose with friends again :D

After that the week started picking up again, and as per the norm I had lots of homework to keep me occupied. Honestly though, I don't really mind it. I can obviously notice my skill increasing, and that's really encouraging.

Friday there was an opportunity to hang out with some Japanese people in a curry cooking class held by the school. I took the opportunity to use my Japanese in "real life" and we all cooked yummy curry!

The Japanese girl we were with spoke really good English, but for the most part we tried to use Japanese and I got along better than I though I would :)

On Monday (11/29) I went over to the guest house of one my American friends for her dinner party thing she was holding with a bunch of her friends from the guest house. There were a variety of nationalities present in the guest house, including a fair amount of Japanese students/young people (the guest house is pretty cheap) which was an unexpected treat!

It feels so weird to think that it's already December. Soon this semester will be over, and I've got conversation exams and finals coming up soon already. The semester will be over in 3 weeks, and then I'll have a winter break. I'm not 100% sure what I want to do but I'll figure something out at some point. I still have some time.

Well, it's gotten late, so I'm gonna crash. I've got plans with a friend in the morning, so I need to get up early. Night!

Pushing One Month Here!

So, in a few days I will have been here a full month (on the 7th). It really doesn't feel that much like I've been in an entirely different country for a whole month. I mean, Japan is just a country full of people doing their normal everyday things. Here in Tokyo the traditional Japanese culture really doesn't smack you in the face like it might were you in a smaller region/city of Japan. Tokyo is almost it's own special country inside of Japan. I'm really enjoying it though. I know enough Japanese to get by, so I haven't had a big issue with culture shock or anything. The issue for me will probably be reverse culture shock when I go back to Manhattan :P

Also, for those who were worried: I survived the typhoon just fine. And for those who didn't know: ... there was a typhoon that hit Japan over the weekend. Typhoon Chaba, I think it was called. It was a category 4 storm, but the part that went over Tokyo was just the very edge of it. Poor Okinawa though got smacked a bit hard. The coast of Honshu (the big main middle island of Japan) only saw a bunch of rain and wind from the edge of the storm. It really wasn't all the bad for me at least. Hell of an experience though, let me tell you. The wind ended up killing my umbrella and forcing me to walk home in the downpour from the station to my dorm (about 20 min if I'm walking quickly). I guess I could have taken the bus, but I would have had to backtrack a bit to get back to the bus stop... plus I'm a poor college student and didn't want to pay the 200 yen fare (about $2.50 ish). I looked like a drowned puppy when I got home, and the dorm manager was concerned. "What happened?! Why didn't you take an umbrella?! You're

going to get sick!" she seemed kinda pitying when I explained that the wind killed my poor umbrella.

I did a few nifty things this week with some friends. On Halloween me and my friend from my dorm went down to the area called Ikebukuro. It's sort of the the nerdy/geeky/anime area here, and it was lots of fun. We went to an 8 story anime/manga store with all sorts of outrageously awesome merchandise for so many animes. Some were familiar and are in the US, but many of them are only recently coming out in Japan or have never made it to the states, so it was pretty cool to be able to peruse the new things and see what I recognized. We also went to the Denny's (Yes, it's exactly the Denny's you're thinking of, with a Japanese twist) and here in Japan Denny's doesn't suck! It's sorta "meh" in the US, but the food was delicious here and was for the most part all Japanese food with a few standard exceptions like pancakes and stuff. I got a seasonal desert for the fall with caramel and a leaf on it that was pretty good. The amount of people in the area was a bit overwhelming though.

Last night I went on a spontaneous trip to Harajuku (the fashion and some shopping district) with a few Americans from school. The atmosphere there is just crazy, but super energizing and entertaining. We checked out some excellent clothes stores and I got myself some nifty earrings and a freaking awesome goth/J-Rock shirt from a used clothes store. Harajuku is also pretty much famous for its crepes, and they totally lived up to the hype. I ended up having a kiwi one with ice cream and whipped cream in it. The variety of them was insane, and there were like 4 crepe trucks right next to each other competing for business. It was a long day last night because we decided to go to Harajuku right after school was finished at about 4 pm which meant we were out most of the night. I got back to the dorm at about 11 pm, but it was worth it. We all did what's called "purikura" (short for "print club" in Japanese) which is the photo booths where you have strings of pictures taken and then the machine prints them out on sticker paper so you can stick them on things. I'm absolutely going back to Harajuku sometime, maybe next week :)

Pictures!

Alright, the first pic was taken in Ikebukuro when I was at Denny's overlooking the street below. The rest of the pics there were from Harajuku of my friends and me eating crepes, the crepe truck itself, and of the entrance to Takeshita-dori (the street we wandered down for shopping)

Videos!

Ikebukuro

Shinjuku

Ride on my train to school

Tea Ceremony

We got to be present for a short tea ceremony today before classes. It was really cool. The Japanese tea ceremony places emphasis on appreciating the simple beauty in things (the tea, the utensils used, the respective seasons when the ceremony is done play a role). After symbolically "purifying" ourselves We were taken to a traditional Japanese tatami room which was sparsely decorated. The alcove in the room showed something simple reflecting the fall season and some calligraphy along those lines. We sat and watched the woman make the tea, were given a traditional Japanese sweet in the shape of an autumn leaf, showed respect for the tea, and got to observe the simplicity inherent in it all. It was very calming--I may end up joining the tea ceremony co-curricular course because I think it's nifty.

In other news: photos!

The first is the much-loved, traditional Japanese "squatty potty" which always seems super weird to Westerners XD The second is... ICE CREAM. In a juice-box like container. HOW HAVE WE NOT THOUGHT OF THIS IN THE US?? You just twist off the top and suck the ice cream out of the package. It's so awesome. And delicious. I approve.

Culture Course and Foodz

The US culture course seems like it's going to be interesting overall if today is any indication. The man teaching it seemed very into it, and that always makes it more interesting to learn. The topic was about the Japanese mentality/psychology, and that influence on Japanese culture. He made us play a little game: 7 people stood in in a circle, and first one person would step into the center and step back. Then two people. Then three. All the way until everyone was moving to the middle of the circle. The catch was we weren't allowed to speak to communicate or set up a "system" and instead had to rely on nonverbal clues. The interesting and relevant part comes when he explained how the Japanese students he coaches performed this exercise. Whereas we US students were more aggressive, made explicit eye contact to try to figure out who was going in, and actively searched for nonverbal cues the Japanese students instead used their periphery and tried to "read" the atmosphere of what everyone else was doing. Both the Japanese students and us had an equally difficult time not screwing up, but our methods for figuring it out were different, and he used that to accentuate the cultural differences. The Japanese are fairly adept at judging the "feel" of the group, and often function in a group-orientated fashion. This leads to a larger focus on the group rather than the individual. This is a direct reversal of how the US functions in which the emphasis is always on individuality rather than group harmony. He went a bit deeper than that brief summary, but it's a complex topic upon which dissertations can be written (and I've written papers on it, so there's a lot to it) but that's a good touch at the surface of the topic :)

Also! Dinner:

A whole cooked fish; some sort of... fried rice I think, with fish, egg and delicious things in it; salad; and soup. The fish was yummy but complicated to eat. You've got to pull the bits of meat from the fillet areas on both sides with your chopsticks, pull out the pin bones, and eat the meat. He was gutted before cooking, so you don't have to worry about that. The fried rice stuff was excellent, but I ended up having to ask the dorm manager lady to show me how to best eat the fish XD She gave a bit of a pitying look, but helped. Turned out to be that I was the only one signed up for dinner tonight so I ended up eating dinner with the dorm manager, her husband, and a woman that I assume is either her daughter or daughter-in-law.

Weird Japanese Food

So, I just ate raw egg and what I think were little fish embryos... and you know what? I LIKED IT. At least, when I could disengage my brain from saying "You shouldn't eat that don't eat that OMG why are you eating that?!" it was good. It's a traditional Japanese breakfast, and pretty common from what I understand. You take the raw egg, beat it a bit with your chopsticks and then mix it into your hot bowl of rice. You can then pour a bit of soy sauce over it and it's pretty dang yummy. I thought the little fish things were like bean sprouts or something initially. I tried them and thought they were surprisingly delicious so I put a bunch in my bowl of rice with egg. I then brought the bowl up to my mouth to begin eating, looked at the bowl and stopped dead--They were little itty bitty fishies/fish embryos or something. And then I ate them anyway. Sadly, I didn't have my phone or camera on me to get a picture, but I can tell you while it's a bit disconcerting visually it's really good. If you can get over the pre-trained "Don't eat raw eggs" thing they push in the states, and shut your brain up you can enjoy it. Salmonella isn't common here, and they wouldn't serve it if it hugely unsafe (at least w/o some kind of warning lol). The dorm manager didn't seem to think I'd be able to eat the raw egg on rice, which of course meant I HAD to as a personal pride issue. She made me a softboiled egg just in case my American sensibilities got the better of me :P

Here's some other yummy stuff I've eaten over the past few days!

The first and second pictures are some delicious curry with chicken cutlet and meat tandoris, respectively. There's this really good--but tiny--curry shop near the school, and a group of us (6 in total) decided to try it out. It could barely fit all 6 of us, but the food was great. There was this little Indian guy speaking Japanese who made the food. It was made right in front of you, including the naan which was absolutely amazing. The curry isn't as spicy as I like though. That's just a Japan thing; things don't swing as far to the extremes as they do in the states. That is to say sweet things aren't a sweet as we're used to nor spicy things. The third picture is the other Japanese traditional breakfast I had a couple days ago. The typical Japanese breakfast nearly always consists of miso soup, rice, a meat, and some sort of salad/pseudo-salad thingy. This one happened to be a fish filet that morning. It was full of pin bones though, and I wasn't expecting that. I popped a big piece in my mouth and began to chew. Fun fun.

The last picture is my new favorite obsession drink-wise. It's called C.C. Lemon and I love it. It's more mild than lemonade, fizzy/carbonated, and has "The power of 70 lemons worth of vitamin C in every can!" (it says that on the other side of the can) which can only be good. I mean, who doesn't like vitamin C, right?

Sorry the pics are kinda fuzzy; I took them with my Japanese cell phone so the quality isn't as good as it could be.