The End, More or Less

As I've said in the past few posts, I'm back in the United States, which marks the end of my study abroad trip to Japan. It was fun, educational, expensive, and delicious, though if you were to ask me to put those in order, I don't think I could.

The best thing about going has to have been the people I was able to meet. I made a number of friends with whom I identified with in a surprising number of ways, and I was able to experience and relish in the rich variety of languages and accents, as well as getting to see little bits of the world from other people's points of view.

One of my goals while I was in Japan was to eat ramen. Sure, it sounds silly, but I'd only eaten instant ramen prior to coming to Japan, and I did so on a daily basis for upwards of eight years. So I wanted to eat lots of varieties of ramen. While I was able to try a number of shops' ramen - probably around 30 - I still couldn't tell you whether I like the miso-, soy-, or salt-based ramen best.

While tasty, my primary reason for coming to Japan was not to eat ramen, or gyuudon, or takoyaki, but to study Japanese, and my stay there was - of course! - invaluable to that end. I'm still very weak with kanji and my vocabulary is very small compared to a native speaker, but the difference between when I left and my current ability is no less than marked.

Writing on this blog was an experience all of its own, and I'm glad that I did. I'll be able to look back on this much like I might a journal.

For those of you that have been reading this whole time: your time and your comments are appreciated.

For who have supported me in other ways, be it in the form of money, cookies, a partner for Super Smash Brothers or DDR or that taiko game, or help defrosting my fridge because I forgot and was late to miss plane, I cannot thank you enough.you for your efforts and your friendship. I don't know how I would've survived this year without the help I received from others.

I hope that many others have the opportunity that I did, and I hope that maybe this log will help one or two of those people out at some point.

Good day and best wishes.
- William Lockwood

Arrival

And I'm back in the real United States. Feel free to not worry now.

Edit: It appears that there was considerable worry, as the blog's front page usually gets about 30 page loads a day, but during my little stint with air travel, it got nearly 400 hits in the span of three days.

Hawaii Arrival

Well, I'm officially back in the US now. It's 7:15AM according to my computer, which is theoretically what time my body should think it is. On the other hand, I did kind of jerk around my sleep schedule right before I left, so who knows? I slept for about two hours on the flight here to Honolulu, and watched a movie.

It's weird being here. I mean, first of all, there are so many... white people. I want to say "foreigners", because that's... just how it works. In Japan, less than 1% of the people in any given sample will be foreign, and 80% of those people will be Chinese or Korean, so seeing a white person is fairly rare, though much more common in Kyoto (where I lived) as it's a big tourist destination.

It's a little hard to say "I lived in Kyoto" instead of the present tense "I live". It's a year of conditioning to say "京都に住んでいます", and the simple act of putting it in the past tense makes it feel really final. I think that is has made my departure sink in the most. Because of my plane-boarding failure and my six-hour layover in Hawaii, I've been slowly sort of fading out of Japan and Japanese culture on the whole. I keep apologizing to people in English, and I feel kind of ADD because I'm so used to going "OMG ENGLISH WHERE?!" that having it spoken all around me is kind of overwhelming.

And I don't have a nice way of saying this, but I never realized how much of our population is overweight. Like, I've seen the statistics. I get that. But there's a big jump from knowing a number and seeing it firsthand. While I was in Japan, seeing people that were even slightly overweight was fairly rare. At 90 kg (190 pounds) I was, at almost any given time, the largest person for half a mile. After being in a country full of short, thin people for a year, being back here where I'm short and merely average weight is very strange.

Security Ordeal...

...Not!

I managed to get through security and customs with no problems.

... Really!

I'm now in the secure area right above the wireless access point that I have been using for the past two days. Though that it happened to be right here where I pulled my laptop out is kind of strangely coincidental, I think. There also just happens to be a power plug right here, as a random bonus.

Surprisingly enough, they didn't even pat me down or have to have me do anything weird. I even made it through the metal detector without having to take my belt off - a first! More surprisingly, I'm wearing my huge brown Marine desert boots and didn't they didn't make me take those off either. I was a little worried that they were going to say something about the fact that my ticket says I'm coming back in three weeks, but that my visa ends in about two, but I said I wouldn't be coming back for a while, and it was okay.

One guy at security was determined to talk to me in English, but after struggling his way through "Check... you... plane... on... [gesture at passport]... 20 o'ten... ride." he let us finish the conversation in Japanese.

Now, I'm killing another 45 minutes while I wait for them to begin boarding the plane.

Status Updated: Missed Flight, part three

See the previous two posts for detailed information on the extent of my foolishness as it relates to international air travel.

Alright, they were able to get the fare difference down to $800 ($2,000-$1,200) and I think they completely dropped the change fee - for reasons unknown to me - but we were able to get it paid for. By "we", I mean Dean, in case you're wondering. One stack of various cards later, I have in my pocket my boarding pass.

Now there's only one more thing to worry about on this end, which is security. The boarding time is listed as starting at 8:10PM for my flight at 8:50PM, but I fully intend to go there around 7:15PM or so and stare at them until the time comes. Then they will, no doubt pat me down. I've made sure that I don't have a bunch of stuff attached to my belt this time, and the only even vaguely dangerous things I have with me are two pens and a notebook.

Bets they confiscate the notebook?

Status Updated: Missed Flight, part two

I am (as of 10AM February 19th) still at the airport, and I'm doing alright. It's looking like my, uh, little mistake is going to cost my family about $1,500 on top of the $1,200 it already took.

Moral of the story: Don't miss your flight.

[Update:
The moral of the story is still "Don't miss your flight". The people at Northwest have been very helpful, especially when compared to the nice, if rather English-challenged lady I talked to who was with Travelocity. They were able to get it down to $1,200 by waiving a couple of fees and doing some kind of magic - this is actually what the woman said - which is pretty cool. If I were to wait a week, I could get it for "only" $300 on top of my current ticket price, but that flight was taken by the time I talked to them about it again.]

[Edit: Oh, and this is the 400th post to this blog. Beth put up two or three, so it's not my 400th. I had been hoping to hit 500 before I left, but I guess the number's not really important.]

Status Update: Missed Flight

I missed my flight. I'm accessing the Internet from a free terminal that's set up by Domestic Arrivals at Kansai International Airport. I have the beginnings of a nice set of blisters from carrying my luggage around, as a bonus.
So, for the "WTF HOW?":
- I underestimated the amount of time it would take to get everything moved out of my apartment and packed, etcetera. Even with the massive - and I don't want you to think I'm overstating that - amounts of help I got from QB, Yanavy, Angela, and Cassie, I ended up leaving nearly an hour later than I had planned to.
- In an effort to avoid spending massive amounts of money on sending a bunch of books to the US by mail, I picked up a surplus duffle bag and shoved all the books in it and a bunch of clothes. I then stuffed it and my decent-quality duffle bag (with wheels!) until they were at the the weight limit, 23kg or 50 pounds, and preceded to attempt to lug these around on the train system. Now, I think what got me here is that I somehow was thinking 23 pounds when I was thinking about how much the whole thing would weigh. But that's 50 pounds times two is 100 pounds, plus a further 15kg (35 pounds) of backpack, camera, etc, and I'm hauling 140 pounds of crap around, and 50 pounds of it is in a completely static sack - i.e., a duffel bag.
That wasn't so bad, but what is usually a five-minute transfer became a thirty-minute ordeal with rest breaks at each flight of stairs.

Packing

It's 9:40AM. I last slept yesterday around 8AM. Well, unless you count the thirty-second-to-a-minute period during which I fell asleep and chatted with people at random from my offline contacts list. For the most part, I've been packing and organizing since early yesterday, minus a gyouza party.

It's 9:43AM. I'm about to go to the post office to drop off the first of the packages to go out by boat. It will arrive three months from now, but doesn't have anything perishable in it.

I'm going to go broke by postage, I think. We'll see.

It's still 9:43AM, and I am one tired puppy.

先生の家

Today, I visited one of my teachers from last semester who I've been in somewhat constant contact with. He invited me to lunch a few weeks back, and I kind of invited myself up to his house. He said it was fine, and we decided on a day, which was today.

It takes him (who was sick today, hence the mask) about ten minutes to get to school by scooter; it took me about an hour to get to his house by bike. Needless to say, there're some slopes involved. It was difficult, and I barely managed it, but I was able to bike the entire way up and even farther than I had to go by quite a ways. He lives up in a suburb about eight kilometers (5.7 miles) away from where I live, and while the elevation gain is only about 200m (~650 feet) it feels a lot more significant on a bike.

He met me at a traffic circle - the first I've ever actually seen - which I went to kind of on a hunch, and it ended up being right next to his house. This picture is a 360-degree panorama taken from nearly the middle of the traffic circle. Guess where the sun is.

I met for the first time both his children (two of 'em) and his wife (one of those!) and both seemed very pleasant to say the least. My teacher is well into his fifties, and from the time frames they mentioned while we were talking, his wife (who is Canadian, and appeared to be of Northern European ancestry, maybe so far as Irish, but I didn't ask) must be getting near that mark as well, but she must be benefiting from the Japanese lifestyle or something, because she could very well be in her early thirties judging by her appearance.

Oh, and they had cheese. Real, honest to cheese, cheese. White cheddar, yum, yum. You have no idea how long it's been since I had cheesy cheesy cheese. Cheese. ... Apparently, they had gone to Costco (there's one in Osaka somewhere) the previous day with some friends, and had just gotten back, as they gave me about a half a pound of cheese to me and a further half pound to deliver to some friends. Yum. Cheese.

We went for a walk and ran into some kids who were walking a dog. When they saw me, they started talking about me a little, and eventually, one of them said to another "Hey, say something in English!" I turned around and interjected "Japanese is okay, too." I love getting people with that one. They had a cute little dog, as well. Isn't he (?) cute?

We visited a bird sanctuary near where he lives as well as a couple of parks, then came back to his house for a bit and talked for another hour or so, then I headed home. The ride home didn't take nearly as long, since the whole thing was downhill and I don't need a map to simply go down a hill.

[These random plants are blurry because I have my camera set to use a shutter speed of 1/60 when the flash is on, and I didn't think to compensate for the fact that I had the lens zoomed at 200mm on top of the 1.5x magnification from my APS-C sensor. That gives an effective 300mm of focal length, and while my lens is rated for a nominal three stops (1/60>1/120>1/240>1/480) the flash didn't take in enough light to overpower the ambient, hence the blur.]

With just a few days left in Japan, I'll be selling my bike tomorrow. I've used it pretty hard, so it looks older than it is, but used bikes don't fetch much anyway. I'd be getting a pretty good deal if I got $30 for it. The other one (the first new bike I bought in Japan) is too beat up to fetch me more than $10 if I'm lucky, but one of my friends is going to fix it up and use it, since it has gears and she has a tire patching kit.

[Edit: We also saw this car while we were walking around. You can see on the front it's a GT-R, but we saw a couple of other really nice cars while wandering around.
On the way back, I saw an import car shop and saw for the first time in nearly a year a car with the steering wheel on the right (which is to say, "left") side.]

[Another edit: I asked my teacher later if it was alright for me to put this up later, and I like it, so here it is. My teacher and his wife, at right.]

Phone Setup/Management Software

I have a Softbank/Samsung 707SCII Japanese cellular phone. Last time I looked online for the software that allows you to manage the phone from your computer, I couldn't find it, so I've pulled it from the CD that was distributed with the phone and put it in a ZIP file, which you can download here.

I'm doing this partially because I intend to throw away my disc rather than try and keep track of it through the move, and for anybody else who is either too lazy to find their disc or has lost it or whatever.

Ko-Un

I woke up at a decent time today, for the first time in a week. Not such a big deal on its own, but I came with some good ideas for RPG stuff and read some interesting stuff from the GM guide.

When I went to school to meet with one of my teachers, she wasn't there, but I met up with another teacher, who took Kilk and I out to lunch for yakiniku (fried meat). When I got back, the teacher I was supposed to meet was there (she was coming in for work, so I was just supposed to meet her at some point after 1PM) and we talked for about three hours while she let me pick all the books I could carry from her bookshelf to take home with me. She also gave me a brand new electronic dictionary. It just happens to be one with a special feature that I will make great use of in the next year or so, as a random bonus.

Now, I just need to ship them home...

Lecherous Statistics Advertisement

"Your log is full. Increase your log size today!"

Sure, it looks like spam that is going to promise that you can get Viagra for 10% it's normal price by going through Nigeria, but it's not.
This is what my stats app tells me every time I log into to see what's going on. And I chuckle every time. Wouldn't you?

Coins, Coins, Everywhere, but not a Yen to Spend

One of the most striking things about buying things in Japan is how much you can spend without really noticing. This is largely due to the fact that they use coins for everything up to 500 yen (~$5).  And those 500 yen coins look a lot like an American $1 coin, which are pretty rare, and we usually use paper money for $1 values.  The 100 yen coin here is very, very similar to an American quarter ($0.25).
The smallest bill currently in circulation is the 1000 yen ($10) bill.  The other two pieces of paper money are the 5000 (~$50) and 10,000 (~$100, though about $110 with the current exchange rate).  I cringe every time I have to break a 10,000 yen note, but the 1000s and the 500 yen pieces feel like 1/5 to 1/10 their value, so they disappear really quickly.  Add to that the fact that everything here is at least twice as expensive as I think it should be...

Now, that said, the coins are really convenient like that.  They're actually useful, not just something to have to put up with.  That said, it's still frustrating to carry around ten nickels and twenty cents in pennies on top of all of your money with enough zeroes after it to matter.  I've been tossing excess coins into a little baggie basically since I got here, and I had forgotten about it for the past two months or so.  I have to go to pay rent today, and once I pull out the money for that, I'll be at (thanks to the exchange rate) about $50 left for the last week that I'm here.  Now, that's no small amount of money, but given that $15 of that will go to getting me to the airport, and I will need to have some money on hand or at least in my account in the event of baggage handling fees or something, well, I remembered my little yenny bank.  That was a pun on piggy bank.  Please tell me someone got it.

So I decided to see roughly how much I've got in it.  About an hour later, it turns out I've got a little over $80 in random change that has been gathering.  Now, there is a slight problem with this, and that's that clerks are not so happy when/if you come in with 226 dimes and want to buy something.  So, for the sake of international relations, I'm going to take everything under the 50-yen coins down to the bank and have them turn that into real money for me.  Hopefully.  I also hope the processing fee isn't super-high, but Japan does love its paperwork, so I'm only vaguely hopeful on that one.

Here are the statistics:

4100 yen	41 coins	100 yen
2050 yen	41 coins	50 yen
2260 yen	226 coins	10 yen
435 yen	87 coins	5 yen
350 yen	350 coins	1 yen	(guess)
9195 yen	Total

Random Phrase: A Process of Translation

Just poking around in the news section of 2Chan - which is not even vaguely a worksafe site; seriously, that place has stuff that creeps me out! Anyway, don't go - and I found this random phrase, which I just happened to like. It's talking about a solid state drive that this guy found in Akihabara.

数ヶ月行かないと、浦島太郎になる街だな
or
suu ka-getsu ikanai to, urashima tarou ni naru machi da na

Now, to get you started, let's first define everything, and we'll see if you can get what it means. Should be fun, right?

Now, when trying to decipher a sentence in Japanese, it's often easiest to start at the end of the sentence. The last word is na, which is what's known as a "sentence final particle", or shuujoshi. It's meaning is kind of like "Don't you think?" or "...you know?", but it's a more rhetorical than anything else. It softens the statement a little by implying that the reader already knows this, and probably agrees.

Next up is da, the plain form of the copula (if that doesn't make sense, don't worry). In other words, it means "is/are". As an example pen da means "it is a pen", though the "it" and the indefinite article "a" are not in the Japanese, because the language, for the most part, doesn't have them. So far, we have "... isn't it?"

machi means "town", but we want to say "place" in English, because "town" conveys a sense of one whole unit, instead of a piece of something larger. So far: "... town, isn't it?"

We'll take the next two words as one to make things simpler, and so this post doesn't end up with a hojillion paragraphs: ni naru. This is "to turn into" or "to become". naru is the verb and ni is the "to" of "turn into". This will make the translation a little iffy if you do it directly and in order, but best of luck. So far: "[the kind of] town [where you] become ... , isn't it?" The brackets indicate implied things, or things that simply aren't there in Japanese due to grammatical differences.

Next bit will also be a two-word chunk, as it's a name: urashima tarou, which like the Japanese version of Rip van Winkle, the guy who fell asleep for twenty years, missed the American Revolution, and woke up to entirely different world. So far: "[the kind of] town [where you] become Rip van Winkle , isn't it?"

to is next up, and serves a variety of purposes based on context and placement, but here is a simple conditional. You could say "if", "when", "and", or "then", depending on where in the English sentence you're presumably making you would put it. So far for this clause: "...and".

ikanai is the plain, nonpast form of iku "to go", so we translate it as "don't/won't go". Japanese has a very confusingly slightly existent future tense, but don't worry about it here, because it's just your normal habitual present tense. So far for this clause: "... don't go and"

ka-getsu is kind-of-sort-of one work, but kind-of-sort-of two words, as well. It effectively means "months", but specifically "in duration" as opposed to "of the year". By itself it's a little weird, so let's tack on suu "numerous", and we get suu ka-getsu, or "a number of months" or "a few months". So this clause in its entirety "Don't go for a couple of months and..."

And we have one remaining problem, which is that the first half the sentence (before the comma) and all the way up to ni naru, are all modifying the word machi "town". This makes necessary a little rearranging to make intelligible English. So, we put it all together, put our patented Lingua-Blender on puree, and what comes out?

"It's the kind of town where if you don't go for a couple of months,
and you become Rip van Winkle, you know?"
suu ka-getsu ikanai to,
urashima tarou ni naru machi da na

If you have no idea how I came to that final sentence from the little bits, try highlighting the whole page (Ctrl+A ought to work well) and you should be able to see some additional hints about how I got from the Japanese to the English.

Flash: チョコ・ブービーズに関して

I was just eating the remnants of the chocolate breasts when I realized they're actually milk flavored. Like, not white chocolate, but more like a very sweet milk. Oh, and each one is a tiny little truffle. Say, breast milk?

Food Pictures - maybe NSFW

Alright, three food-related pictures from the past week or so.

First is a giant parfait, aptly named the "Crazy Big Parfait". Not kidding.

Next is me after having defeated it.

As you can see from how big the bowl is in relation to my hand, it was, indeed, crazy big. It was filled with whipped cream and strawberry ice cream, with green tea pocky and waffle cones jammed in the side. It was yum! Fortunately, we split the $40 price between seven of us, so it wasn't so bad.

Today, I got this in the mail. Tell me what is wrong with this scene. What's that? Yes, "everything" is indeed the correct answer. Broccoli on pizza, covered in what appears to be a baked potato with nacho cheese being dribbled over it. WTF JAPAN?

On the other hand*, boobies! Chocolate!
Chocolate boobies! Surprisingly tasty, even. I only got six, as there were a bunch of other candies I wanted to get as well.

I made sure to use these backwards and eat the nipples first.

*Yes, I have the mind of a high-school kid. Did you really not see that one?

Apartment Manager

The new apartment manager is really cool*. She's immediately able to respond to anything that may be wrong. That her response to everything is "Ask the Department of International Relations", usually without even thinking about the question she's been asked.
* indicates sarcasm.

"Department of International Relations" = kokusai kouryuubu, usually shortened to kouryuubu, and pronounced as koryubu, which is only three syllables and much less unwieldy in conversation. You might think of it as similar to how we very rarely say "The Federal Bureau of Investigation did something to someone" unless it's a news report or you're really scratching for word count.


Just a moment ago, I talked to her about vacuum cleaner bags. Here's how the conversation went:
Kanrinin: "Good morning."
Me: "Good morning. Do you know where I can buy vacuum cleaner bags?"
K: "At... the store, they... probably have them."
Me: "Is there some special number or something?"
K: [frowning] "Ask the koryubu."
Me: "It's not open."
K: [frowning more] "Oh." Uh-oh, I may have to actually help someone. This could interfere with my TV-watching... Gotta think of something!
K: "Just write down the name of it or something." Phew, that was close. I was almost useful. Show him to try and get help from me!
Me: "Uh, right. Thank you."

While I can only imagine that's what she was thinking, it would make her actions make more sense.

Bowling Scorecard

When we went bowling a few days ago, they printed us out individual scorecards. I took a picture of everybody's, just for good measure, but here's mine.
I'm not posting it to brag about the score (average of 120, go me! <- bragging), but so you can see what it looks like. I haven't been bowling in a long time, and I don't even remember what the ones in the US look like.

寿 【ことぶき】 kotobuki "congratulations!", "long life!"

So with Photoshop finally up and running again, I took my feet out of the picture and cleaned up the messiness in general. Oh, and turned the whole thing the right direction, since I took the pictures backwards and sideways.
The character was written in a script form, which is why it doesn't really look even vaguely like the character when typed. But the brush weighs something around 20 pounds, I think, and was dripping all over. There were puddles of ink in places that could've filled an entire normal-sized sumi bottle.

寿 【ことぶき】  kotobuki (n) congratulations!, long life!, (P)

And two other words, so you can see why kanji often make no sense.

恵比寿 【えびす】 ebisu (n) The God of Wealth, (P)
寿喜焼 【すきやき】  sukiyaki (n) (food) thin slices of beef, cooked with
   various vegetables in a table-top cast-iron
   pan, sukiyaki

Pictures of Me Not Being Dead Yet

So this probably doesn't make much sense, since it's just a random spam of pictures from the past week or so. There are pictures from the farewell party, from when ten of us went to Mr. Young Mens (a small okonomiyaki shop, not a gay bar), a random picture of my school from the outside, and a picture from when we went bowling.

Oh, and here's a random picture of me, 'cause I look funny.

To start off this picture spam are the pictures from the farewell party. Such as the wide shot with a whole bunch of people standing around, and Simon playing guitar off on the right side. The school's calligraphy teacher painted a huge character as a kind of performance, and it was kind of cool. I tried to get a direct overhead shot by way of a bunch (about twenty) pictures from above with me wandering around on the thing. Hence the character being surrounded by my feet.

After that, I went to tea ceremony, where Valentina took this picture of me and Tanaka-sensei, who is the guy sitting next to me who looks like he's about to wet himself. Formal sitting style is apparently his kryptonite or something. On the way home after that, I waited for Angela and Yanavy and took this picture of my school, since the light seemed to be just about perfect for it.

The next day, we all went to karaoke and I didn't sing. Then we went to Kawaramachi and tried to go to a Mexican restaurant, but we had too many people, so we went to a nearby okonomiyaki place and pretty much took up the whole store.

I've brought them a considerable amount of business, now that I think about it...

After that, the girls, QB, and myself went bowling. I think I got the best scores both games with something like 110, if that tells you how skilled our teams were.

Not Dead Yet

I'm not dead yet! Feeling quite well, actually. I think I'd like to go for a walk...

Yeah, I'm doing quite well actually. Just been surprisingly busy with stuff, and so I haven't been at my computer as much. What little time I've been at my computer has been spent organizing things or processing pictures. I have a couple of pictures to put up and I'll get to finding which ones to put up right now.