Ultimate!! And excellent Japanese game show videos

So, today was another very long class day starting at 9pm. It was supposed to end at 4:40 but we got to leave at 1:30!! Nice. :D I was so ready to leave class. It's unfortunate but several of my American classmates actually do make an impact on whether or not I want to go home. That's so strange because I'm seriously thinking about moving to Tokyo someday after I graduate college, even if just for a year or two, because the people, language, and culture are so great. It's easy to make Japanese friends, everyone is usually so helpful and courteous, and the language never ceases to fascinate me.

I don't want to go into it, but sometimes I daydream about being in an 8-person Japanese class like mine except everyone gets along, or everyone wants to have fun together, or even where the people could be as cool as on my dogsledding trip. I never wanted to leave those friends, and I still consider them close even though I haven't seen any of them in more than 2 years. (Samantha even rubbed life back into my freezing feet one night!) Or the leadership camps I've been to, where everyone is motivated, bright, and friendly; I always think of them in a positive light and want to see them again but can't. These people, on the other hand, go to UNC. Gamanshiyou...(let's tolerate!) Anyway, here is a picture of several of my dogsledding friends and me so this doesn't become a giant wall of text. Good times, those. :)

After a tiring day, Sachi and I wandered around Kanda University looking for ice cream. We found a lot and she bought an ice-cream-filled waffle but I bought some sweet curry rice instead. :D Then I bought yogurt too, mm. It was just like the yogurt I have at my host family's house except in a bigger container!

Then we went to the field outside building 3 and kicked the soccer ball around for a bit. It was difficult for her because she was wearing platform shoes, haha. And difficult for me because it was sooo hot. But then she had to go, and my friends from Ultimate Frisbee arrived. We passed the Frisbee around, then made teams when more people arrived. It was so fun!! I forgot all about my strange classmates and their myriad issues. I got so sweaty and thirsty, even though it was after 5pm and the sun was not as hot. Robaato-san played with the group but Ethan-san did homework on a picnic table. :/ Here is a photo with some of my teammates and building #3. :D

 

After playing, I went to the train station but missed the correct train, haha. Apparently it wasn't rush hour because it took 10-15 minutes for a new one to come along. While I waited, I noticed that the sun looked cool as it was setting, so I took that picture. I left school at 6:30pm and got home around 8pm. First order of business was a very cold shower. :D

Dinner tonight was awesome!! Yakisoba with tons of veggies and noodles.

Here are some promised videos from yesterday. I assure you, you will not be disappointed!! :D I love Japanese game shows.

This was my favorite prank they did. SO FUNNY.



YES!!



Tomorrow our class is going to the famous Studio Ghibli museum. Studio Ghibli is the production company that makes the most famous anime movies from Hayao Miyazaki, like Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, Spirited Away, and most recently Ponyo. There is a new one coming out in July and I'm going to go see it!! But...I doubt I'll be able to understand it well. ;)

I've been thinking about the Japanese language and how it differs from Spanish and English. The pronunciation of Japanese and Spanish are almost exactly the same, so that's neat. Also, both Spanish and Japanese sentences flow in such a way that English ones don't. We don't realize it, but English is a rather choppy, staccato language compared to Spanish especially, but also Japanese. However, Spanish and English both use voice tone changes very often, such as in questions, that Japanese often doesn't. So in my mind, I have pictures of what I think the sounds of the three languages are like:

This is English. We use tone changes VERY frequently and our words don't all flow together. But to English-speakers, the choppiness isn't really noticeable. However, I think that might be a reason why English is so difficult for Japanese people and Spanish-speakers to learn. Also we make up words all the time.

This is Spanish. I think there are plenty of tone changes, especially with accented words and such, but the words flow very smoothly from one to the next. It's cool that I found a nice river-looking one because I've often compared listening to Spanish spoken in a calm tone to taking a nice, refreshing bath. :D

Japanese flows too, and even the written words have no spaces in them, but the tone remains about the same, even if asking a question. This isn't always the case, but you have to listen closely to see if you're hearing a question or not. There is a little bit of room for tone change. Apparently Americans speaking Japanese is funny because we always put a lot of tone changes into our Japanese.

Time to edit my class survey, print it out, and go to sleep. I wish I could watch more Japanese game shows tonight but it's already 11:15 and I resolved to go to bed early! 私は早く寝ることをしました！

終わりよ！

Kyou wa...eto...

Today's class was unremarkable. I learned things in Japanese! One neat thing from a few days ago that I learned is that when Japanese people make tally marks, such as Americans do in straight, vertical lines up to 5, the Japanese people's tally marks form the character 正. Count the strokes; there are five! It's probably easier to read that then four straight lines with a slash through them. :)

My friends and I weren't able to go to Akihabara today because we all have midterms soon (mine's on Tuesday) and it was pouring rain for most of the day. No adventures today. :( We went to the IES Center and studied, but mostly just chatted about various topics. It would be nice if we could do that in Japanese!

Here are some pictures of the view near my university once the sky cleared up, around the train station Kaihin Makuhari. See that tall hotel way in the distance? That's the one Robaato-san and I climbed all the way to the 50th floor. :D

The Technogarden buildings, which I walk through every morning and evening on my way to and from Kanda University. They are right by the station.

After school today on my walk home, I noticed some girls and their mom trying to catch crabs in the riverside park. Turns out the girls go to school with Takumi so the mom guessed that I was the Moriyama's exchange student. :D We chatted for a bit and I took a picture of a red crab.

For dessert tonight, my mom bought ice cream waffles!!! I ate the Hershey one on the top. YUMMM.

Then we all watched game shows again. It was great fun! See this beautiful singer?

She's actually a man!!! :D I didn't know but the voice sounded manly. :)

I have some hilarious videos from the gameshow watching tonight, but my internet keeps cutting out. :( Maybe it's my computer. Perhaps I'll upload them tomorrow!

I haven't had any major faux pas lately that I can think of, although... today I asked a restaurant worker if they sold sushi at that restaurant, and she was like, "Eto... this is a Chinese restaurant, so no." Haha. :D 

I have gotten better with chopsticks, I think! In the US, I used to think I was hot stuff with chopsticks because I could easily eat sushi with them. But now that I'm here, I can pick up bunches of wet noodles from soba or ramen, slick/round tomatoes, and individual grains of rice. :D I can even cut meat with my chopsticks! When I first got here, I dropped my food a lot, haha. 

MULC and Japanese gameshows

Class today was rough, but not in an academic way. I have ample time to practice a new word we learned this week: gamansuru (我慢する）: to be patient!!! I am not the world's most patient person, so this is a good time to learn. It would be so useful in this class, 役に立つ。。。 Gamanshiyou!!!

I promised a few weeks ago that I would show pictures of the MULC, which is the second floor of the gorgeous library. The MULC is for studying languages other than English, because English is very popular and has its own study building, the SALC. Kanda University is for international studies students, so they often learn other languages. So here are the study areas designed like different parts of the world, used for practicing other languages. I think this is a pretty cool thing to have inside your school's library. :D

 Vietnamese 

Korean

Indonesian

Chinese 

Spanish!

Brazilian Portuguese

After class I studied a little at the SALC and then went home and did homework. I had an essay to write and a survey to create for my research project. It wasn't a very interesting day, but tomorrow I think I'll go to Akihabara with my friends and nerd it out.

Dinner tonight was excellent, as usual! Soba is such a good meal. Takumi reminded me to take a picture. :) We mixed those noodles into a cold broth, then added dried seaweed and things that reminded me of Rice Crispies but with seasoning on them. YUMMM.






After dinner, my host family loves to watch either very funny/sadistic game shows or Japanese dramas. Here is a photo of a Japanese drama that we saw tonight. I couldn't understand much of anything except that this group of guys were all close friends on a dance team and the tryouts were really stressful... and they were always there to help each other up when they fell! The background music was lovely.

 

I wish I had a picture of the game shows we watched last night. There was one that had quizzes about kanji, Japanese historical figures, English vocab (I was so good at that one), and the names of strange animals. It was fun for all!! Then there was a show where this group of men in business suits were locked in a sushi restaurant until they could guess which sushi were in the Top Ten (Most Popular, I think). So they were in there for like 10 hours, eating all of the sushi and trying to guess what each one's ranking was. They looked so miserable by the end!! It started at night and they ended sometime around 10 or 11am the next day! The sushi looked so good, so I asked my host mom if we could get some more sushi sometime, and she said, "Tomorrow I'll make a reservation for that place in this game show that we're watching right now!" So she did, and we're going there on Saturday!!! :D It's not a very expensive place, but she said the last time she went there, they had to wait for two hours to get a table, so they gave up. I can't wait to goooo, I love sushi so much and in Japan it tastes better. :D

I barely packed any clothes at all for this trip and yet I feel like I packed WAY too much. I have already bought 7 new articles of clothing (although some were from a Recycle Shop aka second-hand). My host family and I do laundry every day because it's a small but efficient machine that washes and dries over the course of a 3 or 4 hours all on its own. It's very convenient to do a full load every day.

Tokyo Sky Tree and lots of delicious food :)

Today was a little rough because we had class from 9am to 5pm to make up for the time when we were in Nikko. Two quizzes today and there's a test tomorrow! And an essay due Wednesday and a survey sheet due Thursday. On Friday we go to the Ghibli Museum. At least I am never bored here but wow, so busy.

Yesterday my family took me to see the new Tokyo Tower, called the Tokyo Sky Tree. It won't be finished until 2012 but it's already taller than the old Tokyo Tower!! It's ridiculously huge. I can't wait to come back to see it in all its glory. :) Can you even grasp how tall this building is right now??? Look at the cranes on the top of it!

 For perspective, here it is from far away with some buildings in the foreground.

We saw this on our way to the PIZZA PLACE because my host family is so caring and they remembered that I was missing pizza and pasta. :D We got one pizza that was half-Italian classic and half-avocado and Thousand Island dressing. ;D 

Japanese pizza is cool!! It's not like American pizza. This other one is Taku-chan's favorite:

Yep, that's boiled egg, hot dog, and potato pizza. :) This is normal here! Click here to check out the menu:

 YUMMMM.

Tonight my family made pasta!!! So good, Namiko-san is Japan's best cook. :D

 Cheese sauce and bacon! :D

 Potato-like things in tomato sauce!

 Last night's dinner, so yummy. It was fried pork (katsu) wrapped around cheese, umeboshi, or asparagus, depending on the plate. I was surprised to like the umeboshi katsu, because I really don't like plain umeboshi. It's too sour for me, but with pork it was great!

I need to go to bed now but I wanted to share a cool thing about my host family's apartment. There isn't a parking garage but they have parking spaces that can be raised and lowered into the ground, and then you drive into your space. The spaces on the top here are the most expensive (rented by the month, I believe) but also the most convenient; my family has the top space. In this picture, you can see a small boy operating the remote control to move his family's car back underground.

Here's another one on the other side of the building. In this one, I believe the bottom space is the most expensive because it takes the least time to park. What a neat way to park a number of cars in a small space!! I believe this is common to places other than just my family's apartment.

Nikko trip weekend! Day 2

The next morning, Sachi, Erica, and I woke up at 7:36am when we had to eat breakfast at 8am, haha. The futons were just too comfortable. Breakfast was again amazing, and again I forgot my camera. Not to worry. :) But there was rice, soup, cooked fish, yogurt with strawberries, tofu skin, seaweed, and various vegetables. YUM.

Immediately after breakfast, Sachi, Robaato-san, Ethan, and I decided to climb the trail behind the bridge we saw yesterday up to a viewing platform. The hike was only .4km but it was pretty tough for me. I need to work out if I want to climb Mt. Fuji!! There were a ton of stairs up to the platform, which had a bell and a beautiful view.

We had to pass through this tunnel to get to the stairs.

After ringing the bell and experiencing the beautiful view, we decided to climb the steps that went above this tunnel and up into the mountains. There was a gate on this trail but we opened it to go through. No problem, right? Well, there were these cute bugs that looked like inchworms all over the old steps. Sachi was freaked out about them because she hates bugs, so she shrieked really loudly and we had to help her get the bugs off her shoes. She put up such a fuss that we started to climb back down. At that point, I realized that despite my efforts to get the worms off my shoes, they just. wouldn't. go. I was even squishing them with my other shoe and they still wouldn't die, and more would appear! At that point I started to get freaked out too, so we booked it down the steps. Once we got down onto the road, I asked for help squishing all the worms on my shoes. It was so scary!!! Then Robaato-san said, "Woah, one of them bit me!" and his ankle was bleeding. Sachi flipped out even more and I was like OH NO, now you're going to get some horrible disease! It was a lot like a low-budget horror movie to me, and then Robaato-san would turn into a giant inchworm and eat us all on the bus. Then Ethan-san said he got bitten too, and we had to keep getting even more worms off of our shoes. 

We got back to our hotel room, quickly took off our shoes, and I jumped in the shower. Not only did I feel unsafe about the worms, but I was really sweaty from the hike. While I was checking my naked self out in the mirror to make sure there were no evil bugs on my body, Sachi and I told Erica the story. As we were telling her, she saw more worms on our shoes and commented on how sweet they were. ;) But Sachi and I knew the truth: they are evil beasts that never die. Once we convinced Erica, she freaked out too and helped us try to kill them. After we thought they were all dead, Sachi found one in the hole in the bottom of her shoe and threw her shoes out right away. But then she didn't have any shoes... so some nice hotel worker gave up her own shoes to Sachi. :) We called them pimp shoes because they were awesome.

Robaato-san and Ethan got bandaids and we figured out that the worms were actually LEECHES. As you can see here, the bites were not very bad but leeches have a chemical in their saliva to stop blood from clotting, so there was  more blood at first than can be seen here. Gross! For a more in-depth creepy experience and to see what the leeches actually looked like and moved like, watch this video about Japanese Mountain Leeches.

 We got on the bus and went to the Takehisa Yumeji Museum, about a famous artist from the 20th century. I had no idea who he was but I ended up loving his style of art so much. I bought a bunch of postcards with his paintings and drawings on them so I can frame them for my apartment. He drew and painted very feminine women in kimonos and later in Western-style dress. We weren't allowed to take pictures in the main gallery, so here is my only picture on the left and following are some Google images of my favorite works of his. I loved nearly all of them that I saw! The woman holding the black cat is his most famous piece.

I was really impressed by his works because his portrayals of women were so beautiful. Nearly every single piece of his work had a woman as the focus. He had some fascinating love stories and various important women in his life, which I feel was pretty evident by his art.

After visiting this museum, we went to the Ryou Ravine. Robaato-san, Ashley, and I ran down the stairs to see the waterfall near the bottom. 

There was a shrine by the waterfall, and Robaato-san rang the bell to say a prayer.

Then we ate the most delicious lunch which we cooked for ourselves on a very hot, porous stone. I wish I could have taken some of the food home with me! I ended up putting some of the mugicha (special tea) into my water bottle so I could drink it on the way home.

The plate of raw food that we cooked. It was recommended to put the cabbage down first and then the meat on top of the veggies so it wouldn't stick to the stone. 

Then we went to the Nikko Handicrafts Center where we learned about the traditional art of wood carving/detailing. We weren't given any time to practice, so we just went straight away on wooden mirrors we were given. Here is my design. It was really hard, so I got discouraged when I messed it up a bit. Oh well, not bad for a first try.

 On the bus ride home, Ethan tried on Sachi's new shoes. :)

 The Japanese countryside was so beautiful. Look at all of that rice!

After we got home, Sachi, Ethan, Robaato-san, and I all went to Nishi-funabashi to find a Japanese sports bar to watch the Japan vs. Netherlands World Cup game and have some osake. It was a fun and interesting experience and that is all anyone needs to know about that. :) I bought some ramen because it was the cheapest thing on the menu but it turned out to be the kind you get in a package, haha. They put a raw egg and veggies in mine, though!

I have been writing blog posts for two hours! It is definitely my bedtime. But here is a picture of a vending machine that sells waffles filled with ice cream, mmmm.