Midterms, Parties, アルバイト!

久しぶり！

Mid-terms are over so I don’t feel guilty spending an hour or so on this now.  It’s been a while,  I even have to check my planner so I can remember what I’ve actually been doing! It feels like a lot but I can’t recall any of it…in which case, I’ll just reel off new developments.

I have 2 part-time jobs now!

Which is easy money, 2000yen/hour, 3 hours a week, just having an English conversation with Japanese students, so I’ll try to live off money earned from now on instead of eating into my loan.

(For anyone going to live in Japan at any point, teaching jobs are very easy to come by. Japanese people take English lessons from the age of twelve as part of their education, but they don’t ever have much chance to use it, so I get the feeling they jump at any chance they get. )

So with that income I can save my loan to squander on the other stuff I’ve got scheduled. Like a trip to Seoul, South Korea in February.

 Why, you ask? ‘Cause it’s right next door (and £160), and apparently beautiful, shares a lot of history with Japan and there’s good food, and aha, I like the Korean dramas. Gabrielle, these guys comes from there:

Tae Kyung from the most popular Kdrama series 'He's Beautiful'

It’s a place where pretty boy bands are thriving, and hold a lot of power over people.

Aside from that, it’ll be a nice lil holiday before I Shinkansen it down to Tokyo for the 26^th February Tokyo Marathon.

Yup, I got through the lottery! My gaijin status is good for something :D I’m theorizing that there weren’t as many foreigners applying this year on account of the (ahem non-existent ahem) ‘radiation’ thing from the Fukushima plant.

So I’ve started my running plan, on Mondays, Wednesdays and weekends. So far I’ve been doing fairly well, considering the knee that hurt while I was coming off a mountain started aching o_0. But I looked it up, it’s ‘Runners knee’, so I can for the most part just ignore it. Just rest, buy new trainers maybe.

So I’ve been busy making plans. But also these past two weeks there’s been two welcome parties! One was like a children’s party, and I won a One Piece Jigsaw Puzzle at bingo!

well actually I won a samurai umbrella but I swapped it with Ryan. I know my priorities.
After that, nomihoudai ^^

The other welcome party had lots of food and great music, and I discovered that I could trick Japanese people into thinking I’m actually good at Japanese for a good 3 minutes into the conversation! Progress!

But then it gets to the awkward post-standard info sharing (name, degree, which country am I from, how am I finding japan what’s my favourite food why study Japanese have you got facebook wow you’re good at Japanese no no I’m not an so on…)  and anything of any depth is jilted and contrived. But from now one I’m going to do my best, it gave me some courage.

That weekend I had no break – me and Caroline went to Kyoto (note to self: the hankyuu train line is half the price of JR, damnit!! D: ) for the Jidai festival conveniently outside Calyx’s house at the imperial garden and the Fire Festival,  and aha, it rained as though god wanted us to drowned. So, festival cancelled. We did shopping and print club instead.

But I did get to see Calyx again and walk around the Imerial Gardens, so I really can't complain. It was beautiful:

pfft xD

And the day after that, stumbling home late looking as though I’d hauled myself out of a swimming pool (which don’t exist in japan o_0 public ones are very rare and pricey because space is an issue), it was Tokishi’s birthday!

between the four (three excluding Takamitsu who works in Tokyo),
we'll be having htis for dessert for weeks to come...

He's 5 now! 5!

My host parents didn’t know whether to laugh or panic when the giant American cake they had brought stained their kids mouth an unnatural blue.

They settled for giggling nervously and shaking their heads and muttering how ‘kowaii’ it was (scary), and it got me thinking – Japanese food, like strictly Japanese food, is really quite healthy. It explains why no matter how much I eat I haven’t actually gained any weight at all.

Speaking of eating,  yesterday I ate a lot at this little tacoyaki restaurant in Osaka with my Japanese Literature class. Sensei paid for most of the food so we ate and drank as much as we wanted:

But it wasn’t just a random outing, it was the natural follow on from a Bunraku (traditional japanese puppet) play!

Bunraku is a type of puppeting that has three people in black moving the puppets in such precise movements that their gestures and acting becomes intricate and completely brilliant. The acting on stage is accompanied by a deep chanting voice of the narrator, think buddhist chant, who does the voices of all the characters in the puppet show too. It was such hard work, the guy was bright red in the face.

 The language used in Bunraku is so old that even Japanese people can't follow well, so we had no hope

The stage was fantastic; in one scene the old man and the traveller were trekking along on the spot while the foreground trees slowly moved and the background stayed stationary, giving the illusion of them actually moving along. The little hand gestures are made possible because of the three men per puppet. All in all it was really interesting! I highly recommend the experience to theatre lovers, or fans of classic Japanese literature. The whole performance was stunning!

And this Sunday I went climb Rokko mountains with some friends, these hills behind Konan where the Inoshishi (wild boars) wander down from occasionally. It rained the whole time. Wish I had my Gortex jacket T-T

the promised 'rock garden' wasn't what we'd expected xD
but hiking in the rain is great

There’s an old couple that bicker at the base of it. Apparently they’re quite dangerous when they have kids to defend but as they barely came up to my knees and as I was wearing my kick ass Dr.Martins, I had no fear. They were just minding their own business anyways.

Inoshishi ~

Now that I feel more settled in to life in Japan, despite being busy I’m itching to make more plans. I know enough now to know that I want to go to Nara to see the deer wandering around, to Okinawa for the beaches, to the Ghibli museum in Tokyo, to the Onsen in Arima etc, the list goes on. There’s clothes shopping that I haven’t done at all because I’ve been stingy with my money, living off 100yen (an 80p bowl of udon for lunch with free tea) everyday, so the 1900yen top I want I can’t help but see as over two weeks worth of lunch!

And if you’re concerned about the 80p lunch a day thing, I don’t do this because I’m struggling with money (yet).  I do it because I can. Udon is filling, I’m saving a lot of money without any hardship by doing this, so it’s not a problem. The obvious drawback is that this method of money saving is messing with my psych.  Everything seems expensive to me now!

I called this blog midterms, parties and part-time jobs because that is what has been eating up the majority of my time. From now on it’s going to be the same, but worse. I start my second job on Monday, and I’m going to start running for more than an hour each time. Which means the remaining time will be spent studying hard merely to survive and traveling while I have the chance.

So if I haven’t been/don’t respond to e-mails for weeks at a time, please forgive me! It have simply truly forgotten no time.  Thank you for your patience.

decorations at the konan women's uni where my other part-time job is at

Halloween tomorrow.  The americans are making a big deal out of it, which is nice. I’m gonna go into uni as a scarecrow J