鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks (8)...

7/20

Holy shit did I have weird dreams last night. They were a series of odd little mini-dreams, most of which I don’t remember, but the strangest thing by far was that, at some point during the night, I woke up to the sound of one of my roommates shifting in bed, and then a woman’s voice speaking a bunch of Japanese in kind of a “come hither” tone. I couldn’t understand most of it, but I did hear, clear as day, “貴方、食べるよ～” WTF???? I lay totally still and just listened, waiting for it to continue, but there was no more.

I swear I heard it, very clearly and very loudly, but it didn’t sound like my roommates’ voices, and I sure as hell hope it wasn’t mine. I asked them later, and they didn’t hear anything unusual besides maybe the people upstairs being noisy late into the night, so I can pretty safely conflude it was just in my head, because I was just waking up as I heard it, but still…

Creepy.

“I’m going to eat you~~”

*shudder*

My morning workout today was a combination of TKB moves and later some strength exercises, all while listening to “Praan” and +5 speed, which was pretty awesome. Luckily no one came buy to see me do my goofy round-houses and upper-cuts.

Today was our field trip to Kamogawa SeaWorld, which I was kind of hesitant to go to because I really don’t care much for all that, having been to SeaWorld many times in the US, but my need to do something recreational outweighed my indifference, so I went.

We ended up missing the first courtesy bus to the park, and then being squeezed into the second one like sardines. Some people said that it still wasn’t as bad as some of the subways, so…yay.

The park was pretty nice – many times smaller than the US SeaWorld, but it had three large stadiums for Orca, Dolphin, and Sea Lion shows, all of which were very well put together and very entertaining.

One of the more interesting things I saw was a たこせんべい stand, where a little old man and his wife were making - I kid you not – flattened octopus cracker-wiefer thingies. He took raw octopus, put them in some kind of flour, and then flattened them with this steam presser-cooker. The result was a large sheet of octopus, kind of like those fried cheese sheets they serve at fancy restaurants, except with the impression of tentacles and suckers. Mun-san bought one, and so I tried a piece of it and it tasted more or less like friend cheese, but a little sweeter. Cool.

One bad thing: more 和式トイレ…

鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks (8)...

7/19

Got up around 6am, but with most people sleeping in or hung-over, I decided to just go down to the tennis courts and do some aerobics/anaerobics for a while. It worked out pretty well – I did five-minute sets of alternating aerobics (running in place, jumping jacks, skiis) and anaerobics (squats, lunges, and the strength band I brought). I did it for about 35 minutes, and then I came up and did another few minutes of abs. Not too bad.

Soon after we headed out for the beach on the other side of the peninsula, where we would be watching and/or participating in dragnet fishing. Cool.

They put us on charter buses again, which is nice, and this time there was a lady (maybe she was there on the way over?) who had her little tour guide routine down pretty good. She sounded like most people in sales/customer service do when she spoke Japanese, but her English was a little odd…mostly she sounded, at times, like some kind of witch, and she’d dropped her pitch real low at peculiar times and cackle, which was amusing.

The beach is really pretty – a bit more of a tourist spot than the one near the seminar house, based on all the people there with their kids and setting up camp with umbrellas and such.

Unfortunately, the more isolated from the big city you get, the more 和式 things become…and the public toilets were one of them.

Now, I’m not much for squatting anyway, but I completely forgot about the horizontal urinals they use. Jeez. Luckily I brought lots of wipes, especially as there was no soap, and no paper towels.

That’s the one thing I dislike about Japan – those stupid fucking toilets.

The weather was absolutely scorching…but wet. I step out of any air conditioned area and I’m immediately sticky again, even the palms of my hands. Yek.

I wore my blue sandals, seeing as I nearly ruined my other sandals by wearing them to the beach. But, that means I’ll have to very covertly sneak them out to the tennis court area or something so I can wash them and keep using them as inside slippers. Sheesh.

We got there and almost immediately were called over to start hauling in this reeeeeaaaaaaallllllyyyyyy long fishing line. We must have been pulling on it for ten minutes before we finally saw the net.

It looked like, for a while, that we’d only caught two fish, but the other net coming in next to us caught a bucketful. There was this cute little Japanese boy who was screaming and playing with the fish, at one point holding it up to his ear and going “Moshi moshi?”. LOL

We had a BBQ after that, and I ended up just eating a little yakisoba. I’m not a huge seafood fan, and picnic-style cooking like that often lacks a certain sanitation that I like to think my food is being prepared in. Plus, I don’t do shellfish.

Afterwards we dinked around on the beach, playing with the beachball for a while, somewhat unsuccessfully because it was so windy out on the water.

But, OMGWTFBBQ! What a dumbass I was – totally fried my entire backside and shoulders and chest. I will admit I was hoping to get a little burnt and work on my tan, but I’m like a beet. Well, not that bad, but its gonna be a rough few days. Shoulda worn my f*cking sunscreen…jeez.

鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks (7)...

7/18

I went for a run today, this time with Mr. Awkward, after Amanda called it quits.

We ran down the hill from the seminar house, but this time out to a different part of town. However, we ended up walking most of the way back. I didn’t feel too bad, but the humidity is really killer, and he looked pretty wiped out too.

In class today, we “reflected” on our 討論会 experiences, and 原田先生 gave us comment cards that were very generous…it kind of made me feel bad the way people made sure to point out the one thing I actually did (the opening speech) and comment on how I did it very “logically” and without looking from my notes. Clearly I looked like I was going to burst into tears, which I only just barely managed not to do. But hopefully I looked pathetic enough that the teacher will be nice…I think she will.

Not much going on between lunch and dinner, but dinner…ooohh, DINNER….!. Dinner consisted of the most awesome little pork or beef or something, udon soup, and TAI SASHIMI. Also, because a bunch of people skated out right after classes, there was all these leftovers…I TOTALLY had THREE servings of sashimi. It was super-awesome-delicious.

After dinner Natuko-san and Hisa-san rounded up a bunch of us and we went out for karaoke. Mr. Awkward, in a moment of weakness, also came with.

The karaoke place was a bit of a dive, honestly, but being that it was probably the only one in a town which lacked the young-man-power to keep its yearly carry-the-mini-shrine-down-the-hill festival going, you can’t be too picky.

I ended up in the largest room, with bunch of guys including someone named Matt, who was kind of goofy but really nice and actually took time to encourage the few bashful ones among us to pick what we want and just belt it out, often picking up the slack or adding accompaniment, or even just passing along the mic even if it was a song he picked. Nice guy.

I sang 砂の盾, not too shabbily if I do say so myself, and took the lead a couple time for some of the other songs people picked for the “group” to sing. Matt and the rest of that particular posse of guys were pretty wasted by the middle of the evening. Lots of beer and cigarettes going around. I decided to just not drink anything while we were there, just in case.

Mr. Awkward was in the same room, and sang a few songs, too. He was pretty quiet and didn’t drink anything, so I imagine he probably didn’t have the greatest time. I thought it was plenty of fun, but you know everyone’s got one thing or another to get pissy about.

When we got back (making sure to take a cab NOT full of drunk twenty-somethings), I stayed up for a bit playing a card game called “Sushi” with a bunch of the girls. I lost miserably. They were about to start Cranium, but I was getting tired so I decided to hit the sack. Sadly, agonizingly (especially with my entire body saturated with cheap cigarette smoke) the showers were closed, so I had to lay out of towel and just sleep on top of my bed in my gym clothes for the next day. Blah.

鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks (6)...

7/17

Started out the morning with (FINALLY!) a bit of exercise. Or rather, a lot of exercise.

Amanda (one of my roommates) went jogging with me all the way out to the ジャスCo shopping center downtown (I’d say at least 4 miles), which was not so hard going out because it was mostly downhill. The trek back however…pretty goddamn tough. I ended up waaay ahead of her because she was going much slower and had to stop to walk, but we both felt pretty hard-core by the time we made it back. Even I had to walk a good portion of the way uphill to the seminar house – which would have been the case probably even without the insane balmy weather.

I was totally soaked through with sweat, and pretty dehydrated considering this was before breakfast. BUT! Exercise! YAY! I’m also going to start dropping rice out of most of my meals, and taking only a little bit of food for breakfast (which is still mostly buffet-style), which should cut at least 500 calories out of my three-square-meals-a-day diet. And if I can keep doing the jogging thing most days, that’ll put be back on track. I don’t think I’m doing too bad – my pants aren’t getting tight or anything, but I feel flabby…just a little.

Today was also討論会 for my group. We were debating rural versus urban lifestyles. Of course, I thought we’d prepared pretty well, until the other group came up with no less than five separate posters with various diagrams and such. *sigh* I stumbled through my introduction speech, and then fell into my usual clammed-up state. Tatsuya (a guy in the opposing group) kindly directed a question my way during the open-debate section, which I then fouled up. Harada-sensei also encouraged me to speak up, which was very considerate but really just made me feel worse. It was really nice of people to praise me for my shitty opening speech, since that was all they really could talk about, but I had to leave right after for fear of just breaking down and crying, as per usual when I get all worked up like that.
Stupid emotions…

Max and Julian (the other group members) picked up my slack without missing a beat, as to be expected, and I was very impressed with Max’s speaking ability, which I already had a pretty good idea was very fluid after hearing him talking to some Japanese people on the phone way back at the beginning of the trip.

Yay...Its all over.

Mom called this morning, and left like three messages, one of which was from the SoftBank Phone company, so I called her back. Apparently she’d been trying to call for two days but hadn’t been able to get through as was having a small fit about. She even called Waseda-Oregon at some point, but apparently didn’t get through.

After dinner I talked with Mr. Awkward again, and we played a bit of chess on his laptop. I lost. But, interestingly, he’s quite the chess buff, and was able to tell me that my typical first move (a pawn from either edge of the board) is known as the “Anderson Opening”, after famous chess-player Andre Anderson. He told me about the “Immortal Game” between Andre and some guy named Steinz or something, in which Anderson won, using that starting move, which is pretty ballsy as a first move considering it isn’t very advantageous (he told me he briefly thought I either a) knew exactly was I was doing and was going to pull a fast one on him, or b) had no clue what I was doing…and you know which it is). He has some really interesting philosophical theories about chess, which was nice to listen to, especially given the rather puddle-deep conversations I usually hear from my peers.

Earlier at dinner, Hisa-san asked me (somewhat randomly, I thought)“does Mr. Awkward always says weird things to you?”, to which I replied, half-joking, “ いつも, 毎回”("Yeah, all the time - every time!"). Hisa-san thought that was funny, but I wonder what had spurred that question...

I told the person in question later on, and apparently the context for Hisa-san’s question came from the fact that Mr. Awkward had shown him the 巨根 kanji I’d written on a piece of paper. He went to clear it up with Hisa-san, thinking that Hisa-san thought he had given it to me, rather than the other way around, but there was no misunderstanding. We agreed that Mr. Awkard just says weird things.

LOL

鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks (5)

7/16

Class as usual, and today we had the first round of 討論会 (debate). I'm in the second flight, but both groups did very well, and I think I'll be all right if I can only just keep myself from spontaneously combusting in a fire of my own nervousness.

The most memorable event of the day was the BBQ down at the tennis courts. I ended up talking with Mr. Awkward again, and we discussed a number of things, one of which was how a Buddhist would take to being in Hell…as well as various infamous one liners, one of which had to do with being involved in some kind of drinking game and what was said therein...and which shall not be repeated here.

The BBQ included drinks, yakisoba, various vegetables and some beef and seafood. Really tasty.

But I continued to hang out with Mr. Awkward the rest of the evening. He’s a really interesting guy, and the banter is most entertaining, and refreshingly engaging and unguarded after maintaining such a surface intimacy with most people. A little bit like someone else I know...

Anyway, I ate way too much food, Hisa-san (the surfer-esque RA) talked with us, and was at one point subjected to things like the “Zinger” and various broken-Japanese explanations of the many lewd American hand-gestures by the rest of my gainjin peers, and lots of fun was had all around. Later,once we'd gone inside to escape the hordes of mosquitoes, Mr. Awkward told me, after a conversation that somehow came to a turning point with my suggesting that he was “made of win” (a funny little pseudo-internet meme/phrase I’d heard), how he was kinda-sorta-not-really involved with the now infamous YouTube pheonomenon called Anonymous (which I heard about after one of my favorite bloggers mentioned the call to arms by Annonymous to wage war on Scientology. I’m going to take everything he tells me with a grain or ten of salt, but it was interesting: he'd read some pretty wild stuff, including a live-blogging “Lolita” story, and also kept abreast of the various “trolling” activities of Anonymous in its pre-YouTube days. Which could just as easily be a bunch of bullshit, but its worth checking out when I have private WWW access.

Hmmm….

鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks (3)

7/14/08

First day of class. Yay!

Breakfast was really good – little salads and yogurt drink thingies and miso and rice and SABA(!!)...I’m going to gain like 10 lbs eating three square meals a day like this...Especially with limited exercise opportunities that don’t involve stepping out into the sauna that is all non-air-conditioned space. *sigh*

Anyway, back to classes – I’m in 4th level, which is good, because I’d feel like kind of an idiot if I had to repeat the equivalent of third year again. My listening is absolute crap right now – I can’t hardly understand anything that’s being spoken to me, which is scary, and I’m also not much for speaking in coherent sentences either. I can still write and read, thankfully.

The teacher is really nice – a bit like Nishikawa-sensei but without the peculiar lack of emotional warmth and friendliness...so maybe, she just looks kind of like Nishikawa-sensei...kind of.

Nothing too difficult for me material-wise, but my roommate from the hotel-stay is way out of her league. I gotta feel bad for her though – she’s also making it public knowledge that she’s a major anime/manga/J-rock fan, and that’s just going to draw a lot of negative attention - I sympathize, being the cowardly closet-nerd that I am, but its just such a cliché among Japanese learners, and sadly, the characteristic trait of those who probably will not go far in their studies…

The workshop class was, unfortunately for me, debate. And I hate any and all forms of public speaking, in any language, but especially in Japanese. I just suck. SUCK…

Right after class a group of people followed the R.As out on a 20 minute walk to the beach. The path was pretty treacherous, and it was no wonder they discouraged the people who wanted to go out last night. A trail through the woods with lots of slanting, uneven stairs, and no guard-rail what-so-ever. Pretty damn steep, too – thank gawd for all those aerobics classes I took. The trail also snaked through a little suburban area with cute little Japanese houses and gardens - felt like we were walking through people's backyards. The beach itself was a little disappointing, given that I’d heard from a several people it was supposed to be “white-sand” – it was pretty much like home, but much, much warmer. But we had a nice time.

I talked with a guy from Georgia (who shall henceforth be referred to as Mr. Awkward) who I met earlier at the hotel during the orientation dinner, while we were at the beach. I can’t quite figure out if he's for real or not, but he is a bit less restrained by social niceties, so there’s less of this tedious back-and-forth about “Oh, what level are you in?” or “Is this your first time to Japan?”, which, while pleasant and appropriate given our situation, is also wearing out its welcome. We seem to start talking to each other in a sort of tongue-in-cheek, “So how are you today?” fashion, and then banter about a variety of different things, which is refreshing. He also told me about how disgusted he was by the attitude of people in thinking they can just willy-nilly demand to change classes or levels. Some guy literally went up to the teacher, all of whom seem to be bending over backward to be accommodating us as it is, and told her he either needed to change classes or she needed to pick-up the pace. What an ass.

鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks (2)

7/13/08

Up bright and early for breakfast – compliments of the hotel, and including every conceivable Asian style/Western style breakfast-food imaginable.

Later, its haul our heavy-ass luggage downstairs and meet up for a more in-depth orientation. Mostly going over what was in the information packets they handed out, but also some explaining of procedures and such, which was helpful. Apparently my score from the online placement exam was available on the Course N@vi all this time：Level 4 (highest level)! Yay! Also, all the details about my host-family, which would’ve been nice to know in advance(I probably would have bought that bottle of Johnny Walker back in YVR), but that’s kind of my fault for not being diligent about checking it frequently.

It's insanely hot and humid (also expected, but DAMN!). Thankfully, the bus is spacious and air-conditioned.

We ended up making two stops – one at a little truck-stop type place with a mini-mart and a few restaurants, where I picked up some amazing dried fruit, and another right in Kamogawa city called ジャスCo.

The Seminar House is gorgeous – very clean and the layout is very nice.

We have to leave our shoes at the door and wear house-slippers of some kind, which is kind of inconvenient, but also expected, and it certainly keeps things cleaner.

I’m in a dorm room with three other girls, in bunk-beds. Again, very clean, more than enough room for everybody…

But.

BUT.

Communal showers.

*shudder*

And not even showers, but low-spray-nozzles and a little stool at each station that you squat on.

Not only is it embarrassing, but pretty damn undignified.

*giant humongous SIGH*

頑張るしかないな～

Dinner was quite awesome-delicious. Lots of little dishes, which is a nice change of pace. And the most scrumptious chicken I have ever had in my life. Cooked under this ornamental fish-shaped dish with, like, onions and lemon…yum yum.

鴨川セミナーハウス：2週間/ Kamogawa Seminar House: 2 Weeks

7/12/08

10 hour flight from Vancouver, BC (YVR) to the Narita Airport. About as problem-free as I could have hoped for: I was finger-printed, photographed, and my passport stamped and out of customs in no more than 10 minutes, tops. Easy. My suitcase even came through, contents intact.

Finding my program leader-peoples was a little more interesting: as I (thought I)recalled, they were supposed to be at the Information Desk, which appeared all too conveniently in front of me as I came into customs, and from there the people staffing it were supposed to be informed about the students coming in and where to direct them. Not the case: "Waseda? You mean the university?" I had them page the one person whose name I remembered off the top of my head, but after 5 minutes I just called Naomi Hoka on my cell (it worked, thankfully), and a couple minutes later a guy in a suit came over, introduced himself as so-and-so from the Waseda Program, dragged my heavy-ass suitcase for me and proceeded to lead me around the corner about 300 feet to the OTHER desk, where a few other staff persons and one student were waiting. *doh!*

The other student and I were ushered outside and told to wait for the courtesy shuttle to the hotel. It came soon afterwards, and during the trip the two of us talked about school and how shitty our Japanese was. Turns out he's from UW, too. Huh.

The hotel was very nice, a little smaller than the image on the website made it appear to be, and inside we found a little desk with Waseda staff who gave us our orientation materials and our shiny new student IDs.

My roommate turned out to be a really nice girl from PSU, and we got along great - lots of common interests (like Gackt!).

At the orientation dinner down in the hotel's banquet room, I sat at a table with a few guys and couple other girls. Pretty funny how you can see people segregating into their own little cliques - one table had a bunch of Taiwanese guys, and the girl at my table was clearly the ringleader of a clowder of snot-nosed fashion-queens...not that I'm judging them on appearances or anything...

Dinner itself was really nice, lots of different kinds of foods, and the Waseda staff gave a nice presentation about the program.

First night in Japan: 成功！

日本行き～～

皆さん、もうそろそろ私が日本へ行くよ！ただ6週間だけの留学なんだけど、ほんのすこし日本の雰囲気を味わったり日本語をちょっと上達させたりするはずだ。もうワクワクよね…

ただ6週間っていっても、まあ、ちょっと…何となく寂しい。3ヶ月前までこんな気持ちなんてなかったの…そう…

じゃ、ブログを見続けてくれてね。日本の日記をつけたり、写真やビデオを投稿したりするから。