YAAAAAAARGH

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 19:14:03 GMT

Oh my god, I am using this journal again.

I think I'll probably try to resurrect it as a generic photo blog for the times when I have pictures I want to share. Which won't be very often, but fair warning.

Anyway, I promised my mom I'd show these, so. For those I haven't told obnoxiously many times already, I've got a cat now, since Thursday. She's a bit over a year -- the story was she was being fostered, since her previous owner wanted to get rid of her because she was pregnant with her second litter and the owner was trying to breed pit bulls, which probably would've been hazardous to the kittens. Apparently the conditions there were pretty white-trashy, which stands to reason when you have a cat that's only about a year old who's already had two litters. It's the equiv of having two kids when you're 17 or something.

Anyway, the kittens were born and found homes pretty quickly, since people understandably like kittens. Older cats are harder to house, though, so the lady fostering was still looking for a place for the mother, and sooo... I took her.

Her name's Magpie, or Pie, and she's a crackhead. Very cute, very affectionate, but a crackhead, along the order of 'OO WHAT'S THAT WHAT'S THAT? WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!'

So anyway, pictures below the cut.

She decided to sniff the camera here.

I threw a sock to get her away from the camera. She has interesting sort of crescent-y garter markings on her butt.

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 12:30:19 GMT

Earthquake today, kind of freaky. It was a 5.0 on the shindo scale, and I'd have to look that up to see what it translates to on Richter... Basically, no major damage, but there were objects falling and stuff. Shindo measures what an earthquake feels like at a given location, while Richter measures the energy at the epicenter, so shindo's basically more useful in everyday terms.

Anyway, I'm all right and everything. There were a few injuries across the city, but no deaths reported.

Finals done, wrapping up before heading home, need to buy gifts, no idea what to get. We spent about five days in Tateshina -- it was fun, and I have some pics but I'm being lazy about uploading so probably will... tomorrow or so. My host parents have a cabin up in the mountains, so we took Ikuya's (host father) mother up there along with Yutaka, which made things interesting. Why, you ask? Oho.

Well, as I've mentioned before, granny (which is what we call her; I honestly don't know her name) is completely senile, so she kept forgetting where we were and saying that she was going home. Yutaka just turned four and is at that stage where he's talking pretty much non-stop. Ikuya's going deaf, so it meant that the whole trip it was me and my host mother fielding nonsensical questions from the kid and granny, who were often actually talking OVER each other, so we had:

Yutaka: "Stoplight, grandma, stoplight. Look, grandma, stoplight. It's red. Why is the stoplight red? Hey. Hey, grandma, why is the stoplight red?"
Granny: "We're changing lines at Shizuoka, right? Where is my ticket? I don't have my ticket. Oh no. What do I do?"

At the same time. With both people becoming increasingly agitated as they weren't satisfactorily answered -- in granny's case, it was because we were in a car, and not, in fact, a train, but she wouldn't believe that so we ended up just telling her that Ikuya had the tickets and we didn't have to transfer so she could stop trying to unfasten her seatbelt, thanks.

Heh heh. So yeah. Int'resting. I like mountains, though.

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 02:33:19 GMT

Countdown 'til return time, which is really kind of depressing. The past 9 months went by terrifyingly fast. Now I need to figure out this loan again, get the apartment lease signed... blah. It's funny; apart from the obvious schoolwork and all, this has really pretty much felt like a year-long vacation.

So now I need to get souvenirs for the people back home and stuff, get some things for myself, possibly make a quick trip down to Kyoto while I still have time/if I have money. My last final is I *think* on the 22nd, and before that I'll be going to Tateshina with my host family for Obon.

Not much to say, really, sorry -- been busy with school and stuff. And it's tsuyu, so it's been raaaaaaaaaining. All the time. When it hasn't been hot and sticky. But at least we're not flooding like Shikoku is.

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 07:56:02 GMT

So the interview thing was today, and it went well. Unpaid, but hey, it's pretty much a given that most people don't need monetary compensation for the chance to appear on TV. I did get a free lunch and a pen, though. You should see this pen. The slip of paper that came with it says that it emits infrared rays to heal the tension in your hand. Which I'm pretty sure is bullshit, but it sounds cool.

Q came, and so did three other girls from my class, and two other guys from another class. Thing was, one of the girls was this chick that I've reeeeally been getting bad vibes about since the beginning of the semester, and the more I get to know her, the more justified I find them. It's not just that she's socially awkward, it's that she's socially awkward in that clingy, creepy way. She kept talking to us about her 'idols,' which turned out to be random Japanese guys that she's been stalking, and she had pictures of them on her cell phone and asked me if I'd take some pictures of them if I saw them. I was like... uh, pass. The kind of crowning thing was her interview, though.

Like, okay, we all volunteered to be interviewed, right? And we all came to that place specifically for that purpose. That would imply a certain willingness, seems to me. When it was her turn, though, rather than give a thoughtful answer, she acted all diva-y and said something like 'Don't bother me with these ridiculous questions.' I mean, what? She KNEW the questions were going to be asked. She wasn't even joking around before actually answering -- she just totally didn't answer. She was telling us before her turn that she wants to be famous, so I guess that was her idea of a good way to grab the attention of some actual film producers...? I guess? But, yeah, not... very well thought-out. I can't imagine why anyone would want to hire a bitch, even if she hadn't done this after willingly dragging herself down to Yotsuya to be interviewed. Weird. After she'd gone, the British guy who was acting as the interviewer said, 'Man, she had a stick up her jumper.'

Anyway, after she was done, she left, and so did the two other guys besides Q and one of the other girls, which left me, Q, and this other girl that I'm friendly acquaintances with. Thing about the interview: it turned out it was supposed to be a random 'man on the street' thing, despite that we were all pre-selected, so to make it appear random, we had to act like we were surprised to be stopped on the street and asked questions. To add to that appearance of randomness, they took us remaining three to Harajuku so that it looked like they were selecting people from a few different areas (and Harajuku's a big gaijin hang-out.) Which was cool, because we got a free lunch out of doing that. Good lunch, too. We spent it watching a bunch of unruly white kids tearing around the Japanese-style section of the restaurant that was separated from our place by transparent hanging curtains, and discussing the difference between swordfish, marlins and sailfish.

The three of us rock-paper-scissored after lunch to see who got interviewed first. I was last, so I sat watching first Q then the other girl act as if they'd been approached on the street by a perfect stranger, and not by a guy they'd just eaten lunch with. Then I got the same treatment, though they had me pretend like I was sitting on the bike rack-cum-bench that I had, in fact, been sitting on, and act like I was waiting for someone before I was accosted by film crew.

The questions were English grammar stuff. Explain the difference between these sentences, sort of thing. Three things: 'He turned toward me' vs. 'he turned on me'; 'love is a reason for marriage' vs. 'love is the reason for marriage'; 'I think you are lying' vs. 'I think that you are lying.' They seemed to like my answers and my, uh, acting, so there's probably a decent chance I'll be used for at least one of the questions.

Aaaaaaand then I took the train home.

It was funny because, during the course of the interviews, the crew kept being approached by gaijin who wanted to be filmed. Here they were trying to create a 'random interview' atmosphere, and when they were in fact given the chance to have an actually random interview, they had to turn the people down. At length, actually; some of them were really persistent.

Kinda makes you wonder about those seemingly random interviews you see elsewhere.

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 02:35:32 GMT

I have been lax, and for that, I apologize. Profusely.

Everything is going well -- Yo's back from Italy, we went for the best freaking sushi in the world in celebration, a tiny place near the Myogadani train station. Host parents are currently attending a wedding and a funeral down near Fuji, so I'm alone here with Yoichiro and Rieko. I'm probably going to head to Hakone tomorrow with a friend if I can drag myself out of bed early enough.

I did end up going to that festival, and I have pictures which I'll probably upload tonight to free up the camera memory.

I might be on TV, too. My prof., Shimizu-sensei, sent around a sign-up list for an interview of native English speakers on NHK, and I got an e-mail today from the people about it asking to set up a time. They call it a "shooting," which is kind of scary.

Mon, 16 May 2005 15:35:55 GMT

Man. Why are electronic dictionaries so damned expensive?

I'm cruising ebay and the best deal I can find on one that has the features I want is around $200. Sheesh. You'd think there'd be some college students out there somewhere who'd gotten one and decided that Japanese was the devil and wanted to sell. Or something.

Pondering just getting the $200 one. I don't have a ton of cash to burn, but I've got enough, and it'd shave a ton of annoyance off of my study time. Hmm.

Continued...

Sat, 14 May 2005 16:14:38 GMT

Right on, right on, ikuze, here we go.

These purple flowers were cool.

omg temple

These are all from the same temple. I liked the decoration, as might be obvious. According to my architecture class, this has a heavy Korean influence.

Another shrine/temple.

Another part of the temple, which looked down over the mountains.

I took a picture of these shrine guards because usually they're not so skinny as this. You see these fox guys everywhere, but normally they're more well-fed.

Some peach (we think) flowers near where we stopped for lunch. It was near a kind of nice shop with a great view. Really windy, though.

The shop.

There were a stuffed boar and a stuffed bear near the front of it.

After that we took a really hellish bus ride back to the station. Like, it sucked, because I'm prone to motion sickness, and it was a hot day in a hot bus going around curving mountain paths, so you can only imagine. There was also a kid seated in front of me who kept falling asleep, and every time we hit a curve his head would *slam* into the window and wake him up. Ouch.

Not far from the station, there was a sort of touristy-attraction shibazakura thing that had been advertised all over the place in Tokyo, so we went to check it out. Actually, the host parents were tired, so they sat down and I forged ahead alone. It was pretty cool, though crowded as anything on account of the ads -- basically it was a large section of hill that had been divided up into different shades of the same type of flower, shibazakura (roughly, lawn cherry blossom. Or something.) So it was like a big field of various shades of pink. Pretty, though my camera's battery died so I can't upload any shots. I did get some postcards that I'll be able to scan... someday.

And, yeah, then we went back.

Moskau, Moskau, lalalala la la la.

Sat, 14 May 2005 15:53:53 GMT

This is almost timely.

I've got... a pretty impressive number of Chichibu shots, so this one's going to be on an installment plan.

Chichibu's a pretty 'what the hell, there's nothing here' town about two hours outside of Tokyo via Ikebukuro station. It has mountains, though, and I like mountains. It's a national park, with hiking and so on, though we didn't do a ton of that given that the host parents are in their 60's and it was a pretty hot day. Anyhow.

This was just outside of the station. Hooray, mountains.

It was around Kodomo no Hi, so there were a bunch of koi... banners? Windsocks? Things. All over. They weren't so visible in Tokyo on account of everyone living in tiny little apartments, but out in the countryside they had some impressively large ones. In Japanese they're called koinobori.

After a short bus ride from the station we ended up crossing this bridge. You can see the river and the mountains. The water was kind of turquoise in spots.

Kind of hard to tell, but we were climbing a sloped path up the side of the mountain. You can see the river down below.

The area where the gondola was.

Not strictly a great shot, but it shows the inside of the gondola... kinda. It lifted us above the mountains and was a pretty cool ride.

This looks back on the rope line the gondola came from. You can't even see the launch platform from here, though it's hard to get a good sense of distance.

Just outside of the gondola station.

More next entry, don't want to kill modem people, hooray.

Fri, 13 May 2005 15:42:22 GMT

All right, so motivation isn't my strong point.

Here's the first photo dump of... two. Soon to be three, probably, since I *think* tomorrow is a mikoshi festival at the Kandamyojin shrine (previously pictured) so I'm going to have to go to that, and of course take pictures.

But for now, here are some old ones from a few weeks ago when we went to a temple near Takadanobaba (best area name ever.) It was a place famous for its botan flowers, and I have absolutely no idea what that translates to in English or if it even translates to anything at all. They look like... well, look at the pictures.

These.

These pictures turned out a little weird for some reason. The contrast/sharpness was way up. But yeah. As you can see there were still some cherries in bloom.

Jizo-san. These things are everywhere. I guess they're supposed to protect babies or something, thus the bibs -- not sure how accurate my source was, though.

This was the temple itself. It was really pretty big and impressive, especially on a sunny day.

An undershot of the temple from the side.

This is around the road on the way to Takadanobaba station. I just took these because I thought it was kind of cool with the shrubbery and everything -- usually when people think of Tokyo they think of the big flashing lights and shit, but it's really pretty much like any other city, with the uptowns, downtowns and quieter parts, though on a larger scale than most. Also, they really like their flowers, here. I'd say early May/late April's probably the best time to come here, because there are all sorts of flowers.

つづく

Mon, 09 May 2005 16:56:41 GMT

I've got a ton of photos, but I keep forgetting to upload until it's really late, so I'll just update this now in an effort to remind myself to do the photos tomorrow.

Golden Week's come and gone here; it's the time of year when just about everyone in the country is on vacation, from students to salarymen to... whoever. As a result, all of the big areas were packed. To. Hell. Unbelievably. Ikebukuro was a teeming mass of bodies.

I went to Chichibu with the host parents. It's a wildernessy sort of area up in the mountains, very pretty, I have shots of that.

Otherwise I'm trying to get prepared for next semester. I did the FAFSA, now I need to renew my US Bank loan. Have an apartment picked out that looks good, and registered for all my classes. Man, though, the time went by really fast. Not over yet, but still.

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 11:19:30 GMT

More photo-heavy posting! Like, really photo-heavy. These were all taken about the day after I snapped the previous cherry blossom pics, which makes them a bit old. They're from Kanda Myojin, the shrine near Ochanomizu, and since finding it during KWT's visit it's become my favorite Tokyo shrine because it's pretty and red and within walking distance. A lot of these are going to be kind of redundant, because I like getting as many angles in as possible for my own memory's sake and also for possible drawing reference.

I figured out what the deal with the shrines and temples is, incidentally, through my architecture class. Apparently the shrines were originally homes for the gods, and the temples were based off of the Buddha Sakyamuni/Shaka's tomb, particularly the multi-storied pagodas. Eventually, though, the Japanese combined them into hybrid Buddhist/Shinto, so while there are temples and there are shrines, there are also temple-slash-shrines -- in other words, there often isn't a difference. Hooray, college education!

Onward ho for photos.

Wooden tanuki statue from in front of the Kanda Myojin, right beside the gift shop. Yes, there is a gift shop, and I'm probably going to end up getting souvenirs for people from it, because they're cheap and kind of neat-looking. I was standing in the middle of the street in order to get this guy's whole body in, so it was a quick snap. He's pretty big. In more ways than one. The sign on him says something about how the original Kanda shrine was destroyed during the 1923 earthquake but this tanuki dude survived.

Quite large statue of somethin'-or-other, I dunno.

Some food stalls. It wasn't terribly busy, since I think it was a weekday.

Some decorations on the outer building. Pardon the size of this, but I wanted to save the detail for reference. I think it's pretty.

Chelly.

Just some shots beneath the trees.

Mainly architectural reference.

Yeah, so it's not the first shot I've taken from this angle. I happen to like it.

This is the sort of 'courtyard,' I guess you could call it, between the ornate outer building and the plainer place that houses the deity statue.

I like these dogs. They're called Koma inu, or Koma dogs, with Koma being the old name for Korea. Obviously they're, like, lion-ish. I went back here today on my way to Akihabara and sketched this dude for a while before being chased away by a wedding procession. Being able to say I was chased away by a wedding procession alone made it worth the visit.

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 12:26:57 GMT

Registration here really makes very little sense.

I already went over the issue with registering for courses about 2 weeks after you've started attending, and that there's no web enrollment. New hitch: rather than going by a credit system, where you must register for however many minimum credits in order to be considered a full-time student, they go by an 'hours' system. Thing is, how many hours a week you attend a class has next to nothing to do with how many credits it's worth. For instance, normal courses are 4 credits, language courses are 2, though you spend the exact same amount of time in class. What this means, though, is that I have no idea how many courses I'm supposed to register for -- I'm taking one 4-credit Japanese class, and also taking Chinese, 2 credits, and Japanese art history, 4 credits, and all of this adds up to their required 10 hours of class time, but their book says you should register for four classes and doesn't say whether or not Japanese counts as two classes and argh. I'm just going to assume it does. But still, that's only 10 credits. Which is, really, bogus, because that 4-credit Japanese class is as much time spent in class as I'd spend for TWO regular classes, but for some reason they only count languages as half the credits, and I really CAN'T UNDERSTAND why, because if anything you're doing MORE work in a language class. So I should really be getting 14 credits. I call foul. Moo.

Also, I hate the FAFSA.

Anyway, have some cherry blossoms. I heard there was a blizzard in Colorado or whatever. HAHAHAHAHA.

A Haiku

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 07:42:30 GMT

Sakura are great
for like two days before they
all fall down. Oh shit.

So yeah, the cherry blossoms are blooming and it's an insanely big deal here, with drinking parties in the parks and news broadcasts showing where the first blooms are and so on. I'll have pictures tomorrow or something when I'm less lazy.

Amusing thing: we went out flower-viewing with Tamaki and co., and she brought her kids. At one point she went to a vending machine for something to drink, leaving me sitting on a bench with Takuma nearby in the stroller. While she was away, two middle-aged women passed by and started admiring the kid, saying 'Oh, he's so cute,' etc., but appaaarently, when they were out of MY earshot but were passing Tamaki, they were like, 'Wow, that baby really doesn't look like her at all.' Well... of course he doesn't.

Snicker.

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:10:45 GMT

They had this thing on tonight for the ten-year anniversary (if anniversary's really the right word, since that sounds a little bit too celebratory) of the subway sarin gas victims here. Sadly, no happy rehibilitation stories. It was pretty damned sad, actually. To summarize in case anyone hasn't heard of it, though I think I mentioned it here before, some members of some Buddhist cult went on a couple of the major subway lines (the Marunouchi, which is the one that runs closest to my host family's house, was one of them) and released sarin gas on the trains by dumping cannisters and puncturing them with sharpened umbrella tips around rush hour. During the rush hour, you really can't see a thing on the floors of the trains since they're so packed, so the gas was being released for a long time before anyone noticed.

Anyway, apparently the poison has long-term effects; they had this woman on who was actually doing BETTER two years after the attack than she's doing now. They had her in rehab eight years ago and she was able to sit up by herself and move her limbs, but now she's confined to a wheelchair, blind, and can't talk -- she acts a lot like a severe stroke victim. She seems to be somewhat conscious of what's going on, but she can't shape words or control her facial muscles. Her older brother takes care of her.

Damn, though. I think I'd rather die, in that situation.

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 07:38:38 GMT

I think I need to get my wisdom teeth pulled when I get back in the States. I keep unintentionally biting my cheek.

Uh... plum pictures from the shokubutsuen.

Okay, I actually took these about a week ago. I have no idea why the files are so big. Actually, I do -- I set the quality too high -- but anyway.

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:10:07 GMT

Hina Matsuri (Girl's Day) today. Host mother lent me her kimono, and I got some pictures. They're a royal pain in the ass to put on.

I always make this same face in pictures. I don't know why. At least in this case I can blame the fact that we were taking like three shots, so any expression was bound to fade into either grimace or rictus.

The glasses make me look like Emo Geisha.

Note the stare.

Really unflattering picture of Tamaki. Yutaka's hiding behind her.

And, for the hell of it, a random giant tuna from Tsukiji.

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 05:03:26 GMT

I found it endlessly amusing that two Tokyoites behind me were laughing at the prices in Starbucks. Tokyo. Prices. Are crazy. So, if even they were able to find Bucky prices nutso, you know something's up.

I dropped by Tsukiji again today because it was largely closed down when I went there with the host folks on Sunday. We hadn't really intended to go to Tsukiji that day, but it sort of happened. We'd gone to Asakusa with Yutaka and did the Sumida River boat tour, which was decently fun, but I had to laugh because it went sort of like:

Announcer: (In Japanese) "This is the Blah Blah Bridge, and is the largest bridge on the Sumida River and was built by blah blah blah in blah blah blah. The arc is supposed to represent blah, and at night you can see it lit up. In the distance you can see a memorial to the famous haiku poet blah blah blah." (In English) "This bridge is called the Blah Blah Bridge."

Also saw the Asahi Beer building that day, which was crazy. I didn't take a picture, but here's an image from Teh Intarweb: http://arch.cside.com/t991228/asahiazuma03.jpg

It has a big squiggly gold carrot. I don't know either.

Anyway, that was Sunday. Today was Tsukiji, which is the big fish market place. I went at around noon, which is supposedly after the most crowded time. From around 6 AM to 8 AM they have auctions for the fish -- Tsukiji's the place where most restaurants go for their fish. Bunch of cheap sushi places around, too, and it's all supposedly really good, which stands to reason, given freshness.

La.

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:15:34 GMT

Picture of the dog I took just before I left. Posting here because I remembered Mom probably doesn't have any/many of him, so.

So, like.

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 15:22:43 GMT

Took a couple more shots, nothing special. My picture quality's getting better as I've finally figured out the camera, but this sadly means the files are getting larger. We went to a mochi tsuki today, which, appropriately enough, was a thing where they made mochi. Usually this is more of a New Year's thing, but since it was just recently the Chinese New Year, I guess it still works. Mochi's glutinous rice pounded together with water to form this sort of sticky... wad. It's hard to describe. Really good, though, when served in soup or with anko (red bean paste.) Hard to chew because it sticks together, and I guess they have a few deaths every year from old people choking on the stuff.

Eheh. Anyway.

The thing was near a smaller temple we have near here. I think it may actually be the Myogadani temple, but no idea. I may have to look it up tomorrow for the hell of it. Basically, the deal is you've got a guy with a big-ass wooden mallet pounding the rice in a stone mortar, and you've got another guy (or girl, or whatever) bending down between pounds to put water in the mixture. It's kind of dangerous to be the latter person, 'cos, like. If the mallet guy isn't paying attention...

Fun fact: Instead of the 'man in the moon,' the Japanese have a rabbit pounding mochi. You can see it in old cartoons and stuff. Probably has something to do with the 'tsuki' in 'mochi tsuki,' which means 'making,' also being the word for 'moon.'

The More You Know.

Anyway, pictures. Just two. The mochi thing and some plum blossoms. At least I think I figured out what the weird floaty thing in the snow pic was -- it was a traffic sign that caught the camera flash. I think.

These bloom early and smell really good.

That's some high school kid giving it a shot.

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 11:10:20 GMT

Today was Setsubun. Setsubun involves tossing beans out the doorway and saying 'oni wa soto,' and tossing beans in the entryway and saying 'fuku wa uchi.' Devil is outside, good luck is inside, style of thing. Sometimes someone dresses up as a devil and gets beans thrown at them. On a variation of this, the various temples have people born in whatever particular year it is (tori/cock, in this case,) tossing oranges and candy and stuff out at the crowd. So... I have pictures. They're pretty big this time because I was too lazy to resize.

A temple we stopped at on the way.

Host family and a rock near that temple.

The temple of the actual tossing.

And... the tossing.

This one's unrelated. For KWT, from the day after he left. I have no idea what the thing in the middle is. GHOSTS?????????

In conclusion, WHOO.

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:48:52 GMT

Final exams are coming up, and after that, spring break.

I dunno what I'm gonna do.

I'd like to see Kyoto, and I'd also like to go to Yakushima and Ise. Fuji, too, though Fuji may be better in the summer, when it's actually climbable. There's the issue of cost, though, so I'm going to have to do some research into transportation and how you actually go about obtaining a youth hostel card. We see.

Not much to report, really. Studies and so on. Weather's been sort of crappy on the weekends, so I haven't done a whole lot of wandering, but I'm hoping to get around the weekend after next, maybe, to check out Chichibu-tama or whatever, which is a national park about two hours outside of Tokyo. I figure if I get up early and take the train out of Shinjuku I should be able to get a whole day there.

Went to the library today with Tamaki and her kids. They had a storytime thing where some of the library people were reading picture books to a group of children, so we sat in on that, but during the third story Yutaka started standing up and running around, and Takuma, the baby, started crying, and then Yutaka threw a tantrum when Tamaki told him to sit down, so she ended up having to haul him out. I felt really bad for her, 'cos, you know, embarrassing. Went back to her apartment afterward and saw the inside for the first time, had tea, and it was nice, but holy crap, the housing conditions in Tokyo... She's in there with her husband, right, and these two kids, and the place only has one small bedroom that doubles as a living room. You've got the entryway, which divides off into a tiny bathroom and a storage closet, turns into the kitchen/dining room a bit further on, which is connected via sliding door to the aforementioned bedroom/living room, and this is all in a space about the size of an American living room. I mean, geez. It'd work for one person, maybe even a couple, but when those kids get older, it's going to be really rough.

Anyway, yeah. I need to figure out where I'm going.

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 17:11:20 GMT

I really like their take on religion here.

During New Year, there are apparently certain things you do to thank the gods for a good past year. If something bad happened, such as, in the case of my host family, a relative dying, you don't thank the gods. Am I the only one who finds this amusing? 'Wow, you let us down, gods, so screw you for this year. Maybe next year if you shape up we'll get back with the program, but for now, noop, sorry.'

Went to a shrine/temple today (still can't get them straight, and at this point I really don't think there's much of a need to make the distinction in any except the most obvious cases -- my host mother uses the words interchangeably for the same structures, so whatever.) Threw money in the... thingy, rang the bell, felt strange being Total Gaijin, but ultimately enjoyed the experience. It's strange, after living in America, actually being somewhere where there are a lot of buildings dating from around the 1600's or so. Well, 'a lot' -- Tokyo's had earthquakes and fire-bombings and so on totalling a lot of the old buildings, and it's a pretty new city anyway compared to Kyoto and Nara, but even here there are more than a handful. 'S cool.

There was also a shrine to the god of alcohol nearby, with large casks of sake aging next to it. I guess it's a thing where different companies leave their stuff there in hopes of the god improving the flavor, I dunno. Oh, and while I'm on the subject, interesting fact if you ever come here: 'sake' or 'osake' is just 'alcohol,' generic. You could be talking beer, wine, whiskey, whatever, though they also use 'aruko-ru' which is kana for 'alcohol.' Honest. But if you wanna refer specifically to sake, it's 'nihon-shu.'

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 14:04:38 GMT

Happy early New Year and crap.

Watched TV. TV is always interesting. Highlights:

-Some girls in very bright costumes dancing with people in mascot suits, including Domo-kun and those green guys for... something, I don't know, they're green and look kind of like sea monsters.

-Korean girl with cornrow hairstyle. Trust me, this doesn't look good.

-Some guy dressed as a samurai, but with a gold-sequined kimono and a glowing neon shogun-era house setpiece in the background. It was kind of like Ran does Vegas.

-A bunch of fat guys in a pro-wrestling-style eating contest.

-My host mother, unprompted, said that Gackt looks like a pretty girl.

-Lots of cross-dressing male singers. Apart from Gackt.

Mon, 27 Dec 2004 09:30:47 GMT

Well, that had to be one of the least traditional Christmases I've ever spent. Stands to reason, given my current location; no complaints, really, but here's a recap: we went to Kamakura to climb mountains between shrines, taking the trail I didn't have time to fully explore on my last visit. Interesting scenery, including small hollows in the cliffside that housed small Buddha statues, most missing heads. We got sort of lost. I had octopus balls for lunch from some vending machine, and we both tried this liquified flan drink. Really. I've had a hard time finding any really unusual vending machines, but there's no shortage of strange drinks. Sesame milk, jelly in a can...

Christmas dinner was chicken and the strawberry Christmas cake they eat here. Champagne. Pretty good. This was around Christmas Eve, States-time. Christmas Day here. So, apart from the Kamakura stuff, this wasn't all that odd, but Christmas Day States-time, when everyone else was doing the present-and-food thing, here's what I was doing:

We went to Namjatown in Sunshine City, which is about a 10 minute walk from Ikebukuro Station. Namjatown is an indoor theme park, primarily centered around food, but also with a sort of mystery game where you go around gathering clues and playing games if you go for the more expensive admission. We'd opted for the 300 yen admission, so we didn't participate, but it looked cool. Their ghost area of the park was really cool, with blacklights and holograms and mechanized crabs with Heian woman heads. Other areas were Ice Cream City, some Italian area, Gyoza Dome or whatever, which was a stylized 1960's-ish Tokyo with lots of paper lanterns and food stalls, and this place that looked like a Dick Tracy New York City. The place's mascot was this cat guy with a monocle.

So, right, we get in there, and we wander around, but the actual purpose behind the visit was to try some of the bizarre ice cream in Ice Cream City. Flavors we decided on: raw horse flesh and durian. Raw horse flesh ice cream. Right. They also had oyster, beer, shrimp, seaweed, sea urchin eggs, soy sauce, tomato... And more normal flavors, of course, buuuuuuuuuut... We bought the aforementioned Two and sampled. Okay, so the raw horse flesh... was vanilla with chunks of horse meat. The vanilla wasn't bad, but biting into a chunk of meat... was. Meat and ice cream are not a happy coupling. Meat and ice cream are not one of the great romances of our time. A comparison to Romeo and Juliet would only be allowable if they both killed themselves messily and thus somehow managed to do some good by uniting two feuding houses, 'cos brother, there's nothing else pretty that's going to come out of this. That's not likely, though, because if I were Ice Cream, I would take one look at Meat and run away screaming, because some things were just doomed from conception. And not just meat. Horse meat. And not just horse meat, but *raw* horse meat. What?

Anyway, I'll just say this: bad idea. But, strangely, durian was actually worse, flavor-wise. Durian is a spiky devil-fruit from Thailand or somewhere, I have no idea. It tastes strangely rotten.

Purged those wretched culinary abortions with more normal flavors, then headed to the aquarium and the Room of Dogs.

So... not exactly chestnuts roasting, but it was all very interesting.

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 11:08:51 GMT

Stuff!

I can't post everything here or someone will ineffectively attempt to threaten my life, but yeah, I'm still around, everything's normal, whatever.

You know, there are definite times when it's much better not to know what you're eating. We had this white stuff the other day, I thought it was shredded radish or something at first, until my host mother mentioned it was sushi. I looked closer, and sure enough, it was a ton of tiny white sperm-like fish with little black eyes. It didn't taste bad, but somehow that made it less inviting.

In class, we're reading this story called Shunkin, and the titular character's last name is Mozuya. A mozu is a shrike, apparently, and there are a bunch of them in this city, and they are, in fact, evil little birds. My prof told us about how she had a cage of three small songbirds that she hung outside on nice days, and somehow something had killed them while they were still inside the cage. Turned out a shrike had opened the door, gone in, killed two of them, injured the third, and took one of the dead ones away to eat, then left and closed the cage door again. I guess they also nail frogs to trees with bits of twig.