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...

Creamy Essay

I've tried to be fairly true to the Japanese as I wrote it without embellishing it or making it sound too much more natural than it fails to be. I did this mostly so that I could make sure that there were no serious gaps in the writing that I was just missing because I couldn't evaluate the writing as a whole. Or something.
Now, I'm not saying that there are no fairly serious gaps where you're just like "Wait, what?" But they're not serious enough for me to want to reflow each paragraph.

When you're dealing with Asian names written in roman letters, last names are sometimes written in all-uppercase letters for clarity, as I have done here.

菓子クリームパン！ ウィルロクド	Pastry Cream Bread! William Lockwood
もし一年前の私は「クリームパンって、何のことですか」と聞かれたら、答える事ができなかったはずだ。日本に来る前には「クリームパン」と聞いた事がなかったので知らないのは当たり前の事かもしれない。去年２００８には初めてクリームパンを見たのだ。クラスのみんあにはちょっと信じがたいだろう。	If you were to ask me a year ago "What kind of thing is a kuriimu pan?", I don't expect I could've answered. I hadn't heard the word before coming to Japan, so I think that my not knowing may be kind of a given. Last year, 2008, I saw cream-pan for the first time. Kind of hard to believe, right?
さて、クリームパンの発明に関すして話したいと思う。日本に１４世紀に中国からまんじゅうと言う食べ物が伝わった。当初、肉しかに詰められていなかったが日本人の口に合うようにあんこに詰められて来て、日本のまんじゅうが発明された。１６世紀にポルトガルからの探検者が日本へ火縄銃や宗教やパン、つまり技術と文化を日本に持って来た。その時に日本人の初めてパンを見た。もう少し後、日本は鎖国を始めた結果、パンは外国文化の一部として禁ずられたので約三百年間にほとんだなかった。でも、あんまんじゅうはのこっていた。	Okay, I'd like to talk about the invention of cream-pan. In the 14th century, the Chinese brought a food called manjuu ["steamed yeast bun", a super-soft bread-thing]. In the beginning, they were just filled with meat, but came to be filled with anko ["sweet bean paste", the Japanese version of corn syrup, basically. It's in everything.] in order to suit Japanese tastes and thus was the Japanese manjuu invented. In the 16th century, Portuguese explorers came to Japan and brought matchlock muskets, religion, and bread, in other words, culture and technology, with them. At that time, the Japanese people first saw bread. A little later, Japan started its seclusive phase and bread was forgotten about for about three hundred years. But anko-filled manjuu remained.
１９世紀の明治時代に侍の地位が政府にとられた。その前に侍だった人々は武士ではなくなって来たら、新しい就職を探された。その中の一人、木村安兵衛は西洋文化を普及させたほうがいい思っていたため１８６９年に日本の初めてのパン屋を作った。パン屋の名前は「文英堂」だって、すぐ「木村屋」に変わった。木村屋の新しいパンの種類として、アンパンが発明されて、毎日売り切れていたくらい大人気だった。	In the 19th century, during the Meiji period, samurai were stripped of their rank by the government. People who were previously samurai, when they came to lose their status as warriors, were forced to seek out new employment. One of those people, Yasubei KIMURA, thought that Western culture should be spread and, in 1869, made Japan's first bakery. It's name was "Bun Ei Dou" ["sentence","beauty","hall". Go figure.], but soon changed it to Shop Kimura [kimura-ya]. As a new kind of bread from Shop Kimura, the anpan [bread, filled with anko] was invented and was so hugely popular that it sold out every day.
１８７５年に天皇の侍従が木村屋に行ったら、天皇にアンパンをあげようと申し入れた。桜はずっと前から日本の印だったので、木村屋は新しい桜アンパンを作った。天皇と皇后がその桜アンパンを食べたら、もちろんおいしかったので、その時から木村屋のアンパンを注文して引き続いた。この出来事でアンパンは全国の人気できた。現在でもアンパンはまだ一番人気のある菓子パンだ。	In 1875, the emperor's chamberlain went to Shop Kimura and suggested that they give some anpan to the emperor. Because the cherry blossom has long been a symbol of Japan, Shop Kimura made a new kind of sakura anpan. When the emperor and empress ate that sakura anpan, it was, of course delicious, so from then for a long time they ordered anpan from Shop Kimura. By way of this big event, anpan gained nationwide popularity. Even today, it's the most popular of pastries in Japan.
今までの話は日本の菓子パンの全員に関する長話だった。アンパンは大人気になったら、さまざまな中身と作り方の変更をされて見た。その菓子パン実験によって、今日ジャンパンやメロンパンなどを食べられる。	The story up until now was the long story about all of Japan's pastries. When anpan became really popular, various fillings and recipes were tried. Because of those pastry experiments, you can eat pastries like melon pan and jamu pan [basically a sealed PB&J sandwich, hold the PB).
その一種はクリームパンだ。１９０４年に中村屋で働いていた相(そう)馬(ま)愛(あい)蔵(ぞう)と言うパン屋さんがカスタードを中身として試した。もちろん、すばらしくおいしかった。その慶事あったからずっと日本の全国にはクリームパンも人気のあるパンだった。というのは、現在日本の三番目人気だ。	One of those types was cream bread. In 1904, a baker working at Shop Nakamura, Aizou SOUMA. tried custard as a filling. Of course, it was wonderfully delicious. Since that auspicious day, cream bread has also been a popular pastry in all of Japan Japan. That is to say, even today, it's the third most popular pastry.
でも、日本に来る前クリームパン聞いたことすらないからそれら全然知らなかったのだろう。私の日本にいる二日に学校の前のショップ９９で証明写真を撮りに行ったと店の中のおいしそうな物は多そうだったため、できたらさっそく行きたかった。戻ったとき、三十秒うちにカスタードメロンパンを見つけて、買った。今でも、それは私の一番好きなクリームパンだ。	But before I came to Japan, I hadn't even heard of cream bread, right? On my second day of being here in Japan, I went to the Shop99 in front of the school to get some ID photographs taken and inside the store there seemed to be a lot of delicious-looking things in the store, so I wanted to come back without delay if possible. When I went back, within 30 seconds, I found a castard melon cream bread and bought it. Even now, that's my favorite cream bread.

Why Always Me?

So on the first day of class last semester, the teacher asked me to go sit in front of the whole class while they solicited me with questions. First day, new teacher I've never met, and the most familiar I am with anybody in the class is Sara, who I'd met during our entrance ceremony.

So I'm sitting in front of the whole class of about 17, shaking with nervous anticipation - the bad kind, if there's any question in your mind - and the first question I get comes from Yabari. See that link for more info, but it basically ended up with me sitting in front of the class looking like an idiot for fifteen minutes while responding to questions with about as much fluency as my little sister reading a physics textbook. She's 8 years old, by the way... I think...

So today, the teacher wants us to individually volunteer to get up and do and do pretty much what I did the first semester. Of course, nobody volunteers.

Naturally, she picks me to go up to the front of the room and talk. But not for fifteen minutes this time. No, no, no. She just waited until she got bored of asking me questions.

To start with, she asked if I liked sweets, which is like... Well, I like sweets, anyway. After we talked about where you can buy what, and what temples are involved, and how to get there via the train system I haven't used in months, we went on further and someone asked what else I know about Kyoto.
Ten minutes and two maps later, "What other hobbies do you have?"
Ten minutes and probably a diagram or two later, "Where are you from? America, was it?"
Three minutes and a very rectangular map of the US and Washington later...

And this went on for upwards of an hour. Sometimes, it was kind of cool, and I totally got to make maps and diagrams, and we basically spent an hour of the class with me teaching the class a little bit about almost all of my interests. At times when I found my vocabulary particularly lacking, it got a little embarrassing.

Here's my best blunder of the day that I can recall:
宇宙引っ越し　うちゅうひっこうし (uchuu hikkoushi) "Change residence to space"
宇宙飛行士　うちゅうひこし (uchuu hikoushi) "Space pilot"

I also got to talk to a math teacher for a while, who strongly recommended I not take his class because it was too easy. That's weird for me. That's like someone telling me not to take a kanji class because I know them too well or something. Shocking, anyway.

Oh, and I got full points on a kanji test today. Also shocking.

Oh, and I think I finally figured out how to cook gyouza and make it come out right.

Despite the title of this post, all in all, today was pretty good.

School! I think.

Okay, tomorrow is my first day of school. At least, according to our official calendar.
We shall see if I can get some decent sleep tonight. Something I ate isn't agreeing with my stomach, so I'm not certain. I just ate some Saltines, though, so I should be fine in a few minutes.

... Not!

So... Walking to school, it seemed awfully quiet. I couldn't point to any single sound that was missing, but there's a background hum of a city that usually doesn't go away, and that wasn't there. It's just my imagination, I thought.
So I get to the intersection by my school and I notice that not only is there not a massive pile of people waiting to cross the intersection, there are no crossing guards. Weird, but I'm running a few minutes late at this point, so not too surprising, I guess. Mental shrug.
So I open the door to building nine and - actually, I didn't. It was locked, and while a quarter inch of glass isn't even close to impassable...

So after not opening the door to building nine, I went over and talked to one of the guards:
Me: [inhaling to start talking]
Guard: Oh, hi! It's been a while, hasn't it!
Me: Have I met this person before? I mean, I guess I have, but... Uh...
Me, out loud: Uh, yeah! Do you know when building nine will open?
Guard: Today's a holiday. It's respect for the aged day. [She said this part v-e-r-y slowly so I could pick up the syllables. I then went on about how I thought today seemed strange due to this, and that, and this other thing.]
Me: Anyway. So I should be able to get into building nine to talk to someone either tomorrow or the day after, as long as I go in in the afternoon?
Guard: Yeah, you should be able to.

Having written that down, the conversation doesn't sound nearly as fun as it was when I was actually having it. She had a cute accent in her English, which she would use occasionally for some more common words, though I suspect she's pretty skilled.

So today is not only not the first day of classes, but today is so not the first day that we don't have class for another two days in addition. Woo, more summer break.
[Edit: It turns out I may have been off by an entire week.]

I never got to sleep last night...

Slow Week

Sorry for the lack of updates. Last week was a killer for reasons unknown, and this week is our last week of the first semester. I have, I think, four papers to write between now and Friday. It's Monday evening when I'm posting this. Oh, and Thursday is pretty much all out because there's a festival we're required to go to.

Anyway, it's slow, but I'll try and get something up between now and the festival.

Grades

With the end of my first semester drawing near, I'm a little concerned about grades. I got a 35/60 (58%) on a grammar test we got back today. To be fair, the Sara's very studious and she only got 42/60 (70%). The class did, as a whole, poorly enough that we're essentially going to retake the test in lieu of the test she was intending to give next week.
I haven't been doing well on tests in that class, though I got some pretty good marks on the first few quizzes, this is one of the classes where I hope my attendance will save me, since I think I've only missed one day, and that was one sanctioned by the head of my program. By "sanctioned", I mean he gave us taxi money to go to a festival, in addition to canceling class.

As for my other classes...

• Basic Japanese is... I dunno. I got some poor grades at the beginning, but I think I've been average 16-18 out of 20 (80-90%) on the tests since then. I've done less than stellar on a couple of the tests, but I also got a 91/100 on the last test and I got an 87% on another.
  
• I've missed a couple of classes of ICP, but all but one were things that teacher wanted us to go to. In addition, though, I got a 65% on our first essay, and still haven't turned in the second. The third is due at some later date.
• Kanji... No clue. Seriously, my grades have wavered in this class a lot. It's one of the two classes I'm most worried about. A C would be good enough here.
• JCT is... also not so good. Again, a C would be good enough, but for that to happen, attendance will need to be a large part of the grade.
  I did pretty poorly on the kanji tests at the beginning because I was disorganized and couldn't keep the test types and content straight, and I had issues with that even on the last one. I've taken to asking this teacher, when I first see her that day, whether or not there is a test.
• The rest I'm not so worried about, because they're largely based on attendance.

I'm being somewhat purposefully vague here. I'm not entirely comfortable listing out which classes I'm taking.

Now, as negative as this post seems in general, I've heard from other students that I'll probably be surprised when I look at my grades are, to the extent that I might think to myself "Where did they get these?" I don't know if that's the case, but I sure wouldn't mind that, as long as it's in my favor.

Studying for Grammar

We have a test in my grammar class tomorrow, and here's what's on it:
o~suru (humble generic verbs)
o~naru (honorific generic verbs)
demo ii / demo kamaimasen (asking permission)
ageru/kureru/morau/yaru (giving and receiving verbs)
moraitai/hoshii (requests)
oshieru<>narau and the like (various verb pairs)

First, I know, Ick! Romaji!, but I'm tired and should be studying, and it's 3AM. And it's 3AM.

Now, almost all of this is covered in 2nd year Japanese, and some of it in first year, so it should be old hat, right? Right!
Except this is grammar class, so she comes up with the most bizarre ways to use them she can, or combines them all in one question. As an example, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she throws a question such as "oyasuminishitaindaga, sonoue narattehoshikute oshietekurenaika" which is fairly simple, actually, but... Honestly, if I could come up with what she was going to throw at as, it wouldn't be a problem, would it?

Anyway, that's all pretty simple stuff, so I'm not too worried about it, but I have a vocab test in the morning with, like, 50 new words on it that I haven't looked at yet. I was kind of busy studying for, you know, the one today that had 50 other new words.

Apparently, I'm grumpy at 3AM. Nearly 3:30AM.

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.

Classesssss

Some of you have asked why it is that I almost never talk about classes here.
Part of it is that what we're studying really doesn't make any sense unless you can read Japanese and have a fairly thorough background in Japanese grammar. I'm not out to give grammar lessons - though that's not to say I won't ever post language-related stuff. I intend to, but not until I find something truly useful that I understand well enough to talk about at length.

So I could talk about what I'm learning in classes, but it would look something like this:
Today, we learned about some of the various uses of ということだ and わけにはいかない. ということだ is similar in meaning to だそうです, except it also serves double-duty functioning as a more distant-sounding つまり.

Anyway who can understand that will already know what I'm talking about, or will have had to look up every word, and then make the connections from there. Probably with some sort of paper in there somewhere.

In any case, that would just be boring.

So that aside, I can just say something like:
Classes are going like they usually do, which is to say that they are usually boring with interesting bits scattered around about once a day.

Which would also get old quick. So if you ever feel like asking me how classes are going, you can feel free to point yourself to that. There's a 99% chance that's how classes are going.

Oh, and here's some Dilbert. The post needed a picture.

Bleh.

Not feeling so good today, so I went into to class to take the quiz and headed back home. The teacher was really nice about it.

Osaka with Yasuko

Last Saturday, I went to Osaka and was shown around my Yasuko, the daughter of a teacher from about a year and a half ago. Here's her posing with some たこ焼き (... it's pronounced takoyaki...). Trying to describe takoyaki is... well...
Basically, they're little balls of fried dough with bits of octopus inside. I had some more today, actually, on the way to judo club.

It ended up being a day full of coincidences, but basically we just wandered around Osaka for five hours. We visited the Umeda Sky Building, which was ... Disappointingly unfrightening, but sufficiently high that I got a good pano. I still need to stitch it together, though.

They had a couple of gift shops, and I almost bought these for Josh. It is, in fact, pudding cups. They're called おっぱいプリン, literally, "breast pudding". The text on the right reads "A sweet desert!" and the text on the left reads something like... "If you want to lick, it's okay to lick!" but in some sort of cutesy fashion, I guess. They're caramel flavored, I think.
I also ate some cake and discovered this Engrish, seen at left.

At this point, we ditched her friend and wandered around Osaka for a while in search of cheap radios. I found a couple of shops that sold them, but they were all really expensive. I asked one of the shop owners where the cheap radios were and pointed at the one I was standing in front of that was only $120 without an antenna and for a single unit. What's more, they only interoperate reliably with other radios of the same model. That's totally... cool, I guess?
Also, I intend to go to at least one maid cafe, just so I can have gone to one. We didn't have time, though, so not today. We did find a couple to check out later, though.

At left are Yasuko, Yoko, and Toru Kodama, who totally bought me dinner at a really nice place. Nice as in, it had courses. Nice as in, they had delicious, properly-cooked steak. I don't want to know how much my part of that dinner was, by itself.

On the way back, I ended up talking to a cute-ish girl on the way back to Kyoto. As it turned out, she had just gotten off work and was about to go get dinner, so we went and ate at a bar. I totally misread her and thought she was going to try and get me to pay for her to drink, but she ended up paying for my food and the weird juice stuff I had, so I felt bad for thinking she was up to something, but we met up with some of my other friends and everybody had a good time, I think. At left is her posing with a gay Japanese man and some guy from my apartment building. I don't know either of their names.

The pano just finished pano'ing, here it is, in the most friendly format possible. I left it all weird-looking because I think it looks cool. That's five different pictures, believe it or not.
Warning: full size is 2.8MB and will take forever to load.

It's just about 11:30PM here now, and I am, as they say in Kansai dialect, meccha tired. That's pronounced "may-chuh", by the way.

Now for homework!

Okayama Field Trip, day 1

I'm going to start off by saying that if it seems like this is an awful small number of pictures for a two-day trip... Well, it is. The reason for that is that I have about 50 up in the gallery for this trip.
On Wednesday and Thursday, all the study abroad students went on a field trip instead of classes. I'm sure a couple people skipped out, but pretty much all 120 or so of us went, I think. It was school-sponsored, and it would be entirely possible to go and not pay a dime more, but I spent about $60 during the two-day period between various random food and ice cream and drinks and omiyage.

We left the school around 8AM, stopped at some kind of rest area about halfway, and got to our first place around 11. It was the Bizen sword smithing village, which is cool, but we pretty much just wandered around in a museum, which was not so cool. Everybody else must have thought it was pretty boring, too, as the three little smithing video games they had set up never fell into disuse for more than about thirty seconds. They had some hand-forged kitchen knives for sale, but I fortunately only had about $90 on me and they were averaging about $120. As cool as swords are, I'm not really a museum person. They always feel kind of snobby, I think. Or at least it's similar to snobby.

Next, we got back on the bus for... a... while? Anyway, we had lunch a bit later, and I ate most of it, but couldn't convince myself to eat the little sardine fish thing.

Ew.

On the bright side, after lunch, we looked at another random tourist-trappish shop, then went and played in a park. I'm not sure if that was planned or not, but I think it was one of the highlights of the trip. There are some good shots from the park in the gallery.

This is a picture of the girl I sat with on the way back. I can neither spell nor pronounce her name, but it's Russian, and is apparently very common.

Next up is the oldest public school in the world. Or at least, so they claim. I thought it was a nice area, as it was the first time I've seen grass in decent quantity since comng to Japan. There were a couple of other schools touring around here, too, and I accidentally got a pantyshot on some random girl when I took a picture of their class. There was some interesting stuff here, but I would have to recommend the Korakuen garden over this place if you're choosing between the two. The school's name was something like shizutani, which I would venture to guess means "quiet valley". By the way, gallery.

Later, we went to an all-you-can-eat strawberry farm, where you basically get an hour to pick and eat as many as you can. This by itself was pretty cool, but I had a bandanna in my pocket and ended up bringing about four pounds of strawberries with me. That bandanna now looks like I tried to kill someone with it and smells like I put about four pounds of strawberries in it. Strangely enough.
I later found out that they were stopping people when they tried to bring out even a handful of strawberries, so I guess it's just by chance that I managed to walk off with my big bag o' fruity business. Even though we didn't have a fridge, we managed to eat them all before they went bad. Some were so plump and juicy that I popped them just by pulling them off the vine. You can see the fruits of our labor in the picture at right, but somebody else got a picture of my sack, and I want to get that from them for my own uses. You really should check out the gallery, by the way.

After this, we finally went to the ryokan (Japanese-style inn), where many people immediately went into the onsen, but my group of guys just kind of sat around and talked. It was cool anyway, as the onsen was probably overcrowded with everybody in it and I was pretty wary of the whole idea, anyway. It's been a long time since I got naked in front of random people, and I wasn't intending to stay naked previously, which psychologically makes a big difference, maybe.

Dinner was traditional Japanese cuisine, which means I couldn't recognize any of it and most of it was completely inedible. Raw beef was surprising, but it was the most delicious thing there. After all the scary foods, they finally brought out some rice just before the end, for which I was oh-so-thankful. Even if the rice blew, it was still nice to eat something I could identify. I mean, I'm all for trying new foods, but this trip used up all of my food bravery for about two months. Did I mention lunch was also traditional Japanese cuisine?

Oh, and breakfast the next day.

Traditional Japanese food might be okay if you are against cooked meat, really like fish and random seafood, think that everything is better with fish eggs sprinkled on top, or have just always wanted to eat vast quantities of raw egg, or don't have taste buds. I qualify none of these conditions, and will happily go on eating plain white rice every day. Oh, and the Japanese food that's imported from China, like ramen. Yum.

As an added bonus, us silly Americans were just about the only people wearing our street clothes at dinner. At breakfast, we were just about the only ones wearing yukata. There's just no winning, I think.

[eloquent segue]

Well, that was day one of our two-day trip! It was my intention to do the whole trip in one post, but this is already well past a printed page (though it's less than I thought), so I'll end here for now.
Oh, and check out the gallery.

Why?

Well, I've annotated all the photos that I intended to upload, but the administrators here apparently feel that Picasa is a scourge upon the world (or something) and have felt the need to block access to it. Since my laptop's battery is already drained, I'll upload the gallery either tonight or tomorrow. I should have a few more pictures from later today by then, too.

Here are some pictures to hold you over.

Golden Week (end)

Well, it's back to classes for me.

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.

50 posts! And other stuff

We ran Jynxed Productions for about two years and I think we never hit 50 posts. This is the 50th post in this blog, so three cheers and whatnot, you know?

[Insert smooth transition here]

So I laid out what I think is my schedule this morning in an Excel (coughKMDcough) spreadsheet, but I'm not entirely certain. I'm going to run by the International Office a little later and see if they have a copy of my official schedule that I can check this one against.

[Insert another smooth transition here]

As it turns out, it would seem that I should've been studying for a cumulative test this morning, instead. I think I did okay, but I've learned not to be optimistic with Japanese tests. A 75% here is a B, though, which is kind of cool. Bonus cool if they report it as a 3.0 like it should be.

[Insert crunchy, peanut-butter-like transition here]

I invited Bethany to add to this if she has anything interesting happen, so there should be something from her forthcoming, though as to when, I know not.

School

I guess I forgot to mention that school started last Thursday. It's now Monday here, and I'm on my lunch break. Not much to say as yet since I haven't signed up for electives, and have only been to two classes that weren't the Basic Japanese class.
Well, there's that, though. Hm.
We, uh, study Japanese! We're doing review to make sure everybody's at the same level before they starting killing us off, from what I understand. Seriously remedial review. I mean, we went over various meanings and uses for ~te iru.
Time for class.