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.

Christmas Eve Class

(The picture is one I took a few weeks ago. It was my second attempt at HDR and you can see it didn't work so well. It's not my camera, but I just can't seem to get HDR to work right for me...)

I think I've mentioned this before, but Christmas here is treated about the same as Valentine's Day in the US. In other words, it's a holiday for spending time with your 恋人 koibito ("lover"), and you can expect them to be rather upset if you have to work instead, or if you want to go out with friends instead of with her. I think this expectation is one-way, and girls can do whatever they want.

I found out yesterday that we have a make-up class scheduled for Christmas Eve. In case you needed more proof that Christmas is a cheese holiday in Japan, there you go. On the bright side, that teacher invited Yanavy and I to a dinner at his place on Sunday.

On the down side, there's a $10 secret Santa thing. I'm no good at finding presents and I have two secret Santa things to do!

A Yabari Moment

We were talking about shamisen today in class. A shamisen (三味線 "three flavor strings") is kind of like the Japanese version of a banjo, though the way that they're played is very different. To begin with, or at least, to begin with my very limited knowledge of the subject, banjos tend to strummed while shamisen tend to be plucked. I don't think I've seen or heard one strummed. In any case, the sounding chamber - the body - is made from a frame of some kind of wood, and then covered with the skin of a cat or a dog, whichever you happen to have handy.

Now, I don't know how I made this mistake, but I thought that the teacher had said that the strings of the shamisen were made from the skin of a cat, which would be... wrong. I said as much, and class went on. It was just a small Yabari moment.

元気先生: Do you know what part of a cat is used in the construction of a shamisen?
Me: The... stomach? (腸 "intestines" was a word I didn't know until later.)
元気先生: Er... The skin. You know... [strumming motion] right?

[I'm not certain how I construed this to mean that the strings (specifically the strings) were made from the skin of a cat, but that's the idea I got.]

Me: I, er, don't think that's right, but...
元気先生: I think it is.
Me, to Valentina: He's wrong.
Valentina, to me: He's Japanese, I think you're wrong.

This somehow upset me - more than it should have - and I started furiously researching.
Or at least, as furiously as possible with a pocket Japanese-English dictionary. I researched, in any case. As I said earlier, it turns out that the skin of a cat (or a dog!) is used for the sounding chamber, and that the strings are not only not made from the intestines of a cat, but "catgut" refers to a string made from anything except cat. I was exactly wrong. Ouch.

Oh, and to top it off, shamisen strings in particular are traditionally made from silk, unlike Western stringed instruments, though both usually use nylon or other plastic strings now.

Anyway, we saved the rest of the discussion for the break, and I looked it up on Wikipedia and - ha! - was mostly able to translate it on the fly. As an example, I admit that I don't know the difference between a donkey and a mule is, or what either one is called in Japanese.

Today's class was fun, but a little embarrassing because I Yabari'd - though I'm very much a noob compared to the Yabari himself.

Political Debate

I went to get pastries last night and ended up getting in what was at times a rather heated political debate with a the clerk at the pastry shop.

At first we were just talking about random stuff, and we eventually got onto the topic of water usage during bathing. She feels that Americans waste vast quantities of water by only bathing in bathwater once.

This is a great example of cross-cultural weirdness. For a Westerner, I think the idea of using the same bathwater that was just used by three other people is kind of gross. For a Japanese, not doing that is a terrible waste of water, and they don't seriously consider our cultural aversion to reusing bathing water as a valid point because, to someone raised with that kind of tradition, it's just silly. I'm speaking in sweeping generalizations here, of course, but I thought it was an interesting point.

On the other hand, I was able to counter by pointing out that Japanese shower before they take a bath, and that shower is as long as many people's entire bathing process. In other words, the shower at the beginning of their shared-bath thing may use a similar amount of water to what someone in the US might use in their shower.

At one point, we were talking about congress and various houses and whatnot, but I have neither the vocabulary nor the knowledge for a lengthy discussion on such things.

A bit after that, she said that she was someone disturbed by the fact that America drafts only black people and the poor into the military. When I was shocked by this, she said "I see there are many things Americans don't know", which I have to admit, I thought was kind of rude. I slowly managed to batter some sense into her (this is, of course, assuming that I am more knowledgeable about it than she is) about what the draft is and how it isn't currently implemented, and how the Selective Service works, and how it doesn't.

Later, she played the "You nuked us!" card and even knows history well enough to play the "You firebombed us!" card to trump the "You nuked us!" card.

Clerk: Attacking civilians... There should be a better way.
Me: I think it was done to lower the morale and try and convince the Japanese government to stop fighting in the war.
Clerk: Still.
Me: I agree, but that's how World War II* was fought.
Clerk: But napalm? Think of all the people, just sitting in their houses in fear, with no way out. And Japan is made of wood, so it's all the worse. It just burned completely.
Me: Yeah, but if you look at that from the enemy's point of view... That's good thinking, isn't it?
Clerk: Civilians.
Me: Yes.

It was quite an interesting discussion, and I enjoyed it. Further, it was very good practice, I think, and I felt I was doing a surprising job of holding up my end of it, which really shows the advances my Japanese has made from the first day of class last semester. I had to ask her to slow down a couple of times, but when people start getting upset, they're hard to understand no matter the language.

Oh, and the pastries were delicious, as always.

*第二次世界大戦 dai ni-ji sekai tai-sen Or "major second worldly big-ass war" Thank you, Okada! I don't what other vocab I remember from her class, but I've been wanting to use that one in discussion for two years now.

Test of Doom

We had a test today in Basic Japanese that was pretty much a dastardly test all the way around.

First off, we had a three-page test. Not so bad there except that they printed it on double-size pages so they would have more room to mark errors. Kind of them, right?

Once that was finished, we were to write a 作文 sakubun ("composition") about a saying from our native language. We were allowed to write this beforehand and simply had to copy it onto the test, and we were further allowed to use our dictionaries and pretty much anything except the fellow students.

Here it is:

私の選んだことわざは「Rome wasn’t built in a day」ということわざである。　これから、その英語の言葉の意味を説明する。	The saying that I chose is "Rome wasn't built in a day". Now, I'll explain the meaning of those English words.
まず、「Rome」はローマ、または有名な古代の都市である。そのローマは雄大なところで、このことわざでは、都市じゃなくて、何かいいものか価値があるものを表す。次の「wasn’t」とは「じゃない」の過去受け身形で、「建つ」と意味する「built」とつながると意味は「建たれなかった」になっている。	First, "Rome" is "Rome", the famous ancient city. That Rome is a grand place, so in this saying it means not "city", but something good or something that has value. The next "wasn't" is the past passive form of "not" and when combined with the word that means "to build" "built"(1), the meaning becomes "wasn't built".
残っている言葉はべつべつでさほど意味がないのに、分けられるので、そうしようと思う。四つ目の「in」と言うのは「ある間うちに」のことである。次の不定冠詞の「a」を「日」のようの「day」と合わせると意味は「一日」になる。	The remaining words don't have that much meaning on their own, but we can break them up, so let's do so. The fourth word, "in", means "in a certain period"(2). The next word, the indefinite article "a", when connected to the word like "day", "day"(3), changes the meaning to "one day".
もし前の全部をつながって直訳したら、「ローマは一日の間に建たれなかった」になる。それでも、本当の意味は「価値があることが時々遅くできても大丈夫だ」あるいは「いいもの作るのは難しいよ」とだいぶに似ていると思う。	If you take all the previous pieces, connect them, and translate them literally, you'd get "Rome wasn't built in a day". In spite of that, I think the true meaning is similar to "It's okay if things that have value take a while to finish" or "The creation of good things is difficult".
日本語でこのことわざの意味を持っていることわざ、確かあると思っても、探してみたのに、等価のことわざをみつけることできなかった。多分、「頑張って下さい」と言ったら、十分に近い意味があると思う。	Even though I think in Japanese that there is definitely a saying that carries this saying's meaning, I looked and was unable to find it. Probably, if you just said "Keep trying!" it would be close... enough.

I'm not a big fan of tables and Blogger handles them particularly poorly, but this makes it look like I wrote more than I did, so you get a table.
1) Keep in mind that these were translated from Japanese, so where it says "built means built"
2) Recursive definitions suck, but this is another part where the fact that it's a translation sort of changes things. It'll make sense if you look at the paragraph that's from.
3) See (2).

On top of that, we had a stand-up presentation that was supposed to last for 5-10 minutes. I did mine and recorded myself to time the length and I think it was about 2 minutes, and only that long because I screwed up a couple of times. I have not mastered the art of writing these frustratingly long compositions and speeches that everybody else seems to be able to do. I think it's a combination of a lack of Japanese proficiency and my lack of oratory proficiency.

Only since I started this blog have I gained the ability to talk about length about nothing in particular. I've considered doing something similar in Japanese, but there would be no readers and it would be a lot of work. It would be great practice, but unless I can convince someone (Japanese) that they want to proofread crappy posts everyday for free, it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Two prongs? も一つ、お願いします！

Checked out of the hotel today, and they hailed a taxi for me. The taxi took me to Kyoto Gaidai, where I was supposed to meet someone "by 10:00". I ended up having quite a discussion with Tetsushi YAMADA, who... does something at the front gate. I'm not being secretive, I just have no idea what his job is. He's a pretty decent guy and he speaks better English than most of the Japanese I've encountered so far. Most Japanese people seem to recognize just about any single English word I throw at them, so I can use English words when my vocabulary fails me, such as trying to describe a "TV cord", because "coaxial cable" doesn't quite convey the same... I'm-not-looking-for-a-technical-term.

Anyway, as it turns out I got there an hour and some change early, so they told me to wait in the resource room. So I drop my stuff in the resource room and see a line of computers. Yay! Finally, I'll be able to go Internet something! Alas, it was not to be. KUFS apparently has their own domain, and none of the standard guest accounts worked. Oh, and my laptop was at 7% charge, with nary a three-pronged plug in sight.

Which brings me to my next point: grounded plugs. What the hell happened here, Japan? In the hotel room, there was not a single three-prong outlet to be seen. But you can imagine that. I mean, they must have just not redone the wiring since, say, World War II. ... ... Or something.

Except there's not a single one in my whole apartment. Eh? Eh? Surely the Japanese recognize the risk of electrical surges and whatever else grounded plugs are good for.

In the end, I discovered that two of the outlets in my apartment do, in fact, have a ground. It's a screw. Under the plug itself. To use it, you have to go to a 電気屋 (something like Fry's, but scaled down to Japanese-size) and pick up a converter. The converter has a little two-pronged fork on the end of a six-inch wire; the whole assembly looks like somebody's trying to rig up a VHF antenna for their TV through the wall with only one terminal once it's all done.

Now, you'd think this would work like every other such assembly ever but it doesn't, of course, because OMGWTFJAPANBBQ or something. Hell, I don't know. Anyway, you unscrew the brass - I think - screw and then slide the wire under this rectangular washer. I didn't want to end up accidentally flipping the kill-the-stupid-foreigner switch that I'm sure is hidden somewhere, so I had my kanrinrin (something of a live-in manager. Mine's name is "Gyoubu" as far as I can tell) do it. Now I have one surge protector worth of modern, grounded outlets in my apartment.

Mission complete?