Okonomiyaki Day

I was kind of kidding about the whole starving comment, but we do tend to go to the 500 yen and under places instead of the 800 yen and up places. We still get a lot of food and I've yet to be disappointed. Except for that 200 yen single piece of tempura. Today we had... something that starts with an O. I think it's Okonomiyaki. It was wonderful. They're kind of like pancakes with toppings baked inside. I forgot to take a picture at the start, so here's one of my mostly eaten dish. And also Christ and Shin. And me and Shin.



Shin is Christ's friend, who is super awesome and our new best friend. He grew up in Fukuoka and wants us to enjoy it, and knows all the good places. He's taking us to the zoo sometime and speaks really good English so we were actually able to talk. He was shocked it's my first time out of the country and said he'd buy me a handkerchief if I got homesick and cried, and also offered to help me learn if I needed it. Anyway, we all tried each other's food. I got cheese, Christ got beef, Shin got two (something and mochi, which is a kind of rice paste). The mochi was a shared one for tasting purposes. Cheese was my favorite. A lot of people didn't like it apparently, or at least the sauce, but I thought it was amazing and me and Christ plan on returning sometime. Though a few people just sat there, didn't eat, and then went to Sunny (the grocery store) afterward.

Speaking of Sunny, last night we watched Paranormal Activity on the big screen in the projector room. It was scary. I was grabbed from behind twice during it, once by Chris and later by Brice, and it was terrifying. Chris screamed in my ear when he did it, and I screamed every time anything happened. Then more creepy ideas were put into my head and we have this long running joke that's horrifying to me and hilarious to everyone else. I'm trying to ignore it. It's like... funny, but still terrifying at the same time and it freaks me out.

But, after the movie I joined Christ and Brian in watching True Blood, though I had no idea what was going on. They ran out of episodes so we took a 11:30pm Sunny run and each got a snack and a drink that we split with the others to taste test things. Mostly bread. They have a ton of bread. In short, it was all pretty amazing. I have two bags of assorted bread to try because late in the day the bakery bags them up randomly and sells two bags for 300 yen.

Anyway, that was last night. This morning I woke up and went to class, the Natural World of Japan. It was admittedly boring and I wanted to sleep. But I didn't. It was all introductory stuff so I'm hoping the actual field trips and things will be awesome. She did have a lizard in a vial though. She passed it around and one of the Korean girls screamed and dropped it when she realized it was alive.

Later, I was talking to Kisha in the lobby and we both have the same sized foot so we decided we'd someday go shoe shopping together. I need some good walking shoes that aren't super painful super quick and they have some really awesome shoes here. Then people went to class, I hung out in my room until I was called to dinner, I met Shin and we ate, we left, Edwina and Brian were drawn into an arcade where they played Time Crisis, we left and returned to the dorm, Shin left, me, Christ, Chris, and Brian went to Don Quixote for various things (I got soda and soap), we all did our Japanese homework together(ish), I showered, I returned to my room to get online where I am now, and I'm heading to bed very soon.

P.S. - Mosquitoes here are miserable.

First Real Day

So I woke up, woke up Brian, and went to meet Jeremy, Chris, and a couple others for lunch on campus. We tried out the other cafeteria, which seems way nicer and possibly cheaper as well. I managed to order exactly what I wanted this time too.

Then was my first Japanese class. There's 11 of us in it. (Americans) Me, Tess, Abdul, Jenny, (French) Corallie, Simon, Linda, Brice, (Czech Republic) Daniella, (Chinese) ...oh gosh, I don't know their names. But we worked on introducing ourselves. I'm going to write it here to make sure I've really got it memorized.

Hajimemashte. Ashley Desu.
America kara kimashta.
Sei-nan daigaku no ryuugakusei desu.
Senmon wa pasokon to business desu.
Shumi wa pasokon to e desu.
Doozo yorushiku onegaichimasu.

Translation:
Nice to meet you. I'm Ashley.
I'm from America.
I'm an international student at Seinan university.
My major is computer business.
My hobbies are computers and drawing.
Please take care of me.

We had to recite it today but we have to memorize it again for Wednesday. I knew the first and last lines already, at least.

Let's see... had some room forms to turn in, stating the condition of our rooms and that we got our keys and stuff. We went to turn those in, but it started pouring on us while we were out. The thunderstorm from yesterday is lingering. But me, Mitch, and Christ went to the bank to withdraw money. Oh, I asked about the JASSO scholarship and he said they were done giving them out, as in assigning who gets one. But I don't think he understood that I was asking if I did get one or not. Others are getting theirs on Wednesday. I really don't think I got it, which means I... will starve or something. I'm really kind of super stressing out.

But I just got a text that they're heading out for dinner, so I'm off to see what cheap deals I can find. Then we're watching Paranormal Activity in the projector room. Later!

Ohorikoen

So today we went to a park. It was right in the middle of the city, surrounded on all sides, and had a large pond and nature trails and a kid's playground. It was pretty beautiful. I took a TON of pictures so check my photobucket for more of them. I'll even give this one its own folder, I think. (I did it! Link.)I kept just turning around, seeing something, snapping a picture in passing, and moving on to review it later. So I'm about to see how these turned out once they finish uploading from my camera.



Oh! We got on the wrong train on the way to the park and had to turn around and backtrack. I think we went two stops past before realizing it and getting off to fix things.



That was the main thing we did today. Went to Ichiran or something, which is the famous ramen place around here. Me, Tess, Andrey, Chris, Brian, Christ, Abdul... It was admittedly really good. They have some sort of special sauce that turned out to be spicy. For the first time, I finished my bowl.


(Andrey, Chris, Brian; personal booth with collapsing walls and water tap; my ramen)

Then we did the park, and after that we researched how to get to Marine World and decided to scrap the idea for now. It involved too many subway transfers and that would be costly. Plus, the site didn't tell us what stop to end with. So we scrapped that and opted for ordering pizza. Then we realized the pizzas were tiny, we only got 5, and there were like... 20 people trying to get some. So me, Brian (not the blonde Brian), Christ, and Mitch went to this Italian place in the mall. I got seafood dorian or something, which was not what I expected. There was rice instead of pasta. Rice is impossible to escape! But now I know to try the lasagna or something if we ever go back.

Someone else ordered dominos. We caught them on the way back from getting movie snacks (I finally have snacks in my room for when I'm starving!) and stopped the delivery guy, who gave us a menu. The pizzas are small and expensive so we'll just do that on special occassions. Tomorrow we're supposedly watching Paranormal Investigations. Tonight was Lord of the Rings 1 'cause as I was starting Pirates of the Caribbean, Jeremy saw LotR there and said it was his favorite movie ever. So we switched, at the cost of sleep. I don't have class until 1pm, but we're eating in the cafeteria at 12:10pm so I have to get up a bit early still. But not as bad as them.

First Japanese class tomorrow! And that's all I have all day. Someone told me that I had 3 hours of it tomorrow, but that's a lie. I only have 1.5 hours of class. So we'll see how that goes.

Gotta get to bed now! Night

PS. Deborah, I read every one of your comments. The tempura was good, so next time I hope to get more than just one so I can really enjoy it properly.

Phones~

Got our cell phones today. Went through Softbank. The one nearby sold out yesterday and the others around don't carry prepaids. So we went back to Tenjin and found a store in the huge underground mall thing that sold them for 3200 yen, which is about $32. The calling card was 3000 yen and the unlimited mailing was 300 yen. They had three prepaids left so me, Christ, and Brian all got one. Mitch was on the fence, but later decided he wanted one too so we went to an above ground SoftBank and... it was twice as much for the phone, almost. But he bought it, so we all have phones. I think they don't have texting, or something like that. When they exchange messages on their phones, they're sending them to email addresses. So we set up our email and have been taking advantage of our unlimited mailing. Those who have phones have exchanged numbers, via this awesome thing they have where you just hold up the phones and they scan each other to send the information. So far I have Jeremy, Andrey, Mitch, Brian, Christ, and Corallie's numbers.


(yay phones~~)

I'm currently mailing the pictures I took with my phone to my email so I can post them up and then go to bed.


(tempura and my chopsticks ability, octopus, Christ's reaction after eating the octopus)

Oh, here's the subway we're always using:



Um, we stayed out forever wandering around and half-effort shopping. We split up and me and Christ tried to find keychains for our phones but failed and returned empty handed. We watched a bit of TV, then headed off for dinner with a bigger group, finally trying Hotto Motto, an obento (lunch box) place that's pretty cheap. They give so much rice! I can never finish it.

After that we played some Street Fighter and Tekken in the projector room, we being mainly Christ, Chris, Brian, Andrey, Jeremy, and others who kept coming in and out. Then we shifted to the outdoor deck and now I'm inside and covered in more fresh mosquito bites. They are everywhere.

After this is posted, I'm going to shower and sleep. There's a kendo championship tomorrow but we meet at 7:30am and no one's really feeling it. So we may go to a park and look into a "night aquarium" that apparently has dolphins.

I leave you with this:

Arcade Time

Alright~ So today was the first day of classes. I had Health Issues in Japan as my first class at 10:40am. Then we met for lunch in the cafeteria where I made a fool out of myself trying to order without understanding. Finally I pointed to a picture and the boys behind me read it to the lunch ladies. Beginning Japanese was canceled today, so then I started to just chill until 4pm and then go to the study of society through manga and anime class. But Christ and Brian showed up at my door and said our certificates were in. They let us get phones earlier than mid-September. So we ran off to get those, I got some notebooks for class, and then we went to manga class. We watched a satirical short movie on stereotypes in Japan and it was absolutely hilarious. It was about the guide to getting a date by following a certain set of steps. Supposedly it's on youtube. Hm... eh, I can't find it.

Then we went to get our phones, but apparently the SoftBank only had 3 prepaid phones in stock. So we went to another electronic store and they didn't even sell prepaids. So we went to Tenjin again, with a girl named Maki who was in our manga class. She helped us find things more easily. We went to the Tenjin SoftBank but they didn't have the model others got, it was more expensive, and they said it didn't have the features the others had like a built in English-Japanese dictionary. So we put it off. We're meeting in the lobby early tomorrow morning to go to the original SoftBank, since the one in Tenjin cost more and takes 500 yen to reach. We'll ask about the prices, features, and then how long it'd take for new ones to arrive for us to buy.

Um, after the phone chaos we went to a super crowded ramen place. I need to stop because I can't finish a bowl, they don't ever seem to have smaller sizes, and it's a waste of money. But, after that we went to a new arcade and played around a bit. I think Maki really wanted to do one of those photobooth things and we didn't end up doing it. I suddenly feel kind of bad, but I have her name and I'll add her on facebook, so we'll have another chance. If there's one universal thing I've found, it's that every country here has facebook. Some of Maki's friends were at the arcade though, and we watched them play a claw machine game for ice cream.



After that arcade we went back to the one we'd gone to previously, Taito Game Station. It's 5 floors of games, including a casino type place. Edwina found some coins so we played a little and I won a small prize on my first turn of 8 coins. Um, watched Brian and Christ play DDR, Edwina and Chris play Tekken, then her and Brian play some war shooting game for apparently around 40 minutes. No wonder our feet were all dead.

Japanese business man playing DDR:






Edwina's awesome go against a Japanese guy:


Shooting game:


Then we finally got back to catch the train with time to spare, because I was told that it shuts down at midnight and doesn't restart until 5am, even on Friday night. Oh, it was much more crowded everywhere tonight though. There were at least three streetside singing performances too, but Maki was in a hurry to get where we were going so we never stopped to properly watch. They sounded good too.

(Christian, me, Brian, Edwina, Chris, Mitchell, Maki)

Got back, collapsed into the chairs in the lobby, and then split for bed after being attacked by a giant mosquito thing of doom.



Though, I checked my computer to upload pictures, saw my mom had tried skyping me, and called her a couple times until she called back. So I just got my first verbal interaction with home, and I'm actually talking to her right now.

Heading out on another cell phone attempt tomorrow, then maybe a night aquarium or something.

Part 7 - COMPLETE!!

I can’t sleep here. It’s really hard. I went to bed after 3am but I woke up at 6am. It’s now almost 10am, because I spent a long while just laying there refusing to fully get up. But now I have and I feel like there’s nothing to do. Our opening convocation doesn’t start until 12:15pm.

Alright… so I finally went and it started with a photo of all of the international students together. Then we went to the auditorium where they introduced all of us, and the teachers and others who were there, and then we went to this party thing. Really it was just a… mixer? Free food to lure the Japanese college students in and everyone had name tags so we could meet each other. But here we actually had to go on stage and introduce ourselves in front of everyone. I was standing by a guy named Daisuke when we realized, and he said I had to introduce myself in Japanese and he told me the word to end with. So I started with “nice to meet you” in Japanese (hajimemashte, but that’s misspelled), said my name in Japanese, then switched to English to say where I’m from and how old I am, then went back to Japanese to say “please take care of me”, which is what Daisuke taught me to end with. I’d never been sure of it before. Yuroshiku, onegaishimasu. I spelled that wrong, sorry.

So after that we went to get our phones but realized that they still didn’t have the cards we needed yet so we have to wait another day. We got our computers set up with internet instead, and then went to submit our t-shirt design to the shop. It is AMAZING and looks totally official. I’m totally wearing it on the plane back. I ordered an XS and all the guys got smalls, and the shop owners looked completely baffled by those choices. I think they were calling us fat. But we held them up and they all seemed to work fine. They were also supposedly American sizes.

Then we went back to the gyudon place, which is the beef on rice with onions that’s so good. The high schoolers from the ramen shop were there! The ones that gave me the free juice. They walked in, did a double take, and then enthusiastically waved at us before sitting down.

We left and for a while we were in the projector room of the building, which only has one Ethernet port so we have to take turns using it. We ended up using Brian's computer to look up funny youtube videos and stuff. It was me, Brian, Christ, Chris, Jeremy, Linda, Corallie, and a couple more people in and out. The three first listed, including myself, lasted longest.

Classes start tomorrow! We packed up and compared schedules, checked class times, and made lunch and after class meet up plans to finally go get those phones. Then I came up here and spent FOREVER trying to update this website. Finally caught up now and this time is current and not altered in any way. It's really almost 4am, but I don't have class until 10:50am. I'm going to take a quick shower and fall into bed.

Goodnight! Leave me comments.

Part 6 - Almost Caught Up

So today they told us the rules on computers and stuff. We were divided into groups. About 16 people today, 12 tomorrow, 6 the next day, and 3 the last. So I get my computer registered tomorrow, but we did go visit a computer lab to get our school accounts set up with passwords so I emailed my parents and checked gaiaonline.com and facebook to see if anyone was thinking I’d died or anything. I had emailed home from the Apple Store but I hadn’t done anything else because I had been using a little iPod touch and it was hard. Apparently I also misspelled my dad’s email address on accident. I’m thinking it auto-corrected me and put hugging instead of huggins maybe. I don’t know.

Japanese keyboards are awkward to use. The space and back keys are really tiny so I kept missing and hitting keys that made me start typing in Japanese characters instead. So I frequently had to go back and correct it and switch it back again.

After that, we went to the cheaper cafeteria on campus for the first time. It was finally open, sort of. We went at 11am and it opened at 11:30 so we sat down and waited, then went through and placed and order. I don’t know what I got. It was like… pickled cabbage with pork or something, and… something green. It was good though. I got a bowl of rice too, but it was plain so I dumped it on my other stuff and ate it all together. Someday I’ll go back around campus taking pictures of everything. I forgot today. So the following were taken by someone else.

(cafeteria and fancier cafeteria food displays)

After lunch was a campus tour around the library and gym specifically. We also went into the chapel and an auditorium. This is a Christian school, apparently, so that’s why there’s a chapel here. It all looks really cool, and today there were suddenly a ton of Japanese students back. Maybe their summer break is starting to end? They start classes a week or two after we do, and we start Friday.

(inside chapel and inside gym)

Um, Christian and a few others went to register their laptops ‘cause they’re in today’s group, and once they get back we’re going to look at phones and hopefully get one. The prepaid’s are 3000 yen for the phone, with the cheapest calling card also for 3000 yen. Then you can get unlimited texting (though to them it’s mailing, because they are actually just sending emails with their phones) for 300 yen. So a total of 6300 yen for a phone, which is about $63. The 300 ($3) is monthly and you just buy the phone cards as needed. We all figured we’d be mailing way more than calling so that’s why we’re getting the unlimited amount. If we discover we’re not really using it, we may cancel, but I really think we will. Anyway, a phone will also serve as a good clock. I’m using my iPod right now.

I’m just chilling in my room right now, cooling off and waiting for them to return with their working laptops to make me jealous. The air blows right on me so it gets cold pretty quickly after the initial cooling down. It actually cools off really quickly too, so we’re supposed to keep our AC off while we’re out of the room and it’s not really that big of a deal to follow that rule. We also can’t walk on the carpet with our shoes on, and that’s a little harder to adjust to. I need slip on shoes. We can’t enter the gym without shoes either.

Oh, we haven’t seen Brian all day and we’re kind of worried. Apparently he lost his key last night so he slept in Andres room. He slipped out early this morning and no one’s seen him since. We think he’s scouring the sands of the beach for his key. It’s $250 if we lose it because they have to replace the entire lock. I keep mine attached to me or my bag via a carabineer clip thing I took off my keyring at home.

It’s soooo humid here. We’re dying every day. The information packets we get are just used as fans while we’re walking around. The campus tour was brutal. But I’m so glad I’m here. The campus is awesome, the students are awkwardly nice, I’m getting to know people from all over the world, and everyone’s getting along super great.

Classes start Friday too and I’m ridiculously excited to start attending. I really want to learn Japanese most of all so I can have less awkward conversations with people and order food a bit less cluelessly. I’m really dependent right now.

Okay well, they finally came back and we went and tried to get phones but they wouldn’t let us without our alien registration confirmation. So we walked there for no reason. We returned, then went back out again for something… I’ve already forgotten what we did. No wait, I remember. It was volleyball.



Hung out until dinner time, picked up food at Sunny’s, and ate in the dorm kitchen.
It was Alecs’ birthday so everyone was going to the beach, and we’d decided not to go, but got pulled in anyway and headed off. It was pretty fun. We did that thing again where we chat up the locals and pictures end up taking place all around. But Alex left his bag up by the shelter instead of on the sand with us, and someone stole it… it had his passport, wallet, and room key in it. We filed a police report, but none of us really knew what to do. Brian also lost his room key so he’s just keeping his door open every day. I can’t even imagine. Um, after that we hung out in Christian’s room for a bit, watching some youtube videos. Jeremy showed us some from England and we showed him Double Rainbow, while Simon showed us a video of a guy jumping into a lake only to find it’d frozen over. Bed around 3am.