Address & Weekend!

As a response to the heavy requests (probably because of my and Jesus' upcoming birthdays, ahem), here's my mailing address:

Ryan Smith
532-0012 Osaka-Fu
Yodogawa-Ku
4-17-9 Kikawahigashi
#615 Lions Mansion Shin Osaka Dai 6
JAPAN

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My weekend
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I had a great weekend. Wait, have I told you about Friday already? Ah yes. Alright, so as you may recall, my trainride home had rendered me yenless and I wasn't sure how I was going to get back into town to use the internet to transfer money online into my chequings account to be withdrawn. It's all a vicious cycle leaving me trapped at home. Luckily, my roommate Chris was able to lend me 200 yen so I could catch the train in from Juso. Chris has a shoebox full of change in his room, I'll have to remember this when things get tight... Actually, I created a secret change stash of my own, so that won't be necessary.

I went window-shopping for a glamourous bicycle and found just that. Actually, every bike in Osaka seems to be exactly the same. They all have the kick-stand, just one gear, a basket in the front and one of those little bells that make you feel tough. The shinier they are, the higher they're priced. After checking out a few stores, I settled for a moderately-shiny one for 6,000 yen.

That afternoon I met up with Steve. He can speak functional Japanese and he helped me get my key copied (which I am planning to hide somewhere in my neighbourhood - up a tree, if possible). We visited some of the bars in the Umeda area, one of them was a shot bar where I tried my first Irish whiskey, called Tullamore Dew, which was tasty. We later met up with some friends of his who are participating in the Jet program and had come into Osaka for a concert of sorts. I'm a little jealous about this Jet program, it sounds really good (300K yen/month, heavily subsidized accomodations, Japanese government-funded orientation) and is a much more prestigious program than Nova, but Nova was the only means by which I could go to Japan in November and be pretty much guaranteed placement in a big city.

Actually, in retrospect, I kind of hit the jackpot with Nova. I had originally been planning on teaching with Geos, which I had been told is much higher quality than Nova, but accidentally slept through the third part of the interview. Unfortunatley for Geos, they had already eliminated everyone else in the group interview and thought that I was surely their man, but apparently they were very wrong. I wrote them a letter of apology but never heard back. Well I'm glad I didn't. I haven't yet seen one Geos school anywhere in the city of Osaka (whereas Nova is everywhere) so I probably would have been placed in some kind of two-horse fishing village in the middle of the country- ok, so maybe they fish in a pond. Jen said it was fate and I guess it may have been her reporter's intuition and not just trying to get me to shut up.

Anyway, Steve and the Jet people were going to a club with a $35.00 CDN covercharge and that's still horribly outlandish to me, so I caught the last train to Juso. From Juso I decided to have a footrace with myself and sprinted as fast as I could home, the current record is 7 minutes, 23 seconds. Here in Osaka I feel like enough of an outsider that I have absolutely no problem flailing my arms around and running as fast as possible through the middle of the streets, people will still look at me with an equal amount of curious suspicion as always. I'm not sure if I told this story already, but my roommate Will said the people here are blind to the ways of the Westerners. He said that sometimes on on a full but quiet subway, Chris will just start beatboxing and he'll erupt into a freestyle rapping session and no one even bats an eye.

On that note, I was walking down the street earlier Saturday morning and a man was sitting in his car reading a newspaper, as they often do here. He glared at me suspiciously and as I approached he locked his car doors and sat back. Lucky him, too, since I had my crowbar on me and was looking for a Japanese man to beat up and rob, as I often tend to do. I guess I now know how minorities sometimes feel in North America. Sunday night, also, I was trying to politely ask for directions from a woman, who, instead of responding, took off running.

Sunday I decided to try out the new bike and made my way down to the riverside. The goal for the day was to get my bike down to the Shinsaibashi (southern downtown) area so that I could stay out past midnight (when the trains stop running) and then bike home. At the riverside I found my way up a hill to a set of stairs that led to the sidewalk along one of the many bridges that cross the Yodobashi (though this is the main one which has eight lanes of highway and carries my subway line). I cruised down the sidewalk, clenching the sidebar whenever a bike or person passed so that neither of us would get thrown into high-speed traffic.

My riverside has a walking path, baseball fields and then a bit of a strange boggy area that you wouldn't expect to see in such a central part of a large city. Getting to the other side was a bit of a shock, since there were little huts made of sheet metal and a man sitting in a pile of junk on a hill. It was obviously a sketchy part of town, but at least I wasn't going through at night-time (there's a little foreshadowing for you).

After passing through another neighbourhood into Umeda, I parked my bike and spent the afternoon there, exploring and mixing in with the weekend crowds. I really like seeing the youth all over the streets here and am now very thankful that I have weekends off, since that's when they're all out in their full glory. I met a group of Japanese goths and requested they let me take a picture with my phone, I'll upload it if I can figure out how. Also, Friday night at my work's train station there were a few groups of Japanese rebel teenagers playing the guitar and singing, I'd like to get a video of it because Japanese people can be so... adorable, I guess the word would be.

When it was starting to get dark I biked down to Shinsaibashi to drop off my bike. I passed through another red light district and am confused since I've now wandered into at least five around the city. I passed into another part of town that was actually beautiful. It was the first beautiful part of Osaka that I have seen. The clean street was lined with golden trees, there were little statues along the sidewalk and untacky Christmas-style lights draped over the lamp-posts. There were a few official-looking buildings, one possibly being city hall, and I passed over a nice-looking river that made me finally understand how Osaka was once called the "Venice of the East". Not that that kind of term is used selectively - it's also been named the "Manchester of the East" in reference to its industrial beauty.

I also came across the Hard Rock Cafe and after a few blocks was surprised to see that I had been on the avenue that later became the main strip of Shinsaibashi. Now everything that I had seen in scattered bits while emerging from subway stations around the city was finally coming together into one giant map.

There's always a lot going on in Shinsabashi at night time. Despite the sidewalks being packed, ther was a bride and groom walking down the middle with a cameraman filming them. I parked my bike among the many parked along the road. I always try to pick a point on the street to remember it by, since all bikes basically look the same. Mine, however, is of the unique brand-name "WendyCycle" so at least I have that. WendyCycle makes a fine bike. Actually, it's pretty rickety, but that's alright.

I took the train back home partially to get some supper and change, but mostly because I had nothing to do for a few hours before I was supposed to meet up with Mark, Justin & Jacquie. I probably ate sushi, I don't really remember these things anymore though. Ugh, tonight I bought some sushi at the local grocery store. Trying to find the least dangerous-looking roll, I got one with what I thought was chopped up peanuts in the middle, but it definitely wasn't. I have no idea what it was, but it's wet, gooey, tastes bad and looks like chopped-up peanuts. And please don't mention the fact that no one would make sushi with chopped-up nuts inside, I know.

That night I met up with Mark at Badaboushka's (or something like that), a fairly good-sized bar that provides free pool and darts if you purchase drinks. The pool tables were full so we tried our hands at darts. Apparently, the game of darts exists in Australia, because Mark was able to destroy me (it was my first time playing, though I'm on my way to becoming a darts wizard).

Afterwards we met up with Justin & Jacquie at the swanky Riverside Restaurant where they were on an all-you-can-drink deal with a slew of Nova teachers and staff from their school in Kongo. Jacquie and I have been discussing what to do for New Year's and have started thinking up ideas for some kind of Christmas dinner. Apparently, Nova is still operational through Christmas, though since Christmas Eve and Day land respectively on Saturday and Sunday, I happen to get both off.

Around 11:30, Jacquie and Justin both had to take their train back (but not me) and Mark luckily lives with a five minute walk and didn't have to rely on any transportation. We wandered around for a while, had a Kirin (good Japanese beer) in an Olde English pub, then headed up to Dotonburi to that 280 bar where I had gone last Saturday with Zoe and Suzanna. To refresh your memory, all items in the bar cost 280 yen (294 with tax) and that covers such random items as medium or large beers, skewered chicken hearts (luckily they have an English menu because the pictures look good), mixed drinks, frozen strawberries, various other skewered parts of a chicken, and "bowl of boiled cabbage (second helping free)".

After leaving, the streets were pretty empty and we were approached by a lone woman offering "massaji". Since the streets were so dead I decided to try to bike back at top speed and set another record, though I'm a still a little worried about bike use here. Helmets don't exist, which I guess is good since I hate wearing them, so I have to be extra careful not to crack my head open (versus in Canada, where I have been hit by a car while riding a bike twice).

Everything went well until I got back to the bridge area. I figured that rather than making my way through the dodgy riverside possibly hobo-infested area, I'd just take the shortcut up the overpass upon which cars drive. HUGE mistake. It was four lanes heading in one direction which started out calmly until I got about five minutes along. After a "close call" with what looked to be a car scene out of the movie "The Fast and the Furious", I hopped off my bike and walked it along a narrow strip between the road and a concrete wall I was likely going to be crushed up against. I came to a platform that I could use to cross over to the traffic heading in the opposite direction and took it, thinking it would raise my chances of survival by having the cars at my back, but it just made it ever-the-more-frightening as vehicles went booming by at speeds that physically pushed me towards the rail with a big drop to the road below. I had a near-death-experience when a giant truck, refusing to give me anymore space than he thought necessary, barely brushed past me. I was so thankful to get off of that ramp alive.

Next came the hobo village that I had mentioned earlier. I was making my way towards the lone spiral staircase that I would have to carry my bike up to get onto the sidewalk. Government officials were considerate enough to place this as close as they could to the grassy bit by the river where it seems that Osaka's homeless like to camp out. As I approached, there were no longer any street lights and the area was completely dark, to add to the effect. A man was biking out of there and looked quite ogrish which made me yelp out loud and then burst out laughing. As I passed under a low overpass, I passed another character, a motorcyclist who had debarked and was holding some kind of pack and just standing there in the dark, no doubt waiting for someone to come pick it up and I really didn't want to be there when that happened. I continued on and made it to the spiral staircase, threw my bike over my shoulder and jogged up and took off.

When I got home, I told my roommate Will about it and he said that I took the wrong bridge. Apparently the bridge near Juso is completely made for cyclists. Hmm.

Alright, so it's now Monday night. Today work was easy, one of my classes was cancelled since they didn't have enough students to go around, and I also got to do voice again, which is pretty relaxed. I had good class discussions and in a lesson about nutrition I got to tell some Japanese women about why North Americans are so fat. I think I've now met all of the teachers at my school and am surprised by the number of Americans, at least six. I'm the only Canadian and there's at least one Brit and one Australian. One of the staff (administrative front desk staff, they're all Japanese) told me that one of my students complained that I speak too quickly. I know just who it was, too, and it was his own fault, he wasn't listening and I think was humiliated that he never knew any answers when I called upon him. Nevertheless, I do speak too quickly and have trouble gaging how good the students' English is since it really seems to vary. The other teachers say that conversation with them gets boring once you get to know all of the students for a while, but for now things are going well and I enjoy teaching the classes more than sitting around in the teacher's room.

Anyway, now that I'm into the full swing of things, this is probably the last gigantic post that you're going to see here for a long, long time. Frankly, I don't have the time anymore, things are probably going to become routine and monotonous and there's little reason for you to be sitting here reading the same thing over and over again. There are other things I want to get done too... I went to the Osaka Foreign Work Office today and they directed me to the Working Holiday Visa Office to find second job. Also, one of the teachers at my work told me about a service that matches English teachers up with students for tutoring that pays $25/hr plus transportation. She says that they've even issued her more students than she can handle and she was able to live off of purely tutoring last month, so that sounds nice and I'm going to check it out. This paragraph has really just become me talking to myself, I'm getting really sleepy if you can't tell, and my eyes keep shutting. I don't want to become one of those Japanese people who sleep at the internet cafe (they provide blankets and pillows here), so I had better get out of here.

Ryan

P.S. In case you've forgotten, that address again is:

Ryan Smith
532-0012 Osaka-Fu
Yodogawa-Ku
4-17-9 Kikawahigashi
#615 Lions Mansion Shin Osaka Dai 6
JAPAN

Mein Address, Mein Wochenende, Mein Address

As a response to the heavy requests (probably because of my and Jesus' upcoming birthdays, ahem), here's my mailing address:

Ryan Smith
532-0012 Osaka-Fu
Yodogawa-Ku
4-17-9 Kikawahigashi
#615 Lions Mansion Shin Osaka Dai 6
JAPAN

Ratings are getting low!! I knew I shouldn't have abandoned that towel subplot...

I had training from Tuesday to Thursday and it was exhausting. It ran daily from 1-9pm and I was training in Umeda (northern downtown area) with three others - Mark (AUS), Katie (CDN) and Claudia (AUS). It started out with just classroom lessons - they were basically teaching us how to teach and it was boring and I had trouble concentrating. Every once in a while I would snap back into it and realize that my attention span during this little bit of instruction might plot out how good of a teacher I'm going to be over the next year, but I really couldn't be bothered and just let my mind wander for most of it.

Our teacher, British Doug, however, kept calling upon us for answers, so I needed to be semi-conscious. He seemed to be teaching us the same way as he's telling us to teach the Japanese students: using the same little tricks to "keep us interested", so that was kind of funny.

Soon enough, things brightened up when we found out that we were going to be thrown right into the pool that first evening (metaphorically). We each taught half of a class and were being observed by senior teachers and we were terribly nervous. At first we relieved ourselves in thinking that these students new we were newcomers and were probably getting a free lesson out of it, but then we were told not to let on that we were new and realized that they're all regular paying customers. It was bone-chilling...

The lessons are set up like so: Introduction, Assessment & Focus, Language Input, Tune In, Listening Exercise, Activities 1&2, Application, Wrap-Up. I know that makes no sense to you, but we're basically just given a "teacher's manual" and told to go teach a class and improvise while we frantically read up on what we're going to teach while we're teaching it.

We get to pick the topic of what we're going to discuss - each level (there are 7-8 English levels) has its own set of lesson choices. I tried to pick topics that I thought I knew a lot about, so my lessons are usually about movies or traveling.

I was really impressed with my first class. There were four students (the classes are maximum 4) and their ages/genders were approximately/probably 23M, 17F, 42M, 30F. As I said, I was really impressed with them. Not, by any means, because of their English level, but they were just so interested in learning English. I had their full attention and they were terribly intimidated by me. No one tried talking to their classmates and they would start taking notes as soon as I'd open my mouth.

So the first class went by smoothly and we had been given plenty of preparation and cool-down time. We had a dinner break where Claudia, Katie, Mark and I went to Subway (which is horrible here, for the record-- unless you want a shrimp & hot dog sub on sesame).

I like the group I'm learning with. It's fairly balanced in that we have two male, two female, two Canadians, two Australians, two who will be teaching part-time, two full-time, two living in Osaka proper, two living far away... it makes for a sense of equality. They made us practice teaching on each other and I was surprised that I was probably the least comfortable with it, but I seemed to feel the most comfortable with teaching the actual Japanese people.

Wednesday they threw us head-first into the deep end (again with the swimming analogies). But that wasn't until the evening. In the afternoon I taught another class which went quite smoothly - swimmingly, I should say. My topic was movies and I told them about how I was planning on seeing the new Harry Potter movie that weekend and one of my students elaborated on how the Harry Potter series is her favorite. It was an all-girls class, which I really like because they seem to be more eager to participate and giggle a lot whenever anything awkward occurs. One of them told the class about her favorite movie, "Regarry Brond". Regarry Brond is about Reese Witherspoon becoming a rawyer. I liked it to, Sadako.

At the beginning of each class I write down all of the students' names and constantly repeat them whenever I want them to speak. I accidentally turned my list upside-down this class and mistakingly kept calling Rumiko "Sadako" and she would say "But I am Rumiko" and I would laugh nervously.

We also sat in on "Voice" for a little bit. Each Nova school has a Voice room, where students can pay about $20 and sit in for the day. They cycle through the teachers and always have someone sitting in there discussing various topics with the students. There were about ten of them in there that day and they sent all four of us trainees in at once. Doug told them that we're all new instructors and the voice attendees were delighted and had plenty of questions for us about our home countries. An old woman had me all to herself and we discussed things that she suggested that I do here in Osaka and told me about her business trip to Wisconson a few years back. She also explained to me where my school was and how to get there. I really liked voice and hope that I'll get to do a fair bit of it later on.

We went for sushi for dinner and this was my first time having real Japanese sushi. It was as thick as an arm and really tasty. We ate it in a commonly set-up restaurant where all the stools are around the area where the chef prepares your sushi. We all asked for Coca-Cola and they explained to us that they only have sufficient Coke for two fo us and the rest of us would have to drink orange juice.

In the evening we had to teach two classes back-to-back, with only ten minutes in between to mark all of our students from the first class and get things ready for the second. I found this horribly difficult and bombed both of these classes. After my first one, the observer criticized me on the fact that there were all kind of dead silences where the students were just staring at me while I frantically tried to figure out what to do next. I guess knowing how the lessons work is something that gets easier with time.

In the second class I had a Brazilian (they exist as the biggest non-Asian minority in Japan, though this is the first one I have encountered). He couldn't understand anything I was trying to say and things were so hectic that I had to wave in the Australian observer to take over. She flew through the class with ease, it was really impressive and the students seemed to be enjoying it and laughing at (somehow understanding) her jokes. She was really direct with them and instead of saying something like "Hiroki and Norohiro, you will be partners in this activity" she would just point at two of them and say "Together". Ooh, the simplicity, I definitely talk way too much.

Thursday morning I went jogging, remember that for later...

The third day things went far better. We taught two sets of back-to-back classes and they weren't too bad. We went to a restaurant called First Kitchen for dinner and I ate some kind of Terriyaki Chicken Pizza with seaweed on top that was pretty bad. I really like the fact that I'm not loving the food here, I think I've already started losing weight and have been eating whatever I want whenever I want. I think the key thing is that I don't keep any food at home (except for orange juice, bread and peanut butter for breakfast) so I'm never snacking. It was like the early days of Hong Kong before I figured out how to bargain with the Filipino grocery store ladies for cheap muffins.

To simplify things in my second-last lesson, I did the movie theme again. I had only two students in this class, an old woman who had recently seen "Saving Private Ryan" (or "Pulivetu Lion", as she called it) and a younger woman whose favorite movie was "Bewitched". We did an exercise where she had to describe the movie to the older woman and then the older woman had to describe it to me, but she was obviously not listening and completely made up the plot. I haven't seen "Bewitched", but know that it didn't involve Nicole Kidman driving around and shooting bad guys, but I let it slide.

Our last lesson of the day, we were not being observed. This felt great, and was a huge relief because that's the way that things are going to be as soon as we start teaching at our own schools (I was going to start the following day). At the end of the day, Doug allowed us to ask any questions we had about Nova or Japan in general and that was great. We got him to tell us exactly how much the students are paying, which is kind of funny.

Students buy large volumes of "tickets" and each ticket allows them to come to one forty-minute class. They will buy up to 540 tickets at a time (that's about a class every two days for three years) and I think tickets end up costing around $20 each (though a bit less if you buy huge volumes). Furthermore, some students will buy up all four students' seats in their class with four tickets (so $80/40 min.) so that they can have a one-on-one session with a teacher (I've taught a couple of them, actually), which sounds a little excessive to me.

At the end of the night we asked Doug where we could go for somewhere cheap for beer and he asked us to hold on a minute. He went out and checked with some of the teachers and said that they'd take us to a really cheap bar called "The Balcony".

A few Nova teachers (I think all Australian), took us to this "Balcony", which turned out to just be a look-off in the train station downstairs with a grocery store next to it selling cheap beers, which was perfectly fine. It's overlooking an area of the train station with escalators and giant TV screens and there is a lot of movement. I got the impression that they go drink there every day after work and seems like a cheap alternative to a pub.

A Japanese businessman slyly came up next to Mark and I while we were talking and while pretending to be looking in a locker next to us, pulled out a camera and held it there, trying to get a picture of us while looking away. We posed and when he went to look at how it turned out, saw that we had seen him doing it and scurried away.

The train station security came to kick us out, which they apparently do most nights. They can't speak English, so I think it takes them a bit of courage to come up and politely say "No drink", though I'm sure some of these teachers would speak fluent Japanese. We politely moved to another secluded "balcony" in the station where, they say, no one has ever told them to leave.

Although some of the newcomers from other training sessions were going clubbing all night, we all headed home on the last trains since we were starting work the next day.

When I got home, I realized I had lost my key. "Gahhh!!!!" I exclaimed, since I had been planning on getting an extra one cut earlier that day but hadn't gotten around to it. Losing my key was horrible because not only could I not get into my building and apartment, but I had absolutely no idea how I was going to get a replacement key. We have no idea who our "landlord" is, and even if I could convince one of my roommates to lend me their key to try to get it copied, they would have no way back in and I wouldn't even know where to start to get it cut. I rang the buzzer and luckily Will was there and up and was able to buzz me in. I stomped around the apartment ranting about how horrible this was and envisioned having to survive without a replacement key for a couple of weeks, just sitting and waiting outside of the apartment for hours on end until my roommates got home. Then I decided to check my shorts. Ahh yes, I went jogging that morning (as stated far above) and had left my key in the pocket, hehehe. That night I slept well, with my training behind me, my stomach full of beer, and my key clasped tightly in my hand.

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Friday
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Friday I decided to open my Japanese bank account. I walked to the Jusa branch of UFJ (the big bank here) and sat down with the documentation that Nova had given me. I needed my own little signature stamp with oriental lettering to go through with it. They also needed me to write my name out in Katakana, which I did with difficulty, and had to reference Michael Jackson for the banker to understand what my middle name was.

I started work at 5pm at the Nova branch where I'll be working. It's located in Hankyu Ibaraki and I got a little lost on the way, so I was only about 10-15 minutes early instead of the hour I'd been planning for, so time was tight. Considering that, however, the lessons went smoothly. They cram five back-to-back sessions in for me between 5 and 9pm and it's actually nice to actually have all my time at work used efficiently, rather than any job I've had in the past where there's never enough to do.

This paragraph is going to sound stupid, but when I get into a bind at work, I think to what my inspiration is for teaching English. Believe it or not, it's not the money. It's more so that I've had such a hard time getting around in Japan with no Japanese that the more English I can spread among them, the easier it will be for myself and others who come after me. That kind of motivation actually works.

As a side-note, I just got a drink out of the vending machine called "Aquarius". One of the other trainees had been telling me about this drink, that they bought it from the grocery store expecting it to be some kind of water, and it's definitely not. It tastes like honey and nectar mixed in with hot sugar-water. No wonder the kids here are so buzzing with energy. I wonder why the adults seem so calm and dead inside...

Back to my first day at work, I met the other teachers there and was a little alarmed that I could easily be the youngest by five years. What are 28-year olds doing going to teach English in Japan at such an old age? Does the fact that I'm doing this six years ahead of them make me better than them? I would wager that yes, it does.

The people seemed really nice, though. An American teacher told me she lives near me and can help me out if I need to find anything. They all seemed fairly care-free and relaxed and were running the school as a team. It's a really small school (I think there was a even a period where I was the only one teaching), so that's pretty nice. The area that it's in is just another suburb of Osaka. It's halfway to Kyoto and there's apparently no break in development between the triangle of our two cities and Kobe, so we basically have city going on forever which is a little unimaginable.

After work I mistakingly took the "local" train rather than the "express" train. The express only stops a couple of times before my area whereas the local one sits and waits at every little station along the way, so I think the trip must have taken me at least 45 minutes. I went home and changed and went out to meet Mark in Shinsaibashi.

Mark had just finished his first day as well and we met to go to the Pig & Whistle, Osaka's most famous pub among the expatriate community. It was full of British-looking expats and Japanese people who wanted to associate with them. In a sense it's good to have these British communities in cities around the world who will refuse to assimilate and demand replica pubs like this one, but in a sense it's really tiring. It was a nice bar and I'll probably be going back soon, though the beer was steeply priced at 700 yen/glass.

I didn't realize until I was on my way that I only had about half an hour before I had to leave to catch the last train back. We sat down, I threw back my beer and soon enough I was on my way home, after having sworn to buy a bike the following day so I wouldn't have to rely on this transit system.

I walked briskly back to the subway station and as I approached I saw people running. Whenever you see locals running towards or away from something, it's a sign that you should be doing it too, so I sped up and jogged down the stairs ahead of them all. I paid for my ticket and at the bottom of the escalator saw the subway stopped on both sides, the last car heading in either direction. Since I didn't have time to figure out my bearings, I just plunged into a crowd of people on the one on my right, which immediately took off heading south. I turned to the guy next to me "Shinosaka?" I asked, hoping we'd be heading in the right direction. Nope. He had obviously had too much to drink and was trying to piece together a fancy English sentence, but I meanwhile heard an announcement over the subway intercom in Japanese, something about Namba (wrong direction).

The guy next to me pieced his thoughts together and told me that I was supposed to be going north and that I was taking a great gamble going south and he predicted that I would be paying a lot of money for a taxi ride home. At the next stop he told me to run and I took off running and made my way to the other platform, since people still seemed to be hanging about.

So the subway going north arrived and I thanked Jesus that I hadn't missed the last train. But then the subway just stopped in Umeda and sat there while everybody poured out and headed upstairs. So the subway was just stopping there and I figured my journey home was over and I might as well just settle with the fact that I was going to have to camp out there all night (I didn't have enough money for a cab) or make the long arduous trek home. I made plans to camp out in an all-night internet cafe that I had seen, when suddenly I saw someone running. Yes, running! Was there another way out of here? A secret train?!

And it turned out there was. I followed them a few blocks over, where we converged with more running people. The subway was finished, but everyone was trying to get the last train home. I got up into the large JR station where I found a train that was actually heading up to Shinosaka and was cheaper than the subway! I had no ideas that trains from Umeda came into my station and it landed on a platform above the subway station mall.

Just when I thought my adventure was over, I saw a really strange-looking man hobbling about in the station, what a night!

Ryan

Monday - Orientation - "Welcome to the Nova Corporation"

First of all, I have a little feedback for comments I've been getting. Item the first: I am not having a bad time here. Sorry if my entries sound sad or stressed out, pretty much everything's going well. There isn't really anything that I'm too disappointed with yet and I'm really enjoying being here and think it has some good potential.

Secondly, yes, I will get some pictures up sometime soon. I actually haven't used my camera once since I arrived in Japan. I didn't want to sully my first few days here with the feeling that I had to be constantly carrying my camera around and taking pictures of anything that happens. I also wanted to get a bit of a perspective on Osaka before I started snapping photos of what I thought was representative but what would later end up not to be. Finally, there's a bit of a tendency for people who take pictures to only remember exactly those moments, so I didn't want that to happen to me in my first few days.


"Orientation"

So back to Monday, there were about 16 of us at orientation, which was held on the 19th floor of their main West Japan office in Namba...

People from my flight: Me - Justin & Jacquie - Jeremiah - Alex - Lesley & Linda
People from Saturday's Meet-up: British Zoe - NZ Susanna - Australian Claudia
New People: Canadian Katie - Australian Mark - NZ Brett - and one from California and one from Australia who I didn't really meet.

The Orientation was split up into three parts, but I can't really remember what they were. I was a little bored, at least for the first half, and there was lengthy discussion about Nova policy and such. I really don't enjoy going through all of that each time I start a new job and wish there was some way of hibernating through the first few weeks of jobs.

My roommate had told me that there were going to be free bento boxes (food) there for all of us so I made sure not to eat any lunch, but at our 3pm break I realized that the bento boxes weren't coming. I was famished so I took the 10 minutes we had to run downstairs, order a McDonald's combo and stuff as much of it down my throat as possible. I think I only got about half of it down before it was time to rush back upstairs again.


"Mushi Mushi?"

I got a cell phone at orientation from Vodafone! I'm not sure what you have to dial to call from overseas, but if you're interested then e-mail me and I'll figure it out. OK, my phone is really high-tech, comparible to the Trapper Keeper from South Park or the Matrix from The Matrix. It has its own e-mail address so I can send and receive e-mails from wherever. It has internet access - I haven't fully figured it out yet and I think it's just basic, but I was able to search google on my phone and find my blog. I can take pictures, and better yet I can take videos. It has an English/Japanese dictionary which might come in useful, and I can supposedly also tune into local radio stations, though this feature has given me trouble. And its most high-tech feature, you ask?? TV. That's right, I can watch colour TV on it from wherever - it's not perfectly clear, though I'm sure there are some Japanese scientists out there busy at work perfecting this.

I now have eight names in my address book and someone is showing me how I can get a picture of this person's face to flash up on the screen whenever they call. Last night I figured out how to take a picture of myself and then e-mail it to my hotmail address, though the best feature that I've found so far is for a cartoon bear to come up on the screen and play rock-paper-scissors (or "janken") with me. It makes me wonder what people used to do in the olden days before playing rock-paper-scissors with a cartoon bear was an everyday activity.


"Welcome to the Nova Corporation"

One thing I should note about what I've seen about Nova so far is that they definitely do seem like a big corporate company rather than a school. We're not teachers per se, we're more so customer service representatives. Instead of showing us how to actually help our students learn English, they seem to be more focused on showing us how to not offend our students, how to keep them comfortable and basically how to keep them satisfied (with the altering of their English level being a side-benefit).


"Chinese Food & Trolley Bar"

When the orientation came to an end and the bento box was officially not coming, some of us decided to go get something to eat and drink. I went to a Chinese restaurant with Katie, Justin, Jacquie, Brett and Susanna. There was no English so I tried out my Cantonese, but they were full-on Japanese people. After dinner, we wandered around looking for an appropriate bar. I remember how easy this used to be in Hong Kong, we would wander into HK's bar district, Lan Kwai Fong, and everything was right there on display. Things have been a lot tougher here as no one really knows their way around and things don't seem to be as easily set up. We found a number of interesting-looking pubs, but they seemed to be too small to accomodate us all. They would be literally just a bar with some stools alongside. After wandering down a few alleyways around Dotonburi, we found a pretty good one.

Walking into it felt like walking into a small 1920s drinking hole. The bartenders (both a Japanese man and woman) were like 70, which I had never seen before. We had a big old-style booth in a side of the bar had the air of being in an old-style trolley-car, somehow. Justin's Scottish roommate showed up, he was in his second week of teaching. He said that during our training week (this week) we'd say about a thousand times that there's no way we could do this and that we want to go home, but once it's all over it will be ridiculously easy. That seemed reassuring since my first impression of him was that he was someone who might have trouble doing many day-to-day activities, but I don't think that's true.

At around 9pm, we all were yawning and struggling to stay awake. Orientation really takes a lot out of a fellow. I got on the subway and headed home. I had training the following afternoon and had a lot of resting to get done!

Ryan

Tuesday Evening - Getting Busy (in the literal sense) - Boring Post about Sunday to Monday Morning

Hey, I only have a little bit of time here so I'll just jot down what I can and continue on tomorrow morning.

Sunday afternoon I was exploring the food sections of the department stores here in Umeda. I bought a miniature waffle folded over some mousse for about 85 cents. They packaged it in a big white box, decorated it with stickers and taped an ice pack around it to keep it cool. I had to get out of range of sight before just pulling everything apart and eating it, but it was very kind of them.

I know the towel sidestory thinned out long ago, but I spent most of Sunday still searching. I was thrown about by numerous tricky directions and false claims, and ended up leaving Umeda towelless. I did, however, make another find of something else that had been high up on my list. In the Hankyu train station I came across a shop called "Sushi Express" that sells a wide variety of sushi-to-go, most importantly the coveted California Roll! It was half the price and twice as good as back home, reducing back home's sushi to some incalculable fraction.

So I took the train up to Juso station around where my roommate had pointed out the discount store that he said would sell towels. I found laundry detergent outside and was immediately drawn in. I proceeded up and down the aisles and was able to pick up a number of goods that I had been planning on tracking down. In fact, I was so delighted that I completely forgot what I had gone in there for. That is, until I turned down the last aisle.

There it was: the perfect towel. At 950 yen it was well within my price range and its texture soft, but not too soft, just as a towel should be. It's blue and large enough that it will make a fine toga, should the occasion ever come up.

So with my new towel, I rushed home to try it out. Now that I was officialy able to shower more than once a day, I threw on my jogging clothes and went for some cardiovascular exercise for my first time since I left home. I just looked over this paragraph and found numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes, I haven't been rereading much so I apologize since this is probably a regular occurence.

Anyway, as far as exploring a neighbourhood goes, jogging is probably the best method aside from a bike. Actually, jogging can be better in some ways because it allows you to freely go in and out of shops and blend into a crowd if need be. My main goal was to find out what Magic Bird was. Since the night I arrived I'd been trying to figure this out and my roommate somehow didn't know.

Magic Bird was a big, flashy illuminated building that had the look of a giant casino, right on the other side of the train tracks from the back of my apartment. I could see the words "Magic Bird" flashing all night long if I looked out back and can't understand why my roommates weren't at all curious. It looked fairly suspcious and I had a few theories as to what it could be...

I jogged under the tracks (there's a tunnel) and checked it out... In the first corner of the building that I had come to, it looked like some kind of Japanese diner. They were serving alcohol and the only customers were an old couple. The next corner down appeared to be a souvenir shop. I saw that they were selling women's clothing items and children's toys.

Suddenly, a big gang of people on motorcycles spun around the corner and a parking attendant waved them into an underground parking area on the other side of the building. This was getting weird. Then I found a window which made it blatently obvious... Pachinko!

Pachinko is an immensely popular form of gambling here that seems to be everywhere. I haven't yet gone into a Pachinko Parlour but it looks like it's some kind of slot machine game full of addicted looking Asian drones. The kind of gambling that sucks the life out of people. I'd like to give it a try sometime.

I was surprised to find a Starbucks with a saxophonist playing outside (my roommate says he's there in the corner every night and is just practicing) -- this really didn't seem like it fit in the neighbourhood. I found the bar called Friendly's that Zoe had mentioned the other day. I found a 100-yen shop that is three storeys and actually has some pretty good junk (mass-produced goods from China can come here more cheaply so I guess the products are better), and I found a music store/video rental shop that still rents everything in VHS! These developments all make my neighbourhood far more exciting.

Next, Will and I watched an VHS from the bad collection we have at home, an old movie called K2 about some guys who climb the infamous Himalayan mountain and I'd say you've probably figured out the entire plot with just its mention. He then cycled over to the 99 yen food shop, and I joined him on foot, running alongside. It's good to run again.

This shop has only food and everything is 99 yen (99 cents CDN) which I find bizarre. They have pastries, milk, noodles, chips, juice, and everything in the store is the exact same price. Seeing as these are all very general goods I'd think that you'd be either over- or underpaying for just about anything.

This post has gone way too long for Sunday, when basically nothing happened.

I think that Monday morning brought me my first full night's sleep since a couple days before I left Halifax. I had my Nova orientation starting at 1pm so I went out for breakfast at the European cafe at my train station that serves fresh orange juice.

Japanese restaurants are really into catering people eating alone since that's what most customers seem to be doing. It seems rare to see big tables in restaurants or cafes and a lot of places have bar-type seating all along the outside and even in the middle. The McDonald's in JR Station has a big standing section. By this I mean they have a high counter and people just go there and eat standing up while facing a wall. I laughed when I first saw it but was there at lunch time and it was immensely popular among the businesspeople.

When I got back home after breakfast I was mortified to realize that I had left my key in my shorts from the previous night's jogging escapade. I rang the buzzer but Will wasn't there. I needed to get back in before going to orietnation - I had forms to fill out and a suit to wear. I really, really didn't know what to do, actually. I really need to get a key copied so I can hide it somewhere clever. Luckily, though, Will showed up, he had been getting something from the local 7/11 and let me back into the apartment.

I put on my suit and headed down to Namba. It's almost 11:30pm and I have to go home now since I have a long day of training again tomorrow, but my next post involves Orientation (Monday) and my first day of Training (Tuesday) which is much more exciting than the long waste of everyone's time that I just typed out.

Ryan

Sunday Morning

So where did I leave off....? Friday after typing the last few entries it was starting to get dark and I headed down to Shinsaiban to try to find one of those sushi conveyor belt restaurants. Shinsaiban was very impressive at night-- it was packed with people and its talls buildings were glowing with neon lights.

I aimlessly until I got to Dotonburi, a street lined with flashy lights and big tacky commercial-looking statues like giant crabs hanging off store-fronts. This street is famous for its takoyaki (fried octopus balls). I haven't yet tried them, but fried octopus balls is apparently one of Osaka's most famous dishes, along with that poisonous blowfish that almost killed Homer Simpson back in the olden days. There was a statue of a happy colourful Japanese man who, I read, is supposed to represent takoyaki and it was surrounded by a crowd of what appeared to be Japanese tourists taking pictures of him.

I searched around for well over an hour for one of these fabled conveyor belt restaurants but with no luck. I've been surprised by how little sushi there is everywhere. Don't get me wrong, it's not hard to find, but I think because it's such a staple in Japanese restaurants in Canada I assumed that it was the majority of what people ate here and played a much larger part in Japanese society.

Anyway, I ended up choosing one of the many restaurants with a vending machine in the front. You walk up to the vending machine and press the button of what you want to order and put your money into the machine. It prints you out a ticket, then you go sit down at the counter, the chef takes your ticket and they make your food. I think that since there are so many formalities in speech here that busy people don't want to have to deal with all the exhaustion involved in a conversation.

I couldn't read what any of the vending machine's buttons said, but I saw a poster of tempura and miso soup priced at 580 yen, so I just found the button with that price and went ahead with it. Just like at the subway station, you could only put coins into the machine. Japanese people must walk around with pockets full of coins to get through each day. Japan is still a very cash-based society and stores and restaurants rarely accept credit card, so I have been having a lot of trouble having to carry lots of money around with me everywhere and especially running out of coins (though there are no bills below $10 CAD).

When I got back home it was after 8pm. "Hey!" I heard as I was about to walk into my building. Will (who I don't think has learned my name yet) was also on his way in, he had spent his day off in Kyoto. As we were going up in the elevator, I told him about my day and he burst into laughter at the end of most of my sentences. As we walked towards our apartment he said: "Hey man, I don't know what your stance is on drugs and stuff, but sorry if I'm acting kind of weird, I'm tripping out on shrooms right now."

He went on to tell me that shrooms are legal in Japan and readily available in stores. He says he sometimes goes to Kyoto to take them because their hallucinogenic effects are really mind-opening in historical places (Kyoto is full of history and was the ancient capital of Japan). I started to lose him in the next bit of conversation as he explained that while there he closes his eyes and sees words and images that give him instructions of what to do, but in retrospect that's not much crazier than a lot of the religious theory out there. Well maybe a little bit.

Will and I sat out on the balcony for the rest of the evening and talked. I was surprised to find out that he's a completely different character than I had originally thought. When I said the other day that I thought he may have had a learning disability, I think it's rather just an effect of frequent drug use. He says he's been accepted to start a Master's of Public Policy in London, England. By the sounds of it, his goal in life is to have certain substances legalized in the United States. He says he was getting all "A"s in his undergrad and his family was a little split on his achievements because his brother had gotten into trouble with drug use and his mother is from a small village in the Philippines (Will is half-Filipino) and is of the mentality that "drugs are bad", so he has a difficult time fighting his case for soft drugs.

Will also told me about the Philippines. He has been there for extended periods of time on a number of occasions. He indicated that while there he was approached by modelling agents for Coke and Nike, among others, since they're really into featuring people of mixed ethnicity in their advertisements. He said he stayed briefly after his family went home to potentially work towards some ads and that everything was being paid for by one of these companies, but he couldn't stand the materialistic nature of the industry any longer and left.

And, as an update on the towel situation, he agreed to take me to the nearby bargain store where he had gotten his the next day.

Saturday morning I think I woke up at around 4:30am, though just relaxed in my bed for another couple of hours. I still can't seem to get the whole sleeping more than 5 hours thing straight. I showered and dried myself off with a t-shirt and around 8:30am went to Shinosaka station to have a McDonald's breakfast for the third day in a row. It's so disgusting and I hope that that was my last, I just haven't found any other appropriate place to get breakfast. I guess I'm going to have to find a grocery store to make things myself (though my apartment somehow doesn't seem sanitary enough to keep food). I went to a nearby hotel and asked them where the nearest internet cafe is, hoping to find something new, but they just directed me to the same one I had used the other night.

Luckily, Saturday morning I looked through the packet that NOVA had given me upon my arrival. I was surprised to see that there was a lot of information there that really would have been helpful had I read it on my first night. They had a map of the Shinsaiban/Namba area explaining some good places to go (ie attractions, restaurants, cheapish bars and internet cafes). More importantly, there was a meeting at 1pm that day for newly-arrived teachers who are interested in meeting up, scheduled to meet below the big metal ball near Namba Walk.

Will had been attempting to cook nachos that morning. He said that he had never cooked before coming to Japan and it had become a new hobby. Just as he started eating them at noon he realized that if we wanted to make it to the bargain shop before my 1pm meeting we'd had better leave right away .

He had hurt his knee somehow the day before so he biked while I walked briskly alongside to the neighbouring area around Juso station. It seems now that Will has the personality of a Californian Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, minus the chronic paranoia, he's a pretty funny character. We stopped at a 7/11 along the way so he could buy a box of koala-shaped cookies filled with chocolate that he carried in the basket in the front of his bicycle (they all have them here). He biked slowly and ate cookies as I jogged alongside. We had to cross some railroad tracks into the next neighbourhood and at one point he stopped and looked at me in a really confused manner and said "Wait.... where were going again??"

At 12:30pm, before we found the place, I told him that I had better get on the train to Umeda because I still had to transfer to the Midosuji line to Namba and find this big metal ball for 1pm. He pointed to where the discount store's sign was so that I could return later and then headed home and I jogged down to Juso station. I arrived in Umeda at 12:40pm and was on the subway towards Namba around 12:52pm, hoping to get there in time. Well I didn't. I was a few minutes late in Namba and then had no idea where to go. I saw an Australian guy that I thought was probably going to the same meeting, but he said he wasn't and didn't know which direction it was in. Most of the busier areas of Osaka seem to have at least one level below ground everywhere, like an entire layer below the city where everything is connected via a giant mall. It's very, very confusing. I thought I would have the most success just getting out of there and went up to ground level. I showed my map to a man who had also just climbed the stairs and asked "Koko was doko desu ka." (Where is here?) He seemed eager to help me and knew a couple of words of English. He got the point across that we were in West Namba and he was heading to the OSAT building and would show me the way. We walked for a number of blocks and I wanted to run because I was already 15 minutes late and the other teachers would probably be leaving soon if they had even waited for stragglers, but had to politely keep my pace to his level.

He was really friendly and got the point across that he was a Japanese teacher to Chinese students at one of the local universities. At first I was scared he was going to ask me if I was looking for a Japanese teacher, but it didn't happen. Every time I've told someone here who can speak English that their English is good, they always say "No!" instead of "thank you", which is kind of funny.

When inside the OCAT building, he walked me right down to where I was going which was awful kind of him. As soon as he left I started running through the mall. By chance, I saw Zoe, the British girl from the airport, walking with two other girls. They were just leaving the big metal ball area and apparently, they had all gotten there early and no one else showed up. I couldn't believe that only four of us had bothered to show up for this since there were at least 20 people who arrived this week. I guess a lot of other people may not have read through the whole booklet (like me) and others may have experienced similar problems of getting lost that I did, but still, four people?!

We have already met Zoe and she was as fun as always. The other two were Suzanna, a spunky girl from New Zealand who had arrived on the same day as us, and Australian Claudia, who had obviously just arrived the night before (I think she was still lingering in that angry/scared state that we had all experienced our first day). It was interesting, though, to note how different each of our situations and experiences had been so far.

Suzanna lived really nearby (within a half-hour walking distance to the west, she claims). She said her roommates had both arrived in September and that she was replacing another New Zealand girl who had been really helpful to the other roommates when they first arrived, so they were reciprocating the welcome and she said it was really great. My initial impression of Suzanna was that she talked way too much and was too uppity in terms of what we did. She didn't have any ideas of where she wanted to go, except that she refused to go anywhere not fully Japanese that was mentioned, such as a renowned local British-style pub called the Pig and Whistle. In theory I think many people would agree with her, but you have to think of the situation that we were in... None of us could understand any Japanese and had absolutely no idea of where to go, so somewhere vaguely familiar would have been a good place to sit around and have some food and drink. Instead, we ended up wandering around four literally hours looking for somewhere suitable and just ended up in a Japanese-style restaurant where she went on to boldly order fried chicken and potato wedges. Anyway, beyond my first impressions Suzanna ended up being a friendly person, though maybe a little bit insane.

Autralian Claudia was a little reserved though nice. As I said she had just arrived the night before and I think she was starting to regret having come, so it was good that she got to meet up with the rest of us right away. And her living situation made the rest of us feel much better about ours. She had requested to be placed in Tokyo but had thought it was alright when she found out that they instead placed her in Osaka. That is, until she arrived and found out that she's not in Osaka at all. She lives an hour and a half away by train each way, out in the middle of nowhere, in an apartment across the street from, as I recall, some kind of junkyard. She said her roommates were horrible and although she seemed very mild-mannered, she's going to give NOVA hell at our orientation on Monday and demand to be moved somewhere better.

What's kind of strange is that they seem to not necessarily place people in apartments near their schools, so long as their on a major transporation route. Suzanna, for example, despite living in the centre of town, has been told that she has a 1 hour transit to work (by subway/train). I won't find out where I'm working until Monday, though Yvette (the NOVA rep who had taken me to my apartment) had indicated that I'll probably be somewhere between Osaka and Kyoto. Kyoto is supposedly only a half-hour away by train so that doesn't sound too bad, as long as wherever I'm going is fairly accessible.

Zoe seemed to have been having fairly positive experiences since her arrival. She has a boyfriend (also from England) living near my station who has been here for a few weeks, so although he's been working every day he's been able to show her around a bit. She said one of her roommates has been living there for over two years and one has just recently arrived. One of them is very unsociable.

So we ended up eating in some Japanese restaurant on top of what I think was a Baskin Robins ice cream parlour. I read that ice cream is the only food that is socially acceptable to eat as you're walking, otherwise the elderly might glare at you.

The restaurant menu had pictures and I pointed to a plate of noodles reddish sauce and sausages on top, and the waitress said something that I understood to be Japanese for "Spaghetti Napolitana". Afterwards we walked around the neighbourhood because Suzanna insisted she'd seen shops that would sell me towels. And she was right. You would think that after finding towels I would be willing to settle for anything, but I was very picky. I think my long search would have been in vain if I didn't pick up the perfect towel and I wasn't ready to be ripped off.

The first towel was in a big department store called Muji and listed at around $21. Muji, I have read, targets the "fashionable minimalist", meaning good quality merchandise that's not over-the-top, and from what I've seen it's a good store. I have to say, they were good quality towels and it would have made a fine drying device, but I was looking to pay only half that. Next we found some really nice towels in a market, but they were $26, and if I hadn't bought Muji's, I wasn't buying some street merchant's for a higher price.

Next, they all insisted we find a "100 yen shop". 100 yen shops are similar to our dollar stores, though the products are a bit nicer. But only a bit nicer. They seem to attract the Japanese equivalent of dollar store customers, which was unpleasant to see since the people here are usually so professionally-dressed and wealthy-looking.

In fact, I feel horribly underdressed whenever I'm about town and am excited to start traveling around town in suits (which I need to wear for work) because I think I'll fit in more. In the evening, I even see groups of Japanese people who appear to be younger than me who are dressed in business attire and seem to already have professional office jobs. That's something I would never see back home at my age.

I'm getting side-tracked again. Despite it only being 4:30pm, Australian Claudia had to go home because her baggage was scheduled to arrive at 8pm and she wanted to make sure she had enough time. The rest of us decided to go get drunk.

Zoe had been to a 280-yen bar/restaurant on Dotombori and we decided to go there. The day so far had turned out to be only mediocre since our legs and minds were tired from spending the entire day out walking and trying to figure out our ways around. This bar turned everything around, though. They had an English menu with food, beer and cocktails and everything on it was the same price, approximately $2.80 CDN. This was kind of strange because draught beer even came in different sizes (ie medium, large) but they were all the same price. We all ate a bit, drank a lot an experimented with menu items. It was funny to see the pictures and read the English names beneath them because things that we would usually order because the pictures made them look good, actually turned out to be disgusting stuff like "skewered chicken hearts". It's true that alcohol is always a nice social lubricant and really seems to open people up. The Japanese couple at the table next to us, for example, although they couldn't speak English, became enthralled with our conversations and we were able to speak a few funny Japanese phrases with the girls' Lonely Planet Japanese phrasebooks. There's a section for "come-on lines" which is immensely popular.

A little before 9pm we called it a night and headed home. We're all going to see each other again on Monday when we have our big group orientation.

The early evening always feels so much later when you get up at 4:30am. I went back to my apartment and continued watching the movie "Go", which I have been slowly working my way through in my free time since I got here. I went to bed at 10pm.

This morning I woke up at the pleasant hour of 3:10am. The five hours of sleep rule seems to be holding strong. Luckily, I was able to get back to sleep a little later and actually slept until sometime closer towards 7am. I wonder if this will affect my overall sleeping patterns. I'd like to make my days a little later since I will be working from 5-9pm and am always already exhausted around 8pm and have absolutely no trouble going right to sleep at 10pm for the first time since I was 9.

I cut myself loose of McDonald's chains and ate at a grilled cheese sandwich at a neighbouring restaurant in the station that I think is supposed to resemble some kind of European cafe. I think my orenji jusu was freshly squeezed. Next I went to Umeda and decided to try to see the city from the top of the Osaka Hilton, but the elevator wouldn't let me get up there. Today, every store I've entered with electronic sensors has gone off and I can't figure out why. An employee always comes over and apologizes to me in Japanese and makes it clear that they wouldn't possibly think that I could be stealing something, but it's still really annoying and I want to get to the bottom of what's going down.

The weather is still sunny every day and at night the sky turns kind of purplish. It's getting kind of cold, like it was a few weeks ago in Canada, and I'm starting to worry about my jacket situation (I only brought a light jacket). It's too bad that I'm so horrible at shopping because today I'd like to go buy some things in stores.

The shopping districts here are really exciting. There's such a commercial buzz in the air and it's no surprise to me that Osakans are reputed for their obsession with money and spending. In the olden days, Osaka was known as the big merchant city and its reputation has lived up to today and many Japanese businesses are based here. As the Osaka guidebook I purchased explains, (vaguely) "Osaka's position in the world economy should not be underestimated. It has greater purchasing power than Hong Kong and Thailand, and that's just the actual central city. The surrounding prefecture is more economically powerful than all of Taiwan." I am, of course, racking my brain trying to figure out business ventures that would send a fraction of that economic power to me.

Ryan

P.S. Please keep comments clean since this is read by both friends and family!

First Impressions - Part 3: Osaka Day Two/Three

If you're just joining us, scroll wayyyyy down a couple of messages for the beginning of today's entry. I've had a lot to catch up on so I've had to cut it down into parts (just in case something goes wrong and I accidentally delete it like I did yesterday).

So continuing from where I left off in Part 2, I woke up at 5:30am to hear Chris getting ready for his trip to the Philippines. I waited until after he was gone before getting up myself and was out the door around 8am to go discover the city and try to change my mind about the horrors of coming to Osaka that had plagued my mind the night before. I think the peak of the night before was when I realized that I had signed up for an entire year and was in a What was I thinking?!! mindframe. Anyway, it was a new day, and things didn't seem so bad anymore. The sun was bright and things looked happier. I still hadn't showered since my arrival since I didn't have a towel (don't worry, I'd been using one provided by the hostel while in Vancouver) and so my day's priority was to get out, see a bit of the city and buy a towel. It seemed simple enough.

Everything was bright and had that early morning happiness that I hadn't had the pleasure of being up for in the past few months. The schoolchildren sauntered about in small packs on their way to school and were dressed in hilarious little outfits. I guess their uniforms depended on their school because they changed from area to area. I saw a couple of them near my house who were dressed like Swiss mountain-men with bow-ties and brimmed hats and I burst out laughing and one of the boys pointed at me and said something to his mother. Japan is fun.

I got to Shinosaka and there were line-ups already for the train. Someone had explained this to me long ago and I was surprised to see that it was actually true... While waiting for trains, Japanese people organize themselves by standing in "double-file" lines (as if they're in line with partners) and stand quietly. As the train comes, though, the whole line system breaks loose and they all just rush chaotically aboard. The first came train and was completely packed already and only a few lucky individuals got aboard, including my "partner" and some women behind me, but excluding the people who were at the front of my line. When the next train came a minute or two later, it was empty and we all got on!

I got off at Umeda station. I had read in some travel guides that Umeda was a big business and commercial area and it didn't fail to disappoint. Massive department stores and floods of Japanese people in business suits presumably making their morning trek to the office. I was fairly lost with no idea of where to go and really wonder what most people do in my circumstance, since most newcomers have probably traveled less than me and have far less intellect than I do. After a bit of wandering I found a gigantic bookstore and had found the words in my phrasebook for "english" and "books". The store attendant had absolutely no idea of what I was talking about. I kept repeating myself, then showed him the characters in my book. Oh, apparently I was pronouncing it wrong. He said something in Japanese and said "Engrish Corner" and pointed up while showing me the number 4 with his other hand. "Fourth floor!" I exclaimed and proceeded up the escalators. On the fourth floor I approached the attendant and basically did the same thing, basically saying the Japanese equivalent of "Me want Osaka English guidebook." After a couple of times it worked and she found me one.

I continued on my wandering around the streets of Umeda. I came across those golden arches I'd been looking for the night before and decided I deserved a fine breakfast after that successful book purchase. I got my McMuffin and headed upstairs with my tray. The 2nd floor was really smoky, so I continued up and had most of the 3rd floor to myself.

After breakfast I continued my wandering, still keeping my eyes open for a towel shop. Sometimes I'd go into a random store and say "toeru doko desu ka" (Where is towel?) hoping that someone would be able to help me out, but they kept giving me disappointed looks and making 'x' symbols with their arms, politely indicating something negative.

Next I came across a sign showing computers and had the English name "Media Cafe". Thinking I'd found the internet cafe I was looking for I headed up their stairs and came into a large room with what kind of looked like mahogony cubicles and big mahogony bookshelves filled with what I thought were Japanese DVDs. They couldn't speak English and I tried to indicate that I wanted to use the internet, but my hand motions of typing must have looked like piano-playing because they just stared at me blankly. Eventually I started to think that maybe I'd stumbled upon the wrong kind of "Media Cafe" and that this was just a place for people to watch pornography, so I started to leave, but then saw ads for lan computer games on the way out and decided to go back in and give it another try. This time they gave me a piece of paper with English sentences saying things like "For office class with own room: 480 yen per hour" and so on, I just indicated that I wanted the most basic "class" of computer usage. The page they showed me also said at the bottom "You may buy food from our staff and vending machine. Drinks are free and we encourage you to take them."

I updated my blog for the next two hours or so and then somehow deleted it since I can't read what the buttons are saying on the screen since everything's in Japanese and I have to basically guess or work out of memory of the position of things. I was angry, paid for my time and headed out of there to continue my search for a towel. I saw my first other foreigner in the subway station, an American guy on a business trip who was heading back to North Carolina later that day. I talked to him, hoping he could solve my towel dilemma and he invited me to come with him to Shinsaiban, an area with more department stores where he was headed to eat some sushi off a conveyor belt.

Backtracking a bit, British Zoe had told me that the band Oasis was on the plane with her from London the day before and this businessman said that they were staying at the Ritz Carlton where he was. He drank the night before in the hotel bar with Noel and Liam Gallagher and I noted this so that I could go stake the place out that night, but completely forgot about it until now... maybe I'd better go stake it out tonight and see if they're still there.

So I parted ways with the businessman and went into the first department store I found and upon inquiring about towels the pleased store clerk took me to the other side of the room and showed me a small dishcloth and bowed. "Big, Big toeru" I said indicating something big with my hands. Oh, he expressed in the international language of facial expressions, Well We don't carry real towels. I continued my search and then gave up and decided I really needed a shower anyway. So I went back home and showered, using paper towel to dry myself off.

I still hadn't met Will and he was gone, at work, I presumed. However, he had cleaned a bit in the morning, the garbage on the kitchen floor had been taken out! Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy afterall... I was still really scared of him though.

I decided to go register with my local ward office, as had been recommended by NOVA to do on my first day. I was in the ward of Yodogawa-Ku and went to the Jusan (?) train station from where there was a map that NOVA had given me of how to find it. The map showed the local KFC and a bank that was closed. I knew I needed 300 yen to get an "Alien Registration Card" and only had 250 which was just enough to get the train out of there. So I wanted to visit the bank to either change over my Canadian cash or withdraw from my account from home before I went. Since Japanese banks close at the convenient hour of 3pm, it had just closed and the ATMs, which looked like a primative version from the 1960s, didn't take my type of card.

I decided to go find the ward office anyway and spent a good hour walking around trying to make sense of the map. I was led down strange alleyways to a dead end and through a kind of market-type area. Eventually when I was officially lost, I tried asking some passerbys and people pretended they didn't know what I was talking about (whereas they obviously did). I had been shot down earlier when I asked a man a question in Japaense and he pushed his way past me while others watched and didn't say anything, so I was a little hesitant. I asked a girl who was probably about 15 and she seemed delighted that I was talking to her. She couldn't speak English but motioned for me to come with her. We walked in silence for the next ten minutes or so and she would point when we had to turn a corner. It felt like a bit of an awkward silence, despite not being able to communicate with each other, so I kept looking up little comments in my phrase book as we walked like "massugu desu ka" (straight ahead?) to which she would reply "Hai!" (Yep!). We continued until we passed through a covered street and out the other side and she motioned to a big ward-looking building ahead of us, smiled and walked away. "Domo arigato!!" I said and ran towards it.

The ward building was very bureaucratic and friendly community-ish. People waiting for their names to be called watched a big screen where Sumo wrestlers were involved in an enthralling battle of who's more difficult to push over. I went up to a counter that had the English words Foreigner Alien Registration above it and a toadish old man jumped up and eagerly tried to impress me with a few selected words of English thrown into some Japanese, though he usually couldn't quite understand my responses unless they were "yes" or "no", but it was nice to hear some semi-functional English. I did, however, have a page of instructions in English and Japanese so we both looked at those and he was friendly and able to get me the right forms and told me to leave and come back in 20 minutes for my alien registration cards. I didn't want to ask him if I really needed that 400 yen, but I thought since I'd come so far that waiting it out and coming back I'd have a better chance of either him forgetting to charge me or not making me pay once I explained that I didn't have the cash on me.

Unfortunately, he didn't and ripped up my temporary cards when I said I didn't have the yen. I tried offering him my Visa and Canadian dollars, but he said "No, Japanese yen!" and bowed his head in sympathy and continued to rip them up. He gave me a sheet, though, to bring back the next day and they'd print them out for me again. They were open for another half hour and I desperately ran from hotel to hotel in the area to see if they'd exchange CDN$ for yen, but they wouldn't, so I caught the next train to Umeda with my last couple of hundred yen. I knew that I wouldn't be able to walk home from Umeda, so I needed to find cash there or else I was sleeping on the street.

In Umeda, I was happy to find two sources of cash... A CityBank machine that allowed me to take out 4000 yen from my checking account and a department store that had a foreign currency exchange where I changed my $55 CDN into about 5,000 yen. With my pockets full of thousand-yen bills I got ready to head back home. But first I checked out some more department stores for a towel. One of them was a sports store. The English-speaking employee replied "Oh, to dry yourself off in the rain?" and brought me to another dishcloth. God, how do these people get dry?! When I said I wanted something bigger, he motioned for me to go upstairs and a group of store employees tried to help me out. They called other stores to see if anyone sold towels and finally came back to tell me that there is a place that sells them across the street on the 9th floor.

I spent about an hour trying to find this elusive 9th floor, and when I got there there were no towels in sight. I think the previous store's employees may have just made it up to get rid of me. I decided to give up and go home.

In Shinosaka station I bought a toasted sandwich. Pretty much every shop there sold only rice with various meats on top with a strange brown liquid poured over it, so I was happy to find a shop with actualy sandwiches. I realized the irony in all three meals that I had eaten in Japan so far were sandwiches, whereas my past five or so days in Canada were packed with me eating Japanese food.

I made my way back to my apartment because the deliverymen were supposedly coming between 8 and 9pm to deliver my big backpack and popped in the movie "Go" and watched about 25 minutes of it before the buzzer rang on the phone (not a real phone, one of those ones in apartments with no numbers on it). I picked it up, they said something in Japanese, then I mashed all the buttons down to let them in (they were all in Japanese so I didn't know what was what). I met them at the elevator and brought my bag back to my room. I went out again to use the internet and have the feeling that I ate something else, though can't remember what.

This time when I got back, I met Will and was happy to see that he acutally seemed to be a nice guy and not scary like I'd imagined. I asked him a lot of the same questions as I had asked Chris and apparently he also has no knowledge of Japanese, I don't know how these people get along. At first I got the impression that maybe he has some kind of learning disability, but he told me that he was just accepted to do a master's in London next September, so maybe not. He said he's really into hip hop and his clothing is very fashionable (?). I inquired and most of the 8 or so pairs of shoes out front were his and he has more in his room. It's amusing talking to Californians because they throw words into regular conversation like "Dope" and "Hella-" as if they're regular parts of speech. He told me he was going to Kyoto for the next day. Will showed me how to use the washing machine and I went to bed around 11pm.

Wooo, this is getting long and I want to leave to get something to eat or my next blog will just end up being about me typing my blog.

So this morning I woke up at 5am to see that I'd fallen asleep with the lights on (too much walking the day before). I'm very productive in the morning. I put all my clothes out on the line which hangs across our balcony and started to wash the dishes which were still dirty in the sink. I think at least one of them had been sitting there for a very long period of time.

It was again bright and sunny outside and I was considerably more comfortable and happy to be in Osaka. Most of my clothes were either dirty or wet so I threw on a button-up shirt and fancy sweater to go about town in. At around 9:30am Will gave me directions and I walked to the Yodagawa-Ku ward and got my temporary alien registration papers. They said to come back in December for the actual card.

I made my way to Umeda again afterwards and continued my search for towels, but again to no avail. I went back to the same internet cafe as yesterday, and... well that's where I am now. I spent a really long time typing and my neck hurts and I want to go find some good sushi, so I'm going down to where that businessman told me he was going to eat it off a conveyor belt. Sounds like fun. I still haven't really done any sightseeing but I think that might be more fun when I meet other people to do it with. Also, I think things will be a lot more enjoyable if I can make some local Japaense friends who will be able to help me out and help explain what is going on. Hey, there's a guy reading this over my shoulder right now. Ooh, that got him to leave and go back to his computer really awkwardly. I guess he's not going to be my new Japanese friend.

If anyone has gotten through all of this, please feel free to leave comments.

Ryan

First Impressions - Part 2: The First Night

If you're just joining me here, check out the entry below before you read this because this is just its second half (it was getting too long).

Welcome back. I just took a break to get a reliable Fanta from the drink room and am pleased to note that the girl who was sleeping on her keyboard has woken up, had a couple of smokes and is now applying some make-up at her seat. The guy to my right is still enthralled in his comic book. People seem to be just hangingout here rather than actually using the internet.

So where did I leave off? Oh, the subway. You might notice that I'm not being very descriptive about my surroundings in Osaka. Honestly, I was so tired that I can't even really remember. I remember everyone being Asian (even moreso than Vancouver!!!) and that I couldn't read any of the signs whatsoever. In Hong Kong this wasn't the case, I guess since it used to be a British colony they felt the need to have every sign in English and I'm only now realizing what a luxury that was. Since Japan wasn't colonized I think it lacks the European influence that exists in many other Asian cities -- Hong Kong was once British, Shanghai was once French, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur were Dutch, Singapore both British and Dutch, Macau Portuguese, Manila Spanish... Osaka is just so purely Japanese.

I tried to make Yvette show me exactly what we were doing each stage of the way so that I could easily get around independently without her... Buying the ticket, reading the subway map... I'm really, really happy that I learned how to read Hirongana* before coming to Japan because the map had NO ENGLISH!!

*Hirogana is one of four forms of Japanese writing. The easiest (and least common) is romanji, basically writing Japanese out in English-style characters (such as writing Tokyo instead of the silly characters). The second alphabet is Hirogana and consists of about 80 characters, each representing a different syllable (ie ka, tsu, mo, chi). Every word in Japanese could be spelled out in Hirogana, but that would be too easy.

The third and fourth alphabets (which I don't yet understand) are Katakana and Kanji. Katakana, which has exactly the same amount of characters as Hirogana and represents the exact same sounds, uses different symbols and represents mostly words that come from foreign languages (like pasuporutu to say "passport" -- though they're not usually that easy, take a word like berubetu which is translated from "velvet"). The last, and only really impossible alphabet, is kanji, representing approximately 60-70% of written Japanese, I'm told. It's just random characters that mean different things and is derived from Chinese script.

I'm getting sidetracked again. So our subway turned into an overground trains, crossed a bridge over the Yodagawa River and then a subway station called (seriously) Nishinakashima-Minamigata and got off at Shinosaka station. Shinosaka is a reasonably major station that I'm somewhat proud to be in the vicinity of. She didn't really know where we were going, but she had the map that was given to me that she was trying to follow. We walked past a couple of streets and stopped as she tried to figure out what "grey building" they were referring to on my directions.

We wandered up and down the streets of my neighbourhood for a good 25 minutes or so before we got back on track. My bag was heavy and I wanted to go to sleep, but Yvette had told me earlier that she wasn't going to help me with my bag (she had tried to convince me to have it delivered the next day) so I had to pretend I was having no trouble with it out of principle.

My neighbourhood was strange and I think pretty typical of Japan. The streets were really narrow and quiet, almost like alleyways sometimes and there were usually no sidewalks so people walked and rode their bike on the street and moved to the side if a car came by. I started to become unhappy with how dark quiet my neighbourhood seemed, but then was happy to see that my building was the largest, most monstrous building on the block. It's wide, orange-bricked and probably about 16 storeys high. All of the apartments have balconies facing the street.

We used my key to enter and made our way up to the sixth floor. We walked along the outside of the building (the "hall" is open-air and on the back of the bldg). I was disappointed to see that we were right next to the train tracks (like eight rows of them) and started envisioning being woken up at all hours of the night by passing trains. We rang the doorbell to see if my roommates were there, but there was no answer, so we went in and took our shoes off in the traditional porch-platform that's a few inches lower than the rest of the apartment's floor.

I had bad first impressions of my roommates. The apartment was pretty dirty and kind of smelled. They knew I was coming and was confused that they'd leave garbage out on the counter and scattered across one side of the kitchen. There was a note left on the table from the previous tenant that had been sitting there since the previous week. Maybe I've just been spoiled by living at my parents' house for almost the past entire year and have forgotten what the reality of living with other young people is. Anyway, I think the worst part of it was probably the smell. Yvette had said that my roommates will have left a note for me to welcome me, but there was nothing there.

The apartment was fairly small in size, but having lived in Asia already that's what I was expecting. It was "fully furnished" by NOVA and it looked like a lot of the goods that were there had been passed around for decades. In the small living room area there was a small tv with a V.C.R. If you don't remember, VCRs were a technology used back in the 1900s to watch movies such as "Total Recall" and "Peter's Dragon". I hadn't used one in a while and was confused that one would still exist in what I believed to be the world's most advanced society. They had a couple of Japanese versions of movies that existed around the end of the VHS era such as "Hot Shots" and something starring Val Kilmer. They also had "Go" which I was happy to see since I' like to watch it.

We went into my room (about as small as you can imagine) and surprisingly, there was no bed. Instead, there was an old fold-up mattress and a what looked like a big package that had just been delivered. Yvette told me that my futon was inside that package and asked if I'd be fine to put it together on my own. I said yes and she left.

I was hungry, but had absolutely no idea how I'd go about getting some food. It was probably around 8pm and I decided that I had better put together my bed before I completely pass out. I opened the package to find another fold-up mattress-type thing, a pillow, two sheets and two slippery blankets, one of which was not very pliable like a blow-up mattress used for camping. I threw them altogether until it looked like a makeshift pile that a homeless person might sleep on and then wandered around the apartment for a few minutes.

I started getting a really bad feeling about my roommates. What if they're terrible? I found a pile of CDs on the table, like 60 of them, and I didn't recognize any of the artists except for one - Buck 65 (an independent hip hop artist from Nova Scotia). There was a small toaster-oven that looked like it hadn't been cleaned since its purchase in 1974 and a stove-top on the counter. The fridge was old-style and filled with things that looked like they'd been there for way too long. I hadn't even met them yet but I... I hated my roommates.

Before I came to Osaka I received a letter in the mail giving my Osaka address and saying that my roommates' names were Mr. Christopher Hum (Canadian) and Mr. William Vickery Jr. (American). For some reason I was expecting the former to be a very non-conformed Chinese Canadian from BC and the latter to be a Southern Dandy who would hit people who offended him with his cane and slap people with his glove to demand a duel. It was looking like this wasn't the case...

So I decided to go get something to find something to eat. Luckily, while killing time in the Vancouver airport, I had changed about $40 CDN into 3,500 yen, so I had a little bit of money. As I was about to get on the elevator, a Chinese-looking guy in a brown leather jacket got off. He passed me but then turned around, "Hey, are you..."
"Hi, I'm Ryan, you must be Chris." we shook hands and I went back to the apartment with him. He seemed like a nice guy and I was relieved. He's from Ottawa and has been here since February and is here purely for the money-making aspect of it, I got the impression he'd much rather be back in Canada and was trying to overwork himself by taking as many extra shifts as possible. I barraged him with questions about life here but was surprised that he still seemed kind of unfamiliar with the place and I think could speak less Japanese than me. I asked him where I should go to get some quick take-out and he didn't really know, but pointed me in the general direction of where there's an area about 15-20 minutes away with a lot of small restaurants and he thinks there's one with vending machines there.

So I headed out to find something. I found a small grocery store which was nice, though most of the prepared food looked pretty scary. Stuff like deep-fried pieces of meat (I don't know what since I can't read) that was just sitting out with no packaging on chilled shelves. There was a little bit of packaged sushi, but nothing that looked terribly appealing at the time. I just wanted something nice and familiar that I thought would surely not make me have to go to the hospital in the middle of the night. So I crossed a big overpass and there were tons of people on the streets. People handing out packages of kleenex with advertisements on them (this is really common on the streets of Asia), a lot of businessmen in big groups probably going for after-work drinks. I saw a restaurant called Mos Hamburger that had some pictures of hamburgers and I took note since I started to doubt that I would find anything else understandable.

I was right. I wandered the area for a few more blocks and could usually tell that something was a restaurant, but had no idea what they were serving and everything was written in Japanese. Keep in mind that I was still really tired and was kind of stumbling around and staring at signs trying to comprehend things. I was really hoping that I'd turn a corner and see the big beautiful glow of the golden arches. I would rush in, point to a random combo and throw my money on the counter and have them sort it out. But it didn't happen. I don't know why guidebooks don't give you the translation for "Where is the nearest McDonald's?" because they should know that that's what any scared, tired, hungry, lost traveler needs to get back into their comfort zone.

Anyway, I returned to "Mos Hamburger" and as I said, nothing was in English except that title and its subtitle "Japanese fine hamburger and coffees".

The Japanese are obsessed with formailities. When you walk into any restaurant or store - often even if you just walk near them - the workers all yell things out to make you feel welcome. It usually starts with "SUMIMASEN!!" (meaning a number of polite things) or "OHAIO GOSAIMASU!!" (Good morning) and then often keeps going into a series of sentences that I don't understand. I don't know if they're asking me questions or if I'm supposed to respond, so I usually just try to smile and not make eye contact.

I walked to the front counter, the woman welcomed me and demonstrated for me to point at a picture of what I wanted. I looked at the various pictures of burgers to try to find the safest bet. Any of what I thought to be hamburgers also seemed to have some unrecognizable red mass on it that looked like raw ground beef. I looked through and settled on what I thought to be a chicken burger and what I thought would be a chocolate milkshake and was really happy to think that I found something safe and my stomach wouldn't try to punish me that night. I sat down and studied my phrase book until it was ready and they brought me a bag with both items and I strolled home.

I ate at the table while continuing to squeeze Chris for information. I extremely overwhelmed that he hadn't turned out to be horrible, but was still terrified of the other roommate who still wasn't back from work. Chris told me that he was leaving to go on vacation to the Philippines (Cebu island) the following morning and wouldn't be back until next week. I asked him about the other roommate (now referred to as Will), and he vaguely said "Yeah, he's a nice guy. He's from California."

Soon after I finished eating it was a few minutes before 10pm and I announced I was going to bed and headed for my room. He said he was too because he had to get up early for his flight. The windows don't seem to have any weather-proofing so it was kind of cold, but there was an electric heater in my room so I pulled that out and set it up. Like everything here it's buttons were only in Japanese so I just pressed some radom buttons and it turned on. I turned off my lights and my room glowed red. I was so tired. I think I fell asleep right away which almost never happens to me. Come to think of it, I would say that this is the first time in many years that I was asleep around 10pm.

I was awoken at 11:30pm and felt horrible. I was still really tired but felt sick and could tell that the bad-tasting chicken burger and the coffee-flavoured milkshake that I ended up purchasing had not settled well in my stomach. I was in a wretched state of mind that I find hard to describe and I think has only happened to me four times in my lifetime. The first was when I was 7 and my family went to Europe. We flew into London, arriving mid-day, and I fell asleep in the hotel room at 5pm. When I was woken up at 9pm to go get supper, I remember being in a fit of screaming and crying and not knowing what to do with myself... not wanting to be asleep but not wanting to be awake, kind of like wanting to escape from my skin. It happened again more mildly when I was 17 and went to Cuba and again slept for a couple of hours and was awoken at suppertime. Again when I went to Hong Kong and slept from 6pm-8:30pm and when I was starting to wake up I was on the telephone with my father just mumbling nonsensically and sweating profusely. Anyway, this was basically where I was at this time. I had slept an hour and a half and really didn't want to be there. But why did I wake up if I was so tired, you ask?

Someone had just slammed the door to our apartment and was now yelling. In a menacing voice I heard "Yo yo!! You best get the FUCK out of the country!! Get the FUCK out of here!!". I was confused and angry. Is this my roommate? Why would they subject me to this?? I really didn't want to deal with this and just stayed in bed. He then said soemthing about going to the Philippines and I realized it was Will joking around with Chris. Wow, I really hated him. I felt sick and needed to make a trip to the washroom, but didn't want to have to meet my new roommate in my wretched state and risk doing something inappropriate like punching him. I waited things out and once things seemed to have calmed to silence 15 minutes later I emerged from my room...

Nobody was there, I guess they had both gone to bed. Our washroom is strange. The toilet is in a room by itself across the hall from the sink, which shares a room with the Japanese washing mahcine and the shower room. The shower room consists of a deep bathtub and a floor with a drain. The shower head is kind of off to the side, so I guess we're just supposed to shower wherever and let the water drain into the floor. I went back to bed and slept soundlessly until 5:30am when Chris had gotten up for his flight.

Again, this is getting long so I'm going to cut it short and continue with the next day on another post.