Hello, everybody. Nice to be back, and by that, I mean nice to be away again. For the moment, at least; I'm sure I'll be back in the states eventually. Any other possibility I find unnerving. At any rate, I'm going to start talking about things from when I got in to Japan, leaving Los Angeles after staying with Angwara for some 4 or 5 days. Thank you, Angwara. You were extremely hospitable.
I got in the day before I was to move into this dorm, and stayed the night at a hotel. That was five days ago, but I've been having fun, so the time's been flying, and it seems longer ago. That all went fine. I managed to take a train, transfer to a subway, and ride the subway all the way to campus without any trouble, mostly due to good instructions that I had recieved in advance. Exiting the subway, I was greeted by a kindly soul who guessed that I was looking for the International Residence because I was white and looking at the map just outside the station, and took me there, as he was bound in that direction himself. A word that I'll probably be using a lot is gaijin, 外人, which means "foreigner," or "alien," if you're a bit less polite. In all, people seem to be less impressed with gaijin than I was led to expect, and I've seen a few in most places I've gone recently, which is more than I'd expect. I have been going to large events likely to attract tourists, though, so that must be taken into account. I get the feeling that, eventually, it will become annoying that people will default to English when trying to tell me something, though. We'll see.
But that's not relevant right now. I got to the dorm, the "International Residence Higashiyama" [higashiyama <= 東山 => "east mountain"] without any trouble, and was subsequently checked in by some helpful volunteers of ACE, one of the two major foreign student aid groups. It manages to be an acronym by viture of leaving a bunch of words in the full name out. What's the full name? Let me see if I can look it up. It's the "Action Group for Cross-Cultural Exchange." I guess they thought it was better to omit some things and have a pronouncable initialism than to have to refer to themselves as AGCCE, which could almost be a strand of DNA. Maybe one of ET's, he had six base pairs. So anyway, the ACE guys all checked me in and showed me to my room. The rooms here are small, as you might expect, but that's fine, I don't need much. The thing that I'm worried about is the kitchen. I have a microwave, a sink, a refrigerator, and one gas burner. The sink is too big, so I don't really have any place to put a cutting board, even. If I want to prepare any kind of food, I'll need at least a pan or a pot, not to mention groceries, but it will still be difficult given the lack of facilities. Especially an oven. I have no oven. I can't bake anything. This could be a severe problem. I'm hoping that I'll be able to use some oven somewhere. But most of the stuff I'm used to making is a soup, so just a pot should do. I'd like to learn to make some Japanese stuff, but I don't know how I'd learn. Is there a cooking club? I dunno. I'll double-check. But anyway, I have a small kitchen, and a marginally larger living room, which houses the bed, which is also a sofa if you want it to be, and a small bathroom with a sink and a toilet and a shower, and that's it. The sink and the shower use the same water supply, which can be toggled by flipping a lever attached to a water hose. These folks seem to be really intent that I keep this room clean. I don't know what I'll do to make it dirty -- unless I start cooking, I guess -- but they provide a lot of guidelines on how to clean things and what needs particular attention. There seems to be alot of red tape in general. I get the feeling that life in Japan might boil down to what you're not allowed to do. I suppose you could say that's the case anywhere, you're just allowed to do less here, and I guess that might be true, but it still feels like I've recieved a longer list of no-nos and "we'll fine you if you do this" than I ever did in a US dorm. Now, I call this a dorm, but you may have surmised that it's more like living in a small apartment. There isn't really any common space; there's a lobby thta could more or less serve that purpose, but it's not attached to the rest to the building housing the rooms, and I can't tell that there's much to pull people there, besides wireless internet, usable only by registering your device's MAC address. You're not allowed to use electrical outlets in the lobby to power a computer -- you must use only your battery. I've heard the conjecture that this is because you don't pay for electricity in the lobby, but you do in your room. In the room, where I am now, I can use Internet only by signing in using my University ID and password, which I just received today, after reading all the Information Security crap, passing a test to make sure I had read it (you know the kind, with all the stupid questions with obvious answers ["It is acceptable to send inappropriate images to other students" is obviously not a correct answer] and the same question repeated many times with minor variations -- the typical headache), and completing an Information Security Self-Inspection. Bluh Bluh. People seem to actually care if I pirate things here, so I'm afraid that my anime consumption may somewhat ironically go down while I'm in Japan. I usually stream, I don't torrent (which seems to be the thing that they look out for the most; They keep mentioning P2P program names like Winny, Gnutella, and Xunlei, with a suprising lack of mention of BitTorrent), but I'm still scared to set off any flags. On the plus side, if I can figure out when Stardust Crusaders airs, I can watch it live as it broadcasts. If I can get a TV. There's one on the 6th floor, but I think I'm supposed to contact the office before I use that room, so I dunno if I want to try to book it every week for just me or something. Maybe it's not very stringent.
Boy, I got sidetracked there. So I'd gotten to the dorm, and the room was shown to me. I don't think anything else interesting happened that night -- oh, no, we had the "shopping tour" and the "dining tour." The shopping tour was actually a shopping trip, and I was totally unprepared for it, and had no clue what to buy. I got some bread, some shampoo, some body soap, and I think maybe that was it. Oh, no, I got some melon bread because I just had to try it. It was prety good. I feel like I should be able to make it myself. It reminded me a little of the Liege-style waffles I make, or French Breakfast Puffs. I looked at a lot of manga in the bookstore there, and gleefully saw that they sell Yurihime; I'm gonna have to pick that up. Maybe if I go shopping there regularly, I can keep up with it. It's what, bimonthly? It's going to take a bit of work to find a place where I can buy Hanjuku Joshi or The Rose of Versaille because they're not current seires, but I probably can if I can just find a dedicated manga store, not just a general bookstore or something. But I didn't know what to buy, and because there's a bazaar where they sell stuff like pots and pans for cheap, I'm holding off on buying groceries until there's a chance I'll use them. Until then, I've been surviving on the bread I bought, toasted on the gas burner, and a bit of the peanut butter I brought over. The bread's run out, though, and I'm going to save the peanut butter for later, maybe to share with Japanese people. Today I had some donuts that I bought at a Mister Donut for breakfast. The rest of the food has been specialty food, as you'll hear about a little later. The "dining tour" was just a trip to te cafeteria, which has good food for fairly cheap. I plan on eating there until the bazaar. For dinner, at least; they're not open in the mornings, so I'll just eat conbini cup ramen for breakfast until then.
And that, more or less, was day 1. Day 2 was some sort of orientation or something? Oh, no, it was a visit to the ward office to do some alien registration stuff. Applying for health insurance and the pension, then applying for a pension waiver, as well as just identifying place of residence and stuff like that. I took a long walk beforehand, and a long walk after that, so I have some idea of some of the general surrounding area. That night, there was a party at another international residence, the Ohmeikan, at which I met a Japanese guy that wanted to play Smash Brothers and a Japanese guy who wanted to start a Jazz combo. I gave them both my email address, but I haven't heard from either. I'll at least follow up on the guy who wants to play Smash Brothers, because I know where he lives. The other guy is a mystery. But hey, before we get to Day 3, which was pretty pack-jammed, I should say: I am very lucky because I get to witness the sakura season here. Cherry blossoms are pretty tightly assiciated with Japan, and they are everywhere right now. Around the Nagoya University campus, they can be seen right outside my dorm, behind a baseball field, at an intersection on campus, around some sort of retension pond, and in front of the convinience store on campus. I mention this because I wanted to show you these sakura pictures before I got to the ones from Day 3, Saturday.
On Day 3, there was a big festival in Inuyama, which is some way North of here. So some of us went, guided by the same lady that took us to the ward office, Kikuko-sensei. So it was a big hullabaloo, very crowded, lots of people, and pretty fun. At Inuyama, there's a castle and a shrine -- Inari shrine, right? That's big and important right? Well, at any rate, we all prayed there, following the proper procedure washing up at the temizu, and then we went to see the castle. The castle is really a glorified watchtower, and I don't think it's particularly historically significant. But, even as we left the Inuyama subway station, we could see Inuyama Castle in the distance. It was really cool. Note the sakura canopy covering the walk there. Sakura frikkin everywhere. After praying, we went to see the castle a little closer. We waited in line for a long time, then went up in the castle, which had very steep steps, I loved it, I want every staircase to be built like that, and enjoyed the panoramic view from the top balcony. From there, we could see the courtyard where we waited, a nearby parking lot, and The river walkway we used to get there. Sakura, sakura, everywhere in bloom. So then we tried some festival food, getting some dango and some squid. Dango are just little balls of dough; these were mitarashi dango, so they were grilled and covered in sauce. The squid were whole, small squid that had been grilled on a hot plate with a flatiron and covered in sauce. They were the more interesting thing to eat. Squid and octupus are very chewy, being essentially all cartilidge, but the suckers on the tentacles fry up crispy, so they have a crunch. Then, after everyone had gotten through the castle, we went to some rest house for a while and waited for one of Kikuko-sensei's acquaintances to come play the shamisen. In the meantime, they had some people playing bamboo flutes and drums. During a break, they went around to tables to show off their flutes, and I even got to try one of them. That was cool. After the shamisen dude got finished, we all went to a nearby sweetshop to make manju. This was possible thanks entirely to Kikuko-sensei's connections, as far as I can tell. Manju are balls of rice-flour dough with red-bean paste in the middle. Simple, but tasty, and dense, so filling. We each got to make two, one in the shape of a cherry blossom, one in the shape of a chrisanthymum. The guy who was leading the class produced much more finished products than any of us, as I should well hope, because he runs a sweetshop. Then, after manju, we all went back over to the festival, and we waited for it to get dark so they could light the lanterns on these huge floats and push them down the road. There were six of these floats, which were called "mountains" [山 => yama] in Japanese, and for good reason. They were like three stories tall, and covered in paper lanters in the dark. They're towers on rollers. On the inside, they had more bamboo flutes while kids banged on drums. All in unison, it wasn't a cacophony. These floats are entirely human-powered, so they had like a dozen people, front, back, and center, pushing and pulling to make them move.The exiting part was watching them turn, because turning a float like that with only humans to do it is an imprecise science. For one thing, they made a tremendoud ruckus and shook when they turned (causing a nearby gaijin toddler on his father's shoulders to joyously exclaim, "They farted! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! They farted!" a few times), which was good spectacle, but the float-haulers frequently overshot and turned too much, occasionally spilling into the crowd, and always demanding some correction after the fact. The crowd applauded any time they managed to make an accurate turn, which was not often. Then, it was time to go home, so we did. A Romanian girl named Iwana gave an open invitation for someone to eat a small portion of the meal she was planning to cook, and I accepted. I don't remember what it was called, let me see if I can figure it out right quick. Ciulama. It was Ciulama de poi. Simple, but effective and tasty. Thank you, Iwana. And that was Day 3.
On Day 4, some students got together and went to Nagoya castle of our own accord. It turns out that Nagoya Castle isn't, like, a real castle because the Americans burned it to the ground during WWII. So everything has been rebuilt and reconstructed. There's a reconstructed palace on the grounds that is very nice, but feels terribly modern in make. The castle itself hasn't been rebuilt into the castle per se, but a museum of the castle and some stuff in it, under and edifice disigned to match the original edifice. It had some scroll paintings, and I absolutely loved thoses. I spent a long time looking at those. There were both monochrome and color paintings, and while the color paintings were really nice, it was the monochrome ones that really held my attention the most. It's hard to believe how much contrast you can make when you have only gradiations of one hue; these artists can work wonders with just ink water, and paper. The two that stand out most in my memory were one of a dragon and one of a fish; it's mostly the amount of detail and precision you can fit in with such minor contrasts that really held me in raptures. The scales on a dragon or a fish, and the water effects. It was amazing. I should go to a museum proper so I can just sink into it. There were some monochrome paintings there that were just out of this world. My favorite things in the place. So we visited every floor of the castle and walked around the grounds a bit (sakura, sakura, and more sakura), and then went to Tsurumai for food, because there was a festival at Tsurumai. I'm identifying places by subway stop names, because I assume the subway stop names reflect where the stop is located. Tsurumai was another crowded festival, but this time I tried takoyaki and taiyaki. Both fine, but I got the feeling that the takoyaki was underdone, so it was a bit gloppy and hard to eat with the wooden skewer that they give you. So we spent some time at the Tsurumai festival (there was a rather large group of Touhou cosplayers, all with fairly impressive costumes), and then some of the Europeans decided it was too cold out, and they wanted coffee and to sit down inside, so we took the subway to Sakae and went to a Starbucks of all places. Bluh bluh. Then, after sitting a good long while, we went out and discovered that we were in Oasis 21, which is apparantly one of the most famous places in Nagoya. I didn't know that. It's like a big mall with an open area that has a high glass ceiling with a pond, so the light goes through the pond on its way down to the floor. We got there a bit too late for the sun to be in a good position for the effect, but we still took the elevator up and looked at the pond first hand. It was really cool. Then we walked around the mall. We visited a CD/DVD store, so I can bear testament to the stupidly high prices Japan places on CDs and DVDs (Most music CDs retail for 3,000-4,000 yen; Most DVDs retail for 3,000-5,000 yen, even Eragon, and they had Madoka Rebellion on sale for like 11,500 yen). And apparantly Japan takes online piracy seriously enough that they can captivate the market and squeeze those prices out of their customers. Ugh. Doesn't make me want to buy anything there. But, in that store, they also had this, which I had to take a picture of for Nick. I hope you're watching, Nick.
Which brings be today, Day 5, I guess, which was devoted to long boring explanations and reading verbatim from handouts. It went by relatively quickly. But at the end of it I got THE INTERNETS, so it was all worth it. I'm so stoked about THE INTERNETS. It looks like class registration happens on Wednesday, and classes start on Friday. I'll keep in touch. Peace.
