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?
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6 comments:
You'll make great friend with your new bunk bed, they tend to be friendly. Yeah maybe you should write something interesting from your Japanese classes in your blog. You should go find a 100 yen kaiten(回転) sushi restaurant(It's one of those where you sit around a belt on which the sushi is served, and you just grab what you want). They are supposedly very good quality sushi but very cheap!
lol yeah do what george says. you could be Naruto, except sushi in stead of ramen.
that's pretty sweet you skipped a year of japanese language class. gg studying. I also think you shouldn't include japanese lessons at the end of your posts. they'll probably be too long for people's attention, and if they're short enough they won't be useful. just my opinion. vocabulary at the end of a post would be great though. people love vocabulary.
oh btw, email me. i have a question for you.
Well, seeing as foreigners are like 7 feet tall compared to Japanese men, they were probably trying to do you a favor by setting you up with a clunk bed, I mean chunk bed, I mean bulk bed...
This is from Erik, using Gina's account as she seems to have some how taken over my account, just like Google took over blogger...grrrr...anyway....
I wouldn't so much go for a Japanese language lesson as some interesting language learning moment. So that could include a vocab word that has an interesting history or something funny about it. It could also include a humorous moment you experience as you are learning...like embarrassing yourself somehow by saying a word wrong, or some other similar insightful, interesting or humorous story about a word or experience related to learning the language. Have fun!
would you rather have huge bunk beds or one small bed to share? ...
Your apartment sounds very Asian. And please teach us Japanese! I know nothing.
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