Yesterday I had my first day here at 行田しんしゅうかん. I gave a speech to the assembled staff of the school, which was relatively easy. Then the hard part. A speech on the stage for 800+ assembled students. I guess they liked it.
The weird part will be getting used to everyone (students) seeing you in the hall and wanting to talk to you. When they do, and you talk back, they collapse into giggling fits (the girls at least). Do I have something hanging out of my nose? Is my fly down? It's quite a hassle I tell you. Nerve-wracking, really. But it has been fun. I need to learn names of course, which could take a long time.
Unsurprisingly, rumor spreads like crazy here. I showed some advanced features of my keitai to the English club last week, and today a random student asked me to show her the dictionary/camera feature. At least they're interested in me and my stuff as opposed to hating my guts! I found love notes and lots of photo-booth (really popular here with girls) pictures (with hearts on them) photos in my predecessor's (and now mine!) desk. And as much as the students seem to know nothing about English in class, they have enough guts to hang out of a window and say "I Looooooobu Yoouuu!" at the top of their lungs. Cute, really. As Ryan (my predecessor) says, you do feel like a bit of a superstar. However, one must keep it in perspective. To them, I am a green man. I stick out like a sore thumb and as stated previously, the Japanese don't seem to have a particularly refined taste for physical attractiveness in foreigners. I also have a sneaking suspicion that to them, I look the same as Ryan. Consider it the "all look same" syndrome asians often receive, except turned on its head. It's about time it happened to whiteys so we know how it feels.
In other news, I'm getting the hell bitten out of me by uber-mosquitos here, and swelling up like a balloon. The heat and humidity this year makes for crazy mosquitos (蚊) and roaches (ゴキブリ). Gyoda is so filled with rice fields (rank, stagnant water) that the kanji for rice field (田) is part of its name. Imagine (and realize) that said stagnant water is perfect breeding territory for evil little biting insects. And according to Japanese superstition, they like O-type blood. Guess what I am!
I've got some more pictures coming up, taken last weekend at a nearby dance club. Breakdance competition!
As you can see, I've been taking random pictures here and there during my wanderings. The most interesting here is of me eating an enormous shrimp during Teppan Yaki. You eat the shrimp, as you can see, whole ... spiny things and all. This was the weirdest food I've had yet. This beats out Uni any day in the disgusting category, but the taste wasn't so bad. It was just the ... weirdness of it.
Uni (raw sea urchin), by the way, wasn't as bad as everyone says it is.
Note also the flower pics, taken with my keitai camera. Also please excuse the crappy quality of the engrish picture and also the pile of octopus picture. I didn't know how to use my camera at that point ...
Actually, they don't at all, but haw haw boy did I fool you ... !
Go to Images and be treated to a special gallery of my new Keitai. As you can see, the one sort-of disadvantage of a Japanese cell phone is that they are huge. In comparison, the Keitai is probably twice as bulky as my Verizon phone. But as you can see, the Verizon phone has a tiny-ass screen, not to mention the fact that it's a total piece of crap. I guess their Keitais are so big because they cram so much in there. Mine has:
- GPS Navigation
- 2.0MegaPixel Camera with Flash (same as my current normal camera)
- English-Japanese-English dictionary
- Text/Email/URL recognition on the camera (scan a word and it'll look it up in the dictionary, or scan a url/email and it will copy it to the addressbook)
- MP3 Player
- 2.4Mbps (faster than the average American DSL service) broadband
- The Kitchen Sink
- Downloadable EZChannel movie/TV/radio programming
- Can Opener/Corkscrew
- List of top 100 pickup lines guaranteed to work on Japanese women with bad taste in men
I imagine those who aren't tech-geeks are saying "big friggin' deal" but imagine this: this phone is stable!!! My old Verizon phone would crash twice a day. Crash, as in like Windows. As in have to remove the battery to "reboot" the stupid thing. Stay tuned, and surely you'll see a photo gallery of me beating the hell out of that useless pile of electronic junk.
As for the 100 pickup lines, they must work, because man there are a lot of ugly foreign guys with good-looking women. We've come to the conclusion that there is a significant portion of the Japanese female population who have absolutely abomidable taste in men. Anyway, enjoy the Keitai. I know I will!
Please enjoy the few pics of my keitai. Some are blurry b/c my fullsize camera isn't pleased with the lighting in here. You can see the cool lit-up "win" when it's in the docking station (yeah, Japanese phones get a docking station free, instead of having to pay $40 extra like you do in the states), and you can see the GPS feature. That's where I live!
CNN.com - Bear guzzles 36 beers, passes out at campground - Aug 19, 2004
The idea of drunken passed out wildlife really gets me giggling ...
Last night I did something really freakin' dumb.
I allowed myself to be convinced by a fellow JET to go out to Kumagaya (nearest big-ish city) for beers. At first I avoided it because I had things to do today, like get my alien registration card and have dinner at one of my teachers' house. Finally I caved.
Four pitchers later, I was puking my brains out in the bar restroom. Way to represent, Justin! Now I'm nursing the mother of all hangovers and trying to get it out of my system in the few minutes before I go to this dinner. What an idiot am I!!! This is why I avoided drinking back home in Boston ...
Well on the "up" side, at least I got this out of the way early in the year to realize what a dumbass I am. Maybe I'll go commiserate with Jimbo the dead cicada.
Whilst my internet woes grow still greater, I managed to get out into town today with Lorna and Pete to Gyoda Castle and the nearby park.
Meet Bob, the laid-back Cicada. I think he's a distant cousin of Jimbo the pretty-dead Cicada who guards my apartment stairs.
Please enjoy while I call still more numbers in search of the ever-elusive broadband beast.
If you think American telecom corporations are bad, just wait until you have to deal with NTT. Nihon (Japan) Telephone and Telegraph owns (apparently) every single phone line in Japan. In Japan, if you want phone, you have to either buy a phone line for roughly $800, or you lease one for something like $60/month or something. The "meigi-nin" is the original holder of the phone line, and in my cases, is about 4 or 5 tenants ago in this apartment. To do just about anything with your phone line (including getting set up for internet) you need to know who this person is. It has taken me three weeks to find out who this person is. YahooBB won't give me DSL without it. Neither will KDDI. So I have it. Then I find out I need the Kanji of the person's name.
For the uninitiated, the Japanese have technically four alphabets. Romaji (roman letters), Hiragana (syllables used for Japanese words), Katakana (Syllables used for foreign words) and Kanji (chinese alphabet). Kanji is singularly the most annoying thing on the planet, especially when it comes to names. People use kanji in their names that may have nothing to do with the actual way that people really pronounce other words.
So I'm talking to this poor girl, Uweda-san, and trying to describe in my crappy gaijin ways the kanji for this person's name. It turns out, the kanji for "KAZU" is not "kazu" at all. It's "OSA." Imagine that. I had to actually draw a picture of the thing as my supervisor had written it and email it to a friend, who finally figured out that it was osameru. Gah!
But enough of that. I'm sure you're all dying to see what it really looks like, no? Check it out: 収める. It's the part right before める. Imagine trying to explain that to someone over the phone. Didn't seem too hard at the time...
For those toilet-sink naysayers: The sink in the toilet is perfectly sanitary! The water that comes into the toilet in Japanese and American homes is no different than the water coming into your shower. It has nothing to do with the water going out of the toilet ... unless of course you're pooping in the reservoir tank. Also, it's just a sink in which you wash your hands after flushing the toilet. You do not brush your teeth there, as there is a separate real sink in the showering area of the bathroom. It's a great way, I suppose, to save water.
Anyway, that's all for now. I'm getting cramped sitting in the one corner of my apartment where I can get internet ...
Yeah, sorry for such a long absence, but things have been pretty insane. You never really realize how much you need certain things; food, water, sunlight ... internet. Having gone through serious withdrawal (apparently though no one in Gyoda has heard of securing their wireless networks, none of them are strong enough for me to use ... curses!), I figure it's high time to start doing my blog writing "unwired" and update when I can. At least I can come up with witty things to say when I'm not trying desperately just to wade through the 400 emails in my inbox. No, that's not a self-aggrandizing statement. You see, most of them are notifications from Movable Type (the blogging program I use) that I've gotten yet another spam comment. I don't even know what the hell cialis is, but boy someone thinks it's important to plaster all over my page. Seriously, spam in every form should be punished with public whuppings. I know just about anyone with internet access would love to get a piece of a spammer or two. Not that kind of piece, you pervert.
So, about my experience thus far: I live in a town of 70,000 (I guess that's really "countryside" by Japan standards) called Gyoda in the Northeast section of Saitama Prefecture. Saitama is known by people in Tokyo as "Dasaitama" which pretty much means "uncool." Think of Saitama as New Jersey or Southern Connecticut is to New York City. But regardless of this, Gyoda is cool enough to live in. Unfortunately, I don't mean temperature-wise, because days here thus far have averaged over 95 degrees with over 70% humidity. Imagine waking up at 7AM only to find that it's already 88 degrees. Living in Gyoda has already been an exercise in self-discovery. For instance, I am reminded that my Japanese completely sucks. I also now know that I sweat more in one hour than I thought was humanly possible. Both of my JET friends have asian ancestry, so for some reason they are blessed not only with relative hairlessness (God am I jealous) but also, they apparently have half the sweat glands that I do. This usually translates into the one sweaty gaijin walking around the streets of Gyoda, even though there are three (or four, when Lorna joins us) new faces in town. I went to the local supermarket to buy groceries, and was astounded by the desparity of prices here. A watermelon literally costs $20 on average. A container of tofu (normally $1.60 or so in the US) costs 60 yen here, maybe 50 cents. 40 doses of asprin (less than a month's supply for me, thanks for the genes dad) costs $20. The most soul-crushing moment for me, though (at least in the grocery store) was the discovery that Doritos don't exist. At least, not good flavor ones. What the hell is "taco" flavor anyway? Oh God, what have I gotten into?
Most of my ramblings pretty much are things that every gaijin since 18-whatever have discovered. I guess I'll just be redundant. But every newcomer to Japan simply must visit the hyaku-en store. That's 100 yen for anything in the store. Basically it's a dollar store. Why so great, you may ask? Simple. It's not useless crap like American dollar stores have. Nichole (one of the other JETs) has bought so much crap there, I'm surprised her apartment still holds people. I hear Peter has bought one less item. It's all cheap, but it's really not as crappy as I may have expected.
I've posted some new pictures for your enjoyment. These are of my apartment and not-so-pretty Gyoda. Pay particular attention to the notebook I bought for Japanese study.
Collabolation!
I've finally found a semi-reliable internet connection in my town of Gyoda. I'm on the top floor of the Paseos department store. Since I can't really get anything reliable, I'll keep this short...but here are the first pictures! I apologize that there aren't many and the gallery is a little shabby, but hey, I'm pressed for time!
Sorry for the long hiatus, but here we are with the first batch of pictures. This is a little delayed, but I can only get internet by hanging out on the top floor of a department store here ... and it's very sporadic!
