Darlo's World

Well this might be my last entry for this month, but bare in mind it’s already the 30th. Firstly I’ve put up some more pictures on the Blogspot account. Lately I’ve put up pictures from the hotel, Konan University, the "Meet The Family" shindig and also the first pics from my dorm in Kamishinjyou.

I also want to give a shout out to a friend of mine who’s come over and is studying in Nagoya for a few months. Michael ‘Kriffix’ Kacar is a manga artist from the London, UK, who was a runner up in one of TokyoPop’s Rising Stars of Manga Contests. Welcome to Japan dude, I hope you enjoy your time here!

Recently the weather here in Osaka and Kobe has dropped, and even though it’s pretty much what Summer would feel like in the UK, it still feels pretty darn nippy. My aircon’s now become my heater and I’m now wearing long sleeved tops all the time instead of noth … um … t-shirts. I also heard from Telford that they’ve had a nice bit of snow lately. Typical eh.

So last Saturday (after writing up the journal) I noticed a package had come for me. Unfortunately the office wasn’t open so I couldn’t pick it up. After completely forgetting about it and going to head out for the night, I remembered about it just as I was about to step through the door. After being handed what can only be described as a Christmas Turkey in a binbag, I dropped it in my room and headed out.

After another fun night out at Gush, Okamoto, where we discussed different areas of the UK, the pound to yen exchange rate (which has been killing me as I have some money to bring over from home), and differences between English and American (language), it was time to call it a day and two of us made our way back to Osaka. That night we needed to make a change at Awaji station; we normally get a train from Juso to Kamishinjyou, but not tonight.

At Awaji we decided to try an experiment. We’d been curious for quite some time which of the two stations (Awaji and Kamishinjyou) were nearer to home. We’d always used Kamishinjyou, but judging from the layout of the track and the little time between the two stations, we couldn’t decide. So that night after getting off our train at Awaji, we decided to take a crack at walking it.

Having never done this walk before we decided to follow the track until a familliar point showed itself; a technique that aided areas of my walk from Okamoto to Sannomiya. Thankfully that wasn’t too long, and we soon arrived back at the dorm. Problem was that we never actually timed how quick the walk was. To be honest, we’ve not timed it from Kamishinjyou either. We got home more confused than we were before, and even today we’re still not sure which is faster. We plan one day to get a train back but one of us get off at Awaji and see who gets home first. We have roughly the same pace, so it shouldn’t be a race between the two of us.

So my package was from home (UK), Momma-Darlo was kind enough to send me a huge selection of sweets (photo to come), an advent calendar (little early, I know), a castle ornament (don’t ask), some books I asked for and a nice new coat. I’ve not yet worn the coat, but it looks warm and with the weather taking a turn you’ll soon see me strutting the streets of Kamishinjyou sporting a lovely number.

Waking up Sunday’s are always a feeling of ‘eh’. Yeah I don’t have to get up for University or breakfast, but living as I do every week I catch SDS (Sunday Dorm Syndrome). SDS basically takes control of your ability to speak on Sundays when, for whatever reason, you don’t leave the house. Normally in a dorm (well this one anyway) you only really communicate with the other students if there’s a valid reason (like you’re passing a message on, or want to tell them their goldfish is on fire) or if it’s a meal time (no food given to us on Sundays remember). Besides that, you might flash a "hi" or "ohayou" to anyone you pass on your trips to the bog, but that’s it. Unless you get a phone call, you generally spend the entire day saying less than 20 words.

Compare this to the homestay. Same scenario, you don’t fancy leaving the house. You’ll still get to chat with your familly at dinner, and no doubt a familly member will pop by your room to see how you’re doing, or check you’ve not killed yourself with your awesomely complicated Japanese remote control. The point is if you’re in a dorm and are trying to save money by not going out, and let’s face it everytime you go out you do spend some money, you’re not going to improve your Japanese that day. Stick to learning kanji and forget about those vocal chords would be my advice, accept your SDS and sod showering that day … no one will be around to notice.

Or maybe I’m just ranting on that one because the longer I’m here I notice the differences between dorm and what I’m being told about homestay-wise. Top that with the fact that dorm guys are actually paying more and it’s a bit of a shot to the pills.

Moving on.

On Wednesday I had an exam for my business module (Mergers and Acquisitions). I didn’t get much studying done for it as we’ve started the keigo (respectful) chapters of Minna No Nihongo and it’s new and a bit complicated. However I don’t think I did … that bad. I was a bit worried that I seemed to finish quite early (we had two hours and I was done after about half an hour) so I kept on rechecking over my answers until I saw someone else hand in their paper. We get the marks back in just over a week.

I re-watched over the Miss Dynamite animations/interactive comic a few nights ago in order to relax a little. Sirkowski’s currently making episode 24, for which an animatic is available to be seen, aswell as offering an incentive for Americans to vote for Obama. His site may be a little risque for younger internet users, but I still find it funny.

Remember in the last package from home how I mentioned getting my hair clippers? Well unfortunately for me they don’t work here. Why? Because not only did I forget that it wasn’t enough to merely change the plug pins (with an adapter), but I had also forgotten that electrical equipment in the UK generally needs more power than what a Japanese plug socket can dish out. This is something we discovered tonight when I went to cut my friends hair (with permission of course) and all I could get was a slight vibrating sensation. Either I was being electrocuted or the clippers were working at a speed not fast enough to cut through a fly’s wings, but either way it left me with no means of cutting my hair, my friends hair, shaving the box-dog down the road or someone’s teddy bear and sending it back fluff by fluff.

Well tomorrow’s halloween (one of the reasons my aforementioned friend wanted his hair cutting), and even though it’s not a big thing in my area of the UK (you try telling the shops that) some of the Americans here are making a bit of a song and dance about it. I wonder if they’ll think of us as weird when we try to blow things up on the 5th of November. So there’s a bit of a shindig involved where people are coming into Uni in costume followed by a night out in Sannomiya (Kobe). While it would be nice to have the ability to go out and spend money on something you’re only going to wear for one day without looking like a complete pillock, I have chosen to go down my own route costume wise and will merely be wearing a hat.

Not just a hat, normal clothes too of course. I’ll also put that Skeleton (Gaikotsu) that I won at the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri on my balcony; it’s about time I cleared the skeletons from the closet. I have noticed a huge lack of public decoration compared to England so I’m interested to see how the Japanese do halloween, and also how they find the American’s actions for the night >_<.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to go to Sannomiya with them or not yet, but I have decided that if I do go, then I’ll be walking there from Okamoto once again! That way I’ll save 180 yen and feel like I’ve really deserved that first drink.

For now though, I’ll leave you with a youtube video of how I probably sound to a native Japanese speaker (I sound like the guy in white).

(Check the photos, I’ve finally added some from Japan)

I was going to write this entry last night in celebration of the end of mid-terms, but instead I thought about doing something logical and actually going out to celebrate the end of mid-terms. This in turn makes it possible for me to write an entry celebrating that I managed to get both of the last trains back (I have to make a connection), thus avoiding a walk that would have been my longest so far in Japan. Ok, let me just take a sec to look at my last entry to see in what area of limbo I left you guys floating.

…

Oh right, my body-clock screwation (not a real word). Well as I already said we’ve had mid-terms this week and although they didn’t feel as difficult as the exams we had in Leeds, to me an exam is an exam and they’re something I never do well in, especially when I leave the exam room and think that I’ve done well. This can be seen from my actual results from Leeds … shame on me.

It started out on Wednesday with the oral tests. Me and oral have always had a very odd relationship … for those of you shouting inuendo at your screens please take a step back and realise I’m clearly talking about speaking … perverts. Anyway, when I speak in Japanese it can normally go perfectly fine until someone says the words “your Japanese is good” and whatnot, something I have mentioned before. But also if I find that I don’t know a word or a term then I’ll take a brave stab at making one up. One example was when I wanted to refer to a Car Boot Sale, something Japan doesn’t have. This made me come up with the term Car Rear Market Day. And when I couldn’t remember the word for wallet I simply said money bag.

So anyway the exam went quite well, there was some Q&A based around some of our speeches which wasn’t too tricky, though trying to explain why your favourite food is apple sauce and that you’d happilly suck it down right from the jar was a bit hard. Following this we were presented with a choice of about 5 simple items and asked to talk about them. Of the items given I can only remember there being a pen, pair of chopsticks and electronic dictionary, but I chose the pen. Here’s an approximate account of what I spoke about for a ballpoint pen.

“This pen is a special pen. This pen is a very important pen. I recieved this pen from a friend. This friend was called Pete. One time when me and Pete went to Germany, we had to fight against some robbers. After that, because we won we went to the shop. I bought him a cat and he bought me this pen. Because of that, this is a very important pen.”

To which my teacher asked me what happened to my friend (the name Pete was never mentioned again).

“Hmm … that’s a little bit difficult. There was an accident. Unfortunate isn’t it. My friend went to Italy to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa because he wanted to try looking at it. But when he was there the tower fell over and he passed away. This year they built the tower again, but when I look at this pen I always remember my friend.”

My instant feedback, which I’m always really grateful for, was that even though I tried to be creative and use plenty of grammar points, I did use most of them wrong. Buggar! The next morning we had our marks for that test (seconds before starting the Kanji test) and I scored an 8.6 (86%) and some very helpful feedback.

Thursday … Kanji Test. It wasn’t until the last week of being at Leeds I discovered a system to learn kanji … well, learn it in such a way that I could do “ok” on the weekly Leeds tests. Unfortunately that system doesn’t really work over here. However, after I bought myself a small whiteboard I was able to learn kanji so much easier. It was unfortunate that it didn’t help me on Thursday as I blew spoiled chunks onto my kanji exam (not literally thank god). This was confirmed during the break between the kanji test and the reading test when the teacher marking through them wanted to double check that I was actually from Leeds (Leeds is known for it’s emphasis on kanji) … *SHAMED*.

I don’t remember a lot about Thursday’s reading test, except for the fact that a lot of the kanji from the previous test showed up teasing me with it’s furigana reminding me that I actually DID know some of the things I blatantly got wrong. BAH!

So to finish the midterms yesterday we started with a listening test, pretty simple just listen to a tape and write down or circle an answer … I probably failed that one, and then we moved onto the big grammar test.

The thought of 9 pages of a language exam comically freaked out some of the students, but Leeds exams, especially that last one, were much longer. This one comprised of testing all the different elements we’ve covered including particles, structure, translation, some minor composition, but I have no idea how I did. Normally I come out of an exam thinking either “I’ve failed that” (to which I normally have) or “Wow I passed that one easilly” (to which I normally haven’t) but when I left the exam room I didn’t have any direct thought about how I’d done. Whistle and wait as my parents used to (and probably still do) say.

So tests being over some of us went into Okamoto (in Kobe) and had a little fun. In one bar we went into, Gush, there were two dogs on the balcony, so we had a chat and a play with them. Lots of time passed, conversations were had and then it was time to head back. By fluke and coincidence we (the two remaining folk) got back to Okamoto Station in time for the last train to Juso. Throughout the night I had been joking about walking home if I missed the last train, but frankly from Kobe I didn’t really fancy it much. On the train I was preparing myself for a walk from Juso to home (a 15 minute train ride) by napping and getting up intime to see the stations passing by. Upon arrival at Juso however I was thrilled to see that there was one last train heading my way, hoorah!

Head on pillow, I’m home!

Just a thought on how little things can change people’s attitudes before signing off and doing some washing. I few days ago I was walking around Kita-Umeda trying to find a specific building. Not only did it have no heavilly definable features, I had no clue what it looked like, only a crudely set map. Well after wandering around like a hamster in a maze and going right past the bloody place twice I finally found it and then walked back to Umeda. Needless to see I was pretty miffed with myself (thats a bad thing). On my way there was an old woman watering plants outside her shop with a hose. The distance between her, the shop, the plants and the road meant that I was going to get wet, I honestly didn’t expect her to lower the hose. When I got closer we made eye-contact, with my eyes giving off the message “It’s ok, I’m prepared for your wetness”.

She shocked me though, lowering the hose and turning it off so I could pass dry. With this I bowed to her and said “arigatou gozaimasu” to which she gave me the biggest smile I’d seen since I got here and she replied “domo” in a very pleasant yet shocked voice. I don’t think she was expecting me to be able to communicate at all, let alone to thank her. Anyway my point of this little story is that seeing her smile put a smile back on my face. It’s the little things that can really make your day, I’ll try to remember than when I do another load of washing this afternoon.