Winter Break!

Today is Monday here. It was my last day of classes before winter break starts. Why they put the first day of break on a Tuesday and the last on a Thursday, I can only wonder. On top of that, my Basic Japanese class had a section test today. I was considering skipping and just taking it when break ends, but I figured I'd rather suck it up and take a low score than worrying the whole break whether I had studied enough.

On top of the section test, we had an essay that was supposed to be a page. That's not really bad, but I thought I only had about 1/3 of a page written. As it turned out, my essay came out to one and a half pages when I wrote it out by hand and added a conclusion. Here's my essay in a nutshell:
- I wonder how クリームパン (cream bread) came to be...
- History
- History
- Some extra history
- Something about あんパン
- Mention ジャンパン
- I love クリームパン!

But that's over with and winter break is starting. Yay!

Most of One of Those Days...

Today was just one of those days where nothing goes right... for the most part. I was doing fine until lunch. After some messy eating, I found out that I had a kanji test in Basic Japanese. Level 4 kanji tests are usually 20 new kanji for writing and about 30 new kanji for reading. Not something I'm able to pull off in twenty minutes right before class. That said, I managed to get 11/15, and two of those points were due to my own inattentiveness and the rule I keep forgetting about with 送り仮名 (the syllabary characters after words with kanji). As a bonus, I also didn't have time to find out what any of the words meant, which killed me later in class, as today - coincidentally? - was the first time we actually did anything relating to the meanings of words on the tests. I swear the teachers are psychic or something. Maybe they're ninja. Psychic ninja?

Unfortunately, I also forgot to do the eight-page packet we were assigned over the weekend. Oh, and research someplace in Japan to want to go. Oh, and read the assigned parts of the book. Oh, and... actually, I think that's it. Normally, forgetting to do your homework wouldn't be such a painful experience, but when class drags out for three hours, it's at least three times as agonizing.

管理人

The manager of my apartment building spends a lot of time working on pictures and editing random stuff he's scanned in. The bizarre thing is that he uses what I can only guess is some kind of tracing software that appears to be roughly akin to using MS Paint for everything.

I just came back from watching him touch a black and white scan for ten minutes. He's probably been at it for an hour or two and will be at it for a while yet. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I can do the same thing in Photoshop in about five seconds.

But this sort of thing is really common in Japan. As an example, if you go to the mall, there will sometimes be three people at one entrance controlling traffic. They stand there and do nothing for the better part of the day, then hold up their arms for a little bit every time someone goes by on a bike or by foot. On the way to school every morning, I see a guy named Yamada. His job is to stand at the front gate to the school, keep track of visitors, and answer questions about where and when things are. This is fairly normal, right? Well, except that they have three people in the little guard shack he's in.
In addition to him, there are two or three crossing guards at the nearby intersections, and three more people who just stand at corners whose jobs I cannot fathom. But this kind of thing is normal for them.