Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Take Me Home, Country Roads

Phew. I know it's really been a while. A loooong while. With how classes and everything have been, it's been hard to find time to update, especially with how long my posts usually get. But here's a good look at what's happened since last episode!

I've visited the other dorm in Takadanobaba~ We went to go watch the Yamato Nadeshiko drama that's on Friday nights (which will be more familiar to many of you as the live-action drama version of Wallflower). Such a good show so far, and it's such fun to watch and try to figure out what's going on. It's all in Japanese, and isn't exactly like the manga goes, so it's fun to try our hand at translating. It seems to be turning into a weekly thing, since we've also discovered Seizeriya. That's a sort-of family restaurant (really reminiscent of American style, and someone mentioned they have them on the US West Coast?) that serves really cheap and tasty italian food. $4 for a personal pizza, and then unlimited non-alcoholic drinks, including soda and juice and espresso and cappuccino and tea? Craaaaaziness here. Literally, getting unlimited coffee in itself is a rarity here, let alone stuff like that. It's wonderful <3. Plus, tastiest tomato-cream seafood pasta ever.

We also went to NHK Studios :D! It's where they film a lot of Japan's television, and it's the studio that came to Pitt to interview people learning Japanese. We got to see their kids' show mascot doing a version of the chicken dance with kids, and it was adorable. They even had a booth where you can dub over an anime (in Japanese, of course!). I got the easy part, funnily enough, and just had to voice the cute animal character. Such fun~! We also got to check out the world's first 3D television that doesn't require 3D glasses. Made my head hurt, but it was really awesome. NHK is also the home of Domo-kun, which (for those of you that aren't familiar with Japanese things) is that new brown toothy-smiled mascot for Target. They had half of the store dedicated to him! They had a million phone charms of him in different outfits, and I just had to get a geisha domo-kun =). They apparently also have a television show that I really wanna see now. It's about two Komainu (though I don't know how that's spelled), which take a little explaining. Japanese Shinto shrines generally each house a god, and that god is served by two komainu, spiritual dog protectors. And the ones in this are adorable! One's all grumpy and mean, and the other's really carefree. I really wanna see if I can find more about it.

We also went to Shinjuku and discovered just how big a department store can be. The store we went to was almost literally a 10-minute walk across from one end of the store to the other, and then 14 floors up, and two below ground. The basement bottom was all food, combining shops with a huge full-sized grocery store. While it's really common to see grocery stores as the bottom floor of a department store, this place was just absolutely mind-blowingly gigantic. And we found baking chocolate for the first time ever! Nom. They had yummy gyoza (a type of dumpling) there, and peach-mango juice with it made for a good lunch.

Speaking of stores, found the first store that actually had clothes in my size, and really cheap! This was Zara, and they had a whole clearance section of stuff that was like 1500 yen ($15) and under. I found a shirt and a jacket-shirt and got them and love them =). I also found a nice pocketwatch-necklace that I really liked. It has this classic antique-look that I really loved, and it goes well with the new shirt (the sleeves of the shirt make it hard to reach/see my watch, so it fixes that :b).

Uuuuum what else. People from the dorm went to Roppongi and got ripped off by what they, in their own words, said were "Nigerians". They got invited to a bar/club that charged $30 for the night, unlimited drinks, they passed out, and woke up in the morning with the guys demanding a ridiculous sum of money for things they claim they ordered. They made them go to the atm, and one guy got away, but the other was ripped off for hundreds of dollars. Moral of the story: don't drink in Roppongi. The Temple orientation people aren't lying when they say that.

On a lighter note, I got to learn how to play the koto! We only learned the simple "Sakura" song, but it was still really awesome! The koto is a 13-stringed 5 or 6 foot long instrument, and it's weirdly both simple and difficult to play. The women there teaching us were really surprised at how well we learned the song, so they played us two performances. It was a really great time =).

We found a Chipotle!!!! Not really a Chipotle, but that same style, and so GOOD. I've been missing home food, so we found this place called Frijoles and went there for lunch. Turned out to be the best Mexican food, even better than American Mexican food. They have you choose burritos, tacos, or however else you'd like your food, then what's in it (spiced grilled chicken, beef, pork, or beans), then toppings (omg such fresh veggies have never been had in an American place), and then salsa (I hate raw tomatoes, and this stuff was the most delicious salsa I have ever had). They also had handmade tortilla chips with salsa <3. A tad expensive, and definitely only a once in a long time thing, but so delicious. I also tried Pepsi Nex for the first time, which is sort of like the Pepsi answer to Coke Zero. It's passable, though it kinda does have a weird aftertaste.

Speaking of food, my mom would love some of the drinks here. Grape juice with Aloe (including the weird aloe bits) is in all the machines here, and some other things with aloe in it. My favorite drink so far is the Melon Au Lait, which tastes just like honeydew/cantaloupe in drink form. It's really great stuff.

Not much else going on, though, other than classes and homework. Lit class just keeps on being great, though I do have a lot of reading to do. J Culture class is starting to pick up and is starting to look good, though he still has a bad habit of talking in circles. Japan Today is unexpected coooool. I wrote a paper about Minamata, and got an A on it. Guaranteed 10% of my grade, go =)! Surprisingly really interesting course, though it didn't seem so at first. And some people have complained that our teacher is kind of vain and such, but it's become really apparent that he has a good reason to be. He really knows what he's talking about, and it's kinda comforting to know that. As for Japanese, just had my second interview test and aced it, too. I also love love love that teacher. She gave us an activity to discuss in groups in Japanese about ranking a list of 15 objects in order of importance, given the situation that we're stranded in the desert after a plane crash. Unfortunately, most of the vocab for such things we learn for that day and then never really use it again, and we're not warned ahead of time what we'll be doing, so we can't research vocab and study it beforehand. As such, it's really difficult to retain the vocab that's outside of the required book vocab, but hey. I'm absorbing it =). I have to get working on my midterm project for that class, for which I have to take a survey of at least 7 Japanese people of some question of my choosing and make a graph for it and present it for 3 minutes. Not too bad, I think.

I've got off tomorrow due to Founding Day, which is a national holiday. Sort of like the 4th of July, I guess? But yeah, relaxing day to get homework done and read this novel for Lit class, and watching movies that will probably make me homesick. Then Akihabara again this weekend! I can't wait! I'm going to see about that wig when we go back =).

That's all I can really think of for now. I'm going to try and keep on top of this a bit more from now on. Sorry for the wait guys!

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