Making it to Japan

Hello Everybody!


This post is a little late coming, but I finally have a little spare time for it! I've been in Japan for 2 weeks, and so this post will be a little bit messed up, with no specific timeline, but me just recollecting on some things that have happened to me.  I hope you enjoy it!


I've never flew internationally alone before, so the scariest part of the whole trip was the flight.  The adventure started in Toronto, where I had to say goodbye to my parents.  It was 4 in the morning so even if we were going to cry, we were too tired. I then had I think a 6 hour flight to San Fransisco!!  I then hung out there for 2 hours, before my final flight to Osaka, Japan.  It was a long flight, I think 11 and a half hours, I spent most of it sleeping and watching movies.  But finally, after so much preparation and time put into this, I was in Japan!


The first thing I noticed was the heat.  It hit me like a concrete wall! With my comfy clothes and carry-on luggage, I thought I was going to die instantaneously after arriving.  Somehow, I survived the... check-in? procedure ( I don't know anything about airports), but it was very easy, there were people everywhere ready to point you in the right direction, but it was super easy figuring out where to go.


Two of my Japanese friends I had met at Carleton last year were there to pick me up.  And I am super thankful they did! They tested me a little bit on Japanese, and helped me find the washroom.


THE WASHROOM is so weird!  I couldn't find the flush, but there were lots of buttons that I was pressing that made different noises (i.e. waterfall noises) to help women hide their noises I guess.  I eventually found it though!


My two friends didn't know how to get to the seminar house, but luckily we found a Kansai Gaidai bus that was driving students to the seminar houses.  So we hopped on one of those and drove an hour and a half to my seminar house!  I was so excited to finally be in my new home (for the next 9 months!)!


My apartment/suite is set up like this: 1 giant kitchen with 2 sinks, 2 stoves, 2 fridges, a thousand cupboards; 1 washroom with 3 showers, 2 toilets, and 4 sinks; 1 large living with a giant double-corner couch and a tv, and 4 bedrooms.  Each bedroom houses 2 students.  But for the first week, it housed 3 students (the kids doing homestay had to wait a week to move in with their families, so they bunked with us).  My Japanese roommate hadn't shown up yet, but my homestay roommate was from America.  She was awesome, and I miss having her around all the time.  But next semester we're planning on living together again in Seminar House 3!


My other permanent roommates consist of 3 Americans, 1 Canadian, 1 Chilean, and 1 Norwegian.  It's great! Having a motley of people coming together.  It's especially good for cooking, finding out different recipes and food that they love from around the world.  I'm only useful for cooking eggs, so I have to figure out something to cook for them that is Truly Canadian.  We also have a vegan living with us, teaching us different ways we can cook without meat as a protein.  This is awesome because it's hard to find a good meal on meat/find meat that doesn't still have a head on it.


We also don't walk around with shoes on in the seminar house.  It makes things very clean, but difficult when trying to plan an outfit.


The first week here was mostly just about finding out how to live.  And it is expensive! Food costs a lot more than it does back in Canada.  Sometimes it may be the same price, but the quantity you get is a lot less.  Fruit and veggies are super expensive, and I'm worried I might die of scurvy here lest I invest in some multivitamins.


The weather is also still crazy hot! It goes to over 40 degrees Celsius with humidity.  It kind of makes going outside a dreadful experience.  You need to go out and accomplish things during the day, but you don't want to sweat your balls off doing it.


We also found out that it's rude to eat and drink in public.  Not just alcohol, I mean drinking juices, waters, anything.  Nobody does it, for some reason, I don't know when they find time to drink, it's so hot you have to stay hydrated all the time.  I'm not paying attention to this rule.  I need to chug water all day just to survive, and since I can't hide my massive water bottle in class, I should might as well drink it when I can (when I'm walking).


HURRAH! I got a Japanese cell phone! It's got a wicked camera on it, and a bunch of tools for converting things and translating, but it's super hard to text on.  I'm used to a Blackberry keyboard, and this is a regular phone keypad, but nobody can find out how to switch it's settings to T9 (or Dictionary, as some people call it).  So, it's been very frustrating texting people.  Oh yeah! And it's not actually texting, you get a phone e-mail and you're actually e-mailing people when you're "texting" them.  But if you say I'll send you a text, the Japanese are like O_o?


Yes so, the first week went by fairly quickly.  There was no school, just lots of orientations about life in Japan and a Japanese placement test (I placed in level 2).  We also had an 11 o'clock curfew for the first week so we couldn't really go out late at night.


Our beds are all on the floor.  Like traditional Japanese futons.  That might sound very uncomfortable, but it's the best bed I've ever slept on.  I sleep throughout the whole night, and I wake up very restful with no stiffness at all.  I hope I can take the futon home with me when I leave!


I have a speaking partner, and she's taken me out for dinner twice: once just me and her, and the second time with a few other friends.  She helps me practice speaking and learning how to read certain Kanji.  She's a very sweet girl and we've already made plans to go bowling next time!


I also have a home-visit family.  This program is where you get signed up with a family to go visit them every so often and just learn what the Japanese family is like.  I met the daughter of the family, and she told me that her father and grandfather like to go fishing, so I hope that when I visit them they will take me to the river by their house to fish! A funny thing happened when I met the home-visit daughter.  In Canada, if you want someone to come closer you hold your hand out, palm facing up, and crook your fingers.  In Japan this is considered rude because it looks like a different kind of motion (I'll let you guys figure that out on you're own), so they crook their fingers with their palm facing downwards, which looks like somebody shooing you away.  So my home-visit girl did this to me, and I started backing up, with this horrified look on my face thinking I had offended her.  She thought it was very funny, but she had to come take me by the arm to get me to go where she wanted. Oh me!


Being blonde in Japan is definitely different.  I knew it would be, but I didn't know how different.  Little kids stop and stare.  High school boys try to flirt and they say "beautiful" a lot.  And the girls my age are always coming up to me and just touching my hair, saying how different and golden it looks. I knew there would be more attention put on me, but it's very much so like standing a lone in the spotlight.  Sometimes it feels good (like when the boys say it's beautifiul (^\/^) ), but when the little kids just stop and stare at you, it's a little disconcerting :S.


I started class this past week.  I can already tell that the English classes won't be so tough, but the Japanese classes, they will need a lot more work and effort put into them.  Textbooks are also dirt-cheap here.  Back at home it would cost about $150, but here, 2 textbooks are $45 max.  It feels very good on my wallet.


Another thing about life in Japan is that they're very strict about rules.  They're there for a reason, and they WILL be inforced.  Bicycles have to be registered, and if you don't have proper ID on you when a policeman asks for it, you can get fined and I think 3 months in jail.  You can also get charged with a DUI on a bike too. There are lots of other little nitpicky rules but at the moment of typing this I can't seem to recall them.


Yesterday we had the Friends Festival.  Everybody was split up into teams, mixed of both international and Japanese students, and then we competed all day, playing Japanese versions of Flag Football, What Time is it Mr. Wolf, and obstacle course, and a quiz game.  My team was the Green Team, and we got second place 8D.  And I did meet lots of friends at the festival, and we all went out for Chinese food after.  We practiced some Japanese, we exchanged lots of phone numbers and I taught some girls how to pound it lol.


The gyms here are kind of ancient.  The ones in my area anyways.  I've checked out 2, and the cardio machines have a switch to turn them on and no places to put your water.  Not to mention all the settings are in Japanese.  The weights are in kg, and I'm used to pounds so you kind of have to practice you're math at the gym.  Also, a lot of their machines are not in weight, but in pneumatic pressure, without actually saying what the pressure is in weight.  They're not very good.  They only go up to a level 6 and it's not very high at all.  So I'll be learning lots about free-weights this year.


Here are some tips and advice I've sort of picked up in the first 2 weeks:


1.  Japanese goodbyes are really awkward.  They don't want to offend you by leaving, or saying they have to leave, so you kind of have to initiate it.  But that makes you feel awkward because now you feel like you're being rude.  I still have yet to find a way to get around this.


2. If your in Japan, or if you can find these kinds of places elsewhere, try Yakuniku, Okonomiyaki, and Kappazushi.  The first 2 are where you grill your own food on your table, and the second is a conveyor belt that goes around carrying plates of sushi that you take off and eat.  Very cheap.  Very delicious!


3.  McDonald's burgers are  bigger here than in Canada.  Not a lot bigger, but enough to see a difference.


4.  Get lost.  It's amazing the things you'll see and the places and shops you'll find.


5.  Japan is an expensive city, but it doesn't take much searching to find some super cheap things.


6.  Get used to bowing.  A lot.  Also, you can't 'outpolite' the Japanese.  They will beat you every time.


That's all for my first post.  I'm sorry it was somewhat of a jumbled mess, but hopefully the next one will have more rhyme or reason to it!  Now I'm off to study for another Japanese placement test.