Bye Bye Japan Part 2: Hong Kong

First up:

Dear the 2 random Japanese girls sitting next to me on the flight to Hong Kong: I thought it was very nice of you to do nothing except giggle at my funny accent or whatever when I translated what the Chinese flight attendant was trying to explain to you. I was particularly impressed by the gratitude you showed me by not even saying thank you when I tried to help you out of a situation your own ignorance created. I would also like to thank you for following this up with that "Shit, what do we do now we know that the foreigner next to us understands our entirely unremarkable conversation" act I grew to love so much. It was particularly nice of you to remind me of the thing I liked least about Japan while I was rather upset about having to leave.

I hope you have a lovely holiday in Hong Kong.

Oh, come on, did you really think I was going to let this blog go without a last rant :-)

So, Hong Kong! It was of course my luck that there was a typhoon on the one day I was there :-) And Tony was in America :-( sob sob...

It's pretty jam-packed and completely different from Japan. This was made clear to me pretty quickly when I got my ticket for the Airport Express into Central from the Airport:

Me: Hi, can I get a day return to Central please?

Station attendant: "Buy your ticket in Central. AND GET ON THE TRAIN NOW DAMNIT!!!!!

Hong Kong Dollars are pretty cool, although the coins are way too big.

I thought Central was a bit boring to be honest... Although if I happened to have loads and loads of money...

Went over to Mong Kok at Christina's suggestion, which was much more interesting. The Goldfish market really is something to see... about 4 solid blocks of fish stores... They like to stare there as well. Not like Japanese "I wasn't looking, honest" staring though... as in "walk right up to you and look you right in the eyes and then up and down for as long as it takes for the traffic lights to change" staring... They have Yoshinoya and 7/11 (complete with Pocari Sweat!!!! I'm gonna miss that stuff...) over there at well!

The Star Ferry was really cool as well. Perhaps best not to do that when it's blowing a Typhoon on the other hand. Oh, and I think I saw the SDU raiding the boat in front of ours in the middle of the harbour...

Overall I thought the place was pretty interesting, thought I'm not sure I'd want to live there... it's a bit like a dirtier version of Japan minus the politeness... On the other hand that does come with plus-points. Probably a good idea to visit on a day when there's no Typhoon as well.

Oh, and even though there was a typhoon chucking it down, it was something like 32C and humidity of 7 bazillion (worse than Japan!)

Oh, and they put my passport stamps on the same page as my Japanese ones (Just under my now cancelled Student visa) :-( Now it just looks like I have tons of Japanese stamps :-(

It was kinda strange to be back among so many westerners as well... Central seemed to be about 50/50 Chinese/western... Maybe that's why I liked Mong Kok more... Guess I'll have to get used to this again. Also, it was kinda hard to make sure I didn't speak Japanese to the Chinese people :-X

Oh, and I made the obligatory Starbucks visit... Final results: Japanese > UK = Hong Kong > Philippines.

Asia, I'll miss you X

Last few days in Japan. Part 1

So, I'm here in Hong Kong Airport again (Ironically about 2 gates down from where I wrote that post almost a year ago to the day last time I was here...), and as I promised here's the beginning of the "dignified" ending to my blog.... sob sob.

So I had a lot of goodbyes... the fun ones; Tanaka Sensei, who told me some HILARIOUS stories but swore me to secrecy about them (By the way, she still loves you Mark). All I'll say is apparently she went to Korea. And seems to have G-Dragon bought a Bentley... Pei, who is better at choosing cake than I am. Nanami and Yuusuke and the sheep up at Mount Rokko Farm (which is pretty much exactly like Nara-Park except with Sheep instead of deer...),

Yuuko. There aren't many people I will voluntarily got to Himeji for... Next time: Seoul! (with Eunbee)

The goodbyes I didn't actually get to properly make: Ryoko, Mikuru and a couple of others.

And the really really hard ones :-( Tsukasa, Ryota, Mayuko, Yoo and Takeo...

Oh, and special thanks to Ga and Ryuuka for helping me pack and taking all my stuff so I didn't need to throw ABSOLUTELY everything out :-) And particularly Ryota and Reiko for coming all the way out to Kansai Airport at 7am to see me off :-)

Rather ironically while I was on the phone arranging to have my electricity disconnected I had a final "I have absolutely NO idea what you just said" moment...

I've been in Japan almost exactly one year to the day, and I have to say staying on this extra month and a half was a great decision, these last few weeks really have been amazing.

I seem to be leaving :-(

First things first, the good news. I sort of thought that I'd only just passed the JLPT test but turns out I'd got the pass mark wrong and I actually did pretty respectably :-)

So yea, it kinda hit me the other night somewhat predictably while I was picking out onigiri in a Konbini (Convinience Store). I'm leaving next week... as in like, leaving leaving. As in end of year abroad...

On an unrelated note I feel the need for a disclaimer:

Mayuko and Ryota's recent English-vocabulary additions have absolutely nothing to do with me. I have absolutely not been teaching them naughty words. 100% True. And by true, I mean false. To be fair they asked. Sort of.

Anyway, to be honest, I've sort of been (fairly justifiably) more concerned with enjoying these last few days here to the max rather than writing about it here... I'll write something while I'm sitting around Hong Kong airport on the way back...

Oh, and packing is a bitch.

合格！

I passed JLPT 2 :-) Yaaaaaay

So, we had a rather nasty Typhoon the other day... ended up missing Kobe/Osaka (as usual) and smashed up Tokyo instead. Kanagawa-prefecture (southern Tokyo) got hit pretty badly actually. What was most shocking though was that THEY SHUT DOWN THE SHINKANSEN (Bullet-trains)!!!!!! :-O What the hell? This is Japan, this sort of stuff just doesn't happen!

On the other hand, rain! And not-unbelievably-sweaty-scorching hot weather for a change! Thomas likes.

So, we're at the less than 2 weeks mark here... Don't really want to talk much more about that.

I've been doing a lot of wandering around my neighbourhood recently, kinda doing a bit exploring. I'd always assumed I lived in the middle of nowhere up a mountain with absolutely nothing of interest. Turns out I live in the middle of nowhere up a mountain with absolutely nothing of interest.

Fair chance we'll get some more Typhoons coming through before I leave. Kinda want to see a big one... I live up a hill, I can just sit here and watch Osaka get flattened... It'll be like 日本沈没。。。

Japan tells me to take an English test.

So, I had a meeting with the international coordinator (Maeda-sensei) for the Economics department at Kobe University ("Hi. I really like your university/country. Will you please take me back in a year or two?").

Basically, in principal, I can was the answer. One odd thing. Apparently part of the entrance exam I would have to take for post-grad economics is the TOEIC exam* (Test Of English for International Communication). Everyone does this, including the Japanese students. Apparently they've just never had a native English speaker as a student, so we spent about 45 minutes calling round various people to figure out if they would make me do this (Rather surprisingly for Japan, everyone admitted straight up that it was rather pointless to make me do it.). At one point Maeda-sensei even asked "You're Scottish right? Is there any way you can claim Scottish as your first language?".

I actually had a look at some of the test questions later in a book store... There were a few I didn't know...

*TOEIC holds a somewhat bizarrely revered position in Japanese society. Not Kimutaku/Ichiro-level reverence of course, but you hear people talking about fairly regularly (actually it would be more accurate to say "you hear people talking about it when they see a foreigner"), and the English book sections of bookstores are sorted by "TOEIC-level X" shelves...

I need JLPT 1 as well (Yay! fun! Not to mention another 500 Mister Donuts points :-S). Actually, that's not 100% true. I would need to SIT the JLPT 1 exam. Apparently they wouldn't care even if I got 0 as long as I attended the exam. Actually I was planning to taking it this December anyway...

Somewhat depressingly, JLPT 2, despite being a perfectly respectable level of Japanese is in practice a rather useless qualification... It's kinda 中途半端 as Yume would say...

I have a cold :-(

I never really understand how you get a cold in summer, especially when it's still about 35C everyday here, but I guess it's probably something to do with the crazy cold air-con every building in the country has on every day (not that you'd want to be without it on the other hand...)

So yea, I have a cold. It's not really that serious, and wouldn't be a massive problem except it's screwing around with my voice... which is a problem when you try and speak to people in a foreign language where they won't understand you if you get a single syllable wrong*, when you already have a funky weird accent. (Think the Japanese sound weird when they speak English? Guess what...).

Example: I walked into a konbini today and asked for a ピザまん (Pizza-man; Kinda steamed bun thing with pizza sauce filling.), and got given a packet of cigarettes instead...

*I think it has something to do with having comparatively few non-native speakers. They've just never had much experience hearing anything other than perfect Japanese. I think English speakers (French/Spanish/German whatever) are much better at figuring what someone meant to say, even if it wasn't perfect.

I have just re-read that last paragraph. My god I sound like a 5 year old... I'm just gonna leave that there as a monument to... something. I forget what I'm supposed to say... Yea, maybe not such a bad thing I'll be back in an English-speaking country in 3 weeks (sob sob).

Anyway, what I meant was that since there are a massive number of non-native English speakers of competencies ranging from native-level to "can say 'Herro-'. Badly", we tend to be better at working out the general meaning.

Oh, and by the way: Special note, aimed specifically at Louise and Yume. This blog will not end randomly with "I'm just going out for some ramen tonight" or such like. I promise it a proper, dignified conclusion and maybe even a reflective entry in 2 months or so. :-P

Everybody's leaving :-( sob sob

So we've sadly come round to this point...

Good-Tony left this morning (probably sitting in KIX departure lounge at the moment...) to go back to America. I'm going to miss living down the corridor from Hong Kong film-star royalty... (Tony Leung hehe) (Coincidentally Bad-Tony also left today...)

Louise left last week (Granted she was only in Kobe for 3 weeks...), Alexis left Sumiyoshi a few mins ago to spend a few days in Tennoji before he goes back to France, and Chris leaves in a few days...

I'm leaving 5 weeks from yesterday... Seriously, what I wouldn't do for another year here...

Oh, we had お盆 (O-bon) this weekend. It's a Japanese Buddhist festival to remember your dead ancestors. Interesting task: Go ask Japanese person under the age of 30 if they know what it's for... lol.

So anyway, I went up to Fukui-ken to go see Yoo again. Met a couple of his friends at the 鮎祭り (Fish Festival?) who were pretty cool, one of whom had a truly amazing command of English swear-words hehe :-). Another one, assuming I couldn't speak Japanese*, was speaking to me in mostly-not-bad-English for about 10 minutes. I'm not sure if this was mean or not but I just let her keep going with that assumption (answering only in English) until Yoo "outed" me. Is this bad? I don't know, I kinda figure it's sort of what you get for not asking...

*Given Yoo speaks only Japanese and a bit of German, this really doesn't make that much sense...

Incidentally, Year Abroad lesson: No matter what language your speaking NEVER assume that nobody has a clue what you're saying.

Special mention goes to Louise, who shouted accidentally "Vagina" rather loudly in an Osaka Starbucks. The Japanese woman sitting next to us gave us some interesting looks...

Unless you're speaking in Danish. Not even the Danes understand that sh*t lol.

We were having a chat about how I don't really like how Kyoto is full of tourists who can't be bothered to learn a bit of Japanese, and they asked if that meant I didn't like Japanese people who couldn't speak English. Basically, the way I see it is the difference is, when Japanese people (actually this goes for pretty much all non-English speaking countries) go abroad, they don't try to speak their home-language to whoever they meet there. Japanese tourists aren't generally in the habit of waltzing into Starbucks in London and expecting the barista to understand "アイスチョコをクリーム抜きでお願いします". This is however, exactly what tourists do here. I think it's just rude to make your own laziness someone else's problem like that.

Oh, and we went swimming in the river next to Yoo's village, which was great 'cos it's still roasting hot here (and the water was as clear as glass). They say it'll get cooler soonish. I was here last September so I know this is a complete lie :-) hehe

Ryota seems to have become a fan of this foreign cinema over in West Kobe (新開地). It's a bit like the Cameo or Filmhouse in Edinburgh (This reference was put in for the sole benefit of my mum.). I have to question it's selection on occasion however... "Did you hear about the Morgans"????

Oh, and "The Karate Kid" is called "ベストキッド" ("Best Kid") here...

徳島 Tokushima

So I actually made it off Honshu Island for once lol.

About 15 of us (mix of Japanese and foreign students) took a little trip down to Kaifu at the very bottom of Tokushima Prefecture, Shikoku for a few days. In other words, pretty much the middle of nowhere. Was really fun! Got some rather itchy sunburn on my back though...

Oh, and I had NO idea what on earth anyone was saying there... Mind you, apparently neither did the Japanese lol... Where's Taichi when you need him... (In Birmingham actually).

Also, Louise arrived! She's here for 2 weeks for a Japanese language course Kobe University is running. Yay! (Judging by how everyone says the classes are "really fun", I think they must be getting different classes from the ones we did. :-P) . Oh, and I think I might be successfully converting here to the obviously far superior Kansai version of Japanese :-)

Speaking of Japanese, I heard this random foreign woman in a bar speaking Japanese (I think they were the Kobe JETs). She obviously new the language very well (better than me) but it was a little bit weird in that she didn't seem to know how to use it. By that I mean when she told us someone else was using the seats we tried to sit in, she told us exactly that, which is fine in English but came across as a bit rude in Japanese... I just thought that was interesting.

Oh, and I got my nose felt up by the waitress in a Korean restaurant in Kobe. (Incidentally, Eve, Elena, we're going to need to have a discussion about Kimchi in the fridge...). Literally I was sitting at the table and she came up and was like "Wow, your nose is really big!" And just started feeling it! Wierd... lol

Sad news: Yume and Mark are leaving in a few days :-( Stevie and Marina are already gone :-( sob sob

Bye Bye Kobe University :~-(

General update on the status of Japan: Hot.

I heard on the evening news that it got to 38C in Nagoya the other day. Poor souls, as if having to live in Nagoya wasn't bad enough already*... Apparently someone there left a spray-can in their car and it exploded, blasting a fair amount of their car interior to bits**.

* The position Nagoya holds in Japanese culture was once explained to me as follows: "Think of Birmingham of 15 years ago (I.E. Before they built all the stuff that makes it vaguely nice these days), with the population replaced with that of Essex."

** Yes, the top story of the national 9pm news was an exploding spray-can. Welcome to a country with approximately zero crime and zero interest in the outside world.

So, rather sadly I've reached the end of my classes at Kobe university, just got the Classical Mechanics exam left :-( (Incidentally, the textbook we use has a bad case of the Japanese strain of what I call "Ray Jones syndrome". Why write F=mv when you can write F=md2x/d2t?)

Off to Tokushima next week, which will be the first time I`ve actually been off Honshu Island... looking forward to it :-)

Oh, and I`ve been watching this Korean TV series lately (Iris. More or less a Korean version of 24/Mission Impossible. They showed it on Japanese TV back in April.). Weird side-effect of this is that last night I had a dream mostly in Japanese but with random people talking in what I`d have to call "Subconsciously-made-up-Korean"...

アルバイト Arubaito

German (Probably Danish as well...) speakers (I.E. Elena and Helen (and Sean)) will probably figure out what the title means, for the rest of you, it's the word the Japanese borrowed off them to mean "Part-time Job" (Note to the German speakers: Yes, they borrowed the wrong word... Or rather, not enough of it...).

See, it's not just English they borrow from... Portuguese pops up as well sometimes (パン- pan: bread). Incidentally 天ぷら(Tempura) is actually Latin...

Etymology lesson over. Anyway...

So, Kobe University has been hosting an international "Linguistic Pragmatics" conference this weekend which I've been helping out at as a receptionist/guide/etc. Been pretty fun and best of all I got loads of free food :-) (Most notably those massive Costco muffins you get. I didn't even know they had Costco in Japan...)

Incidentally: Japanese assumption that "Asian= Speaks Japanese/Non-Asian= Doesn't" becomes quite amusing when you have loads of Korean, Chinese and Thai visitors around... (Especially since about 70% of them were American anyway...). Special mention goes out to the Kobe University shop assistant I was talking to who ignored the "Kobe University STAFF" written on my T-shirt in big letters and explained everything I asked her about to the Taiwanese-American woman I was helping who didn't understand a word she was saying...

Oh, and celebratory declaration: Introduction to Earth and Planetary Science has no exam!!!! woo hoo

I've still got 2 months Tuesday left before I leave, but most people are leaving in 3 or 4 weeks and all this talk of going back home is kinda hanging over everything I do... weird feeling...

Sumiyoshi Zoo

I don`t think I`ve ever actually mentioned much about my halls...

Precisely one thing makes up for any inconvenience about them. My entire rent for 1 year has been less than ¥60,000. That`s about $450 (I mean pounds. Japanese keyboards...). In other words, about 1.7 months in Birmingham...

The wildlife certainly makes it interesting... Wild boars, foxes, monkeys, raccoons, MASSIVE spiders, even bigger hornets, Bats, massive butterflys and then what I can only describe as massive butterfly/bat hybrid things....

Oh, and it`s on top of a mountain! 20 minutes up a really steep hill from the nearest train station :-)

And best of all is the random people singing at all hours of the night. Really really badly. Last night I had the delights of the same 3 bars of "Eye of the Tiger" over and over and over again. At 1am. When I had to get up at 5am...

And who said Japan was wierd?

Gotta love the place...

Randomness

I bumped into Tanaka-Sensei (Supervisor/last term's 2nd Language Acquisition lecturer) today.

Apparently she's a fan of Korean Hip-hop/pop. She rather out-of-the-blue suggested I go listen to G-Dragon (From BIGBANG)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOXEVd-Z7NE

There's a youtube link.

So, while she doesn't buy me beer like Ogasawara-Sensei used to...

I'm sort of lost on what to do now that Sophie's gone (for another 3 weeks traveling around China...) and the JLPT test's over. Studying was pretty much my life for a month and a half... I don't really know what to do anymore. That said, my Kanji reading has gotten so much better now I'm kinda just carrying on... The day after the exam I went out and bought a new textbook...

I've kinda come to realise that in terms of learning a language, it really is more or less just the number of hours of study that count... the more you have the better you are...

JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test)

So, it finally came around... rather unfortunately for me it wasn`t a week earlier, in which case I could have got it over and done with and freely enjoyed Sophie's visit.

It was harder than I expected to be honest, somewhat worried that I may have failed on account of the vocabulary section...

Me and about 5-6 other Kobe University students took it over in Nishinomiya at Kwansei Gakuin University (Which a) has a really nice campus, and b) can't spell its name properly in ANY language, the Japanese name is 関西学院大学, which should really be read as "Kansai" but they call it Kansei for some reason). Incidentally, the people doing level 1 (I did level 2) got to do it in good old Kobe University... Anyway...

Having never actually been to Nishinomiya before we were a bit worried about finding the place... the enormous line of people speaking Chinese and Korean kinda helped...

They all stared at us :-( I will not print Marc's (hilariously non-PC) retort...

This years test was different from before. By that I mean harder. One change was they separated the marking into 3 sections (Vocabulary/ Kanji/ Grammar, Reading and Listening), which you have to pass minimum scores separately as well as an overall score (Stops deaf Chinese people cheating). On the other hand, I read somewhere (I'm not entirely sure if this is right) that the scores were 50/60 for Vocab/ Kanji etc, 30/60 for reading and 40/60 for listening...

Just to emphasise that, you are allowed to get HALF the reading section wrong but only make 10 mistakes in the first section...

I'm not entirely sure that it's accurate, though on the other hand given that "Can you read a page of text and understand what it means" is a much more practical, useful ability to have than "Do you know what 風俗 means", I would fully expect any average person employed in Japanese-language education to value the latter more hightly...

Anyway, I get the results in September...

Does not Compute

For some reason this has happened a couple of times lately...

Basically, I'm sitting somewhere (Starbucks, Kansai Airport (again)) minding my own business, reading something in Japanese (Usually Death-Note. On time it was A PLANETARY SCIENCE TEXTBOOK. Which said EARTH AND PLANETARY SCIENCE in really big kanji on the front cover.), when the Japanese people next to me start talking about me...

Usually it's just stuff like "Wow... he knows Japanese. I wonder what country he's from...", but still, do they honestly think there is even the slightest possibility that I learned to read a language to that level but not understand considerably simpler stuff when it's spoken 50cm in front of me? Dear dear...

I have occasionally called people up on this... I particularly bizarre one happened when the two 40-something women who were doing this started saying stuff like "Hmm, that's odd... your pronounciation is a bit foreigner-ish...".

I put this down to the (somewhat justified) belief most Japanese people have about foreigners not possibly being able to speak Japanese...Even in spite of the blatantly obvious they still sometimes can't get over it...

I did have a thought about a slightly odd double standard. It's sort of expected for Japanese (and pretty much every other non-native-English speaking person) to learn English if they are in the UK/US etc and no-one bats a eyelid when they do, but when we learn Japanese/whatever it's kind of "wow!"... not terribly fair...

Mayuko was saying that compared to 10 years ago there are many more Japanese-speaking foreigners, and maybe in another 10 years it will be considered perfectly normal... is there a fast-forward button on life?

Speaking of fast-forward... JLPT tomorrow afternoon. Back to work....

Oh, and incidentally, Prince Charles can now join David Beckham, Nick from the Backstreet boys, President Obama and Wentz Eiji in that most exclusive/infamous club...

Sophie`s Visit!

So after a crazy month long-cram for the JLPT test (This Sunday, i.e. 2 days!) off I went again to Kansai Airport to pick up Sophie! (Friend from Edinbugh)...

*I have to admit to having realises THE MORNING SHE ARRIVED that her follow on ticket to Shanghai hadn`t been payed for on time and had thus been cancelled... all was well in the end but I more or less flew to the airport on a cloud of panic... "Shit! I`ve stranded my friend in Japan!!!!"... all was well in the end...

**Incidentally, while on the phone with the sales assistant to re-book the flights she asked me how to spell Sophie`s name... When she got to "E as in England" literally all I could think of was "I`m sure イングランド (Ingurando) begins with an I..."

So, been having a great time showing her around Osaka, Kobe etc. We also hopped on the Shinkansen to Okayama, and Hiroshima/Miyajima for the weekend, which I`d always wanted to go to... For the record, I agree with Yume`s assessment of Miyajima. Although we could have done without the rain.

Hiroshima is an interesting place. As a tourist it`s sort of limited, but it looked like a pretty cool place to live. Felt a bit more like Tokyo than Osaka really...

The 原爆ドーム(Genbaku Doumu- the A-Bomb dome) is pretty horrific but the Peace Park is sad but at the same time kinda hopeful.

Sophie`s been laughing at my occasionally messed up English as well... :-( lol. "Lets go to Shinsaibashi, there`s various food...stuffs there..."

Speaking of Sophie herself, she`s bravely off to Tokyo on her own for a few days while I prepare for the exam... think I`ll be ok... as long as I stop writing this and get back to work...

I am a Japanese School Student. Minus the Sailor Uniform...

Is it bad that I found this hilarious? (sorry it's in Japanese)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv9YUH0cFNg&feature=related

Anyway, havn't written anything lately, basically because my life has been one thing for the entire month before Sophie arrived last week (yay!). That is STUDY...

Since I get distracted way to easily in my room, I've been camping out in various cafes around Kobe... In spite of my rotating around various places Starbucks have started preparing my order as soon as they see me in the door and I swear that "We may ask studying customers to leave during busy times" sign wasn't there in Mr Donuts 3 weeks ago...

(Just to put this into context, Kobe University's top level Japanese-writing class is currently now in its 3rd week of teaching us exactly where brackets are supposed to go in kanji-square paper. Helpful as ever...)

The Madness continues...

Do you remember AKB48? They're back...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYCmdkb5oZ4&feature=related

This is No.1 at the moment... I give up.

The two guys sitting in front of me in Earth and Planetary Sciences (This is the class where the only person who ever acknowledges my presence is the lecturer. By staring at me with a shocked expression.), randomly started talking to each other in English at the end of class. Sounded a bit like they'd learned their whole vocabulary from Mario Kart 64 to be honest...I don't really know have a clue if they were trying to impress me, make fun of me or try to get me to talk to them...

Things took a more surreal turn in Classical Mechanics (This is the class that talk to me from time to time. Usually to ask me if I'm French...). A photographer came round to get some snaps for the department prospectus... can you see where this is going?

So she asks if it would be possible to get some "action shots", like, people doing physics-y stuff. Like, maybe someone could write a problem on the board and the rest of the class look interested... someone like...

I didn't really feel that I could refuse, but I was pretty annoyed with it. I wouldn't care if they had me sitting around randomly in class (like I do normally anyway) in a kind of "look! We have foreigners as well!" way, but having me standing up front and center just looks ridiculous and contrived... And besides, my handwriting sucks...

So, JLPT in less than a month... Basically this means 4 hours of studying a day... fun times are being had here :-)

Oh, and I had 2 reports on Satellite Laser Ranging and the Indo-Eurasia plate collision to hand in last week. At least, I though we had 2 reports to hand in. When I stuck my 1000 character, thrice checked and fully referenced Laser Ranging masterpiece in the box I noticed everyone else had written 3 sentences on this tiny A5 scrap of paper... :-(

E-Mails

I just got a nice if slightly odd e-mail off one of my sensei...

Basically I decided there was pretty much no way I would have the time to do the study required to pass 3rd year quantum mechanics at the same time as the JLPT test (Ironically it was the physics that was the problem, not the Japanese), so I e-mailed the lecturer to say I was dropping the class. Before I sent the e-mail I got Ryoko to check it over for me.

I got a reply this afternoon, and basically what it says is "Ok, good luck with the test", followed by literally a sentence by sentence analysis of the grammar and structure of my e-mail, with comments such as "The possible usages of this particular phrase are increasing in modern Japanese, which may cause problems for the older generation."

Nice, but odd...

Dad and Roda arrive :-)

Parents! Yay!

I told Roda in advance that she should try to sit on the left side of the plane on the flight from Paris to get a great view of Kobe and Osaka as you land, which she managed to get. I woke up that morning to find it was so foggy I couldn't see the apartment block 200m in front of my window... cest la vie...

So, another trip down the Osaka bypass at silly AM to pick up Roda from Kansai Airport. Guess who I bumped into there... Hiro. As in, "Off to Birmingham for a year, see you in September" Hiro (Incidentally, Thank's to family for kindly adopting him!). Turns out he had a research conference here and so came back FOR A WEEK... that's dedication...

Incidentally, Hiro's last words before heading back to the UK (more or less): "Enjoy the summer hahaha"

Speaking of the Summer, it seems to have arrived... apparently we're in the rainy season, but it hasn't dropped below the high 20s for about 3 weeks now (I'm tanning! In a kind of... Scottish way...).

Except of course for about 4 of the 8 days Dad and Roda were here, where it chucked it down...

Dad arrived the next day from Shanghai (where the food was terrible, so he said), so that was another trip to Kansai airport (this time we took the boat! Novelty!)...

Sadly we didn't really have time to do any traveling outside of Kansai, but I took them round Kyoto, Osaka and Nara etc. The torrential rain actually kept the hordes of Kyoto tourists at bay for once :-)

The (for once not-raining) day we went to Deer-town (Nara), where randomly 5 million billion middle school kids from Gifu (AKA Kaori-town. That's like, just north of Nagoya, half-way to Tokyo) were on a school trip. I don't know exactly what their teachers had told them, but it seemed to have been something along the lines of "If you see a foreigner, run up to them and ask them this questionnaire about their home country.". Actually, knowing Japan it probably was exactly that... This got a little irritating after like, the 100 time...

Oh, and Dad did a presentation at Osaka University, which went really well, and one of the Professors and his wife took us out for lunch in Umeda (central Osaka). It was Kaiseki (very elaborately presented set menu dishes. I think it cost something like ￥10,000 per-person...), and was so delicately made it was really a shame to eat it...

Oh, and some of the tempura was Ayu (a fish), so I made a joke about Ayumi Hamasaki (Who's also called Ayu) in Japanese, to which the old lady explaining the meal replied with "This fish was raised very well and has a most delicate flavour and is generally excellent. Ayu eats junk-food all day. Please do not compare the two!" hehe.

Oh, and the professors wife very kindly explained "子" to me (It means child and is probably about the 3rd Kanji I learned...)...

Escaping Tokyo

So, after being hit on by some random 45-year-old Japanese guy in a sombrero in Yohji Yamamoto in Ginza I headed back to Tokyo Station to catch my Shinkansen back to Kobe.

I'm sure I mentioned this when I first arrived here, but you can get pretty much anything served with ice here. It wasn't until this point that I discovered this extended to cream-cheese bagels...

Me: "Oh, can I have one of those little cream-cheese pots as well please?"

Bagel shop girl: "Yea sure. Would you like ice with that?"

Me: "Er, did you say ICE, as in, like, ice ice? Like, glaciers and stuff? What on earth would I need ice for?"

At this point she decides that the reason I'm struggling to get my head around this question is that I don't understand Japanese (Never mind the fact I just dropped about 2 other synonyms for "ice" not to mention "glacier" into the conversation...)...

Anyway, turns out you can get a little bag of ice to keep your cream-cheese cool if you're saving your bagel for later!

I also accidentally left the little bag of deodorant I'd just bought earlier lying on the counter, so they handed it into lost property. Anyway, I got there about 7 minutes before my train left, and very hurriedly described the exact brand of deodorant, that the receipt was in the bag and where and when I had bought it.

Security guards response: "Ah yes, we have it here. Please sign here, fill out these two forms and could we please have your passport to copy?" WTF...

Anyway, I made it to my train (just).

Sadly no nice beer-buying business man this time :-(

Arrived back in Kobe and was rather (stupidly) surprised to hear everyone speaking Kansai-ben... And I also forgot which side of the escalators we stand on here...

Oh, and I really wanna go back :-) Tokyo's cool.

That said, I REALLY think that it would be pretty difficult to handle if you'd never been to Japan before...

東京! Tokyo! Part 2

So, went back into Tokyo on the Sunday (after running into a rather odd international food fair in a Tsukuba car-park...shame we'd just had a whole load of Cake for breakfast) with Mei and Naru.

Headed to Akihabara first off (wandered around the Yodobashi Camera store there; SOMEHOW Tokyo's one is EVEN BIGGER than Osaka's... Paul said he thought it was a sports stadium when he first saw it...Yodobashi Camera is a bit like Curry's/Dixon's by the way, just 10000000x better...). Oh, and we met up with Paul (久しぶり) and went for a wander around the place. There's a Gundam cafe there, but it had just opened and the queues were around the block so we didn't go in...

Paul left us and we headed over to Nihonbashi where we sort of accidentally walked into a MASSIVE festival at Asakusa Temple.

It's a bit embarrassing to admit it, but the reason I particularly wanted to go to Nihonbashi was because I watched this Japanese detective drama (新参者) set there which featured these little sweet/cake things called 人形焼き (Ningyouyaki- Grilled dolls) and I wanted to try some... Yes, Japan has made me ludicrously to susceptible to suggestion... and food in general...

They were actually really tasty! Unfortunately 黒木メイサ was not hanging around outside the shop... shame...

Found some rather bizarre snack there as well, rather vaguely called "Osaka-yaki"... turned out to be pretty much perfectly normal Okonomiyaki, just in pie form... not bad actually...

Met up again with Paul, Louise and Fifi for dinner in Shibuya (Rendezvous at Hachiko no less! I somewhat predictably got horrendously lost in Shibuya station on the way...) where we went for Shabu-Shabu :-P

Had to leave midday on Monday, but I took a quick trip to Ginza on my own before I left. I'm pretty much certain I walked past Yumiko (Bham exchange student from last year) there... she seemed to recognize me... didn't say anything, but then again, not sure what we would have to talk about these days...

東京！ Tokyo! Part 1

So, after 7 months (Such talk of remaining time here is henceforth 100 percent zettai-ni Verbotten), I finally managed to make it up to Tokyo...

Mental note: DO NOT buy tickets using a computer system you've never used before and has a large possibility of using an entirely new random assortments of squiggles you've never seen before to book a seat on a train which leaves in 4 minutes...

Incidentally, what I did manage to book myself a return Shinkansen (Bullet train) ticket for ￥7000 using above system. I thought this was suspiciously cheap... then the gate attendant pointed out I hadn't paid for the other 3/4 of the ticket...

So, the Shinkansen... pretty cool. Goes fast... (Osaka to Kyoto takes about 10 minutes...), and best of all, I randomly sat next to some salary-man (who used to live in Uruguay) coming back from Fukuoka who, once he caught sight of the manga I may perhaps have been rather overly prominently reading, started talking to me and bought me beer and snacks all the way to Tokyo! He gave me his Meishi (business card)!

Ryota's response when I told him this was "I wanna be a foreigner!" (then he got cutely paranoid that he'd offended me with that... while I'd like to think it's my radiant personality, I think it's probably the "novelty Japanese reading foreigner" effect that got me the beer...)

So... Tokyo is pretty big... Bit bigger that Osaka. Smells different to... And they have funny accents (I say funny accents, to be honest I hear it every-day on TV etc).

Met Louise on the Friday night at Tokyo station (Just to emphasise, that means "the station CALLED "Tokyo Station", as opposed to the 500 others IN Tokyo) and went over to Shinjuku for some dinner (we have better Ramen and MUCH MUCH better Gyoza down here incidentally...) before heading out to Tsukuba to meet Mei and her boyfriend (Naru) who very kindly lent me their floor for 3 days :-). Tsukuba is... a little far from Tokyo... Mei spends 3 hours commuting to Tokyo and home every day... That's pretty much what the words "大変" and "お疲れ様" were invented for...

Soooo, Saturday Mei and Naru and I met up with Louise again to go for a wander around Aoyama/ Omotesando (I wanted to see the the Comme des Garcons and Prada stores. I stress that I DID NOT BUY ANYTHING- I HAVE WITNESSES, and that I actually went for the architecture...). Also met up with one of Mei's friends who went to Kobe University AND had Ogasawara-Sensei as her supervisor too! (And know's Mayuko...).

Headed over to Meiji Jingu and Harajuku next (DEAR GWEN STEFANI: Way to go hype the place up for like, 5 years or so... bit disappointing to be honest. Also, some-what less famously, Harajuku has a truly inordinate number of Crepe bars...). Went to Shibuya after that to see the crossing (3000 people cross it every time the lights change.) I survived crossing it! 3 times!

Oddly, Shibuya has this famous little statue of Hachiko the dog, who has pretty much an identical life story to Edinburgh's Greyfriar's Bobby...

Anyway, off to Gunma-ken (Ie, 2 hours north of Tokyo.) to go to the yakitori (BBQ) stall run by Mei's friend Tomo's friend the Shinjuku-transvestite-bar-owner at a festival in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. Incidentally Tomo's friend's mother and grandmother were also there...

Incidentally, Tomo knew who I was... "Oh, Thomas. Designer's Bitch yes?"

So, after the BBQ we somewhat anti-climactically train-ed it back to Tsukuba for 2 hours. As Mei put it, "Tomo went too far this time. In a geographic sense".

To Be Continued...

I'm really running out of decent titles, but never mind

Dear UK Electorate: You let Cameron in. Shame on you. Very disappointed.

And now over to that other rather insular island-nation with dodgy politics.

Turns out Meisa Kuroki is half-Brazillian. Sometimes it seems the only thing you need to be famous in Japan is a foreign parent...

Ryota said this is due to the Japanese finding "halfs" (mixed race) people novel and cool (Though at the same time, "not too foreign"). He then went on to claim he was half Himeji-an and half Okayaman... bit like claiming yourself to be mixed-race Glaswegian/Edinburgher...

Failing that either Osakan or Okinawan will do it seems.

I learned a random Japanese expression a while back, ケイワイ、 or KY. Now forgive me, but I was a little bit shocked to learn this was sort of every-day Japanese kid's slang, until I learned it actually means "空気読めない", or "Kuuki Yomenai", which means "Cannot read the situation" as opposed to Jelly...

Oh, and I beat a Japanese person on a Kanji reading :-) Granted, it was "Undersea Mountain Range" which is a tad specialised and doesn't turn up very often, but I was still pretty chuffed. Incidentally, that's 海嶺.

So yea, I'm off to Tokyo this weekend it seems... I say it seems because it still strikes me as a little bit odd that it seems that all I have to do is shimmy over to Shin-Osaka station, buy a ticket (for an exorbitant number of Yen I add) and jump on the Shinkansen (bullet train)... seems oddly straight-forward for Japan..

Speaking of Osaka, Dad's going to give a presentation over at 阪大(Handai, Osaka University. Incidentally, I just noticed that's actually Osaka (大阪) with the Kanji reversed... ) when he comes over here next week. The person from Osaka gave us the helpful directions of "meet in front of Osaka station.", which helpfully narrows down the location to about 4 square kilometres of one of the most densely packed bits of the planet... I don't think Osaka station (which is not anywhere near Shin-Osaka station by the way) even has an identifiable "front"... look at it!

生麦、生米、生卵

The title has absolutely nothing to do with any of this by the way, I just couldn't think of anything.

So, it seems Hiro is not only alive and well in the UK, but that my fickle Family seem to have decided to replace me with him (>_<). As a result of this evil betrayal, all my future blog entries will be in Japanese.

じゃ、最近はね、別に忙しくなかったんやけど、奨学金は口座にまだ入り込んでいないので、ちょっと貧乏なちゃったなぁ。。。お金ほしい！

ところで、これをグーグルなどで訳したら、どう？

全部日本語で書いて面倒くせぇ。

I've decided to forgive my family.

On a related note, Google translator isn't actually that bad these days. Actually, I just stuck that stuff up above through it and saw the mangled mess that came out (Ironically, particularly the bit that said "How is this if you translate it through Google?), so I should really say what I really mean is it makes a decent job of translating Swedish to English (I use it to read the Lam and Pernilla's blog). That said, it didn't get horrendously screwed up by the Kansai-ben...

So yea, mum calls up (With her usual amazing timing of Friday-evening/Saturdays. Luckily, unlike last time I wasn't drunk and didn't try to get her to talk to Yume), and guess who's having breakfast with them...

Apparently Sean (my little brother) took him to the Sushi restaurant he works in (Shogun Teppanyaki in the Mailbox) and then out clubbing. Sean's restaurant is apparently run entirely by Filipinos, so I hae me doot's about the authenticity, but Hiro said it was pretty good. That said, he mentioned some rather cheesy looking bandannas with rising suns and "日本" written on them. I just want to deny all responsibility for these and emphasis that I most certainly did not help Sean buy these in the departure shop of Osaka Airport.

Glad he's doing fine. At the same time WHO AM I SUPPOSED TO SPEAK JAPANESE TO IF YOU ALL RUN OFF TO HAVE FOREIGN ADVENTURES! lol

Woo, and I'm famous! Sort of... Should you ever come across the Kobe University Faculty of Intercultural Studies Prospectus (English version), turn to page 6...

For some reason I've lately found out who about half of those random people who are on TV/adverts all the time are. Oh, wait, that's because I watched TV with Yoo and just pestered him for half an hour. Turns out that one I always thought was Swedish is Wentz Eiji and half Japanese, half German-American, and his friend is Koike Teppei. Bekki turns out not to be French after all, but half-British, half Japanese. Apparently she's best friends with Ueto Aya. Oh, and "Sunglasses man" is タモリ (Tamori) from 笑っていいとも (Famous Japanese comedy show I've never seen.).

This has obviously greatly increased my understanding of Japanese culture, and was a critical learning objective of my study abroad programme.

Dunno why I've particularly noticed this recently, but I keep sitting next to groups of either 1) Japanese people who won't say a word and sit in total silence once they realise I understand Japanese or 2) People who realise I can understand Japanese and then just talk about me or foreigners in general to annoy me.

しょうがないわ。

Oh, and I'm off to Tokyo this weekend and Dad and step-mum are coming over at the end of next week :-)

金の週間： Week of Golden-ness

Incidentally, crazy psycho schoolgirl from Kill Bill pt 1 has a singing career now...

I decided in the end that I will indeed take the JLPT 2 test this August (Potentially at the same time Sophie is here - yay to that one :-). Sophie coming, not the test, but never mind). My life has thus become fantastically study-tastic. I close my eyes at night and all I see are kanji :-(

So yea, the other major thing this time of year is Golden Week, which is a bunch of Japanese public holidays coincidentally in a row. It actually is only 4 days of holiday with a work-day and the weekend in the middle, so not really a week as such, but Japan has it's own "Special" attitude when it comes to time (the TV schedule occasionally has stuff like "2345-2600" on the schedule and opening hours can be stuff like 17:00-28:00).

Oh, and incidentally, in spite of those Kanji at the top, the Japanese just call it "Golden Week" or GW for short...

So, I exiled myself off to Yoo's for a few days in the middle of no-where. Yoo claims to live in Kyoto, but I discovered this time that infact his house is about 1km from the border with Fukui Prefecture ergo, BARELY Kyoto.

Oh, and a bunch of his Dad's German relatives were there as well, so I got to repair my German a little bit :-)

We also went to a town called Obama. Apparently Obama-sama (the real one, not me) wrote them a letter last year...

Oh, and we drove to the top of this mountain overlooking Obama and Wakasa-bay, then spent 2 hours trekking down it to go to this really pretty little cove. Obviously, given Water+Germans, inevitably there was some disturbing nudity involved...

For some reason we ended up climbing about 3 or 4 other mountains as well over those few days...

Yoo also came back to Kobe for a couple of days, and, in a really weird twist, introduced me to his half-Scottish friend (who lives in proper Kyoto) who went to Boroughmuir High school (about 500m from my High-School).

Incidentally, avoid Kyoto like the plague on public holidays...

I find it kinda hard to talk about "nothing" in Japanese to be honest... This probably wasn't helped by the fact that Yoo was being a bit quiet and rather annoyingly not telling me when I wasn't making any sense... grr.

EAT FEWER DOUGHNUTS

My dear friends and followers, I bring to you, from the farthest reaches of the Orient: "The world map according to a Japanese professor of Tectonic Sciences":

(Mid-lecture on tectonic plate separation in central Africa)

"By the way Thomas, have you been to Lake Victoria?" (Ie, Kenya/Tanzania)

"Er... no..."

"Oh, I just thought since it's pretty close to Europe you might have..."

Thinking of taking the JLPT 2 (2nd highest level) along with a couple of other exchange students this summer, but I kinda have to decide quickly because the application deadline is about the end of next week. JLPT 1 (top level) is crazy hard. Like, really really crazy hard. Absurdly hard. The Kanji section is pretty much designed to screw over Chinese people who have read them their whole lives (Although my teacher insists this is gives everyone else an advantage). One of my classes is an example class for the JLPT 1 test. I understand about 20% of what's written in this class without my dictionary. If I'm lucky. Just for an idea, here's some of the thing's we're supposed to read: 解熱剤 which my dictionary tells me is an "Anti-pyretic" My dictionary sadly does not tell me what an Anti-pyretic is (Anti-fever drug?). 主従, which is "relationship between master and servant" (Only the Japanese would have a word for that...) and 弔砲, which is apparently a funeral gun-salute "in a regrettable sense".

So yea, JLPT 1 is still a wee bit off...

My Physics classmates talked to me! Without prompting! Yay! That said, the first thing they said was "Hi", which was quickly followed up with "Are you French?". Apparently I have a French nose to go with my French hair from last month... (Incidentally, Ryota explained this as "For the Japanese, Big nose = French"...). Woo :-)

Oh, and the English Speaking Society (ESS) ambushed me the other day. I heard them talking behind me: "Quick! Ask him about the ESS!", shortly after which one of them came up to me, started leaning on my shoulder and said in (actually pretty good) English "Hi, which country are you from?". In what I believe is a thoroughly praise-worthy piece of intuition saw where this was going and replied in Japanese "Is this about the ESS by any chance?" to which he replied, I kid you not, with "No, no. But entirely coincidentally I am a member of the ESS. Do you know about us?". I guess this is what Chris calls an "Eigo-Bandit".

The people sitting next to me in Mister Donuts (On a side note, I have WAY more points on my loyalty card than I really should...Bad Thomas!) were playing linguistic-chicken with me today. I was working on my Planetary Science notes (which are in Japanese funnily enough), so first they kept staring at them, then started talking rather stiltedly in what I eloquently call "That-way-the- Japanese-talk-when-they-know-the-random-foreigner-next-to-them-will-understand-that-causes-discussions-of-Touhoushinki-to-sound-like-spy-talk", then dropped all pretense and just started talking about "Foreign student guys" (Nicely I add). I was unimpressed. Final Score: UK 1: Japan 0.

On another occasion in a completely separate shop which coincidentally happened to be frequented by people in search of coffee and doughnuts, I was reading that manga that Tony lent me and I still havn`t finished 3 months later ("xxxHoric"? Yes, I`m reading a Manga. It makes a change from all my other Japanese books which are mostly Earth Science textbooks. Hang me or whatever.). Anyway, the Japanese person sitting next to me happens to be a Japanese-language teacher and so says to me "Can you get meaning from that?" "No, I`m just staring at the pictures...." (Actually, this being Japan, it is a distinct possibility for people "Reading Manga" to be ONLY looking at the pictures but we won`t go into that at this time... thankfully.).

It`s rather disheartening that there seems to be a certain number of Japanese language teachers (I am of course not in any way referring to any of the teachers I had last semester...no, not at all...) who seem to go into the job with the preconception that their pupils ARE NOT going to succeed in learning Japanese to a significant level. I get rather depressed by this.

Fortunately, Samurai-sensei and the new bunch are not so affected :-) It`s very nice to be treated as an intelligent human being after a semester of level 3 classes :-). That said, my composition sensei did ask me if I had the right classroom when I turned up to a room full of Chinese people and Monica. My case was not helped by "Early morning Japanese inability" syndrome which caused me to say "Yes, I took the placement test, I was Thomas Arnot"...

Ash Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday...

Yea, 2 posts in the same day, but they didn't fit together as one, and it helps keep away from "Never-Ending-Monster-Post" Syndrome, which has, perhaps on occasion (note: deliberate irony), affected this here blog.

So, Tsukiko and Hirotake, two of my friends here in Kobe, are off to the UK for their years abroad. Sometime... Tsukiko was supposed to leave last week and is currently in a less extreme version of the same situation my little brother is in (Last I heard he was skiing with some NATO contractors heading back from Afghanistan. In Dubai.). Less extreme in that she didn't even get out of Tokyo Narita Airport in the first place and was thus able to just go back home. To Akita. Hirotake leaves at the end of the month and is off to Birmingham (!). Bham people, please say hi should you ever bump into him. Nice to know I can see them next year when I get back to the UK.

They also gave me a very nice and rather surprising birthday present, a book called "日本人の知らない日本語" (Japanese the Japanese don't know), which is about random stuff that foreign learners discover and torment their teachers with. In other words, oddly enough pretty much exactly what we discuss in Yamamori's Japanese Grammar class...

Kinda jealous in a way, given that they get to do the whole "Year abroad right from the beginning"-thing. I wouldn't change a thing I've done here, but it would be nice if I could have started this year with my current level of Japanese...

That's not to say I don't still have about a billion miles to go. We did a practice JLPT level 1 listening test. Bigorah, that be a tricky little leprechaun, though he does have a mighty fine crock 'a gold...

Harrison-sensei (One of the Japanese-language teachers. Who's white. And from Manchester.) mentioned one of the random little targets of learning Japanese; To make the Japanese stop complimenting you on it. Hehe. Silly but true.

Do I use ellipses too often?

Fourier has an "L" in this country...

I laughed at Japanese TV. This wasn't the first time I hasten to add, but it was the first time I laughed AT WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO LAUGH AT. I'm worried to be honest. I don't think this is a good sign in terms of my sanity.

The adverts are also starting to make sense. I don't mean language wise. I mean "I now can see why that talking dog is sharing an ice-cream with a 45 year-old woman, both of whom are dressed as high-school students, and I don't think this is not a particularly out of the ordinary situation."

Except that one with the female weightlifter and dancing riot police. That was just strange...

Tanaka-Sensei (of 2nd Language Acquisition Class- AKA Comme des Garcons discussion group fame), who is now my supervisor incidentally (She probably won't buy me as many beers as Ogasawara-sensei did. He went to London to teach at LSE by the way), invited me to what she called the "Department Tea-party". I thought "Oh, nice a tea-party, leisurely chat and eat some cake. Fashionably late is fine.". Turns out it was more "Formal introduction to the Faculty of Intercultural Studies, with cake and pizza tacked on at the end.". Fashionably late did not go down so well...

This being Tanaka-sensei, naturally there was a "Thomas, say something!"-style ambush. Knowing this was Tanaka-sensei, I was prepared :-)

Incidentally, I met a guy from the Kobe University Double-Dutch team (Yes, they have a University Skipping team). One of the great mysteries of Japan is quite how guys like this manage to maintain their elaborate hairdoos in spite of these sports...

Strangely enough, Miyata-sensei from "Introduction to Planetary and Earth Sciences" class seems to have inherited Tanaka-sensei's mantle of "Ask the foreigner random questions about anything unconnected to Japan". For example: "Thomas, does the Thames freeze over these days?" What I thought: "What the hell do I know, I live in Edinburgh!" What I said: "Well, not really. Maybe sometimes"; "Thomas, have you been to Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines?" (Yes, he seriously asked me If I had been to a random volcano on the other side of the world from the UK) What I though: "Well, yes, 3 weeks ago, but if I say that I'll have to explain why...". What I said: "No, sorry".

So, I had my first Quantum-Mechanics-in-Japanese lecture this morning (Note: 08:50 is far FAR too early for linear algebra in a foreign language...). Rather worryingly the Japanese part wasn't so tricky (Sensei's illegible kanji aside. Even the Japanese were complaining...), the maths on the other hand... some revision is clearly required... Still, I'll be well chuffed if I manage to pull this one off.

I went along to Yamamori-sensei's Japanese Grammar class. For some reason the name lead me to expect a Japanese grammar lesson. Turns out the class is a Japanese Grammar DISCUSSION class. We spend an hour and a half discussing such things as the difference between は and が. Basically, two ways of saying "is". A paraphrase of the discussion was:

Sensei: "Does anybody know the difference between these?"

Class: "No, not really..."

Sensei: "Shit, I was hoping you guys did... What, you all thought I knew? I'm Japanese, I don't care."

Somehow the class manages to be really interesting and deadly dull. At the same time.

Random side note: I heard from Alexis that the French TGV staff have gone on strike. Of all the frikkin times they could have picked...

Life and Movies

11 Umbrellas...

I've got a few classes up in D-building of the Intercultural Studies Faculty this term. No-one has been able to provide me with an adequate explanation of why this building starts on the 3rd floor...

Perhaps it was because the Intercultural Studies faculty was more used to dealing with and to an extent simplifying their content for international students, or maybe it's just because I understand the lectures more this time around, but the science lectures in particular have felt more like "real" university than my classes did last semester.

Also, in something of a reversal of the norm when it comes onto the topic of Japanese language classes, they've actually been rather good lately. They're mostly focused towards preparation for the JLPT level 2 and 1 tests, (level 2 isn't actually as hard as I expected. Level 1 is frikkin insanely difficult...). A nice up-shot of this is that we're actually treated as intelligent human-beings at this level, as opposed to the ones last year which could often be... not so fun.

Also, a bunch of us international students went to see a Japanese movie "ダーリンは外国人" (My Darling is a Foreigner) at the cinema the other day, partly out of curiosity, partly out of wanting to see what the Japanese were saying about us behind our backs hehehe. Basically it was about inter-racial relationships in Japan, though we were all a bit disappointed that it was about what I call "The boring kind" (Western guy and Japanese woman, as opposed to vice-versa which is much less common). While the whole story was basically one cliche after another (cultural differences, parents disapprove but later come around and they get married and live happily ever after), it was interesting to watch for us in a way that I suspect the Japanese didn't really get, in terms of the portrayals of the foreign characters. The main character was an American guy, who, in order to play-up the "Foreigners are a bit odd" concept in Japan, was at one point skipping down the road waving flowers in the air... It would have been nice to see at the very least one foreign character who was normal, well adjusted, competent and spoke reasonable Japanese (I was rather amused to see that they've imported the "Evil Brit" stereotype, complete with horrendous Japanglish lines such as; "You know, Japanese girls are so 簡単(easy). They just fawn over me because I can speak 英語(English)"). Though, to be fair, there are foreigners who are exactly like that in Japan (pretty much the only thing I don't like about Kyoto really; it's full of foreign tourists who can't be bothered to learn Japanese).

On the other hand, there were a few moments where they got the foreigner-in-Japan experience spot on, with the "日本語はお上手ですね" (You're good at Japanese) and "いいえ、いいえ、英語ダメです"(Sorry sorry, I can't speak English) lines in particular (We hear these like, every other day.).

Also, I'm guessing this was entirely accidental, but the way the story went resulted in some rather hilarious anti-Japanese-ness. After he meets her family in the middle of the story, where the mother tells her daughter "He'll cheat on you because HE'S A FOREIGNER!" and the father says he's against the relationship and will absolutely never recognise it, the couple make up again and go to New York for his sister's wedding and the happy ending, where his family welcome her enthusiastically and without hesitation.

That said, her mother did at one point say "It's got nothing to do with being Japanese and not-being-Japanese, it's about the differences between two people.". To reference tv tropes, some anvils like these need to be dropped in Japan, where dating a foreigner sometimes seems like A REALLY BIG THING for them.

Oh, and on a total side note, it was nice to see from the trailers that the Japanese make exactly the same throw-away pop-corn movies we make, just in Japanese :-) I do think it's a bit unfair that the only bits of Japanese cinema that makes it to the UK are Studio Ghibli (New movie coming out!), violent psychopath movies and freaky pre-teenage-girl ghost movies.

Oh, and after 5 1/2 months I have bought a fork. I got tired of eating pasta with chopsticks.

Bye Bye Brother

Why is everyone complaining about it being cold? Silly Australians and American Southerners... Except the Swedes and Austrians were also saying that...

Saw Sean off at the airport, (Wooo! hour each way on the airport "limousine" bus!). We had some ups and downs while he was here, though I guess that`s kinda normal. I sort of miss him now as well, I keep having to remind myself that he`s not around now. On the other hand, I can now get back to the none to minor task of my own life now...

Also, news just in, but he`s stuck in Dubai due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. I seem to be missing all sorts of calamities befalling the UK this year; the snow, now this. Maybe safer not to go back...

Back on campus most days now, though I have Mondays off this term due to timetable oddness...

First Physics lecture in Japanese! Not too bad actually... I`m unsurprisingly the only non-Japanese person in the class, so there were many odd looks of "are you sure this is the right class room for you?", although due to the massive class and tiny classroom they couldn`t really avoid me hehe.

The lecture it`s self was a first year classical mechanics one, and I`m not yet sure if they just have a different system from us and do all their practice questions in their tutorials, but we basically seemed to be running through a list of coordinate systems with very little explanation of how it works and what it does... Fine by me, as I basically took the whole thing as a useful little (if rather obscure) vocabulary lesson: 微分方程式（Bi-butsu-hou-tei-shiki), which is obviously "Differential Equation", and 位置ベクトル （I-chi-bekutoru, location vector) Which everybody of course says every day... (Ironically, one of the other exchange students mentioned they learned the Kanji for "vector" today. Someone should tell the physics department about it. They just write it in English with Japanese phonetics lol)

Placement tests are, as always, ongoing. Today was essay writing. I chose my question of "a social problem in your country" and wrote a fairly horrifically fascist piece about refugees and Immigration, which rather quickly became a celebration of what I called "The UK`s brave defence of humanity". Obviously this isn`t really a social problem so I tacked on a "On the other hand, native British culture is disappearing. The future of my country is uncertain..." on the end.

The best bit about this whole thing was I basically just wrote out the trailer for "Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society", which I bought a few months back and only watched the trailer of because it was so frikkin hard to understand (it didn`t even have Japanese subtitles). Anyway, from the trailer I did manage learn "The policy of refugee naturalisation will have unexpected consequences", which I basically rephrased and wrote variations of throughout the essay...

Geek moment: Sean bought me the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie for my birthday (thank you very much also to Stevie for the Vivienne Westwood sweat-rag/hand-towel :-)). It`s cool.

Hmm, seems Minami (陽) and I have entirely given up on even pretending we still like each other...

Back to School

It's been rather variable on the old Japanese language front recently. What with Sean here I've been speaking almost exclusively English and I've noticed a definite decline in Japanese ability. On the other hand, I did get a break while Sean was moving into his Kobe hotel-room to go and have dinner with Mayuko and Ryota, who rather amusingly mentioned they it was weird to hear me speaking English again (on the phone to Sean), which I was very pleased to hear :-)

The quadrennial ritual of the language course placement test came round again today, with the added novelty of a) punch-card answers and b) massive hangover.

Pleasantly short analysis: It was crap and pissed me off. They told me to take the same classes I passed last semester (Better than someone else who got told to take classes 4 levels below what he passed last semester...). I politely told them I disagreed with their assessment.

Back to uni! After being on holiday since mid-February I`m actually quite glad to be back to work and have something to do every day. It also means I can stop pestering every Japanese person in my phone book for conversation practice.

Sean's still around, back from Kyoto and have spent the last few days in Kobe, with a day trip to Nara today, where it rained a lot and we got attacked by the deer as per usual. One of them stuck it's head into my back pocket and ate the tickets and fliers from the botanical gardens...

Cherry blossoms and deer, how stereotypically Japanese...

Went on a quick dinner trip to Osaka as well, took Sean round Umeda and Shinsaibashi (took a detour to the Glico man as well). Perhaps understandably, he was so shell-shocked he's refusing to go back hehehe...

On the other hand, how are my Dad and Stepmum going to cope with it? Turns out Dad's going to be doing a lecture at Osaka University... He gave me the address. WHAT FRIKKIN USE IT THAT TO ME!!!!!!! I TOLD HIM MAP AND DIRECTIONS FROM UMEDA OR JR OSAKA OR NAMBA... groan... Oh, and he phoned me up on my birthday (Yesterday, thanks for the messages everyone!) and called me Sean... cest la vie... (He's also holding my birthday present hostage until I send Granny a postcard written in Japanese)

Worry number 2: Dad likes to imitate the accent of anyone he talks to... this could be embarrassing...

An odd thought I had; given the Japanese believe that all foreigners speak English and only English, why do none of the people you see in Starbucks pouring over English textbooks ask a question or two?

兄都- Kyoto

Astute readers will no doubt have noticed that those are not in fact the correct kanji for Kyoto (京都). It is infact a hilariously witty pun I created by replacing the Kanji for "capitol", with the one for "brother", both of which can be read as Kyo (きょう For all you Romaji-nazis I know are out there who complained about Yoo`s name last time around.

Anyway, to the point, It does infact seem to be the case that no matter where you go in the world, no matter how hard you might try, you just can`t avoid your family for ever. Drat...

So, here he is, being "Big in Japan" (in a height sense at least). Luckily for him he`s arrived right in the cherry blossom season here in Kansai, and he was even kind enough to bring some good weather with him! (Though I was less thilled about the 6am phonecall from Dubai Airport while he was en-route... Also apparently the immigration official at Osaka Airport gave him a horrified look when he explained that he was in Japan to visit "his brother", until he hurridly explained that I was a Kobe University student. All foreigners living in Japan being of course drug-dealing terrorists hell-bent on destroying Japanese society...)

I was a bit of a rebel and let him stay over in my room in Sumiyoshi for a night (Which is in theory ganz verboten but in reality nobody cares), telling him to keep a low profile and be discrete. Not 10 minutes late he comes back from the shower room at the other end of the corridor wrapped only in a towel and having taken (i.e STOLEN) one of the clothes baskets... dear dear (facepalm)...

So, off we went to Kyoto for a bit off culture, we went to Fushimi-Inari, (which I kept accidentally calling "Inari-Zushi", which is a kind of sushi...), which has an endless passage of over 10,000 torii gates running up, down and around the mountain overlooking Kyoto, as well as the Kodaiji (I again screwed up and asked for directions to the Todaiji, which is in Nara (Que puzzled looks on old woman`s face...) and the Kyomizudera (both of which I had never seen in the day). I`d forgotten Kyoto was abosolutely hoaching with foreigners (cherry blossom season not helping this situation), seriously, they`re everywhere (freaks me out a bit). Anyway, since the vast majority can`t speak a word of Japanese (Sean has since developed his own "unique" variation of "arigatou gozaimasu"), while at the Kyomizudera I was trying to fight my way through a massive group of Japanese school kids, so I said すみません (excuse me). BIG MISTAKE. IMMEDIATE 30 STRONG SCREAMING FAN CLUB SURROUNDING US.

Had some lunch in a tiny place in the backstreets of Kyoto, where I singularly failed to impress Sean with my linguistic performance. According to the old lady running the place, among the things I said were "My mother is very sick." and "My older brother lived in Japan for 4 years."... In my defence, she was deaf...

Sean seems to be enjoying it here, I can see he finds it very weird through, and also that he can see that he doesn`t really fit in here at all... (Seriously, I swear I get stared at 10x more with him than when I`m alone).

Kansai 'til I die. Whether I like it or not...

Rather out of the blue, I got a nice phone-call from Mei, one of my friends from back in Birmingham who graduated and is now studying at Waseda University up in Tokyo (Or something like that). Anyway, we were speaking in Japanese, and I realised I was finding it pretty hard to speak in "Standard" Japanese, bits of Kansai-ben kept slipping in, which isn't really a problem when speaking to native Japanese people, but non-Kansai (Ie, Kyoto, Kobe, Osaka) foreigners tend to find it more difficult. Aside from being mildly annoying the the above conversation, I'm rather taken aback with the realisation that I may be stuck with effectively the Japanese equivalent of a Liverpool accent... while this may be amusing, I have a feeling it may come back to bite me someday in the future...

Still, at least I won't sound like 99.9% of other foreign Japanese speakers :-)

So, Sean arrives on Saturday afternoon! Looking forward to it, think it will be interesting for both of us; he gets to see Japan, I get to find out about all the odd stuff which I'm now pretty used to now.

A quick, tourist friendly Japanese phrasebook for you all (potentially with a slight Kansai-accent):

Hello: こんにちは Konn-nee chi wa

Nice to meet you: おっぱいを見せて　Op-pai o me-se-te

Nice weather don't you think?: ちんぽがないんだよ　Chin-po ga nai-nn da yo

Thank you very much for this: てめえ、きもいやん te-mei, ki-moi yan

If you have any Japanese friends try these out, I'm sure they'll be very impressed.

On a more mundane note, I've been sorting out my modules for next term, with the rather annoying obligation to take science courses this time around. At least I'm allowed to keep physics to a minimum :-). I was flicking through the Earth and Planetary Science course list and came across the truly bizarre "Teachers advice" section of 2nd year Rocky Stone Studies(That's what the course title reads as! Its 岩石学 if anybody thinks they can translate better), which reads as "煮ても焼いても食えない[etc]", or in English, "Even though these rocks have been cooked and grilled, don't eat them." Words to live by I guess...

Oh, and I have to credit Lilly (and Facebook newsfeed) for bringing this to my attention, but check this group out. I would be EXTREMELY surprised if any of the photos were staged. Trust me...

http://www.facebook.com/yumchaaa?v=feed&story_fbid=110035052354189#!/group.php?gid=25380231345&ref=ts

Philippines Photos

My photo's from the Philippines are over on my Photobucket account now.

http://s913.photobucket.com/albums/ac337/thomasarnot/The%20Philippines%20March%2010/

By the way, WHAT THE F*CK IS UP WITH THIS FRIKKIN BLIZZARD!!!!!

Back to normality. Well, Japan at least...

So, I survived the Philippines. In contrast to the dire predictions of the British Foreign Office website, I was not kidnapped, blown-up, robbed, drugged or consumed by some tropical flesh-eating disease (that I know about yet). For the last few days we wandered around the jungle a bit, found some natural bubbling mud pools and went over to see the volcano at Tagaytay, which seemed really tiny and a little bit over-hyped until you realise that the massive hill you stand on to look at the cone down below is actually the caldera rim... Apparently the volcano still erupts from time to time so we weren't allowed onto it. Oh, and we went to what is said to be the best restaurant in the Philippines for a very nice lunch.

Oh, and I was skimming through the international tv channels at one point (The NHK World rather annoyingly broadcasts in English for some reason...). Turns out the Korean one (Arirang) really does televise Starcraft matches... I thought they were just making that up!

Incidentally I also survived the dinner party with the Japanese researchers. They said I had a funny Kansai accent even when I was actively trying to speak standard Japanese.

I caught the two Japanese guys sitting next to me on the plane talking about me. Nothing insulting or anything, and I was impressed that they were inventive enough to talk about me as 白人 (white person) instead of Gaijin which I guess they figured I would know. The death-stare they gave me when I started prominently reading the Japanese newspaper next to them was pretty funny :-)

So, Japan again! I got to go in another special passport line for re-entry visa holders, which was practically empty so I actually got through passport control faster than half the Japanese people :-) I know it sounds really really stupid, but I also was struck (again) by how mono-racial Japan is... good to be back though. I guess it's because of being away, but I kinda realise now how precious the time I have here is. At the end of April I'll have been here 6 months, so that's just slightly over the half-way point, so I've been feeling very motivated to go do stuff each day and make the most of everything (God, that sounds cheesy).

Unfortunately, the weather seems to have other ideas, and has pretty consistently been rather wet and miserable since I got back (and not even in the "It's raining but by god is it impressive rain" like it was in the Philippines.). Rather reminds me of Scotland to be honest...

And Sean arrives a week today! Should probably book his hotel soonish maybe...

The Philippines, Part 2

Still alive down here :-)

Went up to the Batad rice terraces at Banaue, up in the middle of the mountains of northern Luzon. Basically the Ifagao tribe (former headhunters) terraced an entire valley or five and farmed them for the last 2000 years (in between beheading the odd Spanish/Japanese soldier who had the misfortune of wandering round). Apparently if all the terraces were put end to end, they would reach half way round the globe... I'll put up some pictures at some point. I have to say it was probably about the most remote place I've ever been too... 10 hour drive north of Manila, way up in the mountains (Although for much less effort you could just look at the back of a 1000 peso bill, which has a photo on it.)

On a side note, while we were wandering around the Ifagao village we ran into some elderly Japanese tourists from Fukuoka (whom could be seen a mile off by their 100% stereotypical Japanese tourist gear) whom I chatted with. The actually spoke pretty good English, and had been to Scotland (Skye of all places!)

Speaking of Japan, I entirely coincidentally ran into another exchange student from Kobe in a restaurant near our inn in Banaue!

Went back to Manila as well with my cousin who went off to her museum group and left me with the driver (called Rolly), so I went to the American War Cemetery, which is the largest American burial ground outside of the States. Around 17,000 US and Filipino soldiers who died in the Philippines are buried there, and another 30,000 missing in action are listed on the walls of the central monument. Pretty sobering stuff...

World War II really has had a massive impact on the Philippines. By the end of the war, Manila was the second most destroyed city in the world after Warsaw. Basically, the Japanese refused to leave the city, even though they had no chance of defending it, so the Americans pretty much bombed the place to the ground, and since then the place has never really recovered.

Happier things; met up with cousin again to have lunch at the Peninsula hotel in central Manila, where I had a very nice Margarita and some noodles. The Peninsula hotel is somewhat infamous for a rather amusing coup attempt a few years back, where some imprisoned Filipino generals walked out of their courthouse (having been on trial for a coup attempt the week before), along with the people who were supposed to be guarding them (obviously the pride of the Philippines), at which point they saunter into the 5-star hotel ("We'll take that suite up the top") and set about taking over the country. For about 30 minutes that is, until the government took it upon themselves to do a little "redecorating" by driving a tank into the lobby... it's fixed now.

Amusingly, when we got to the hotel they checked under the car and in the boot for bombs etc, and would only let us through after this. On the other hand, you could just drive straight out the other side when you left. I guess they figure any terrorists wouldn't be so ungentlemanly as to just drive in the exit...

Oh, and corruption in politics is so rampant here that it's just a joke. All senators and representatives have the same license-plate on their cars ("8") so are basically above the law. Also, the current president (Gloria Arroyo) is the daughter of a former president, and the current candidates to replace her include the son of Corazon Aquino (another former president), who's running mate is the grandson of another president, along with an impeached former president, back for some more... they like to keep things in the family here it seems...

Finally, my cousins have invited ALL of the Japanese staff here at the institute to dinner tonight to "test" me on my Japanese... gulp...

Oh, and I checked online and the Cherry-blossom bloom reaches Kobe the day after I get back :-). Which is a public holiday, so will be absolutely mobbed :-( Oh well...

The Philippines, Part 1

So, I made it down here to the Tropics, leaving behind Japan's rain (mostly) for 12 days. I'm in Los Banos, about 1.5 hours south of Manila, staying with my cousins who live in the International Rice Research Institute compound, somewhat ironically half-way up another mountain. The jungle is literally 3 metres from my window, so it's more than a little bit different from Kobe/Osaka's urban sprawl.

Flew down here with Thai Airways (direct from Osaka to Manila), who were very good, although going by the rate at which they were handing out the Brandy I was A) pretty surprised that the Japanese weren't on the floor by the time we reached the Philippines and B) thinking Thai parties must be pretty awesome...

Airport security in the Philippines seems to be pretty interesting. They had a tank (honestly) parked outside the terminal, but at the same time my cousin was able to walk right up to the gate to meet me (I.E, past customs, baggage and immigration...). Oh, and I got to go in the diplomatic line for passport control (since they work for an international agency).

Went to Central Manilla the other day, seems a bit like a dirtier and (slightly) more chaotic version of Osaka to be honest. Minus all the Japanese people of course... Oh, and they certainly seem to love chocolate brownies here...

Second day; MY GOD CAN IT RAIN HERE... not so much chucking it down as grabbing it by the scruff of the neck, powering its face into the dirt and stamping on it down. Ironically everyone has said they haven't had rain in the last 3 months before now... consider it a present from Japan, where it's most likely still raining I expect. Speaking of Japan, my entire room back there is about the size of my bed here :-)

Oh, and Janet arranged for one of the Japanese people here to meet us for coffee to "test me on my Japanese"... she found my Kansai-ness quite funny and said she's get one of the other Osakans to drop by.

Off to Bananue tomorrow! (Which is apparently a 12 hour drive away but is very nice, so I've heard...)

After Thoughts

Hehe, title-pun, geddit?

I know... I might be going a bit blog mad lately. Sorry. If you're still reading all of these, Otsukare-sama ("O honourable tired person". Doesn't translate very well into English...)

So I got some freaky Japanese doll thing for my cousins from a little shop not that far from my halls (In Mikage/Sumiyoshi, basically where people who work in Osaka/Kobe/The Yakuza sleep. No joke about the Yakuza by the way. They keep the neighbourhood very clean.). Anyway, while down there, the shopkeeper randomly surprised me with "Are you a French person?" Eh? No... "Oh, really, you have very French hair..."

So, Anyway...

Some thoughts...

Oh the horror! I forgot to mention this last time (and to be honest that post was long enough already; sorry about that), but I found out that Japanese kids DON'T WATCH DISNEY MOVIES!!!!! Back when Yoo and I were over in Kyoto station for some reason they were playing "A whole New World" (In Japanese, which was really weird... they changed the words as well), and Yoo didn't have a clue what it was :-O. He'd never seen Aladdin or any of the others :-(

Somebody recently said to me that my knowing English, German (somewhat shaky these days...) and Japanese was impressive. This was told to me by a non-native English speaker, who also speaks Japanese. Similar stuff has been mentioned to me by a couple of other Non-native English speakers, all of whom were themselves upwards of tri-lingual. Maybe I'm just being overly-sensitive, but every time I hear this I keep thinking "You mean, impressive for a native-English speaker"....

If you'll forgive the jump into linguistics, someone pointed out to me recently that the English language actually uses a writing system (I.e, the Roman letters you're currently reading) which comes form a different language family from the language it's self. Explains some of our more "creative" spellings... I wonder why nobody though that squeezing a writing system which didn't actually match the target language's phonology wouldn't have a few problems...

On the other hand, Japanese phonology and writing system match perfectly. Every sound in the Japanese language has a symbol to represent it. Unfortunately, Japanese phonology is itself at the same time strictly defined and somewhat limited, which I guess explains the problems native-Japanese speakers have when they learn other languages.

Off to the Philippines on Wednesday, so I'm going to go find a Japanese-y present for my cousins. Unfortunately, since they're about 40 I don't think they'll be that interested in a giant Hello Kitty or Rirakkuma... shame...

The One and a half Gaijin, all Kansai-ben adventure.

Met up with Yoo (陽), who I suppose I could joke is my stand in for 陽, who is currently in Tokyo. Although there's the small fact that 陽 is a girl and about half the size of 陽. 陽 is also less inclined towards using words like 俺(Ore) and 行かへん（Ikahen). That said both 陽 and 陽 both speak in Kansai-ben, though after speaking to 陽 for about 5 hours straight I don't get stuck in Kansai-ben mode for the next 2 hours, which happens if I hang around with 陽.

If your computer can't read Japanese characters, I've very sorry, but you just missed a hilarious little joke about how I have two friends who's names are written exactly the same way just pronounced as Yoo (who's a guy) and Minami (who's a girl).

On the subject of Japanese name-based silliness, I've also got a friend called Yu (優） (who is a girl) and one of my new pupils is also called Yu but is a boy (I don't actually know how you write his name in Kanji but it'll be different. ).

The plan was to meet up in Kyoto (Incidentally, Yoo assures me that he does actually live in Kyoto-prefecture. I am yet to be entirely convinced of this...). Anyway, the plan was to meet up in Kyoto and head up to Lake Biwa, which is, depending on who you ask, either very beautiful or a toxic bog that makes the Clyde look inviting (A little Glasgow reference there). I was personally hoping to steer us in the direction of the "Ninja village" Wikitravel talks about, or if not the hilltop-temples at Mount Hiei, but we ended up going for some noodles in Kyoto before heading down to Osaka.In effect I ended up doing the Kei-han-shin triangle in a day... If Tanaka-sensei was following us she would probably have had fun watching me adapt dialects. I pass on attempts at Kyoto-dialect though, it's hard :-(

Anyway, apparently I seem to magnify Yoo's slightly foreign appearance (Half-German. I'm tempted to nickname him Asuka but I don't think he'd take it well... 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン reference there - I admit to deliberately writing that in Japanese to hide it's slight geekyness... In protest however, has anyone met a Japanese person who didn't like it? Apart from Yume, who it scared the crap out of apparently. And it is basically their version of Star Wars...) I guess at this point I do now have to admit to watching Neon Genesis Evangelion recently...

Back to the point (again), basically the whole day was for me a nice holiday from being what I will generously refer to as "exotically weird one" (Also know as: THE GAIJIN) and for Yoo an never-ending stream of "Here is your English menu" and "Are you a lost English-speaking tourist whom I can assist?". Not to mention the fascinating spectacle it seemed to be for two apparent foreigners to be chatting in Kansai-ben Japanese...

Amusing aside: My complete inability to navigate Osaka having been documented previously, I gave Chris (Exchange student from Sheffield) a call while on the train with Yoo (I know, rebel. Don't worry, I did that "cover-hand-with-mouth-thing-that-makes-it-ok). Conversation as follows:

Me (To Chris, in English): Hey, can you recommend anything in Osaka?

Chris (In English): Yea, the castle's pretty cool. Shinsaibashi is also good.

Me (To Yoo, in Japanese): Hey, have you been to the Osaka castle before?

Chris (In Japanese): Yea, it's pretty cool

Yoo (At the same time, also in Japanese): Yea, ages ago

Me (To Chris, in Japanese): I wasn't talking to you!

Yoo(In Japanese): Oh, sorry..

Me (To Yoo, accidentally in English): No, not you sorry...

Yoo(In Japanese): Eh? Wat?

Me (To Yoo, in Japanese): Never mind

Chris (In English): Oh, I get it, your friend's Japanese!

(Head explodes)

Speaking of head-pain, I very nearly knocked myself out on one of the stupidly low doors in my halls :-( Worst bit is that's about the 4th time I've done that on that door...

Went on to Osaka castle, which is distinctly un-authentic given the interior elevator (Himeji is better), then for some (more) noodles in Shinsaibashi, where the shopkeeper rather amusingly said he was really surprised that I ordered something written in Kanji (月見定食, which was very nice) on the menu, and that he expected me to order something written in phonetics. I'm honestly really not sure how to take that...

Gold star of happiness also goes to random Hankyu Men's (Department store. No, I didn't buy anything) shopkeeper-girl, who randomly started talking to me in Japanese without any encouragement :-)

Philippines in a week! :-) :-)

More Water...

8 Umbrellas...

Oh, and apparently there is a tsunami on the way, expected at 1200 on Sunday here (0300 UK time). Given there's a large island between Kobe and most of the Pacific, and more importantly the fact that I live half-way up a mountain, unless it's of "2012" magnitude I'm not too worried.

Soaring, flying (to the Philippines)

It seems the Japanese were not in fact lying about their 4 seasons, the just over-simplified. From what I've seen so far:

Autumn = Hot/Pleasantly warm

Winter = Warm/Moderately cold

Spring = Pleasantly warm/ RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN

Summer (From what I've heard) = DEATH BY HUMIDITY

This country has now consumed, kidnapped, damaged beyond repair or otherwise dis-incentivised 7 of my umbrellas since I arrived here. Interesting questions this has raised:

1) What is it about Japan that has such a severe effect on umbrellas?

and 2) What is it about Japan that has convinced me that an umbrella is such an absolutely indispensable object that I have felt compelled to buy 7 replacements since arriving here?

Question 2 is particularly odd given that before today it's barely rained at all here...

It rained today. A lot. And according to the weather forecast it's set to continue. I still find it a bit odd to watch the weather report on TV and see China and Korea next door...

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm off to the Philippines in just under 2 weeks, to go see my Canadian cousins living just outside Manila (Los Banos for any Filipino readers (I.E Kirstie). Apparently we're going to go to see the Banaue rice paddie, which are a UNESCO World Heritage site... I'm looking forward to seeing some grass :-) (Not that kind before you make some comment.). My allegedly "Multiple-Entry" Japanese student visa is now nicely complimented with my ￥6000 superfluous bit of paper and two tiny passport stamps which make up my "Re-entry Permit" after a visit to the Osaka Immigration Office, which is A) actually in Kobe, and B) NOT where google maps said it was, though thank you very much for the lovely sight-seeing tour of a nearby building-site.

Question: Why did my Student Visa, which allows me to live in Japan, study at a university, get health insurance, mobile phones, work part-time and receive a very generous Japanese government scholarship (JASSO様、愛してる）, cost a 1/10 of the price of my "Re-entry Permit" which basically says "Please let me back in"?

Answer: Because this is Japan.

Oh, and I am now an English tutor :-) Foreigner-in-Japan stereotype No.17 completed. My pupils are 2 little kids (7 and 10) They like Avatar a lot... Their mum is mixed-race American and Japanese ("Half" as they say in Japanese. Not to be confused with "New-half" which means trans-sexual...sorry about that little confusion Yume...), though entirely Japanese by upbringing so doesn't really speak an enormous amount of English. She also asked me to do my best in teaching them American English... Shin and Carlos are sceptical of my chances of success...

Oh, and we went for some karaoke as well the other day with Mark's friend from the UK. I'd love to share mine and Mark's (Mark and I's?) "unique" rendition of the Neon Genesis Evangelion theme song with you all (complete with improvised "Da da dada da da da da da dadada") (Un)Fortunately such a marvel has been lost in time, so I can only point you in the direction of the original and let you use your imagination:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvFJvYkka_o

Had it not been brutally cut off/censored by Yume, our later duet of "Breaking Free" from High School Musical could well have rivaled such a performance. (To be fair, Mark wasn't bad as Zac Efron. My Vanessa Hudgens impression was perhaps spectacular in a different respect...).

Btw, now do you see what I did with the title eh? yeah?

Right, that's all for now, though I'm sure something else as silly will happen to me before I go off to the Philippines so speak to you then :-).