Well, my update tonight (this morning if you're in the Midwest) isn't so much because anything happened, but because something is ABOUT to happen, so I thought I'd just fill you in on what's happened before what's going to happen so that what happened doesn't fill up space when I want to talk about what's going to happen.
Hahaha now that you're all confused, I'll continue (although I bet if you just try a little you could make sense of that sentence). I've officially moved out of Davy's house （家） in Houya (保谷) and into my apartment (アパート） in Jiyuugaoka （自由が丘）. What's the difference? Well instead of living with Davy and his family and his friends who came over (and who all converse in near-perfect or perfect Japanese and not English) to living in an apartment complex with all international students who of course always speak in English. I'm also living with Dave, of course. But maybe the biggest change is that we have to provide our own food here and also had to buy new soap, shampoo, paper towels, cooking stuff, etc----and it's expensive! Which is another difference between Houya and Jiyuugaoka: the location. Houya is sort of in the boonies--it's pretty much a suburb, although Davy said they've been developing it a lot more lately. This, however, means that there's basically one close grocery store and a few convenience stores within easy walking distance, as well as a bunch of houses. Jiyuugaoka, on the other hand, is much closer to downtown Tokyo (if you can categorize Tokyo that way), and is actually very much a "rich-person" type of place. This means that the closest convenience store is 2-3x as far as it was from Davy's, and the local grocery store has ridiculously stupid prices. Basically we have to walk much farther to get to cheap places, including restaurants (and fyi, it is not necessarily automatically cheaper to cook in Japan, although it is probably healthier than eating out at cheap places every day).
As for the apartment itself, ummm... honestly it's just OK. It's nice that it came furnished, so we don't have to buy furniture or most kitchen utensils, and we have our own kitchen and bathroom. It even has a TV. But even with all this, the apartment is extremely bare, with white walls and brown wooden floors. But probably the biggest problem I have with it is the bunk bed. The place is already really small, with only one real room to be in, and that comes with two chairs, one dresser, and a bunk bed. And there's not much room for more. No couch or extra chairs or real desks or anything. But the bunk bed!! Compared to the room size, it's HUGE! Plus the "linens" (I don't like that word) that they gave us are Japanese-style, meant for folding up when not in use. Which, given that we are in a typically small Japanese-style apartment, would be quite nice. But noooooooooo we have a stupid huge bunk bed that takes up all our space and that we can't get rid of. Grrrrrr....
In other news, classes start tomorrow and I took a test that and talked to the head of the Japanese Language Department, and got put into Japanese 201! So I skipped a whole year of Japanese with 2-3 months of my own Japanese studying! That was totally sweet. Also I've been doing a lot of people-watching here, and will have a few things to say/ponder about the Japanese I've run into here in my next entry.
New blog question: Should I put in a tiny "Today's Japanese Lesson" at the end of some of my posts?
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Hey everyone! Welcome to my second post at this soon-to-be-great blog!
So it's about 3pm back in the good ole Midwest, which means it's 5am here. Which means I am 1) still jet lagged or 2) being stupid. Actually the correct answer is 3) both. In terms of jet lag, I was actually doing better the first two days than I am now. How is this possible? Well there were other people over at Davy's house then, which meant that everyone was up late and it was easier for me to stay up. Now for some reason everyone is going to bed at 10 or something, so when I get tired but want to stay up, I just end up falling asleep without having taken a shower or brushed my teeth or anything. And then, not because I am smart (in fact it is stupid), I wake up early and get online, like I am now, and don't go back to bed because I still have to take a shower and brush my teeth, and that's kind of a pain. So woopdeedoo, I've been online for like 2 or 3 hours now, so I'm guessing I'll get pretty tired today. Will I be able to beat the trend and stay up tonight? Or even sleep ALL NIGHT without waking up? Only time will tell.... but I sort of doubt it.
For the past 2 days or so I've spent tons of time online looking up information on phones and rate plans here. Surprisingly it looks like I found a loophole in the Japanese system with Softbank, meaning I can get a super good deal (for being in Japan for only 4 months) on rates. More details to follow, since it'd be lame if I told you all now how cool it is and then found out I can't do it. I'm hoping to get a nice phone too, which will act as my new camera as well, so until then I'm mostly camera-less :( sorry! Pictures will come eventually, rest assured.
One last thing before I finally go shower and go back to sleep: I'm sort of undecided on what the tone of this blog should be. Should I keep it to mostly serious, thoughtful commentary on cultural differences and the oddities of the human race... or whatever? Or should there be some fun, simple, short, random posts once in a while? Or maybe having those silly posts water down the whole experience. What do you guys think?
So it's about 3pm back in the good ole Midwest, which means it's 5am here. Which means I am 1) still jet lagged or 2) being stupid. Actually the correct answer is 3) both. In terms of jet lag, I was actually doing better the first two days than I am now. How is this possible? Well there were other people over at Davy's house then, which meant that everyone was up late and it was easier for me to stay up. Now for some reason everyone is going to bed at 10 or something, so when I get tired but want to stay up, I just end up falling asleep without having taken a shower or brushed my teeth or anything. And then, not because I am smart (in fact it is stupid), I wake up early and get online, like I am now, and don't go back to bed because I still have to take a shower and brush my teeth, and that's kind of a pain. So woopdeedoo, I've been online for like 2 or 3 hours now, so I'm guessing I'll get pretty tired today. Will I be able to beat the trend and stay up tonight? Or even sleep ALL NIGHT without waking up? Only time will tell.... but I sort of doubt it.
For the past 2 days or so I've spent tons of time online looking up information on phones and rate plans here. Surprisingly it looks like I found a loophole in the Japanese system with Softbank, meaning I can get a super good deal (for being in Japan for only 4 months) on rates. More details to follow, since it'd be lame if I told you all now how cool it is and then found out I can't do it. I'm hoping to get a nice phone too, which will act as my new camera as well, so until then I'm mostly camera-less :( sorry! Pictures will come eventually, rest assured.
One last thing before I finally go shower and go back to sleep: I'm sort of undecided on what the tone of this blog should be. Should I keep it to mostly serious, thoughtful commentary on cultural differences and the oddities of the human race... or whatever? Or should there be some fun, simple, short, random posts once in a while? Or maybe having those silly posts water down the whole experience. What do you guys think?
Friday, August 17, 2007
Heat and Japanese
Well, here it is, my first post on this blog about my time in Japan! This will be where I'll post what I'm doing over here in Japan, as well as any interesting things that go on (especially things demonstrating cultural differences or other stuff like that). I'll set it up to post these on facebook as well. I tend to write a lot, so be forewarned. Anyway, I guess we'll just get started..
I arrived at the airport yesterday after the 12 or 13 hour flight, and the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane was the heat. Or maybe it was the humidity... either way, it is very hot and very humid right now in Tokyo. Over at Davy's place, where I'm staying for about a week, everybody is wearing either a t-shirt, a wife beater, or nothing. Apparently it's going to stop in about a week, so that means it'll be hot the whole time I'm at Davy's. Oh, and we have air conditioning in some of the rooms but we're not really using it--probably to save electricity and because it's not as useful to have on all day when it's only in part of the house.
The other biggest difference about being here is, of course, Japanese. Actually at Davy's place almost everybody that comes by also speaks English, but Japanese is the language of choice (as it should be). Still, this makes it a little hard for me to get to know anybody very well, since I don't understand most of what's going on, and usually can't say anything of my own to add to the conversation. This makes me really want to learn more Japanese, but of course learning a language well is a process that takes a lot of time, and I'm not really feeling patient about it right now.
Surprisingly, it's actually easier to speak Japanese with someone who doesn't speak any English, partly because then it makes sense to use it than English (obviously), and partly because that means we can't resort to English when something is confusing or whatever. That happened when I was on the train to Tokyo from the airport--I ended up talking to the guy next to me in Japanese for almost the whole time (about 50 minutes), but it was really fun because I was trying to say things I'd never normally try to say in Japanese. This meant that it was really horrible Japanese most of the time, but at this point it's more important that I'm understood at all. Traveling from Narita to Davy's place was pretty interesting, since I was on my own, I had to take 3 different trains, and it took almost 3 hours. Apparently I did it pretty fast (for sure faster than James Cho!) It totally sucked to have all my baggage with me though.
Anyway now I'm at Davy's and have sort of nothing to do, or at least nothing planned. Actually tomorrow I'm going into Shibuya with Davy to go to a hiba party and to meet Emi there, and then sometime before Emi leaves I'm going to meet up with her again. So far for food I've had curry, instant noodles, and eggs and bacon. All of it was really good but it's nothing very exciting or worth talking about.
Oh, and for anyone wondering about jet lag, I slept a little on the plane yesterday and then stayed up til about midnight (10:00am) and slept for about 7 1/2 hours. I'm starting to get a little tired again but it's not bad (currently 5pm Japan time). I'll post again later but in the meantime I hope you're all doing well! Anyone is free to email me about how you all are doing at andrew.butz@gmail.com . Ja ne!
I arrived at the airport yesterday after the 12 or 13 hour flight, and the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane was the heat. Or maybe it was the humidity... either way, it is very hot and very humid right now in Tokyo. Over at Davy's place, where I'm staying for about a week, everybody is wearing either a t-shirt, a wife beater, or nothing. Apparently it's going to stop in about a week, so that means it'll be hot the whole time I'm at Davy's. Oh, and we have air conditioning in some of the rooms but we're not really using it--probably to save electricity and because it's not as useful to have on all day when it's only in part of the house.
The other biggest difference about being here is, of course, Japanese. Actually at Davy's place almost everybody that comes by also speaks English, but Japanese is the language of choice (as it should be). Still, this makes it a little hard for me to get to know anybody very well, since I don't understand most of what's going on, and usually can't say anything of my own to add to the conversation. This makes me really want to learn more Japanese, but of course learning a language well is a process that takes a lot of time, and I'm not really feeling patient about it right now.
Surprisingly, it's actually easier to speak Japanese with someone who doesn't speak any English, partly because then it makes sense to use it than English (obviously), and partly because that means we can't resort to English when something is confusing or whatever. That happened when I was on the train to Tokyo from the airport--I ended up talking to the guy next to me in Japanese for almost the whole time (about 50 minutes), but it was really fun because I was trying to say things I'd never normally try to say in Japanese. This meant that it was really horrible Japanese most of the time, but at this point it's more important that I'm understood at all. Traveling from Narita to Davy's place was pretty interesting, since I was on my own, I had to take 3 different trains, and it took almost 3 hours. Apparently I did it pretty fast (for sure faster than James Cho!) It totally sucked to have all my baggage with me though.
Anyway now I'm at Davy's and have sort of nothing to do, or at least nothing planned. Actually tomorrow I'm going into Shibuya with Davy to go to a hiba party and to meet Emi there, and then sometime before Emi leaves I'm going to meet up with her again. So far for food I've had curry, instant noodles, and eggs and bacon. All of it was really good but it's nothing very exciting or worth talking about.
Oh, and for anyone wondering about jet lag, I slept a little on the plane yesterday and then stayed up til about midnight (10:00am) and slept for about 7 1/2 hours. I'm starting to get a little tired again but it's not bad (currently 5pm Japan time). I'll post again later but in the meantime I hope you're all doing well! Anyone is free to email me about how you all are doing at andrew.butz@gmail.com . Ja ne!
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