I get around

This post is a bit long. Not really worth the read. It's just old (originally from july 13 2005) and needed to be posted. Oh but check me out in the NUPACE ad below.


So what, you may wonder, did I do with all my time in Japan? Well, at least pretend like you have some interest; after all, you are reading my blog. Aside from going to Japanese lessons, studying Japanese culture, and pretty much being an all-around lousy student, I enjoy a uniquely Japanese lifetsyle I will dearly miss when I go back home. Let me paint you a picture of a typical day.

Most mornings I wake up, almost too sore from exercising the day before to even move. I manage to turn and look at the clock and realize either I've slept through 2 of 3 of my alarms, or the sun has woken me up long before my alarms are set to go off. In the latter case, it must be a day I don't have an 8:45 class, so I stay in bed a little longer, enjoying the peace and qu...

「みんなさん、おはようございます。今日、シーツなんですけど、blah blah blah blah」

ARGH, stupid intercom system. I want to just shut off power to my whole room from the circuit breaker. But then my robotic air conditioning arm wouldn't continue to pacify me through its hypnotic swing. Besides, today is the sheet washing service day, which is much more convenient than washing it on my own, especially given the amount of quality time I spend in bed (NOT NEARLY ENOUGH).

So, on go some clothes, off go the sheets, and we'll skip the rest of the morning routine. Anyway, more often than I'd like to admit, I'm nearly out the door of my building, having reached the lobby from the 5th floor, when I realize I'm still wearing my indoor slippers. These are necessary because the Japanese custom of removing shoes in certain rooms of the dorm is a real pain when you have to unlace and lace them every time you want to grab something from the refridgerator, watch TV, etc. So anyway, back up to the 5th floor to swap out my shoes, and I'm off to school.

Of course by now I've had more delays than I accounted for despite setting my alarms earlier, so I'm late to Japanese class. Every day of the week has a different concentration. For example, Monday is reading day, where the teacher just ignores me because, unlike the rest of the class (with the exception of the perfect Indonesians), I'm not Chinese and can't just skim all the kanji (Chinese characters used in higher level Japanese writing) to get the message of the passage. Perhaps my favorite day is the conversation grammar day, where we learn 3 ways to say everything. For example, the key phrase to forward a message a friend gave you is ～てって, unless you are talking to superior, in which case you have to make it longer to make it more polite. In the case of a senior student, or 先輩, you say ～ように言われたんですが. In the case of a professor, you have to say ～ていただけないかとおっしゃっていました, which has to be the longest jargon of meaningless kissing up I've ever heard. All three of these phrases basically translate to "said".

After Japanese, since I've exhausted the supply of English-instruction engineering courses offered, I go to a random culture course, be it a comparison of American/Japanese cultural perceptions, a course on cross-cultural training, or even a Japanese history class. But that's not as exciting as is the fact that western professors get absolutely no feedback from the Japanese students in these courses unless they are directly called upon. Through these courses, I've also been exposed to a lot of West meets East films, such as Gung Ho and Tampopo.

Ok I wrote most of this stuff a year ago... so I'm gonna go ahead and post it. Nobody really cares about day-to-day life in Japan (except for our all-you-can-drink self-introduction parties every week). After all, most of my fun "getting around" involved the Korean... incident. I know what everybody REALLY wants to read: the Billy/Lily updates. Oh yes, by popular demand, they may be posted here. I just have to sort through and see if there's any offensive content first.