Semi-first day

Today was our first day of actual, we-signed-up-for-these classes. My first class, Basic Japanese, was cancelled due to the teacher having some kind of infection… Under her ear I guess? I don’t really know, but another teacher came in and proctored the test she had planned to give, and that was it for that class. So at 10:30, by which time most people had finished the test and we were starting to clog up the hallway outside, we dispersed.

So, cool, a day off already, right? My next class wasn’t until 3PM, so I had plenty of time to wander around and do stuff, but I ended up staying in the area around the school. Upside is that I found an okonomiyaki shop that’s right by the school and, bizarrely enough, serves 糯お好み焼き(… imagine a non-sweet pancake with onions, ginger, and little balls of compressed rice good and you’ve got the right idea) which was pretty… mediocre. I guess the location makes up for it, as well as the size. Admittedly, I also ate a クリームパン(cream bread) and a チョコパン (bread with swirls of chocolate pudding), but that’s because they’re delicious, not because I was hungry.

I think one of the weird things about being here is that you get used to using coins to pay for stuff. The smallest bill is essentially a $10 one, and they have coins that are about $1 and about $5, so you can buy most daily stuff with just random change from your pocket. It’s hard to equate that with spending actual money, though, instead of the American/English concept of pocket change. I have a little change purse that I got that is big enough to hold a small handful of change, and I think it’s got about $10 in it right now.

Every few days, I go through and pull out all the ￥1 coins, and leave four-ish of the larger coins in, as it otherwise slowly ends up filled with, essentially, pennies and dimes.

I did that just now and it turns out that I had ￥757.

By the way, tax is included in the price of things here, which is really nice. So if it says on the menu that something costs $7.50, it really costs $7.50, not $8.133141592 and a 15% tip ($1.13) totaling an entirely different number ($9.26π) than you were originally thinking. Oh, you don’t tip, either*. It’s really convenient.

That said, a basic bowl of ramen costs $5 for the smallest size (fills me up, though!) at someplace cheap. Okonomiyaki starts at about $6 and the size varies a lot more than with ramen.

*There are a couple exceptions to the not-tipping rule here, but they mostly involve going to places where the reservation alone will cost more than it would to take all your friends out to eat at a decent place.