Almost there....

Well been a somewhat eventful week this week. The biggest thing that happened was probably that EKU has once again delayed my loan, mainly due to their constant mistakes as well as their own stupidity. Worst of all they say that it's my fault which I will take partial blame for being that I started the process so late in the semester. However, I didn't know I was coming to Japan for sure until August (you're supposed to sign up for aid in the spring) and I didn't really know I could get loans until October by learning it from Pat. Anywho, everything should be worked out in a few weeks so I'll be able to do a little bit of traveling while I'm in the country, as well as have enough money to get a small boost out in California when I come back stateside. I'm sure a lot of people think I'm crazy for going out that way, most movies aren't made there but that's still where all the big wigs are and if I want to get into the production side of things I need to try my best out that way. Of course there are lots of film schools in Cali as compared to the big Zero that are in Kentucky. Who knows though, I'm still in Japan for about 8 full months so I might always find a film school to go to over here!

Anywho, Monday I didn't do much other than class and then come back and sit around. I tried to study for my test the next day but I just didn't have it in me and was constantly distracted by friends talking to me on the internet that day. I ended up with a high listening score, but a mid B on my writing. Of course I made perfect on all my kanji this week. So Tuesday was pretty much just the test and I relaxed by playing some games and watching a movie or two.

Come Wednesday I don't have classes so I woke up late and ate a breakfast/lunch with Pat and Martin at the grill. The lunch-ladies there know me now and know that I always get my chicken and meat without the sweet and sour sauce they put on it. After that I picked up my pay check and paid some bills. Later that night was my last class for teaching English. I had my students write short speeches and give them in front of class and then made them answer questions from the students. One of my students, Yumi (whom I also think is a beautiful girl), did the best seeing as she's spent time out of the country and really practiced her English. I had another student just run his Japanese through an online translator and I had to correct everything he had written (I had the students send their speech texts ahead of time for corrections). After the speeches I paid for pizza for all of us and we ended up getting pepperoni, BBQ chicken, and dried tomato sliced pizza. I ordered three large size pizzas but they ran out of L size crust and they gave us two mediums which equals out to be a lot more pizza. Between the 8 of us we managed to finish it off though. I bid my students farewell and then headed back home to do a little bit of homework.

Thursday, Pat and I woke up earlier than usual and skipped our first period to go to a nursing school to speak English with some of the students there. We were picked up by taxi near campus and drove about 10 minutes over where we met with a few other students from the area. One student that went with us was from Malaysia and he was pretty cool. Another girl we met there was from Iowa. Then there was a guy from China who was pretty much trilingual (if not more). We would sit and take questions from the students while eating snacks and drinking hot tea (yes I burnt the shit out of my tongue once again). It was really fun and the girls kept asking me if I had a girlfriend and when I'd say no they would all be like "GET ONE IN JAPAN!". The last table was the most fun as I met a really cute girl who liked to talk about anime and would just keep saying this one characters name over and over from Gundam 00 "Setsuna F. Seiei!!". Maybe she thought I looked like an older version of him or something, I'm not really sure. Here is a pic of me and the last group I was with, the girl I was referring to is to the right of me with the stripes.




Afterward all that Ed (the man from Canada who invited us there) said his goodbyes and gave us a small amount of money for helping out. The taxi took us back to campus and then Pat and I rode our bikes down to Hinata's for a nice small Japanese lunch. Our teacher delayed class so we weren't actually skipping first period. While I enjoy this teacher's class I knew there was no way she could finish the lesson no matter how hard she tried. So I ended up not going, and I ended up being right about her not being able to finish the lesson. That night was really fun because we decided to go out to eat with Ho-san, Cho-san, Martin, and Pat for a small going away thing since Pat and Martin flew stateside to do some Christmas stuff as well as Martin being able to see America for the first time. We ended up eating at the same Italian restaurant that we held Steve's going away party at. For a massive 1500 yen (about 17 dollars) I ate an entire pizza by myself, shared spaghetti with everyone (with chili sauce no less), three orders of garlic bread by myself, and then we all shared ice cream and cake at the end. Needless to say I was ready to explode.

Afterward, I convinced everyone to go to the puri-kura (photobooth) where I think we had a good time. We didn't get any digital copies of the pictures so we had to scan them in so they may be a little blurry. Here they are:

I think this is one of the funniest.

This one is pretty good too, gotta
love my bunny ears as well as the
weird face Martin is making.

This is the one I designed the most.
Gotta love the cat border I put on,
as well as the awesome afro I gave Martin.

Somehow Martin manged to lean
out of this one. While those bunny ears
might not be placed correctly I gotta say
they almost look real.........

And the last one, I looks the most
ridiculous because I'm the only one
trying to mimic the pose they put
on the screen before taking the pic.

Needless to say I have a lot of fun with these things. And they're very cheap as well only like 400 yen for a lot of pictures.

Friday was lackluster as I went to class all day and ate at the grill for the second time this week. I found the last two volumes of Full Metal Alchemist (鋼の錬金術師) that I needed to complete my collection, so I was very happy. I was also pleased to learn this week that they will be airing another season of it in Japan coming this April! This anime is very popular in America, but the manga is almost entirely different from the anime, and the new season is supposedly going to stick more closely to the manga which makes me excited. A lot of people in America look down on you depending on what your hobby is, here it's not a big deal. You can't base what a person does in the free time on what kind of person they actually are. Some people might think it's a little nerdy to do some of the things I like but in Japan there are people way older than me that are into this kind of stuff. My point in case in America would be that I've always played videogames in America and was ridiculed by my peers and was always told by my mom that I would eventually grow out of it. Well I never did, while I don't buy as many games as I once did, I still love playing games as much as I did when I was a kid. However, now games are becoming more popular than movies and are high grossing forms of entertainment. So now who's the nerd.....

Well it's the weekend now and everyone has gone somewhere for the break. Most the people I hang with are either in America or on the north island of Hokkaido visiting Sapporo (where I hope to go as well one day). Even with my financials the way they are I've got good friends like Ho-san who are going to help me enjoy myself in Tokyo even if I don't have much cash right now. My buddy Bob paid for my bus ticket and hotel to go to Osaka and Kyoto during the new years so that should be pretty awesome as well. I must have a way better personality than I thought to make such awesome friends like these! Expect an update mid next week because I'll be back from Disney Sea, Akihabara, Tokyo Dome City, Ueno Zoo, and Fuji TV so there should be lots of pics and a big update! つずく。。。。。。

頭がいたい － My Head hurts

Howdy from the land of the rising sun as usual. Been a minute since I've updated but there's not been anything extremely exciting to talk about. Not that there will be in this post but there are some upcoming things that should be rather exciting.

First off I hate EKU, it's as if the place is run by people who never even made it through high school. It takes so long to get a response from someone and even then it's not a straight answer and you're left guessing. I am of course referring to my loans I applied for in order to stay over the entire year here in Japan. Everything is supposed to be worked out already and I should be receiving my funds fairly soon via mail. However, I looked over my account and it says I will owe nearly $400 dollars even after my scholarship pays for my school. The only differnce between this semester and last is that I applied for loans. I somehow doubt I'd be charged for loans so there's not telling what this magical charge is. So I'll ge calling them tonight, wasting even more Skype minutes on calling their stupid asses. I've also been informed from my USA chap (Pat) that when he applied for loans that he had to chose either for his loans to be disburst through his bank account or the new debt enhancement card through EKU. I refer to a new scam the school started this past semester in which the school give you your school ID, but guess what...it's a credit card too. How craptastic is that? I think they want kids to owe them for about two lifetimes now, and that's totally helping our economy.

Since I'm on a roll here I'll take a little time to gripe about the economy. Since being in Japan the US dollar has dropped in value almost 20%. I now lose 10 dollars for every 100 dollars I take out. Which in turn there is no tax here so in actuality I guess things could be worse, but to be safe as soon as I get the loan money I'm going to try and take a big chunk out in order to avoid possibly losing more as the US dollar makes a .5% drop nearly every week, or sometimes more than that. But I'm sure Obama will help make everything right! Doesn't matter whose ass got elected they've got a shitstorm to attempt to clean up. I don't however believe feeding stimulus packs into our economy will help anything other than get rid of SSI and any kind of retirement I could possible hope for in the late future. Of course I think one thing that just might help America is if they learn to stay the fuck out of other countries' business. No one treats me with spite or disrespect here but they all say the same reason why they dislike America if at all, because we can't keep out hands out of other peoples shit. If you think the Iraqi war is about freedom you need to wise the fuck up.

Ah, well I think I've griped enough about the world for today. I'm venting after having an extremely crappy day. Having a day long test every 8-10 days is kicking my ass. It's like having someone take a corkscrew to your head, pop your cranium out, and take a funnel and pour in mass amounts of language. Needless to say I've managed to kill a bottle of excedrin in less than two months, getting at least two migraines a week on average now. I ended up making 47/50 on my listening, 10/10 on my kanji, and for my writing I've yet to get back the score but I'm fairly sure that I made lower than I usually do seeing as I didn't study too much the night before. However, having so many A's so far a low B or high C isn't going to hurt me, and if I really wanna be a douche bag I can look at this in such a way that grades don't really matter, because I've already graduated! However, I do want to learn this language, I know that becoming fluent in a year will be difficult but I'm sure to pick up quite a bit of the language. I can easily get around with the vocabulary I have now. I continue to surprise people that I know so many words and kanji after reading so much manga and watching so much anime (I've cut down on it in recent years though).

I'm more than likely going to Disney Sea next week (no it's not like Sea World ppl). It's more for adults unlike Tokyo Disneyland. Other than that I don't really have a lot planned for my Xmas break. I was going to go to Osaka right after New Year's but the round trip ticket is 150 bucks, plus the cost of hotel and such I'd end up spending around 250 at the least. That would only be for one night so I don't think it's really worth it. Of course the other reason being I don't have my loan money yet so I can't really make plans like that. At the very least I'm thinkin about heading over to Tokyo by myself to kind of wander the city and probably hang out in Akihabara (electric central/nerd central).

A few of us are making plans to try and go to Nagano during a short break we will get during mid January. I'm really looking forward to it seeing as I've never tried to snow ski before. I can waterski but I'm quite sure it's very different. Nagano is actually very close to here, but for some reason we don't get much snow. I need to snap a pic of a view I get every morning, I get to see the snowcapped Southern Japanese Alps if I look to the west on a clear day.

Nothing really mindblowing has happened to me of late unfortunately. Hopefully, once I get passed all this shitty buearacracy I can have some cash and relax for a little while anyway. Well hope everyone enjoyed this blog completely void of anykind of pics. Wait....I'll add some, but let's just hope she never sees these or she'll kill me. This is my Taiwanese friend Ho-san whom I'll be going to Disney Sea with, she'd definitely kill me if she knew I threw this up on the internet :|