(no subject)
Soooo...I've been here for about 2 weeks. It's been such a whirlwind of activity I'm not even sure how to explain it. Actually I haven't been able to do much in the way of sightseeing or other tourist type activities, as we've mostly been preoccupied with getting set up with our apartment, job, etc. We're pretty well established now so in the last few days we've been looking around more.
Anyways, I thought I'd give some impressions and some idea of what this place is like and what I've been up to.
We live in a suburb called Ichikawa. Ichikawa is actually a small city in Chiba prefecture, the neighbouring prefecture to the east of Tokyo prefecture, which is outside the Greater Tokyo Area per se, but is only 20 mins away from downtown Tokyo by transit. I call Ichikawa a suburb but it's much cooler than the typical type of place that word conjures up. It's not really sprawly the way suburbs tend to be and you don't need a car to get around at all. In fact, tons of people just use bicycles to get everywhere (we've started using our bikes, which were provided by the owners of the place we're staying at, as well). It's just denser and more intelligently laid out than "suburbs" tend to be.
The transit system is incredibly awesome, easily the best I've ever seen. There's a massive system of criss-crossing train, subway, and bus lines that is affordable and easy to use, even when you only understand a few words of Japanese (actually, there's a lot of English signage around in general. some of the trains even have audio announcements in English). It's also always on time and I have yet to wait longer than 5-10 mins for a train, no matter where I'm going or the time of day. Plus, every train station has clean public bathrooms, lockers where you can pay a hundred yen to leave your stuff all day, and cheap places to eat.
So I work as an English teacher at what they call a "conversation school", which aren't exactly schools in the strictest sense of the word but more like "studios" where we basically have "guided conversations" in English with Japanese people (some conversations schools have a classroom setup, but mine is a one-on-one thing). We're expected to correct their grammar, usage, pronunciation, etc, and help them with specific topics like if they're business people who have foreign colleagues or whatever. The actual job itself doesn't SEEM too demanding, although I haven't had any actual lessons yet, just training and hanging around doing preliminary introductions, so we'll see how it goes. Being an employee of this Japanese english-teaching corporation (my school, "Gaba", is one of the larger, more corporate ones, whereas some conversation schools are small, makeshift enterprises) is seriously fucking mindblowing and I could write a whole post about just that, but I'll leave that for later.
Somehow I thought we'd see and encounter other foreigners more frequently, but often Anuja and I are the only foreigners around. There are more of them in some neighbourhoods though. No one is weird about though, and most people are pretty friendly. Obviously, the more into downtown Tokyo you go, the more used to dealing with foreigners people are. I've been trying to gradually drop more and more Japanese into my vocabulary, but it takes some courage because you're afraid of just sounding dumb. Of course, in some cases you pick up words and phrases out of necessity, just from day to day interactions. I find trying to get around the langugage barrier is actually kind of...fun. It's like this weird interesting challenge that makes even mundane interaction seem like a fun puzzle, and makes simple stuff like when you figure out what's in a dish at a restaurant or how to ask simple questions seem like some kind of triumph. Sometimes you also encounter people who are eager to try out their English with you. Surprisingly on the whole the language thing works out ok. You do have to have some sense about it though...like you can't be too demanding or picky. Sometimes at a restaurant I just end up ordering food by pointing at a picture of a dish that looks good without having any idea what's in it (I can ask "what is this" in Japanese, but I often don't understand the response anyways hehehe), or asking them to recommend something and just seeing what happens.
Which reminds me, some of the WP's I've seen around here act sooo amazing it's embarassing to watch. They seem have such an intense sense of entitlement that they're baffled by a place where they can't instantly get what they want, and so they are ridiculously demanding, and act seriously butthurt and offended when they can't/don't get it (and that feeling is probably exacerbated by being in a country where they imagine being a WP *should* get them lots of respect/admiration). Also, I'm not necessarily defending Japanese social norms, because some of them are clearly backwards, but I've heard way too many people complaining about stupid shit like how you're not really supposed to talk on the phone while on public transit. Who gives a shit?
So far, I've visited a few interesting parts of Tokyo. A few days ago we went to Akihabara, which as you might know, is the neighbourhood for all kinds of geeky things like video games and anime. Totally mindblowing. There's a main street with really glitzy camera/computer stores and arcades, and beyond that, winding alleyways with ramshackle stalls and little shops. I was only able to get a general sense of the area, as it was too overwhelming to take in all at once. I saw a lot of cool retro videogame stuff, like Nintendo's hilariously ill-conceived failure of a "virtual reality" console, the Virtual Boy, and weird rare consoles like the Neo-Geo and PC Engine.
Another part of the city I've spent some time in is Marunouchi (it's where my workplace is actually), which is basically central Tokyo, where the Imperial Palace is, along with a lot of financial/business stuff and fancy places. Oddly though there are a surprising amount of affordable eateries around here. The grounds of the Imperial Palace are pretty cool, but you can't really go inside cause the, like, Imperial family, actually lives there and stuff.
Just recently we went to Ueno, which is an older, somewhat seedier part of town, what they call "shitamachi", which means "low town". These parts of Tokyo are more working class, have older architecture, and a looser, grungier feel. Ueno has a really cool, huge outdoor market called Ameyoko, and also a giant, EIGHT STORY toy store full of amazing crap. I should also mention the really weird few blocks we walked through of strip joints, bars, and weird restaurants, especially one called "Arabian Rock", which, I kid you not, had speakers outside...BLARING the theme from Aladdin. Nothing can prepare you for walking around in Tokyo and suddenly hearing, out of nowhere, that dude sing "Arabian niiiiights, like Arabian dayyyyys, more often than not, are hotter than hot...", and then turning to see a restaurant called "Arabian Rock", complete with posters of japanese women wearing stereotypical "middle eastern princess/belly dancer" outfits. Needless to say, I fully intend to dine at this fine establishment, perhaps insisting that I'm some kind of middle eastern dignitary checking the authenticity of their Agrabian cuisine. So yeah, Ueno is really interesting, and it's just all kinds of stuff, both cool and cheesy, awkwardly jammed together under the train tracks.
So yeah, that's more or less a very abbreviated summary of what I've been doing and what I've seen so far. I've omitted boring stuff like...most of what I've been doing for the last week and a half, which was getting a bank account (most places, including my workplace, don't deal with foreign bank accounts), figuring out how to buy groceries, getting an "alien registration card", getting a cell phone, etc. I've only begun to scratch the surface, so my subsequent entries will probably be much more interesting and detailed.
Anyways, I thought I'd give some impressions and some idea of what this place is like and what I've been up to.
We live in a suburb called Ichikawa. Ichikawa is actually a small city in Chiba prefecture, the neighbouring prefecture to the east of Tokyo prefecture, which is outside the Greater Tokyo Area per se, but is only 20 mins away from downtown Tokyo by transit. I call Ichikawa a suburb but it's much cooler than the typical type of place that word conjures up. It's not really sprawly the way suburbs tend to be and you don't need a car to get around at all. In fact, tons of people just use bicycles to get everywhere (we've started using our bikes, which were provided by the owners of the place we're staying at, as well). It's just denser and more intelligently laid out than "suburbs" tend to be.
The transit system is incredibly awesome, easily the best I've ever seen. There's a massive system of criss-crossing train, subway, and bus lines that is affordable and easy to use, even when you only understand a few words of Japanese (actually, there's a lot of English signage around in general. some of the trains even have audio announcements in English). It's also always on time and I have yet to wait longer than 5-10 mins for a train, no matter where I'm going or the time of day. Plus, every train station has clean public bathrooms, lockers where you can pay a hundred yen to leave your stuff all day, and cheap places to eat.
So I work as an English teacher at what they call a "conversation school", which aren't exactly schools in the strictest sense of the word but more like "studios" where we basically have "guided conversations" in English with Japanese people (some conversations schools have a classroom setup, but mine is a one-on-one thing). We're expected to correct their grammar, usage, pronunciation, etc, and help them with specific topics like if they're business people who have foreign colleagues or whatever. The actual job itself doesn't SEEM too demanding, although I haven't had any actual lessons yet, just training and hanging around doing preliminary introductions, so we'll see how it goes. Being an employee of this Japanese english-teaching corporation (my school, "Gaba", is one of the larger, more corporate ones, whereas some conversation schools are small, makeshift enterprises) is seriously fucking mindblowing and I could write a whole post about just that, but I'll leave that for later.
Somehow I thought we'd see and encounter other foreigners more frequently, but often Anuja and I are the only foreigners around. There are more of them in some neighbourhoods though. No one is weird about though, and most people are pretty friendly. Obviously, the more into downtown Tokyo you go, the more used to dealing with foreigners people are. I've been trying to gradually drop more and more Japanese into my vocabulary, but it takes some courage because you're afraid of just sounding dumb. Of course, in some cases you pick up words and phrases out of necessity, just from day to day interactions. I find trying to get around the langugage barrier is actually kind of...fun. It's like this weird interesting challenge that makes even mundane interaction seem like a fun puzzle, and makes simple stuff like when you figure out what's in a dish at a restaurant or how to ask simple questions seem like some kind of triumph. Sometimes you also encounter people who are eager to try out their English with you. Surprisingly on the whole the language thing works out ok. You do have to have some sense about it though...like you can't be too demanding or picky. Sometimes at a restaurant I just end up ordering food by pointing at a picture of a dish that looks good without having any idea what's in it (I can ask "what is this" in Japanese, but I often don't understand the response anyways hehehe), or asking them to recommend something and just seeing what happens.
Which reminds me, some of the WP's I've seen around here act sooo amazing it's embarassing to watch. They seem have such an intense sense of entitlement that they're baffled by a place where they can't instantly get what they want, and so they are ridiculously demanding, and act seriously butthurt and offended when they can't/don't get it (and that feeling is probably exacerbated by being in a country where they imagine being a WP *should* get them lots of respect/admiration). Also, I'm not necessarily defending Japanese social norms, because some of them are clearly backwards, but I've heard way too many people complaining about stupid shit like how you're not really supposed to talk on the phone while on public transit. Who gives a shit?
So far, I've visited a few interesting parts of Tokyo. A few days ago we went to Akihabara, which as you might know, is the neighbourhood for all kinds of geeky things like video games and anime. Totally mindblowing. There's a main street with really glitzy camera/computer stores and arcades, and beyond that, winding alleyways with ramshackle stalls and little shops. I was only able to get a general sense of the area, as it was too overwhelming to take in all at once. I saw a lot of cool retro videogame stuff, like Nintendo's hilariously ill-conceived failure of a "virtual reality" console, the Virtual Boy, and weird rare consoles like the Neo-Geo and PC Engine.
Another part of the city I've spent some time in is Marunouchi (it's where my workplace is actually), which is basically central Tokyo, where the Imperial Palace is, along with a lot of financial/business stuff and fancy places. Oddly though there are a surprising amount of affordable eateries around here. The grounds of the Imperial Palace are pretty cool, but you can't really go inside cause the, like, Imperial family, actually lives there and stuff.
Just recently we went to Ueno, which is an older, somewhat seedier part of town, what they call "shitamachi", which means "low town". These parts of Tokyo are more working class, have older architecture, and a looser, grungier feel. Ueno has a really cool, huge outdoor market called Ameyoko, and also a giant, EIGHT STORY toy store full of amazing crap. I should also mention the really weird few blocks we walked through of strip joints, bars, and weird restaurants, especially one called "Arabian Rock", which, I kid you not, had speakers outside...BLARING the theme from Aladdin. Nothing can prepare you for walking around in Tokyo and suddenly hearing, out of nowhere, that dude sing "Arabian niiiiights, like Arabian dayyyyys, more often than not, are hotter than hot...", and then turning to see a restaurant called "Arabian Rock", complete with posters of japanese women wearing stereotypical "middle eastern princess/belly dancer" outfits. Needless to say, I fully intend to dine at this fine establishment, perhaps insisting that I'm some kind of middle eastern dignitary checking the authenticity of their Agrabian cuisine. So yeah, Ueno is really interesting, and it's just all kinds of stuff, both cool and cheesy, awkwardly jammed together under the train tracks.
So yeah, that's more or less a very abbreviated summary of what I've been doing and what I've seen so far. I've omitted boring stuff like...most of what I've been doing for the last week and a half, which was getting a bank account (most places, including my workplace, don't deal with foreign bank accounts), figuring out how to buy groceries, getting an "alien registration card", getting a cell phone, etc. I've only begun to scratch the surface, so my subsequent entries will probably be much more interesting and detailed.