Darlo's World

Feeling rougher than usual this morning I decided to take the day off and catch up on a bit of rest, after breakfast of course. Waking up for a second time at about half two in the afternoon, I venture out on a search for food. Easily I could have went to Matsuya or McDonalds, but I didn’t feel like a curry or a burger.

Instead I took a walk towards Umeda where under a railway bridge was a very small udon place. From the outside it was really noisy with trains going by every ten seconds or so, traffic blaring (as it was also a busy crossroad), and the very common sound of ambulance and paramedic sirens. I figured that inside wouldn’t be quiet due to these factors but I was shocked to discover how wrong I was.

When I closed the door everything seemed to go quiet, the only real breaking point to the silence was when the woman behind the counter greeted me “いらっしゃいませ”. I ordered 肉うどん (niku udon, beef udon) from the vending machine, handed my ticket to the cashier and took a seat, stopping on the way to pick up a glass for some water. To give you an idea of how small the place was, I was the only customer and was taking up 10% of the occupancy.

My meal was 400 yen (£2.92), which is quite a bit more than I normally spend on lunch, but it was definately worth it for it’s flavour and size. Good grub! Speaking of good grub, here’s a dog trying (and failing) to eat food off his nose on command.

Wow. Friday night was fun. Too much fun. So lets start off with some music eh. Hit play from the youtube link, and carry on reading.

Today’s music comes from L’Arc En Ciel and is called Daybreak’s Bell. It’s a tune I’ve found quite fun to relax to, drive to, do homework to, clean to … honestly, I find it very open. Most listeners might know it as the theme tune from Gundam 00 (don’t worry not all the music I’ll be putting on here will be from anime themes, or always in Japanese).

So starting off at the Torikizoku (the everything 280 yen (£2.01) place), actually no, starting off at a convenience store, two of us bought a can of beer (each) to get the night kicking. In Japan it’s not uncommon for people to drink on the streets, but it still felt quite odd to be, especially as my alcohol wasn’t concealed by a brown paper bag.

Heading out in the direction of Osaka’s Hep 5 building, where we were to meet another buddy, I soon realised I should have worn more as a vicious wind blasted a shot of cold air right down my back. I can’t wait for the days of being able to just wear a t-shirt (and bottoms ¬_¬) again.

After joining our third amigo we then made our way to Torikizoku. Being a Friday night we’d expected for there to be a bit of a wait to get in, though to be honest this didn’t worry us. The central area of Umeda alone has plenty of branches, so if one had a hellova queue, we could have just headed to another. It’s not quite as bad as the number of Starbucks in a city center (in Birmingham’s Bull Ring you can see one easily from sitting within another), but there are a fair few. After endulging in many an over-sized glass of beer and assorted bits of a chicken (my favourite part being the heart), and an alcohol fueled conversation (of which I can remember very little of) we were soon on our way to Sam and Dave, a bar and nightclub in the area.

The rest of the night was filled with dancing to a good variety of music (this is the only place I’ve been to that had Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” followed by 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”), drinking (mainly beer and Malibu & Milk … yum!), and a lot of conversations (shouting to be make sure people could hear me and being shouted at for the reverse reason of course). Sam and Dave is a very international club. The bar staff were from all areas of the world with a mixed knowledge of Japanese, some customers (ourselves included) were also from abroad, and the Japanese customers who go there seem to use this as a good time for English practice as well as me for the other way around. For a while I was talking to one woman in Japanese while she replied to what I was saying in English. It made for a very interesting conversation.

We left at about 4 in the morning on some very wobbly legs and headed into a nearby Matsuya to complete the night. I couldn’t find Curry Rice on the vending machine, so picking a random button I ended up with a random meat-rice dish, of which I found I could only eat half. Matsuya also proved to be a good time to practice speaking as my trio conversed with two girls who had also been at Sam and Dave that night.

Coming back to the dorm, taking care not to wake anyone up, I turned off all alarms on my phone and put my head down to sleep.

I’ll always remember that the strangest hangover I’ve heard about happened to Dave Gorman when he did his Googlewhack Adventure, where his Texan hangover was in his arm (which turned out to be a very badly done tattoo). For me, waking up totally fine at about 4pm, with the exception of being a bit thirsty a hangover was no where in sight. Sitting at my desk, my stomach slowly started to dance on it’s own accord. It was as if a village of Hula Dancers were putting in the extra overtime. Since I had no orange juice and had skipped breakfast, I made my way (very tenderly) to the 99 yen shop to pick up supplies.

To spare you the details, shortly after arriving home and having some OJ, I found myself very thankful to the fact that I had something in my belly. The strangest part about this hangover, is that it wasn’t really much of a hangover. In fact, it was just like I’d caught a bit of the flu that has infected the majority of the dorm. Truth be told I wasn’t feeling too great before Friday night … hmm … yeah, that’s what I’ll put it down to. Trying to rest, I didn’t wake up (get out of bed) until 11 o’clock this morning.

So welcome to March, and for those readers in Wales happy Dydd Gŵyl Dewi (St David’s Day). I’ll be boning up on some kanji today for this week’s midterms, as well as making a start on tidying.

Also thanks to the family back home for the socks, jeans and chocolate I got through!

Sitting here chomping on a rather large niku-man from the 7-eleven, I’m happy to be able to say that I’m now well again. So catching up from last week, I did try to relax and sleep most of the weekend away and that (combined with the 4 different medicines I was taking) was just what the doctor ordered, literally. Come Sunday afternoon I was feeling much better and managed to keep down some small foods, though it did leave an odd feeling in the bottom of my gut.

Monday morning was the day of my make-up test, obviously my confidence was taking a trip that day. Harsh as it may seem, I was kind of hoping that other people may have been ill on the Friday so that I wouldn’t have to take the test alone. But no, no one else. There’s something incredibly weird about having to take a test alone. The room had no clock and my watch had died some time before, so I had to try to estimate how long I was taking on each section. When the test was over I handed in my paper and headed down to the Ajisai room.

As I’ve previously mentioned, the Ajisai room is one of the few places I can talk to native Japanese speakers in a relaxed atmosphere. I feel kind of guilty asking friends to come all the way to Osaka from Kobe for the mere purpose of hanging out, and on the reverse side of the coin I really don’t always fancy going to another prefecture for the same reason. Once again my random conversations were had and a few games of Mario Kart DS also.

Since my Japanese language classes were over for the year, I only had my linguistics assignment left to worry about. Well, that and my assignment from Leeds that’s due early in January. Thus between this and sleep, not a lot’s actually happened this week.

On Wednesday we had our final Business class, and since the last exam was already done and dusted we had a little bit of a party. Our sensei brought in a range of Japanese munchies and we had a bit of a quiz (on the subject of mergers and acquisitions). Winning myself some a red-bean mochi, by answering that Nestle were the only foreign chocolate maker with a base in kansai, I started to unwrap the squidgy food.

This is the first time I’d tried mochi and to be honest it was probably the last. I’ve not been a big fan of red-bean paste since first trying it in a donut some time ago; I find they remind me too much of kidney beans, which I do like (with rice) but not in a sweet sense. The mochi itself consists of a gelatinous rice which I’m told has been pounded repeatadly to give it its form. It is a very chewy and powdery kind of cake, but for me it didn’t really have enough flavour.

Next year my classes and class times will be changing, so Thursday was the final time I would be going to my Practical Athletics Training class; where I am the only foreigner. To mark the occaision I decided to really push myself and improved on all my levels on each piece of equipment. I won’t say what they all are (because frankly I don’t remember them but have them written down at the gym), but do remember that I ‘abcrunched’ 56kg. Bare in mind I’m only 66kg myself.

This was also the day of the last Linguistics class, which in turn meant that my linguistics assignment was due the following day. After working through the night, napping on the floor at times, I had my essay finished at about 7 o’clock on Friday morning. Throughout the essay I discovered an extra thing about Chiri Kitsu, a character in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, and an extra about the Itoshiki family, that I didn’t research online.

Firstly, thanks to a friends linguistic project on mimetics, I realised that ‘Chiri’ can also mean curly or frizzy. This is a reference to Chiri Kitsu’s true hairstyle, rather than the straight, perfectly split down the centre look she usually goes for. As for the Itoshiki family, well when you combine the kanji used for the family name (a running joke in relation to all the family members), and add the kanji for home (read as ie), then you are given zekke, meaning extinct family. I would have put those up here in their kanji versions, but not everyone who reads this can view kanji properly on their computers, so the links will have to do.

I got my marks back from Japanese and although they seem to be quite low compared to the status quo, they do seem to be a vast improvement to my marks at Leeds. Personally I could argue that this is because at Leeds everything was new and here for the first part of the year we covered old material, but would like to think that being in a country where I can put my degree topic to use on an almost daily basis had something to do with it too. Once again my speaking saving the day over all, which is ironic when you think about it.

On the subject of speaking, a few times yesterday I have had encounters of speaking with people I didn’t know, and with me still being alive and well, I can only assume that I did well. I first had to go to the local ward office to change my address details for my National Health Insurance, then on the way back home I had a good conversation with woman selling takoyaki. I know this chat went well because she threw in some extra pieces for free, calling them a welcome gift. Finally last night I went to a bar a few doors down the road where I was enticed by the fact that they advertised selling Red Stripe, a Jamaican beer. The conversation was great as I was the only other person in there (this has become something of a habit, being the only other person in a bar) and the Red Stripe was good, though very expensive.

Recently I’ve got back to playing a bit of old school gaming with Rockstar Games giving away it’s original Grand Theft Auto and GTA 2 via download. It has been a nice stress buster aswell, giving that you can easilly go on a murderous rampage for little to no reason whatsoever and then turn off and go on your merry way. Of course, that is if you’re over 18. Let’s face it, when people moan that the youth of today are being warped because of games like this, we really have to look at how they’re getting them, and in many cases it seems to be the parent’s buying them for them. I’ve included the the links for them above, so do enjoy going back in time before realism was all that people wanted in games like this.

Finally, Christmas is coming. Though I’ve never been a fan of Christmas back home, everyone getting into a “gimme gimme gimme” attitude, the cold weather, the fact that starting in October everywhere shoves Christmas lights so far down your throat that you fart out sparkles, here it’s been quite different. The main thing I’ve noticed is the disctinct lack of a Christmas atmosphere. Yes there are lights, but you don’t feel blinded everywhere you look. Yes there are people dressed in santa outfits, but they’re minimal (I don’t mean their height). And yes there are signs advertising things that would make for good christmas gifts, but this is over shadowed by the fact that in Japan it is New Year which is the key focus of the winter break. Christmas here is not a national holiday, so we will be getting food at the dorm.

I’m still going to KFC for lunch though, as it appears to be something of a Japanese tradition.

Ok, mistake number 1 has been rectified, I have changed the month of the previous journal to December. I’m not sure why I did write it as November, maybe I’m just trying to turn back the clocks so I can stay in Japan for as long as possible.

For the vast majority of the week I’ve been either revising for our end of semester Japanese exams or taking said tests. Starting with the Kaiwa (conversation) test on Wednesday, I chose not to volunteer to go first like I did for the mid-terms. Instead going 2nd to last thanks to the reverse alphabetical order system used. Still, I was pretty pleased with how I performed. However, shortly afterwards I realised that a lot of what I had said was complete and utter non-sense. Still, I hope what I managed to blather on about can save me again, just as it did in Leeds last year.

Thursday was the usually dreaded Kanji test, where we were tested on the first 3 chapters of AIAIJ; the 102 pre-requisite kanji, 125 written kanji and 101 kanji readings (though some of the kanji readings do cross over into the written kanji). Although Wednesday night I did work my ass off trying to remember as much as I could, with time restraints I could only get as far as mastering chapter 1 (50 kanji). However, realising it was possible to master a chapter of kanji in one night made me realise that given the coming winter holiday it just might be possible to really buckle down with kanji practice, something I’ve always struggled with.

Thursday was also host to our reading exam, where we were given two short stories to read and asked various questions upon them. One story was about a trip to … somewhere and it was … cold or something … yeah I don’t really remember that well. The other story I remember more about because it was quite funny. A foreigner (aka one of us ^_^) was talking about how trains in Japan are different to whatever country he’s from (it’s not mentioned). One time he noticed someone couldn’t get off the train (due to it being totally packed) and they looked like they were going to cry. But then at his station he couldn’t get off either. As it looked like the doors were going to close he wanted to say “Oroshite kudasai!” (please let me off) however in his confused state it came out as “Koroshite kudasai!” (please kill me). This in turn made everone get out of his way.

Yesterday was going to be the final test day, where we have a listening test followed by the main grammar test (aka The Biggie). Normally after this day’s testing we can relax a little more, or work on the one or two projects left outstanding. Due in next week is a linguistics project where I look at various aspects of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (Goodbye Mr Despair), but more about that another day.

The reason I used “was” is because I didn’t get around to taking them. Yesterday at around 3 in the morning I woke up and had to be sick. To put it in the nicest possible way, I had to make several trips to a toilet throughout the morning.

When it came to my usual time to leave for uni, I considered the possibility of staying home, but given that the test was that day I decided to ‘man up’ and head in. After stopping at two stations (for reasons that should now be obvious … hmm … from now I’ll call it ‘painting the bowl’, it sounds a lot more pleasant) I managed to get to Uni five minutes late, not yet missing the first test (listening).

After hamming my way through the listening test we had a short break. I used this time to go and paint the bowl. When I left the bog there was a member of the KIEC staff waiting for me. I was told that I didn’t have to do the test that day and could take a make-up test on Monday. Knowing this was the case, I wanted to get myself properly checked over so asked if there was a doctor nearby who understood English.

Being sick is no fun, but being sick in a country where English isn’t the primary language is not only no fun, but it’s also difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m in Japan and people shouldn’t have to be able to speak English just because I don’t speak Japanese well (something some of the other exchange students need to learn), but I thought going to an English understanding doctor could at least be a little bit easier on me.

Ironically throughout this whole excapade I found myself using Japanese for the vast majority of conversations with doctors, staff members and so on, and even learned some new vocab that wasn’t covered (i don’t think) in my text books, such as tenteki (drip).

To cut down what happened yesterday I went to the doctor, was put on a drip, slept, went to the Uni’s sick room, slept, went back to the doctor, was put on another drip, slept, got a taxi home, slept.

Today I went with my dorm manager to a local hospital to get checked up, but thankfully needed no more drips and was told I could start eating again. After that I came home and had a quick rest before writing this.

I really owe a huge thanks to all the KIEC staff members, my dorm manager and doctors for helping me out during that tricky period, especially those who accompanied me to the various locations.

Thank you

In other news, I probably won’t be able to walk to Shirakawa this side of new year. It’s not because of health reasons, but I’d forgotten that I actually had another assignment due for Leeds Uni shortly after New Year, so I really should get that done as a priority. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do the walk, it just means it’ll be a little bit warmer when I do.

Oh, I’ve still not got around to having a shave yet, but here’s an animation of a beard design I considered.

And on that note, I’m off to bed.