Adventures in Errands
When you`re living in Japan, pretty much everything is an adventure. Now, I`m sure when you think "adventure" you think, Indiana Jones, maybe riding a cart through a perilous mineshaft, with a half naked Indian man in a turban in hot pursuit. Or falling into a pit of snakes or riding an elephant through the jungles with an annoying bitch and a Chinese kid. Or, at the very least, you think something that one is happy to engage in, which lends the adventurer a sense of accomplishment and a certain measure of self-confident smugness.
This would be an erroneous view. In point of fact, adventures of the day to day kind create a sensation rather like one might imagine a Maybelline rabbit feels after a long day of testing the latest eyeshadow.
Let`s review, shall we?
I came in to work this morning not sure whether it was a normal day or not, but it wasn`t. My students are taking tests today, and tomorrow, and Friday, and also the entirety of next week. So I will have exactly nothing to do in either of my schools until the week before Christmas. Right. Except, this is not as much of a hardship as one might presume, since it is pretty much what I have been doing since August.
So I spent the morning looking at this new thing Eric told me about called del.icio.us which is AWESOME! (Thanks Eric!) It`s just a site where people can store their favorite bookmarks and see other people`s bookmarks too. So it`s basically a vehicle for finding cool weird things. I learned how to tell if people are lying, I found tips on how to make XP run faster and things to do for virus protection, I read a long list of weird phobias (I think my favorite was aibohphobia, which is the fear of palindromes :-D see? cause it`s a palindrome? hahahahaha), learned 18 tricks your body can do (like if your nose is stuffed up, press against the roof of your mouth with your tongue and then press a finger between your eyebrows. it moves the vuh-something bone in your nose so gunk can leak out). And...and...um, that`s basically it, really, but I`m quickly becoming a master of wasting my time. Yay!
So then at noon the fun started when i went to get my stuff together to go to the bank and the post office and the covini to buy lunch. I had three things I wanted to do. First, I had three bills that I wanted to pay at the bank, my rent, my car payment, and my phone bill. I`d been waiting for like a week because the bank closes at 4, and I`m usually getting out of work then. So I was vaguely worried that I was late paying my bills. But whatever.
Then I wanted to send money to Roni Boring, who`s the treasurer for the Miyagi JET Association. Everybody has to send 31,000 yen ($300) to her by Dec. 10 in order to go on the big Sapporo Snow Festival trip in February. I never made claims to not be a joiner, so I`m totally going. So, second I wanted to send that money. Right.
Third, I wanted to buy lunch at the convini.
In an hour.
In the hour when everyone else in Tajiri also wants to go to the bank, the post office and the covini. Awesome, let`s go.
First of all, I realize that in order to mail the money to Roni, I had to have the example form (as the thing would be in Japanese). So I go to look it in my AOL inbox, and realize that it`s gone, because I`ve filled up my inbox with spam and thirteen thousand emails yesterday between Alice, Eric and me about American McGee`s Alice. So then I get all frustrated and think about going home, looking in my gmail, trying to find it there, realize that she only ever sent it to ennui83, curse the firewall, think to send roni another email asking for it again, then leave to at least go to the bank and get that done, because it`s lunch and Roni probably won`t write back immediately.
So I zip off to the bank, walk in the front door and run smack into a little old lady standing in a line of like ten people waiting for the three ATM machines. I realize I left the bills out in my car, so I go back out to get them, and then when I get back in again, the line has inexplicably multiplied like thirty fold. But I patiently wait my turn. And wait. And finally get up there and there`s all this pressure to perform, what with the picking out the right kanji and entering the right thing at the right time without ever understanding what the damn thing is actually telling me. But I do it, and I get out an exorbitant amount of money that I`m imminently to be parted with, then I go over to the bank area, grab a little number and sit down to wait. This one doesn`t take that long, and I get called up to the window, where the nice lady takes my bills, and immediately frowns at the one that i was most worried was going to be late and starts jabbering away incoherently and circling things and pointing and gesturing and I`m all confused so I pull out the old "sumimasen wakarimasen" and take it back and put it in my purse. The other two bills, about $550 worth of money-parting goodness, I might add, are pulled off without a hitch.
So then, I have to drive back, past the post office, squinting malevolently the whole time. Next to the post office is the gas station and I realize on the way that I`m also near empty, so I stop to get gas. Then a little further down the same road is the covini, so I stop and get my lunch, then head back to school.
Then, miraculously, as I start to eat my lunch, Roni forwards the very form that I need! So I can go back out to the post office after I finish my lunch! yay!!! But I`d already asked kyoto-sensei if I could go to the post office, bank, and covini once today, this second request (to go to the same place I went before) must be handled with care...so I ask Kazuko sensei (who I mostly teach with at Tajiri) what the Japanese equivalent of "May I Please" is and she tells me, and we practice a little, and I get all prepared and go up to kyoto sensei and say "waruii desu, demo, itte kara ii desu ka?" which is roughly "this is bad, but I`m going for good?" and is, of course, completely wrong.
So everyone laughs at me and Kyoto sensei says yes and I zip off to the post office. And (Kazuko sensei and I had practiced this too) I said to the clerk "furikomi iraisyo onegai shimasu" and he gave me the furikomi form that I needed, and I start to fill it out, and I realize with a start that I need my address. Which I don`t have on me or memorized. So I stumble my way through telling him I don`t have it, and I think he says that`s okay. So I resume, but I realize I also don`t have my hanko (the stamp to sign your name on forms)! So I excuse myself and run out to my car, only to find that I had stupidly left the hanko in my other bag, on my desk, in the office. So I think for a minute, and stare at the sky, and then I jump back in my car and drive the ten minutes there and back to get my bag from the office.
My teacher laughs at me, of course, when I walk sheepishly back in, and I jump on her good mood to ask if she understands the bill that the bank teller couldn`t pay for me. Kazuko sensei looks at it for a while, can`t figure it out, but thinks that it`s nothing I can do at the post office at the moment, so I zip off, yet again, to the post office, finish the form, get laughed at by the post office guy, too, and then zip back to school, because it`s now about half an hour past my lunch break.
So then, successful resolution, I come back and meanwhile Kazuko san has been puzzling over the mystery bill and I come back and ask her and she says something that could certainly have been english, but was seriously deficient in any sort of familiar grammatical structure. So we puzzle over it together, her puzzling out the bill, me puzzling over what the hell she said, but lots of puzzling, nevertheless. And finally we deduce that she thinks the bill was already paid, taken out of my bank account! Which would be awesome! Because having people take money directly out of my account, while it would seem to be a bad idea in normal circumstances (i.e., ones where you understood what the fuck was going on at any given time), it`s pretty much a godsend in my current situation. So I whip out my little bank book that you insert into the ATM when you withdraw money which prints out your current balance and all transactions since your last withdraw and sure enough! There`s the same amount for the alleged bill I`m holding in my hand. Happy days are come again!
And that, class, is how we walk up to the language barrier, and poke at it repeatedly with sharp sticks.
This would be an erroneous view. In point of fact, adventures of the day to day kind create a sensation rather like one might imagine a Maybelline rabbit feels after a long day of testing the latest eyeshadow.
Let`s review, shall we?
I came in to work this morning not sure whether it was a normal day or not, but it wasn`t. My students are taking tests today, and tomorrow, and Friday, and also the entirety of next week. So I will have exactly nothing to do in either of my schools until the week before Christmas. Right. Except, this is not as much of a hardship as one might presume, since it is pretty much what I have been doing since August.
So I spent the morning looking at this new thing Eric told me about called del.icio.us which is AWESOME! (Thanks Eric!) It`s just a site where people can store their favorite bookmarks and see other people`s bookmarks too. So it`s basically a vehicle for finding cool weird things. I learned how to tell if people are lying, I found tips on how to make XP run faster and things to do for virus protection, I read a long list of weird phobias (I think my favorite was aibohphobia, which is the fear of palindromes :-D see? cause it`s a palindrome? hahahahaha), learned 18 tricks your body can do (like if your nose is stuffed up, press against the roof of your mouth with your tongue and then press a finger between your eyebrows. it moves the vuh-something bone in your nose so gunk can leak out). And...and...um, that`s basically it, really, but I`m quickly becoming a master of wasting my time. Yay!
So then at noon the fun started when i went to get my stuff together to go to the bank and the post office and the covini to buy lunch. I had three things I wanted to do. First, I had three bills that I wanted to pay at the bank, my rent, my car payment, and my phone bill. I`d been waiting for like a week because the bank closes at 4, and I`m usually getting out of work then. So I was vaguely worried that I was late paying my bills. But whatever.
Then I wanted to send money to Roni Boring, who`s the treasurer for the Miyagi JET Association. Everybody has to send 31,000 yen ($300) to her by Dec. 10 in order to go on the big Sapporo Snow Festival trip in February. I never made claims to not be a joiner, so I`m totally going. So, second I wanted to send that money. Right.
Third, I wanted to buy lunch at the convini.
In an hour.
In the hour when everyone else in Tajiri also wants to go to the bank, the post office and the covini. Awesome, let`s go.
First of all, I realize that in order to mail the money to Roni, I had to have the example form (as the thing would be in Japanese). So I go to look it in my AOL inbox, and realize that it`s gone, because I`ve filled up my inbox with spam and thirteen thousand emails yesterday between Alice, Eric and me about American McGee`s Alice. So then I get all frustrated and think about going home, looking in my gmail, trying to find it there, realize that she only ever sent it to ennui83, curse the firewall, think to send roni another email asking for it again, then leave to at least go to the bank and get that done, because it`s lunch and Roni probably won`t write back immediately.
So I zip off to the bank, walk in the front door and run smack into a little old lady standing in a line of like ten people waiting for the three ATM machines. I realize I left the bills out in my car, so I go back out to get them, and then when I get back in again, the line has inexplicably multiplied like thirty fold. But I patiently wait my turn. And wait. And finally get up there and there`s all this pressure to perform, what with the picking out the right kanji and entering the right thing at the right time without ever understanding what the damn thing is actually telling me. But I do it, and I get out an exorbitant amount of money that I`m imminently to be parted with, then I go over to the bank area, grab a little number and sit down to wait. This one doesn`t take that long, and I get called up to the window, where the nice lady takes my bills, and immediately frowns at the one that i was most worried was going to be late and starts jabbering away incoherently and circling things and pointing and gesturing and I`m all confused so I pull out the old "sumimasen wakarimasen" and take it back and put it in my purse. The other two bills, about $550 worth of money-parting goodness, I might add, are pulled off without a hitch.
So then, I have to drive back, past the post office, squinting malevolently the whole time. Next to the post office is the gas station and I realize on the way that I`m also near empty, so I stop to get gas. Then a little further down the same road is the covini, so I stop and get my lunch, then head back to school.
Then, miraculously, as I start to eat my lunch, Roni forwards the very form that I need! So I can go back out to the post office after I finish my lunch! yay!!! But I`d already asked kyoto-sensei if I could go to the post office, bank, and covini once today, this second request (to go to the same place I went before) must be handled with care...so I ask Kazuko sensei (who I mostly teach with at Tajiri) what the Japanese equivalent of "May I Please" is and she tells me, and we practice a little, and I get all prepared and go up to kyoto sensei and say "waruii desu, demo, itte kara ii desu ka?" which is roughly "this is bad, but I`m going for good?" and is, of course, completely wrong.
So everyone laughs at me and Kyoto sensei says yes and I zip off to the post office. And (Kazuko sensei and I had practiced this too) I said to the clerk "furikomi iraisyo onegai shimasu" and he gave me the furikomi form that I needed, and I start to fill it out, and I realize with a start that I need my address. Which I don`t have on me or memorized. So I stumble my way through telling him I don`t have it, and I think he says that`s okay. So I resume, but I realize I also don`t have my hanko (the stamp to sign your name on forms)! So I excuse myself and run out to my car, only to find that I had stupidly left the hanko in my other bag, on my desk, in the office. So I think for a minute, and stare at the sky, and then I jump back in my car and drive the ten minutes there and back to get my bag from the office.
My teacher laughs at me, of course, when I walk sheepishly back in, and I jump on her good mood to ask if she understands the bill that the bank teller couldn`t pay for me. Kazuko sensei looks at it for a while, can`t figure it out, but thinks that it`s nothing I can do at the post office at the moment, so I zip off, yet again, to the post office, finish the form, get laughed at by the post office guy, too, and then zip back to school, because it`s now about half an hour past my lunch break.
So then, successful resolution, I come back and meanwhile Kazuko san has been puzzling over the mystery bill and I come back and ask her and she says something that could certainly have been english, but was seriously deficient in any sort of familiar grammatical structure. So we puzzle over it together, her puzzling out the bill, me puzzling over what the hell she said, but lots of puzzling, nevertheless. And finally we deduce that she thinks the bill was already paid, taken out of my bank account! Which would be awesome! Because having people take money directly out of my account, while it would seem to be a bad idea in normal circumstances (i.e., ones where you understood what the fuck was going on at any given time), it`s pretty much a godsend in my current situation. So I whip out my little bank book that you insert into the ATM when you withdraw money which prints out your current balance and all transactions since your last withdraw and sure enough! There`s the same amount for the alleged bill I`m holding in my hand. Happy days are come again!
And that, class, is how we walk up to the language barrier, and poke at it repeatedly with sharp sticks.