So much to say, so much to do....

So it's been more than week since I've blogged. Didn't do anything too extravagant but there are some things that are definitely worth noting here...

Fist off, 1 MONTH ANIVERSY IN JAPAN! Just a few days ago (Sept. 20th) marked my being in this country one whole month. Time flies! I'd say mainly it flies because I'm doing more than I've done since I first started college. It's a good feeling, only that I hope it doesn't all go by too fast, but hey, I've still got about 8 months here total. I'll be coming back for a few weeks in March to work and visit friends and family, and if all goes well I'll be back for the second semester that starts in April. I think by the end of this semester my speaking will be really good, everything is getting better by the day but my listening and reading skills are really coming up to par. Really got to work on getting myself outside, but classes really wear me out. Guess I'm not getting enough rest these days.

Let's rewind a few days before the 20th though. As most everyone reading this blog knows I went to the winery last Saturday. I think that's definitely made me want to drink more wine. I'll note that the office we get our copies (as well as get paid at) for my teaching job they actually sell wine made by agriculture students at the university. They're fairly inexpensive, $30 being the highest out of the bunch.

Back on subject Sunday was quite the day. We went to Ogino's (the grocery store) and I stocked up on some tasty goods. Instead of blowing money on Pizza Hut, we've discovered that on the third floor of the dorm there's a toaster oven. The first time I went up to use it Emma (one of the girls from Australia) came to use it about the same time so I asked who it belonged to, and come to find out it's the Australian students. I then asked to make sure it was okay that I was using it and she said that it was fine. Which I'm really glad for because I love toast and other small oven baked goodies. The point I'm getting at is that Ogino's has pizza on what might be either be toast or french bread. The closest thing in American would of course be french bread pizza. For less than $4 I can get four of these decently sized things and it has one piece of peperoni and one piece of ham (which I've never had on pizza till now!). It takes about 15 min to cook but they are mighty tasty. I've also found that I can probably live off of bread. I go through about 3 loaves of french bread a week (less than 5 bucks in total) because I just eat it as a snack or meal.

After Ogino's we came back to rest a bit and I decided to have nice cold glass of Coca-Cola. To my dismay (as well as my own clumsiness) I broke my only glass by trying to clean it and it slipped out of my hands. So I headed down to the Hyaku-en shop (dollar store) yet again to get another glass. I picked up a few other necessities like a bread cutting knife (I wonder why...), a bag of microwaveable pop weaver popcorn, a pillow, and a few mother misc things that don't come to mind right now. I don't think I've ever mentioned this but my room came with a pillow that has these small plastic beads in it almost making it like a bean bag of sorts. One might think it sounds comfy but is in no way easy to rest your head on. Since I've been here I've mainly used my extra blanket I got with my room as a pillow and eventually stuffed my blanket into a pillow case but that wasn't enough so I thought "Hey, it's a $1 dollar pillow".

I headed back up the hill to the kaikon (dorm) on my bike but ended up hoofing it most of the way. One things I noticed on the way down to the shop though was that it was a fairly clear day and I could see Fuji the best out of all the previous days I'd seen it. Here are a couple of pics:




On that note, I would like to say that we've already planned to climb Fuji next semester. There's only a about a two month window when one can climb. Total it's about a 10-11 hour hike up and down (7 up, 4 down). You start at night and then make it to the top for sun up where you are treated to an ocean of clouds (at least that was Steve's experience). Looking ahead that will probably be the last really big outing I have before coming back to the states for good (or maybe I'll just stay...). Strangely enough, when we saw Fuji a couple of days later all of the snow had melted back off!

After taking these pics of Fuji on campus. Pat and I rode down to a guitar shop where he's thinking about buying a cheap electric to play around on for the next 10 months or so. The shop was run by a father and son, the only way I know this is because he called him his father in Japanese. They kind of looked at us strangely the entire time probably wondering what we were doing in there. Pat ended up leaving empty handed but is planning on going today (10-26-08) to maybe get the one he's been eying for a while now.

We then rode past Ogino's again and I grabbed just a few more things since we were already there and Pat bought me an ice cream. Ice cream cones are really interesting here. They come completely encased in plastic and the top comes off to reveal the ice cream while, of course, the bottom covers the cone. I kinda stayed away from them before because I thought they might taste weird being that the milk here is a lil different since it's not completely homogenized, at least to my knowledge. However, I was quickly proven wrong as they are just as tasty if not tastier than ice cream you get at the grocery in the US.

When we got back to the kaikon we were greeted by someone asking for Steve. Then it jumped back into my mind that Steve mentioned going to an onsen the next town over with someone who could drive. It was said person and he goes by "Bob". This of course isn't his real name, but I think it's really unique so that's what I call him as well. So Bob, Steve, and I all hopped into a small van (Bob's) and headed over to the top of a mountain where the onsen was. Bob told us that this onsen was actually featured on the news a few weeks before and is one of the more famous onsen in Japan. Needless to say it was much larger than the onsen I'm used to going to and it had an open air bath (outside) which had about three or four individual springs. In total I'd say there were about 50-60 people in this onsen (and that was just the men's side). I say people because some father's would bring their little daughters to the men side (I'm assuming because their wife didn't come with) and a cleaning lady came to the men's side when I went to the toilet. The open air bathes are separated by wall, one side being the men and the other the women. We went all the way down to the lower spring where we were treated to an awesome yakei (night view) of the city. On some level it's quite empowering to stand naked at the top of a mountain overlooking a city. After an hour or so of sitting around in the spring I grabbed one of the most delicious things I've found in Japan thus far, Coca-cola in a glass bottle! In my opinion Coke should not be served in anything but a glass bottle, it tastes 10x better. Here's a group pic of Bob, Steve and I at this onsen:




After the onsen I went to bed as soon as we got back. I woke up early the next morning to pick up the latest issue of Weekly Shounen Jump (週刊少年ジャンプ). To my surprise it was more expensive than the first uiisue I had bought! But only a whopping 10 yen more. Meaning I got 500 pages for a meager 250 yen. Let me take this time to explain the denominations of money they use: 1 yen coin (it's as light as play money and you can bend it with your teeth), 5 yen coin (much sturdier than the 1 yen and has a hole in the middle), 10 yen (reminds me of a penny, I usually save these up to buy my Shounen Jump every week), 50 yen (good for the occasional vending machine), 1 yen coin (pretty much the equivalent of a dollar), 500 yen coin (the last coin before paper money and is the largest in diameter compared to the rest), 1000 yen bill (10 bucks), 2000 yen bill (very very rare, apparently they can be worth more than that because of the rarity), 5000 yen bill (go-sen-en that's how you say it in Japanese), and lastly 10,000 yen bill (ichi-man-en). I'm sure there are probably more bills than this but unless I somehow hit it big by modeling (still need to tighten those abs) or by getting into film here that won't be happening in the immediate future.

After getting my shonen jump class went as usual throughout the week and I pretty much stayed in. Come Wednesday we had our second class and I think we've finally got an idea of how we're going to teach them. Simply "This is what you say, this is how you say it, this is why you sat it" set up. We thought grammar and phonetics would be useful but in the end the best thing to do was to have each student ask another student a question, that student answers and then turns to the next to ask a question, and so on.

This week also marked my very first test in my class. I only missed two questions on my listening, and missed a few on the writing. In all I still scored about 83%, Martin got a little higher, Pat didn't do as well as he had hoped, but Ali (the Egyptian student) scored a whopping 4% overall. Needless to say he's not absorbing any Japanese whatsoever even though he keeps saying he studies nearly four hours each night. I keep saying if I did that kind of studying I'd be well on my way to fluent here. In any case I hope that eventually Ali will start to learn and catch on more and more because it will be for his own benefit, not to mention our classes benefit.

Friday had a really cool experience. There was a bazaar for international students to have the opportunity to get second hand goods for free. Such as clothing, kitchenware, and stationary. I ended up walking away with a Domo-kun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domo-kun) bag that had never been used which I sometimes use a camera bag now (all the Japanese girls think it's cute as hell). I also got a really nice thick coat for the winter, another curtain to help block out the sun in my room, two t-shirts, a nice airwalk button up shirt, a tie, a pot for cooking, and a food warmer that I probably won't end up using. At the bazaar you also have a chance to win other items using lots you are given at the entrance. None of us (Pat, Steve, and I) didn't see much that we would want to lot on, but we found a toaster and with Pat's lot we ended up winning! So now we have a cute Winnie the Pooh toaster for us to use:



And of course the Domo-kun bag:


I mentioned once before I was the internaitonal representative for a BBQ commitee that was organizing a grill out one weekend. That weekend was this weekend and I only managed to invite about a handful of people (the other 2 Americans, the Germans, one Chinese student, and three of my Japanese students from the English class). Total there ended up being about 22 people or so at the BBQ. We left early to go shopping with everyone which was really fun. Later we met the rest of the people coming along so we could all carpool over to the park we'd be grilling out at. Steve and I went shopping because we each wanted to make something. Steve chose hamburgers to grill, while I chose the chicken I've been working on the past few weeks here. Needless to say it was a really good time and I go to speak a little in Japanese there as well as in English. I would like to say that Japanese people are afraid of fire. Once you get a fire going it will burn on it's own, but the Japanese feel the need to continually fan the fire to keep it going, but I think a little bit of flame is neccessary to cook... Since I was a boyscout (which amazingly enough the Japanese know about) Steve nominated me to help them with the fire but none of them listened to me so I tended to my grill by lightly stirring the coals. Everyone was really wanting to try my chicken, which made me nervous because I really wanted everyone to enjoy it at that point. So after a few things had been cooked I went for it and then handed out the first few pieces and got really good reactions. It ended up being one of the bigger hits! The biggest hit being yakisoba (fried noodles) which I must say was freaking awesome! Here are most of the good pics I have from the this outing:




Here is my first crush in Japan, her name is Chen and she is from China, it's the girl on the left. Too bad she already has boyfriend :( The girl on the on the right is Mami (or is better known as "Mommy-chan"):



Here's Domo-kun trying to eat Yumi-san (Yumi loves American televsion like Smallville, Grey's Anatomy, Supernatural, and many more):


Here's Stehpan (German student) and the other German's (Martin my classmate) tutor talking. Both German students are very cool, outgoing, and nice all around:


Steve and Yumi talking:


Here's a pic of my tutor (left), some guy who happened to be in the pic (middle), and my teacher Okumura (right):


Here are some of the foods we cooked, as you can see it includes burgers, veggies, chicken, and yakisoba. MMMmmmm....




Lastly here are some group pics I took:






So here I am a day later finally getting a day to rest and not do much more than making a grocery run, laundry and tidying up a bit in my room. I think that this coming week is going to be pretty awesome considering it's only a three day week because next weekend is the school festival which will give us a FOUR DAY WEEKEND! Another cool note is that since I'm into film my adviser is going to help me organize and have movie watching sessions on campus! I think I'll soon be having lots of new friends due to this!!!