Friday's test and weekday fun
So it's actually a lot cheaper and a lot less hassle than in America to have a cell phone in Japan. As far as I know, you don't have to worry about roaming and long distance at all, plus the phones do a lot of cool stuff that just comes standard, even for ones that are free with a service plan, like mine. I should post a picture or two of my phone some time. It's bright green, with an external screen and an internal screen, both color. It can send email and do other things on the web too, but there are packet charges, so I don't usually do anything except email. It actually has two email modes. The standard has a character limit of like 10000 and can be sent to any email address, including other phones. The other mode is called cmail (for chat-mail I guess). This mode has a character limit of 100 and can only be sent to other au (that's the service company) phones. It's great for sending little messages to Jeff and other Konan exchange students though because we pretty much all use au. Because it's so limited, it's supposed to be cheaper than sending a standard email.
Other features: it has a built-in digital camera (which I don't actually use for taking serious pictures because it's not a very high resolution, plus sending the pictures to my computer would take a lot of packets probably.). It can receive FM radio, which also isn't terribly useful because the reception isn't that good, at least in my room. I haven't tried it other places yet. The amusing part of the radio was that I could receive a station playing Korean music. Of course, it has things like an address book, a calendar, and options for alarms. I guess it can set up to five alarms at once for different times on different sets of days. It can also display on the main screen times for two different time zones. Of course, I set it for Japan and Chicago. It can also access this GPS map thingie which is really cool except I think it uses internet so I don't use it to save on cost. It also has a built-in dictionary which is probably only a little less limited than my portable yellow paper dictionary, but it's still cool that the phone does it. All of this costs maybe $25 or so a month. It'd be a bit more if I actually called people on it, but I mostly just use email.
On Wednesday Jeff and I did stuff in Okamoto with Mariko, an English teacher in the area who comes to Konan a lot and knew Kendall, a guy from UIUC that came last year. Kendall was the one who told her about us. I guess we'll see her every so often and practice English and Japanese with her. So we went to lunch at an okonomiyaki place in Okamoto. It was really yummy. The owner made it nearby where you could watch him do it. Not quite like teppanyaki, where they make it in front of you, but still interesting. And then to keep the food warm after it's made, each table has a stovetop-like flat area embedded into it, with controls on the side. Pretty cool. The guy set it up too high at first so the okonomiyaki started kinda cooking on the bottom some more and sticking to the table, but after he turned it down it was fine. After lunch we went to a karaoke place that was pretty cheap compared to the last one. An hour and a half with a drink cost only 420 yen, but the facilities weren't nearly as high-tech. No electronic search box, just a big thick book of song listings. One of the microphones didn't work very well, and the song remote didn't work at all at first and we had to get a replacement. It ended up not being as fun as the week before, but oh well. We'll probably go try a different place in Sannomiya next time.
Thursday was another holiday, and this time we did get the day off from school. So I went with my host mother, Yuka, Yuka's husband, and the two kids to the aquarium for the morning, which was pretty fun. There were lots of fish, squid, octopus, jellyfish, and crabs to watch. They all half-joked that Japanese eat almost everything in there, which really is true. Well, I dunno about the jellyfish, but everything else I think I've heard of cooked in various ways. There was also a live dolphin show, which was interesting, if kinda cutesy. There was a song in the background (something about blue skies was about all I heard of it since I wasn't really paying attention. I commented that the sky at that time wasn't blue, it was white, since it was pretty cloudy and a little rainy that day). The dolphins jumped a lot; one of them even hit a ball suspended high over the pool. A lot of people in the front rows got pretty wet from the splashes. We were sitting far enough back though that we didn't get wet at all. After the dolphins some penguin babies waddled out, but they didn't do anything. They just waddled around for a minute, then jumped into the water and were gone. Later on though, we got to watch part of a sea otter feeding too. They were explaining how otters crack shells of stuff with rocks so they can eat what's inside.
Near the aquarium there was a little kiddie park with rides and stuff, including Reishi's favorite, Thomas the Tank Engine (or whatever he's called...I haven't seen that show in years and years). There was room for two kids and two adults, so they made me ride it with Yuka and the kids. They took a bunch of pictures there, and when they developed them later, they gave me copies of several. I don't know if I'll be able to post any, since I'll have to scan physical pictures in to do it, but Konan might have a scanner somewhere. There were also rideable animals that reminded me of the panda bear I rode in Japan when I was two. (Where was that, Mom? Somewhere in Tokyo I assume...) It couldn't have been the same place I don't think, because the animals were a dog and a brown bear, but they were really similar. For 100 yen it would walk around for a while, and you could kinda steer it or make it back up with a steering wheel and a reverse button. Anyway, after that, for lunch we went to a "toriya" which literally means "bird shop." That basically translates to its specialty being yakitori, or grilled chicken skewers. I had a yakitori meal with rice and miso soup which was pretty good. There were three different skewers which seemed to be different kinds of meat; one of them tasted really odd and I couldn't finish it. The other two were good though.
Thursday night I had to study for the test on Friday. Apparently we have an hour test every Friday which covers grammar and vocab for the previous week. I wasn't sure exactly what we'd have to do on it, so I studied kanji quite a bit more than I needed to. We actually didn't have to write the kanji specifically for any of the vocab words, but we had to know what they meant in context so we could understand the sentences. Two or three sections were "fill in the correct word" which was either a particle or a word given in a word box below the section. One section was "fill in the blank" where we had to complete sentences started for us with particular grammar structures. For another section we had to write our own sentences answering questions with given answers. This isn't as easy as it sounds because we usually had to use a particular grammar structure and create the sentence accordingly. One particular "fill in the word" section was really hard for everyone, mostly because the vocab wasn't easy. I happened to know a couple of the random words that made it easier, but it still took me a long time to figure out which word I thought should go where. I was pretty confident of my answers by the end, but we'll see.
Yesterday was a pretty ordinary day. We started a new chapter in the book. The first one had been about self-introductions; this one is about choosing a place to live. So like, we talked about renting an apartment and the various sorts of fees you have to pay at the beginning, and different kinds of apartments, and various services they offer and how they're marked on an ad. It was pretty interesting, and very real-world useful. (Finally we get to learn useful stuff! hehe.) It's pretty hard though - there's a lot of new vocab and stuff. I picked up on a bunch of words pretty fast, but there are a lot more still. We also watched the first episode of an anime about an assassin. Yeah, I don't know what their thing is about assassins, but the thing we watched last Friday was about an assassin too. Well, that's the way to make sure we learn the word I guess...whatever. Anyway, the speech in this one was really fast, so it was hard to follow. It was even more hard to follow because the teacher kept stopping it after every other line to ask us what they'd said, which meant the beginning of the next line got cut off. Oh well. At the end, we had to write down a summary of what had happened, plus any comments we had about it. I ended up writing at least five or so sentences in a few minutes I think, and I observed that I probably wouldn't have been able to do that sort of thing a few months ago. It's hard to tell over a span of a few days, but I know I've improved somewhat already since I've gotten here. I'm gonna keep going and learn a lot more though! ^_^