FLY AARON FLY
Just like that, miraculously without getting any of my utilities cut off, I'm almost three months into living alone in Kanagawa prefecture, and midterm exams are done. I did really rather better than I likely deserved for one, seeing as how I spent a lot of the allocated time coming up with crackpot logic to justify answers to questions that mostly just left me going huh?!?!? a lot. So far, so good. I've made friends (more like 1 awfully good one, and a few more comet-types that swoop in and dash out following an orbit set by what classes we have together). Given that I've spent the past few weekends out of the house, hell, you could probably say I've even sortof got a social life. This isn't really where I expected to be at this point in my life, but it's maybe even better.
That said, though, I did fail my maths exam (gotta pass it to qualify to take compulsory units, not the brightest set-up for kids awful at maths I tell you) so I have to re-take it by the end of the semester. Technically I'm fine as long as I can pass it by next april, but I really don't want to leave it that long. Physically, knee's been holding up a treat. Been pushing it a bit hard, to see how far I can go, and she's hanging in there. And my Japanese skills are suffering, I can literally feel it. While the units taught in Japanese grossly outnumber the English ones, I'm getting away with both by reading textbooks in English and then blearily memorising the approximate shapes of the Japanese vocabulary.
Gonna buy me some maths books and hit up the library and read read read, then gonna go home and turn on the laptop (what a lie I never turn it off) and watch watch watch shows till I get better (I wanna be the very best!!).
Now, to gently recap my weekends.
Last week was the Keio-Waseda Baseball Tournament. It's sortof like how Cambridge and Oxford like to puff out their chests at each other to see who's the smarmiest, and I think some universities in the US do it too. Here, it's Keio and Waseda and they don't limit it to just one sport. The baseball one's the biggest, I think, seeing as how a victory gives the school the right to shut down Tokyo roads from the stadium until the front gate of their main campus in a victory parade. But I know for a fact there's a volleyball one that I'd like to go see, and I think there's rugby and football too. Team spirit was on full show last Sunday, particularly by the Waseda crowd, a huge number of whom wore colour-coordinated outfits (of this really pretty red-maroon colour). The game started at 1, but cheerleaders and the cheer squad had been hollering at people to get their fighting spirit burnin' from 10 or so.
Looks empty, you might think, but this was 2 hours before the game even started, and it was swelteringly hot. I think it must've been about thirty, or something. And slightly dim-wittedly, I'd neglected to take pictures when stuff was actually going on (I think I was too busy stumbling over words to baseball chants and generally yelling any time one of our boys had his bat hit the ball). As I've never before attended or even watched a baseball game before, and even my knowledge of baseball manga is very limited, I didn't know how long the game usually went on for. I think we were out there three and a half hours or so, and despite appropriate summer wear, a floppy-brimmed hat and a biological predisposition to surviving in the heat, the back of my neck got seared so very very red. Totally worth it, though. Getting emotionally invested too quickly is pretty much my superpower, and by the time we were in the 9th inning I'd mostly lost my voice to pretty much non-stop chanting action (hours upon hours of thousands of people going (name of current batsman or pitcher here) TAKE WASEDA DOWN MY SON but really melodically). It was closely fought, I think, but at the end of the day....
We won. Heh heh heh.
Keio's boys didn't get off to the best of starts, but I think they're the type to run warm (is that the term) because when they hit their stride they were batting like angels and catching balls like an eight-legged Spiderman. We won, and I was there to see it, and see it with that friend who found me worth spending a really really hot Sunday with. I kinda got teary-eyed, and it got worse when they interviewed the captain and the coach and both their voices started warbling then cracking halfway through. Man oh man oh man, it felt like a personal victory. It took two hours to get to the place from my house, but it was well worth it.
A weekend or two before that was the enigmatically named Mandolin and Garden Tea Party for Foreign Students event. It cost about 500 yen, (about 5 USD, rm 15) to take part, and I'd signed up pretty much as soon as I saw the word mandolins. My sister said you can't genuinely expect them to have mandoliners for a bunch of loser students, do you, and I believed her, I really did, but then
Literal mandoliners literally doing some serenading. They played the school song and anime music and it was ridiculously hot but it was also ridiculously great. The event was held by the Welcome.net people, who I think are Keio alumni who have the time and the resources to look out for lost lonely foreign children. Speaking of resources, the event was held at a member's house, and it is easily the most achingly pretty house I've ever been to in the whole of Japan. It was not too far from Yokohama, so I can only assume making the world's pleasant-est house in a city was not that cheap. Look at how lovely it is!
It's set into the side of an incline, and if you peer through the bushes it drops down like twenty meters or so onto a big road. It was isolated, it sortof was like a more accessible kingdom of heaven.
I think this is legitimately the first time I've ever seen this outside of anime.
He had a little moat of koi fish do I even need to say more. The house also came with a goddamn outdoor wood-burning oven and I would've taken pictures honest to god I would've but I was way too busy eating freshly baked pizza hngggh. Also had anchovies on pizza for the first time ever, and they were unexpectedly delicious. Salty and glorious and totally worth a try! There was a Japanese-style room too where we got invited to watch the ladies of the house, decked out in full regalia in the burning summer heat, perform a traditional tea ceremony. Everyone got cool mugs that were hand-crafted and decorated with distinct styles depending on which part of Japan they came from. The sweet that came with the ceremony was marshmallow-y and too sweet, so I solved that problem by eating more pizza and some sort of odd pickled carrot thing. It was nice to see so many foreigners all in one spot! And I hella tried to be out-going and social and chatted people up and we message each other sometimes on LINE now and say hello when we pass by each other in school, so all in all what a blessedly resounding success.
The food, and they even made the effort to not cook pork-products because of muslim students! Neon orange is the pickled carrots, and holy crap did I eat a lot of that.
The Japanese-style tea room with a lady tea lord and a young boy who did a stellar job as a waiter.
Literally how is this not the most unbearably pretty house ever.
The only odd part of the day was meeting this Taiwanese Ph. D. student who appears perfectly! Normal! but for the occasionally unbearable quirk. I sorta knew this was not a man to be trifled with when all the students were hustled onto the bus from the train station to be carted to the house, and he tapped a girl who was standing next to him and casually said, It's hot, isn't it?
Confuzzled, the lovely lady agreed.
Not to be dissuaded, the mister tapped her back, and said something along the lines of, Yeah, I can tell. Your back and armpits are all sweaty.
???? Social interactions are complicated but I've never felt compelled to point out to a girl in a pretty summer dress (or to anybody lately) that I gauge weather by her pit stains. It was weirdgreat.
AND NOW for the last weekend event! My friend from Japanese school came over from Singapore for a holiday, and I managed to go see her in Tokyo not once, but TWICE. In return for transporting some stuff she'd mail-ordered in Japan and had sent to my house (but also my personality probably) she treated me to dinner on both occasions and without the help of any intoxicants whatsoever we laughed a crap-tonne over muddled Japanglish over the silliest things. She was here with her older sister, who rather likes the nature bits of Japan, and they holiday-d hard and I was extremely jealous I couldn't shamelessly follow along because school is balls.
The first time we met up, our class teacher from the language teacher came over too, and we had really posh sushi at this posh sushi place and holy hell sea urchin tastes like roasted spices and butter if you get a good batch and I am a convert (of good sea urchin sushi). I've gotten more adventurous with my eating habits, so I was down to try almost anything, and freshwater eel and red snapper sushi were unbearably delicious mmm. I would've taken pictures, but we were left waiting for a table for ages and when we finally got one we were too busy laughing like mental patients to do anything else, pretty much. Apparently the new semester for the language school brought with it numerous cosplay enthusiasts, including a 6 foot tall blond Norwegian man in his thirties who periodically shows up to class wearing a gakuran, a sheepish expression, and a core of solid affection for dressing up as he dreams. You can't make stuff like this up, honestly. And owing to slightly patchy comprehension on my part I thought another student showed up cosplaying the recon troupe from Attack on Titan / Shingeki no Kyojin, when really what happened was a girl went cosplaying out in her free time and ran into a classmate who took a picture of her then blew it up into a poster that now holds pride of place on the wall of their classroom. Holy hell I laughed a lot (this teacher and this friend are awfully dear to me).
The second time, Singa-lady treated me to a seafood restaurant barbecue extravaganza, where I gamely tried out every single organism you see in the picture below after we'd cooked them on the grill and added some soy sauce.
I know a scallop's a scallop, not at all sure about the rest of stuff going in my mouth, but every bivalve (everything bar the thing that looks like a barnacled cup) was almost incomprehensibly delicious. The texture had my teeth going through 'em like a mildly heated knife through butter, and they tasted like meat but ocean-y. 10/10, would eat again, and it's a chain store, I think, so if anyone's heading to Japan I highly recommend going for a try! We also had Sushi Misdirection Overflow, where there was very little rice but an overabundance of toppings, to the point where the rice and seaweed were buried under tuna, sea urchin, crab, and the lot.
Our closer was miso crab,
and it had the texture of custard and a down blanket, and it tasted opulent and crabby but not heavy or overwhelming or anything. It was heaven oh my sweet lord I could've eaten a veritable swarm of the little bastards. As you can already tell, the best adventures are the ones that come with food and people you like.
To end, here's a picture of the cafeteria and the tiny little lake on campus. This was taken pre-rainy season, so it looks a hell of a lot more miserable now, but we got ducks in our wee lake and I genuinely can't complain.
All in all, things have been going rather well. Classes are hard, comprehension is hard, trying to be social is hard, but thus far the greatest pleasure has been finding out that this toughness isn't unbearable. I can't say for sure that things will continue being manageable, but I hope they do, and I'm trying to keep things under control while having a good time at it. Hell, bad days come and go as regularly as rain clouds in this gloomy rainy season, but on the whole, yeah, on the whole things are going well and I hope to be able to report much the same once the semester ends in late July. Hope you ladies have been doing equally well!
That said, though, I did fail my maths exam (gotta pass it to qualify to take compulsory units, not the brightest set-up for kids awful at maths I tell you) so I have to re-take it by the end of the semester. Technically I'm fine as long as I can pass it by next april, but I really don't want to leave it that long. Physically, knee's been holding up a treat. Been pushing it a bit hard, to see how far I can go, and she's hanging in there. And my Japanese skills are suffering, I can literally feel it. While the units taught in Japanese grossly outnumber the English ones, I'm getting away with both by reading textbooks in English and then blearily memorising the approximate shapes of the Japanese vocabulary.
Gonna buy me some maths books and hit up the library and read read read, then gonna go home and turn on the laptop (what a lie I never turn it off) and watch watch watch shows till I get better (I wanna be the very best!!).
Now, to gently recap my weekends.
Last week was the Keio-Waseda Baseball Tournament. It's sortof like how Cambridge and Oxford like to puff out their chests at each other to see who's the smarmiest, and I think some universities in the US do it too. Here, it's Keio and Waseda and they don't limit it to just one sport. The baseball one's the biggest, I think, seeing as how a victory gives the school the right to shut down Tokyo roads from the stadium until the front gate of their main campus in a victory parade. But I know for a fact there's a volleyball one that I'd like to go see, and I think there's rugby and football too. Team spirit was on full show last Sunday, particularly by the Waseda crowd, a huge number of whom wore colour-coordinated outfits (of this really pretty red-maroon colour). The game started at 1, but cheerleaders and the cheer squad had been hollering at people to get their fighting spirit burnin' from 10 or so.
Looks empty, you might think, but this was 2 hours before the game even started, and it was swelteringly hot. I think it must've been about thirty, or something. And slightly dim-wittedly, I'd neglected to take pictures when stuff was actually going on (I think I was too busy stumbling over words to baseball chants and generally yelling any time one of our boys had his bat hit the ball). As I've never before attended or even watched a baseball game before, and even my knowledge of baseball manga is very limited, I didn't know how long the game usually went on for. I think we were out there three and a half hours or so, and despite appropriate summer wear, a floppy-brimmed hat and a biological predisposition to surviving in the heat, the back of my neck got seared so very very red. Totally worth it, though. Getting emotionally invested too quickly is pretty much my superpower, and by the time we were in the 9th inning I'd mostly lost my voice to pretty much non-stop chanting action (hours upon hours of thousands of people going (name of current batsman or pitcher here) TAKE WASEDA DOWN MY SON but really melodically). It was closely fought, I think, but at the end of the day....
We won. Heh heh heh.
Keio's boys didn't get off to the best of starts, but I think they're the type to run warm (is that the term) because when they hit their stride they were batting like angels and catching balls like an eight-legged Spiderman. We won, and I was there to see it, and see it with that friend who found me worth spending a really really hot Sunday with. I kinda got teary-eyed, and it got worse when they interviewed the captain and the coach and both their voices started warbling then cracking halfway through. Man oh man oh man, it felt like a personal victory. It took two hours to get to the place from my house, but it was well worth it.
A weekend or two before that was the enigmatically named Mandolin and Garden Tea Party for Foreign Students event. It cost about 500 yen, (about 5 USD, rm 15) to take part, and I'd signed up pretty much as soon as I saw the word mandolins. My sister said you can't genuinely expect them to have mandoliners for a bunch of loser students, do you, and I believed her, I really did, but then
Literal mandoliners literally doing some serenading. They played the school song and anime music and it was ridiculously hot but it was also ridiculously great. The event was held by the Welcome.net people, who I think are Keio alumni who have the time and the resources to look out for lost lonely foreign children. Speaking of resources, the event was held at a member's house, and it is easily the most achingly pretty house I've ever been to in the whole of Japan. It was not too far from Yokohama, so I can only assume making the world's pleasant-est house in a city was not that cheap. Look at how lovely it is!
It's set into the side of an incline, and if you peer through the bushes it drops down like twenty meters or so onto a big road. It was isolated, it sortof was like a more accessible kingdom of heaven.
I think this is legitimately the first time I've ever seen this outside of anime.
He had a little moat of koi fish do I even need to say more. The house also came with a goddamn outdoor wood-burning oven and I would've taken pictures honest to god I would've but I was way too busy eating freshly baked pizza hngggh. Also had anchovies on pizza for the first time ever, and they were unexpectedly delicious. Salty and glorious and totally worth a try! There was a Japanese-style room too where we got invited to watch the ladies of the house, decked out in full regalia in the burning summer heat, perform a traditional tea ceremony. Everyone got cool mugs that were hand-crafted and decorated with distinct styles depending on which part of Japan they came from. The sweet that came with the ceremony was marshmallow-y and too sweet, so I solved that problem by eating more pizza and some sort of odd pickled carrot thing. It was nice to see so many foreigners all in one spot! And I hella tried to be out-going and social and chatted people up and we message each other sometimes on LINE now and say hello when we pass by each other in school, so all in all what a blessedly resounding success.
The food, and they even made the effort to not cook pork-products because of muslim students! Neon orange is the pickled carrots, and holy crap did I eat a lot of that.
The Japanese-style tea room with a lady tea lord and a young boy who did a stellar job as a waiter.
Literally how is this not the most unbearably pretty house ever.
The only odd part of the day was meeting this Taiwanese Ph. D. student who appears perfectly! Normal! but for the occasionally unbearable quirk. I sorta knew this was not a man to be trifled with when all the students were hustled onto the bus from the train station to be carted to the house, and he tapped a girl who was standing next to him and casually said, It's hot, isn't it?
Confuzzled, the lovely lady agreed.
Not to be dissuaded, the mister tapped her back, and said something along the lines of, Yeah, I can tell. Your back and armpits are all sweaty.
???? Social interactions are complicated but I've never felt compelled to point out to a girl in a pretty summer dress (or to anybody lately) that I gauge weather by her pit stains. It was weirdgreat.
AND NOW for the last weekend event! My friend from Japanese school came over from Singapore for a holiday, and I managed to go see her in Tokyo not once, but TWICE. In return for transporting some stuff she'd mail-ordered in Japan and had sent to my house (but also my personality probably) she treated me to dinner on both occasions and without the help of any intoxicants whatsoever we laughed a crap-tonne over muddled Japanglish over the silliest things. She was here with her older sister, who rather likes the nature bits of Japan, and they holiday-d hard and I was extremely jealous I couldn't shamelessly follow along because school is balls.
The first time we met up, our class teacher from the language teacher came over too, and we had really posh sushi at this posh sushi place and holy hell sea urchin tastes like roasted spices and butter if you get a good batch and I am a convert (of good sea urchin sushi). I've gotten more adventurous with my eating habits, so I was down to try almost anything, and freshwater eel and red snapper sushi were unbearably delicious mmm. I would've taken pictures, but we were left waiting for a table for ages and when we finally got one we were too busy laughing like mental patients to do anything else, pretty much. Apparently the new semester for the language school brought with it numerous cosplay enthusiasts, including a 6 foot tall blond Norwegian man in his thirties who periodically shows up to class wearing a gakuran, a sheepish expression, and a core of solid affection for dressing up as he dreams. You can't make stuff like this up, honestly. And owing to slightly patchy comprehension on my part I thought another student showed up cosplaying the recon troupe from Attack on Titan / Shingeki no Kyojin, when really what happened was a girl went cosplaying out in her free time and ran into a classmate who took a picture of her then blew it up into a poster that now holds pride of place on the wall of their classroom. Holy hell I laughed a lot (this teacher and this friend are awfully dear to me).
The second time, Singa-lady treated me to a seafood restaurant barbecue extravaganza, where I gamely tried out every single organism you see in the picture below after we'd cooked them on the grill and added some soy sauce.
I know a scallop's a scallop, not at all sure about the rest of stuff going in my mouth, but every bivalve (everything bar the thing that looks like a barnacled cup) was almost incomprehensibly delicious. The texture had my teeth going through 'em like a mildly heated knife through butter, and they tasted like meat but ocean-y. 10/10, would eat again, and it's a chain store, I think, so if anyone's heading to Japan I highly recommend going for a try! We also had Sushi Misdirection Overflow, where there was very little rice but an overabundance of toppings, to the point where the rice and seaweed were buried under tuna, sea urchin, crab, and the lot.
Our closer was miso crab,
and it had the texture of custard and a down blanket, and it tasted opulent and crabby but not heavy or overwhelming or anything. It was heaven oh my sweet lord I could've eaten a veritable swarm of the little bastards. As you can already tell, the best adventures are the ones that come with food and people you like.
To end, here's a picture of the cafeteria and the tiny little lake on campus. This was taken pre-rainy season, so it looks a hell of a lot more miserable now, but we got ducks in our wee lake and I genuinely can't complain.
All in all, things have been going rather well. Classes are hard, comprehension is hard, trying to be social is hard, but thus far the greatest pleasure has been finding out that this toughness isn't unbearable. I can't say for sure that things will continue being manageable, but I hope they do, and I'm trying to keep things under control while having a good time at it. Hell, bad days come and go as regularly as rain clouds in this gloomy rainy season, but on the whole, yeah, on the whole things are going well and I hope to be able to report much the same once the semester ends in late July. Hope you ladies have been doing equally well!