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.]

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...

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?

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.

Presentation (Divtesting)

I was just awake enought to get this up last night, and I honestly don't know what I changed that made it work after two hours. I think Blogger might have just had pity on me.

I woke up on Tuesday at 6AM cooked a super-duper protein breakfast, and worked on my presentation and went over some last random notes for Japanese for Certified Tests (JCT), in which class I had a test. As expected, it took about 15, maybe 20, minutes. No clue how I did, but if you wanted a guess, I'd say 80%. Ish.

After that, I headed up to the school's Japanese Room. I kid you not, we have a room called the 和室 - "Japan (-style)" "room" and it's where the tea ceremony class takes place. I have no interest in tea ceremony itself, but the girls (of my little squad 'o gaijin anyway) were wearing kimono and this would probably be my last chance to spam pictures of them.

Once I was allowed in, I was sat between the head and sub-head - I don't know their official titles, but between Michiharu TANAKA and Mariko UCHIDA. Pictures. Tea. Sweets. Pictures.

Tanaka is the one at the right who looks like he needs to go to the bathroom. He was probably just about to change to a different sitting position than seiza (which should translate to "death to the foreigners", but doesn't, as far as I know). When I asked if it had defeated him, he replied "I think I must be an alien..."

So after ingesting about two handfuls of pure sugar, I had ten minutes in class and a further 30 minutes of sitting around while we talked in class, etc. IE, just enough time to come down from the sugar and be nice and shaky.

---

Good points

1- Researched extensively and summed everything up neatly
2- Hard-to-understand words were clarified, so it was easy to understand
3- Clearly introduced topic at the beginning
4- Looked at the listeners while speaking and used clear pronunciation
5- Speed and loudness of speech was just right, so it was easy to listen to
6- You had fun with your topic, and that came through in the way you held on.

よかった点

・くわしく調べて、きちんとまとめて発表できた。
・わかりにくいことばは、もう一度違う表現で説明しなおしていて、わかりやすかった。
・はじめに何について話すかはっきり伝えていた。
・聞き手を見ながら、はっきりした発音で発表できた。
・スピードも大きさもちょうどよい声で、聞きやすかった。
・自分が内容を楽しみながら、そして、その楽しさをみんなに伝えようとがんばっていた。

Not-quite-there points

7- Sentence-to-sentence connecting words were almost nonexistant.
8- Because of that, there ended up being a lot of "because"
9- You used a lot of "you know?". Instead, it would be good if you used others, such as "... don't you think?", "... isn't that so?", "... or at least, that's what I think.", "... you may be able to look at it like this." There are a variety.
10- Sometimes, you stopped in the middle of sentences, and just kind of lined of words, which had kind of a weird feeling.
11- There were some words where your pronunciation was hard to understand. Especially long words with lots of kanji. I totally couldn't understand "converters"

もう少しの点

・文と文をつなぐ言葉（接続詞など）があまりなかった。
・そのため、「から」が多くなってしまっていた。
・「でしょ？」も多くなっていた。かわりに、他のいろいろな
言葉を使ってみるとよい。（と思いませんか、ではないでしょ
うか、だと私は思うんですがどうでしょうか、という見方もあ
るかもしれません等、いろいろあります。）
・時々、文が途中で終わってしまった。語だけが並んでいる感じで、少し変だった。
・少し発音がわかりにくい言葉があった。特に漢字の長いことば。
（「てんかんしゃ」は、私は全然意味がわかりませんでした。どういう意味のことばでしょうか？）

Thanks for taking so many pictures.
I bet you can make a good compilation with them. Have fun.

Well, be careful not to eat much cream bread!? LOL

写真をたくさん撮ってくださって、ありがとうございました。
いい文集ができることでしょうね。楽しみです。

では、クリームパンの食べすぎには気をつけて！？（笑）

---

So that's what my teacher thought. I have a pack of notes of what the other students thought as well, but I haven't looked at it yet.

Kilk at left, being cheesy. Me at right... WTF? I don't know.

After the presentation, we hustled the class outside for a group portrait, which we took a couple of just to be sure, which was fortunate, as the first three of the four we took didn't turn out well once I checked them.

Then, I spent an hour and a half helping Uchida-sensei piece together a Word document that had quite possibly the worst formatting I've ever seen in a word document - maybe second worst, thinking about it. Someone I live with has done much worse things in Word, if I think about it, which I'd rather not...
Ahem.

Then, we went shopping for ingredients for the food we were preparing for the farewell party, which I need to be at in about half an hour. It's a potluck and I'm being lame and bringing fried rice, but... It's what I can cook that isn't gyouza.

Jes Visits! - Himeji

So while Jes was here, her, Roxanne, and myself went to Himeji, a city to the South where Himeji castle is located.
As you approach the castle, there's a large field that was probably used as a staging ground or something. It's just a big dirt field. You can see Jes wearing her new jacket in the center of the picture at left. This is a panorama that is composed of, I think, 12 different pictures.

As you come closer to the castle, you can see some of the battlements and the arrow slits and stone-throwing holes and suchlike. At left, Jes is just about to look out one, and you can see another square one at the right side of the frame. There were circular, rectangular, and triangular slits. I would guess they were for different purposes, but I don't know how those specific shapes would be advantageous to anything.

At right is a sign that I liked for the "No danger!" symbol in the lower right. The blue text above the sign says "Plastic bottles are allowed".

This just occurred to me now, but the walk up the walkways was pretty tiring as-is, so I can't imagine what this would be like while constantly trying to dodge rocks and arrows and oil and fighting well-rested sword-/pike-men.

Oh, feel free to add musketeers to that list as well.

This was one rack of guns that was to be seen, but there were probably racks for well over a thousand longarms such as this.

This is "Princess Sen's room" or one of them. She had a whole section of the castle devoted to her and her serving girls, if the signs are to be believed. I don't know what she's doing with the rocks, but I would guess it's some kind of prayer ritual or something like that.

This room is not very high up in the castle and kind of off to one side, but as you go up into the main castle area, you see these little fish guys (left) at random. I think they signify some kind of dolphin (though the tails are sideways for that) or dragon or something. I dunno.

Of the stuff at the castle, I think these fishy statues are probably the most artistic, useless thing there. The rest is fairly bland and militaristic, largely because it consists of empty rooms and hallways.

And doors like the one seen at right. They still work, I think, but were locked so you couldn't open them.

From the top, you have a great view of the city, and I managed to get something like a 280-degree panorama, as you can see.

On the way down, we saw a couple of really neat sights, and I got what is probably my favorite picture of the castle proper, at left. The sunset is what's causing it to turn that nice orange color, though I think they have lights that come on at night to keep it that color. If not, I don't know what they use the massive lightbanks that they had set up for.

Here's that same sunset, a few minutes later, looking the other direction.

And some cats we found. A little after us, an old guy came with two little girls and they fed the cats.

These pictures could really use some warming up, but I guess I missed that when I was working through this set. Oops.

And then there's the toilet. We went to an okonomiyaki place on the way back to the train station, and the place we ate had this toilet. The picture at right really doesn't do the horror of the thing justice, but suffice to say that it had the strangest color scheme of any bathroom I've ever seen.

On top of that, the girls commented that the toilet was kidn of strange, so I had to go investigate. It turns out that it's an old-style toilet with what something like a booster seat on it so that you can sit down like a Western-style toilet. I moved the seat aside for this picture so you can see sort of what's going on. And yes, I washed my hands afterwards.

Random Picture Post

While going through the pictures I want to post in the next post about our trip to Himeji, I kept finding random unrelated pictures I wanted to put up. So, here are some of them.

My parents send me to some stuff for Christmas, including a jacket that basically works magic and a nice pair of sneakers. Even while unwrapping the presents on Christmas Eve, it didn't really feel Christmas-y. What really reminded me of Christmas as a kid was the pile of discarded wrapping paper.

At right is a train in the 通動快速 mode, which I've seen on all kinds of signs and things, but never actually ridden before. It's nothing really impressive, but I've been wondering whether or not they exist since I got here, and I was really excited to discover that I had finally found one.

My airsoft arsenal has grown considerably in the past month or so, as you can see here. Included in that pile is my $4 cheapo generic airsoft gun (far right), a Tokyo Marui spring-powered H&K USP (middle-right), a Tokyo Marui AEP H&K USP and its associated battery, charger, 30-round magazine, 100-round magazine, and 20mm rail converter, and a quick loader that works for every airsoft magazine I've tried it on as yet.

And Yanavy sketched this out because we got bored at the Italian food place near here. That was Jes's first time meeting that group as a whole, and I think she was bored out of her mind because she ended up on the far end and didn't get any of the massive quantity of in-jokes. Poor kitten...

Nara: Sleepy Pre-Post

Yanavy and company (plus me) went to Nara today. I took a lot of pictures, but I haven't really looked through them yet. A couple of them that needed some Photoshopping, though, I did just now.
These picture are from a game center (usually "arcade" in American English") we found completely by accident on the way back to the station. Cool thing: four-player air hockey! I teamed up with Angela against Sara, Cassie, and Yanavy, the latter two of whom took turns.

We also found a super-super cheap place to get takoyaki and I found some really tasty mochi to boot.

Anyway, inside the game center were these banners, which I felt pretty much required to take pictures of. Tails is my favorite character of them, and pretty much always has been. I just noticed that Sonic and Knuckles both have a species name, whereas Amy and Tails both just have their full names.

The quality of the pictures is kind of bleh, at best, but I did what I could for them. Eh.


Here's one last picture so you can see what they look like coming out of my camera:

Jes Visits! - Jeff's Party

One of my teachers is a rather famous guy in this area and is a published (he has, like 13 books) researcher of intercultural communication. He also teaches English to a lot of people, and he hosts parties at various times to help give his students chance to interact with each other and to practice the languages that they're studying. To aid this end, he used a lottery to figure out seating, which made sure everybody was nice and mixed. Jes was at the center table of three and I was at the South table, where the population varied widely. Hidemi, at left, was one of the people at my table.
[Edit: I guess I forgot to mention that he has a couple of television shows and he teaches at his own English school. To quote Anchorman: He's "kind of a big deal".]

I took some pictures, as I am wont to do, though almost all of them came out a little blurry. Once I pulled out my flash, there were no problems, but before that the light level was too low even for my fast lens to get sharp pictures.

Stupid physics, stupid optical levers, stupid 50mm.

Anyway, as long as you look at them really small, it's not so easy to see the blurriness, so here's what I've got. It's mostly me and Jes, but she's cute and my parents always want pictures of me, and Jose's apparently a photographer. He was drooling over my camera, in any case, which is a little weird - it's kind of backwards - for me.

First up is a picture of Jes with Jose, who everyone calls "Josie", using the girls' name instead of the Spanish pronunciation. I think this is weird, but maybe that's his actual name. Who knows.


At far left is me setting up my tripod. I like this picture, because I'm decently far enough away that you can't see how doom I look.
The next picture I'm not so happy about, but I think it would look pretty good if I weren't so tired. It was nearly 1AM at that point, though, and we had gotten up around 7AM to take Jes to church.

I think this may be the first picture on the blog of me in my blue shirt, which is one of my favorites. It's pretty much my favorite color, though it looks a little different in these pictures.

At right is Jes being cute. That's really all that needs to be said. I wish that I could say I took this picture, but I think Jose took it.

Moving on.

We did a gift exchange that was... weird. Everybody brought a ~$10 present and then we sang a song and passed it around. I got a nifty blankety thing.

No real idea what's going on at left. Maybe it was when he was saying how she had prepared all the food. I remember that she was the one who did it, and apparently on really short notice, but I dunno if this was when he said that. The food was good, by the way. Speaking of food, this is one of the sweets that was brought out, along with about two hundred creampuffs and a huge box of very, very good mikan, which are known as satsuma oranges in English, I think.

This was the group of people who stayed until fairly late. Remember I was setting up that tripod earlier? I've got the remote in my right hand in this picture. I used the two-second timer to hide it. From left to right: Jeff, guy whose name I don't know, David, Hidemi, Jose, me (Will!), and the kitten (Jes).

To finish the night off, Jeff played his Japanese flute for us. Calling it a "Japanese flute" really doesn't do it justice, but I don't remember the special name it has. It's got a special name because it's longer than the normal flute, known as a shakuhachi.

It was interesting, though a little slower-paced than I was expecting. I was excited to hear him play it and Jes really enjoyed it as well, apparently, because she got to learn about new musical stuff.