I walk so much here...
09/20/04 1900
Saturday wasn't too exciting. I sat around the house in the morning and studied a bit, and then in the afternoon I went to try to get bikes with Jeff and his family. We were taken to a recycle shop, which pretty much takes in junk, fixes it up as best as possible, and then sells it for really cheap. There were some interesting things there, but only a few bikes, none of which looked very good. So we didn't buy bikes. There were a lot of dishes though, for some reason, so we bought matching souvenir shot glasses for like 70 yen each, since I decided that shot glasses were an interesting thing to collect as souvenirs. I actually have a collection of one already, that I bought something like five years ago at the one Rennaissance Fair I've been to. It's pretty; it's dark purple with a design in gold. The ones we bought are just clear with some kanji on them. I didn't look too closely at what it said, actually. Anyway, Jeff was also going to buy two video games that were really cheap, but after we'd paid and were starting to walk out of the store, he started looking through them and realized that neither one was what it was supposed to be. One didn't have the game disc at all, and the other one was the wrong game. He got his money back, but after that he complained goodnaturedly that they were trying to rip him off and he'd never go back there again. I actually managed to find a game and a cd for myself for a total of about 300 yen; I checked both of those carefully and they seemed to be complete. I haven't tested the discs though, so we'll see if they work or not. After we left the recycle shop we went to a Baskin Robbins for ice cream. I was going to pay for my own but Jeff's family didn't give me any chance to do it.
09/21/04 2230
On Sunday we did something different to try to get bikes. Apparently we entered a raffle to win the chance to buy some refurbished bikes really cheap. I hear there's a one-in-ten chance of winning (which isn't bad for a public random drawing thing like that) and then if you win, you can buy the bike you want for 500 yen plus another 500 yen charge for something, I'm not sure exactly what. Even so, 1000 yen for a bike is ridiculously cheap, and it doesn't cost anything to enter, and the bikes looked sturdy enough, so we figured there was no reason not to at least try. We'll find out by Friday if we've won.
We actually did that on the way to Konan for an undoukai, or sports day. Jeff's father dropped us off at Okamoto so we could go to that. His mother was really good to me again that day because we went to a little place in Okamoto for lunch, and she again just paid for all of us. *sigh* I'm gonna have to get his parents something at some point. His father keeps driving us places, and his mother keeps buying us food.
Anyway, this undoukai was an event organized by the IEC, the international club. There were probably ten or fifteen Japanese students there, and many of the exchange students came. Total about forty students were there, which was plenty; we were divided into three teams, labeled by pieces of tape colored red, yellow, or blue. We played four different games: the first one was a relay race where we had to carry a golf ball across the field in a ladle, then spin around ten times, then carry it back. The second was a tag-ish game where we had to capture "tails" made of towels tucked into the back of the pants of people on the opposing team.
The third was dodgeball, Japanese style. I'd played this version when I came here before, but never in America. Basically, you have two teams on opposing sides of the court, like usual, but a few members of each team are spaced around the outside of the opposing team's side. There's only one ball in play, but whenever it goes outside the court, the people on the outside can take it and throw it at people on the opposing team to get them out. People inside can deliberately pass it to people on the outside. We also played the custom rule that all the guys had to throw with their off hands. Sometimes a guy on the inside would pass it to a girl on the outside so she could throw with her good hand as opposed to him throwing with his off hand. The only other rule is that whenever a person on the outside gets someone out, then he can come inside again, and when someone on the inside is hit, he goes outside on the other side and acts like all the other people on his team that are outside. Catching the ball cleanly without dropping it does not count as being hit. In grade school, we played with the rule that if someone caught the ball, the person who threw it was out, which meant you had to be a lot more careful about how you threw the ball and where. Here though, it didn't matter. Of course, the people in the middle have to be a lot more watchful of where the ball is because attacks could come from any direction. All three games were a lot of fun, even though it was really hot out.
The fourth game was supposed to be soccer, but Jeff and I didn't stay for that. We were pretty tired from the first three games already, so we just headed home after that. His mother had actually stayed the whole time. I thought she was going to go home on the train after we got there, but she stayed and watched. I guess there was another host mother there too, so they were chatting much of the time. I actually got to see their house for a bit that day too after we got back to Seishin-minami. Jeff's room is really big, bigger than his room in America. There's no actual bed in it though, which contributes to the effect. He's got a traditional futon which he folds up when he's not using it. Of course, there are so many drawers under my lofted bed that my room would be a lot more crowded if I had to spread out a futon on the floor to sleep, but my room's a lot smaller anyway. I don't care though; it's big enough.
This weekend my other host sister Yuki and her son were also visiting for the three day weekend. Apparently Monday is a national holiday, except Konan is one of the few schools to actually have classes. So Yuki came from Nagoya, which is where she lives (not sure how close she is to my host father's apartment in Nagoya though). Her son Reishi is also two years old, but a few months older than Yuka's, so he can actually talk a bit and also has a lot better temperament. Shikkun doesn't seem to like much of anything and often refuses food at meals. He mostly ignores me unless he's prompted to say something to me by one of the adults, at which time he usually gives this sort of sideways half-bow which is rather cute, but he doesn't actually say anything.
Rei-chan, on the other hand, took a liking to me immediately. He can say a couple dozen words probably and likes pointing out things and saying what they are to me or anyone else. One of his favorite words is "tokei," which means "clock." He also likes sitting on my lap or riding on my back. I think he likes my rides because I don't have a problem with doing whatever it takes to make them interesting, which usually involves spinning around and bouncing up and down. (Theory: He uses a word that sounds like "omma" to demand a ride, which could be a corruption of "uma," or "horse.") The cutest thing I've seen him say was when he was struggling to pull one of the cushions off the couch. (He likes doing that for some reason, I'm not sure why.) Anyway, he used the Japanese "yoisho" which is an expression of putting forth effort. From a two-year-old, the effect was extremely cute.
So I did have classes on Monday even though it was a holiday, like I said. I got up at my normal time for during the week, just after 7, but I didn't realize that my mother didn't know I had classes. Somehow it came up during breakfast because she started talking about taking me somewhere, and I asked her if she wanted to go after school and if I should come home earlier or something. That was when she started giving me a strange look and saying the equivalent of "waitasec, you have classes today?" So I had to explain that I had classes on Monday but not on Thursday. Gotta love the Japanese for having two national holidays in the same week. I have no idea what I'm going to do on Thursday yet.
After Japanese class, we had an orientation meeting at noon, during which we "elected" (=verbally agreed on after one nomination for each post) class officers, and I had a yummy bentou (lit. box lunch, but this was a bowl of noodles and rice with some sort of meat on top). The meeting was over pretty quickly, and we didn't have our afternoon class until 2:30 or something, so Jeff and I decided to go back to a store we'd found in Okamoto that sells used manga, cds, dvds, and video games. I think I mentioned it. They've got a lot of 100 yen manga volumes as well as sets that are sometimes even less than that much per volume. This time I found a Card Captor Sakura complete set (12 volumes) for 960 yen, which is 80 yen per volume. I seem to have started a collection of CLAMP stuff, so I figured this was a great addition to that. Amusingly enough, the French girl (Aurelie?) saw me reading manga later in the Ajisai room and asked me about it, so I told her about buying Please Save My Earth (which I was reading at the time) and Card Captor Sakura (which was sitting on the table near me). We ended up showing her and another guy the location of the store after our class was over and we were heading back toward the station.
On Friday, the teachers had offered each of the Japanese classes five tickets to see a Noh play (traditional Japanese theater) on Tuesday night. I hadn't taken one originally because I wasn't extremely interested, and it worked out that three Australian students raised their hands, and then Doug and Tassa raised theirs, so I didn't want to interfere with them. But then over the weekend, Jeff told me he'd gotten one and he thought it'd be cool if we could go together, so he wanted me to try to get one if possible. Apparently not all five for his class had been taken immediately, so he thought there might be a couple left. I tried to ask at the office on Monday, but was told I'd have to ask the teachers directly, so I had to ask Tuesday during class, by which time they were all gone. I thought I wasn't going to go, but then later I ended up being able to get one from Chris, oddly enough, whose mother had several extra for some reason.
I had to a lot of walking and traveling today though because this weekend, Jeff had made plans for us to go to this random station called Tsukaguchi that's in the opposite direction from Sannomiya on the Hankyuu train that stops at Okamoto. He wanted to buy wireless cards from a store he found on the internet, so he wanted to go to the address he found. Unfortunately, the address was on the edge of a residential district; Jeff's theory was that it is an internet-only store run out of someone's home. So we did a lot of walking because it was on the other side of this huge residential area from the train station. Oh well, we learned something and got to see a new area at least.
After we got back from that, we met Savi, who was also going to the Noh play, at Okamoto and headed for Sannomiya for dinner. The play was going to be held at Ikuta shrine, which is only a few minutes' walk from Sannomiya station, so that was very convenient. We had only found out I could get a ticket from Chris a little bit earlier, at Okamoto, so then I had to call home and let my mother know I would be coming home late and wouldn't need dinner. I had problems doing that though. I found out after I came home and talked to her that I'd connected all three times I'd tried to call, but I couldn't hear anything any of those times, so I didn't say anything, so she couldn't hear me either. I couldn't tell if there was just too much background noise, but sometimes I seemed to get weird beeping noises too, which sounded like a modem or something one of the times, so I wasn't sure I was even getting through. I'm going to have to figure out how to turn up the volume on my phone for one thing I guess, and I think I'll try calling once when I'm at home just so I can test it and see what I can hear when I know she's picked up the phone.
So anyway, because I couldn't seem to talk to my mother over the phone, I ended up asking Yuka by email to contact her for me and let her know what I was doing. Luckily, my language skills are plenty good enough to write that and make it all polite and stuff too. Only a few minutes after I sent my message, Yuka sent a nice message back that sounded like she didn't mind doing it, which was a relief. I wasn't sure what she'd be doing at the time or if she'd even have a chance to do it, but I guess she could. I figured if I was really lucky, she'd be visiting with Shikkun at home for a while, so then it'd be really convenient to just relay the message verbally, but I'm pretty sure she wasn't here today. In any case, she did it. I got home and my mother came and asked me how the play was and didn't seem at all worried that I'd come home at 9pm instead of my usual 6pm, so it was all okay.
So, about the play itself. Well, it seems kinda misleading to call it a play, since only the first part seemed to be an actual dialogue. There were two people, one of which seemed like the student of the other, but the student at two different points seemed to turn into this demon with a red mask for some reason. I didn't understand most of the dialogue because it was a really old mode of speech though. The later half or two-thirds of it was this odd synthesis of shakuhachi (Japanese traditional flute), a hand drum, and various voices making various sounds which didn't sound like words. So two people were playing the instruments and making voice sounds (can't even call it singing as we know it), and then there was a "choir" of eight more people along the side. Then there were two people moving slowly around the stage. I guess at the beginning they were saying some stuff, but it was even less intelligible than the dialogue, and there didn't seem to be any plot, so I didn't pay as much attention to it. Anyway, one was dressed like the people in the dialogue, kinda warrior-ish, but more fancy with a hat and stuff. The other one had a female mask and was dressed fancily like a traditional woman of the time, with a fake fancy hairstyle and everything (but it was definitely a guy underneath, which also follows tradition for Noh).
It's pretty hard to try to describe most of this though, so if you really want to know what it looked like, come to Japan and see it for yourself. I'll be thinking about it for a while tonight to try to fix the details in my head. Even if it's not really that interesting to sit through, it's definitely one of those cultural things that should be experienced at some point.
Saturday wasn't too exciting. I sat around the house in the morning and studied a bit, and then in the afternoon I went to try to get bikes with Jeff and his family. We were taken to a recycle shop, which pretty much takes in junk, fixes it up as best as possible, and then sells it for really cheap. There were some interesting things there, but only a few bikes, none of which looked very good. So we didn't buy bikes. There were a lot of dishes though, for some reason, so we bought matching souvenir shot glasses for like 70 yen each, since I decided that shot glasses were an interesting thing to collect as souvenirs. I actually have a collection of one already, that I bought something like five years ago at the one Rennaissance Fair I've been to. It's pretty; it's dark purple with a design in gold. The ones we bought are just clear with some kanji on them. I didn't look too closely at what it said, actually. Anyway, Jeff was also going to buy two video games that were really cheap, but after we'd paid and were starting to walk out of the store, he started looking through them and realized that neither one was what it was supposed to be. One didn't have the game disc at all, and the other one was the wrong game. He got his money back, but after that he complained goodnaturedly that they were trying to rip him off and he'd never go back there again. I actually managed to find a game and a cd for myself for a total of about 300 yen; I checked both of those carefully and they seemed to be complete. I haven't tested the discs though, so we'll see if they work or not. After we left the recycle shop we went to a Baskin Robbins for ice cream. I was going to pay for my own but Jeff's family didn't give me any chance to do it.
09/21/04 2230
On Sunday we did something different to try to get bikes. Apparently we entered a raffle to win the chance to buy some refurbished bikes really cheap. I hear there's a one-in-ten chance of winning (which isn't bad for a public random drawing thing like that) and then if you win, you can buy the bike you want for 500 yen plus another 500 yen charge for something, I'm not sure exactly what. Even so, 1000 yen for a bike is ridiculously cheap, and it doesn't cost anything to enter, and the bikes looked sturdy enough, so we figured there was no reason not to at least try. We'll find out by Friday if we've won.
We actually did that on the way to Konan for an undoukai, or sports day. Jeff's father dropped us off at Okamoto so we could go to that. His mother was really good to me again that day because we went to a little place in Okamoto for lunch, and she again just paid for all of us. *sigh* I'm gonna have to get his parents something at some point. His father keeps driving us places, and his mother keeps buying us food.
Anyway, this undoukai was an event organized by the IEC, the international club. There were probably ten or fifteen Japanese students there, and many of the exchange students came. Total about forty students were there, which was plenty; we were divided into three teams, labeled by pieces of tape colored red, yellow, or blue. We played four different games: the first one was a relay race where we had to carry a golf ball across the field in a ladle, then spin around ten times, then carry it back. The second was a tag-ish game where we had to capture "tails" made of towels tucked into the back of the pants of people on the opposing team.
The third was dodgeball, Japanese style. I'd played this version when I came here before, but never in America. Basically, you have two teams on opposing sides of the court, like usual, but a few members of each team are spaced around the outside of the opposing team's side. There's only one ball in play, but whenever it goes outside the court, the people on the outside can take it and throw it at people on the opposing team to get them out. People inside can deliberately pass it to people on the outside. We also played the custom rule that all the guys had to throw with their off hands. Sometimes a guy on the inside would pass it to a girl on the outside so she could throw with her good hand as opposed to him throwing with his off hand. The only other rule is that whenever a person on the outside gets someone out, then he can come inside again, and when someone on the inside is hit, he goes outside on the other side and acts like all the other people on his team that are outside. Catching the ball cleanly without dropping it does not count as being hit. In grade school, we played with the rule that if someone caught the ball, the person who threw it was out, which meant you had to be a lot more careful about how you threw the ball and where. Here though, it didn't matter. Of course, the people in the middle have to be a lot more watchful of where the ball is because attacks could come from any direction. All three games were a lot of fun, even though it was really hot out.
The fourth game was supposed to be soccer, but Jeff and I didn't stay for that. We were pretty tired from the first three games already, so we just headed home after that. His mother had actually stayed the whole time. I thought she was going to go home on the train after we got there, but she stayed and watched. I guess there was another host mother there too, so they were chatting much of the time. I actually got to see their house for a bit that day too after we got back to Seishin-minami. Jeff's room is really big, bigger than his room in America. There's no actual bed in it though, which contributes to the effect. He's got a traditional futon which he folds up when he's not using it. Of course, there are so many drawers under my lofted bed that my room would be a lot more crowded if I had to spread out a futon on the floor to sleep, but my room's a lot smaller anyway. I don't care though; it's big enough.
This weekend my other host sister Yuki and her son were also visiting for the three day weekend. Apparently Monday is a national holiday, except Konan is one of the few schools to actually have classes. So Yuki came from Nagoya, which is where she lives (not sure how close she is to my host father's apartment in Nagoya though). Her son Reishi is also two years old, but a few months older than Yuka's, so he can actually talk a bit and also has a lot better temperament. Shikkun doesn't seem to like much of anything and often refuses food at meals. He mostly ignores me unless he's prompted to say something to me by one of the adults, at which time he usually gives this sort of sideways half-bow which is rather cute, but he doesn't actually say anything.
Rei-chan, on the other hand, took a liking to me immediately. He can say a couple dozen words probably and likes pointing out things and saying what they are to me or anyone else. One of his favorite words is "tokei," which means "clock." He also likes sitting on my lap or riding on my back. I think he likes my rides because I don't have a problem with doing whatever it takes to make them interesting, which usually involves spinning around and bouncing up and down. (Theory: He uses a word that sounds like "omma" to demand a ride, which could be a corruption of "uma," or "horse.") The cutest thing I've seen him say was when he was struggling to pull one of the cushions off the couch. (He likes doing that for some reason, I'm not sure why.) Anyway, he used the Japanese "yoisho" which is an expression of putting forth effort. From a two-year-old, the effect was extremely cute.
So I did have classes on Monday even though it was a holiday, like I said. I got up at my normal time for during the week, just after 7, but I didn't realize that my mother didn't know I had classes. Somehow it came up during breakfast because she started talking about taking me somewhere, and I asked her if she wanted to go after school and if I should come home earlier or something. That was when she started giving me a strange look and saying the equivalent of "waitasec, you have classes today?" So I had to explain that I had classes on Monday but not on Thursday. Gotta love the Japanese for having two national holidays in the same week. I have no idea what I'm going to do on Thursday yet.
After Japanese class, we had an orientation meeting at noon, during which we "elected" (=verbally agreed on after one nomination for each post) class officers, and I had a yummy bentou (lit. box lunch, but this was a bowl of noodles and rice with some sort of meat on top). The meeting was over pretty quickly, and we didn't have our afternoon class until 2:30 or something, so Jeff and I decided to go back to a store we'd found in Okamoto that sells used manga, cds, dvds, and video games. I think I mentioned it. They've got a lot of 100 yen manga volumes as well as sets that are sometimes even less than that much per volume. This time I found a Card Captor Sakura complete set (12 volumes) for 960 yen, which is 80 yen per volume. I seem to have started a collection of CLAMP stuff, so I figured this was a great addition to that. Amusingly enough, the French girl (Aurelie?) saw me reading manga later in the Ajisai room and asked me about it, so I told her about buying Please Save My Earth (which I was reading at the time) and Card Captor Sakura (which was sitting on the table near me). We ended up showing her and another guy the location of the store after our class was over and we were heading back toward the station.
On Friday, the teachers had offered each of the Japanese classes five tickets to see a Noh play (traditional Japanese theater) on Tuesday night. I hadn't taken one originally because I wasn't extremely interested, and it worked out that three Australian students raised their hands, and then Doug and Tassa raised theirs, so I didn't want to interfere with them. But then over the weekend, Jeff told me he'd gotten one and he thought it'd be cool if we could go together, so he wanted me to try to get one if possible. Apparently not all five for his class had been taken immediately, so he thought there might be a couple left. I tried to ask at the office on Monday, but was told I'd have to ask the teachers directly, so I had to ask Tuesday during class, by which time they were all gone. I thought I wasn't going to go, but then later I ended up being able to get one from Chris, oddly enough, whose mother had several extra for some reason.
I had to a lot of walking and traveling today though because this weekend, Jeff had made plans for us to go to this random station called Tsukaguchi that's in the opposite direction from Sannomiya on the Hankyuu train that stops at Okamoto. He wanted to buy wireless cards from a store he found on the internet, so he wanted to go to the address he found. Unfortunately, the address was on the edge of a residential district; Jeff's theory was that it is an internet-only store run out of someone's home. So we did a lot of walking because it was on the other side of this huge residential area from the train station. Oh well, we learned something and got to see a new area at least.
After we got back from that, we met Savi, who was also going to the Noh play, at Okamoto and headed for Sannomiya for dinner. The play was going to be held at Ikuta shrine, which is only a few minutes' walk from Sannomiya station, so that was very convenient. We had only found out I could get a ticket from Chris a little bit earlier, at Okamoto, so then I had to call home and let my mother know I would be coming home late and wouldn't need dinner. I had problems doing that though. I found out after I came home and talked to her that I'd connected all three times I'd tried to call, but I couldn't hear anything any of those times, so I didn't say anything, so she couldn't hear me either. I couldn't tell if there was just too much background noise, but sometimes I seemed to get weird beeping noises too, which sounded like a modem or something one of the times, so I wasn't sure I was even getting through. I'm going to have to figure out how to turn up the volume on my phone for one thing I guess, and I think I'll try calling once when I'm at home just so I can test it and see what I can hear when I know she's picked up the phone.
So anyway, because I couldn't seem to talk to my mother over the phone, I ended up asking Yuka by email to contact her for me and let her know what I was doing. Luckily, my language skills are plenty good enough to write that and make it all polite and stuff too. Only a few minutes after I sent my message, Yuka sent a nice message back that sounded like she didn't mind doing it, which was a relief. I wasn't sure what she'd be doing at the time or if she'd even have a chance to do it, but I guess she could. I figured if I was really lucky, she'd be visiting with Shikkun at home for a while, so then it'd be really convenient to just relay the message verbally, but I'm pretty sure she wasn't here today. In any case, she did it. I got home and my mother came and asked me how the play was and didn't seem at all worried that I'd come home at 9pm instead of my usual 6pm, so it was all okay.
So, about the play itself. Well, it seems kinda misleading to call it a play, since only the first part seemed to be an actual dialogue. There were two people, one of which seemed like the student of the other, but the student at two different points seemed to turn into this demon with a red mask for some reason. I didn't understand most of the dialogue because it was a really old mode of speech though. The later half or two-thirds of it was this odd synthesis of shakuhachi (Japanese traditional flute), a hand drum, and various voices making various sounds which didn't sound like words. So two people were playing the instruments and making voice sounds (can't even call it singing as we know it), and then there was a "choir" of eight more people along the side. Then there were two people moving slowly around the stage. I guess at the beginning they were saying some stuff, but it was even less intelligible than the dialogue, and there didn't seem to be any plot, so I didn't pay as much attention to it. Anyway, one was dressed like the people in the dialogue, kinda warrior-ish, but more fancy with a hat and stuff. The other one had a female mask and was dressed fancily like a traditional woman of the time, with a fake fancy hairstyle and everything (but it was definitely a guy underneath, which also follows tradition for Noh).
It's pretty hard to try to describe most of this though, so if you really want to know what it looked like, come to Japan and see it for yourself. I'll be thinking about it for a while tonight to try to fix the details in my head. Even if it's not really that interesting to sit through, it's definitely one of those cultural things that should be experienced at some point.