Nihongo-a-Go-Go :: Aimee's Journal

Very full day!

Today I went out with my new Japanese friend, Miki. She's very cool! She brought her friend, Yumie, and I brought Mandy! :) It was really fun. We went to a lot of neat places.

We started out by going to Animate, an anime and manga shop near where I live. Then we went to Geestore, and I showed her the costumes and doll stuff. Then we went to Volks, and looked at the doll stuff and the model kits. It was a very otaku-driven day.

We went to a place called Osu, which is an area which has areas of very traditional old buildings and shrines, and then it also has a lot of shopping centers and electronics stores. It's very much a case of old world meets new world. We went to a very interesting coffee shop. It was a shop that mostly caters to male otaku (basically, nerds). It was a housemaid coffeeshop. Basically, it was a little shop set up to look like a Victorian living room. There, girls in 18th century (sort of) house maid costumes serve you and call you master (or in our case, "My lady"). It was pretty fun! Miki and Yumie handled ordering food and drinks, which was very nice of them. Mandy thinks that our particular housemaid had confusion over whether I was a boy or girl. I didn't think so... there's also another coffee shop 2 floors up that has "shrine maidens" to serve you. We might go there next time!

Then we went to karaoke. I've never done karaoke before, so I'll admit to having entered the situation with some trepidation. It was a brand new facility (like, opened today). In the US, to my knowledge, karaoke mostly exists in the form of bar-side entertainment that mostly just annoys other bargoers. This is... state-of-the-art karaoke. Like... it's a 10 floor, skinny building that is partitioned off into lots of little tiny rooms. All the rooms have comfy gold couches, a coffee table, a flat-panel tv mounted on the wall, and a sound system that kicks butt. You can select from several hundred thousand songs, several thousand of which are english. You enter the song number, and then you turn on your mic and go. There's some cheesy music video to go with the song, and the lyrics come up on the bottom of the screen for you to sing with. It was fun! I was very nervous, though, so my voice was particularly bad. But then I did David's Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, which is much more in my range. And that was fun. Mandy sounded very nice, Yumie sounded very nice... Miki has a fantastic voice! She did the theme from an anime that I like, and I thought for a moment that it was the regular soundtrack.

They also gave us free little pens on the way out that were Hello Kitty! They say "Big Echo" for the name of the karaoke club, and then they have a little karaoke Hello Kitty on them!

After that, we went to an izakaya. An izakaya is a type of restaurant. You order food, and then everyone shares. It's really pretty cool! We tried almost as many new foods tonight as in the whole time we've been here. We definitely tried foods we wouldn't have tried on our own. For example, we had sashimi... sashimi is raw fish. It's not raw fish in sushi, it's just slices of raw fish. I've had raw fish before in sushi... but this was different. I tried raw tuna, salmon, and something else. I don't remember what it was... but it was very good, surprisingly. It had a very mellow flavor and the texture was so soft and almost melty. Along with the sashimi was uni - raw sea urchin! It was really yucky. Imagine something that is very fishy tasting, and at the same time... slightly sweet and creamy... and also very salty. Eww. Among other things, we also had steak cubes, fried chicken liver (on a stick), fried chicken skin (on a stick), quesadilla-like-thingies with honey on top, and a salad. It was a huge meal, and it was very enjoyable. :) I had a very good time!

Mandy took a few pics, so you might want to check her journal too!

We love Emi!

We have a truck that comes through every now and again and plays this rather cryptic-sounding recording. It sounds rather like Gregorian chant, and comes through at pretty random hours of the day or night. It's vageuly creepy, just this white truck going slowly down the street ans chanting.

The other day I taped it with my camera. And tonight I sent it to Emi, who is awesome and helpful and brilliant. She identified it for us.

It's the potato man.
He's singing 'Ishiyaki imo", which means something like "coal-roasted potatoes."
As she describes it, it's like the ice cream man for autumn.

I want a roasted sweet potato now. Damn. *sings the potato-man song an hopes he shows up*

Thanks Emi!

Miscellaneous photos.

Today was kinda surreal. Like being in a Final Fantasy game, or some Square Enix concoction - right down to the soundtrack. There was a soft, music-box type version of the Beatles' "Yesterday" playing as we walked through the station.

I think the worst musical creations I've heard here so far have been "Hey Mickey You're So Fine" in Japanese, and then today, a weird Japanese remix of a Vanilla Ice song.

Anyway, the most exciting news is that Christmas presents are all packed up, and wil be mailed on Monday. Fun things! We bought about $20 worth of candy today to mail home. Yummy!

This first picture is one of my new favorite foods - it's half of a fish that's battered and fried. The bones have all been removed, and it's just so nice. Inexpensive too. The tail is sticking out. I don't know what these are called (Something "fry," from what I can sound out), but so I just call them fish butts.

The second pic is of one of my most prized gashapon. It's from Panda-z. It's a panda driving another mechanical panda and basically kicking some butt.

The third picture is of our official Aichi Expo 05 toilet paper. -_-* We didn't buy it with the intent of having it as a collector's item or anything... it's just, well, official toilet paper. We were walking home from the supermarket and realized we'd forgotten to buy toilet paper. We passed a beauty/make-up shop that had a toilet paper display outside, so we grabbed on of the six-packs and went in to ring it up. The owner had a little dog that yapped at us cheerfully from it's place in a little crib in the corner. The owner brought the dog over for us to see and pet, and she showed us it's little shaved, manicured feet.

The last pic is of our scallops from the other night. Look at the price on the package - 300 yen (~$2.80) For aaaaaalll those scallops. Yummy. These are small, too. (Probably about 1.5" across?) They're usually huge!

Today was weird....

MT Blacklist fights Spam!

Note:
We've been having some comment spam issues over the last day or so, so I've installed MT Blacklist. This program resides on our server and will prevent comments that contain links to adult websites.
I'm not certain that I installed it correctly, so if you encounter posting problems... you have two options:
1. Stop posting porn!
2. Drop an e-mail to nihongoagogo (at) gmail (dot) com and I'll check it out.

Slice o' life at 1 am. Guess who's who.

*pigeons cooing annoyingly loudly on the balcony*
"Shut up."
"You really hate the pigeons, don't you?"
"Yes."
"They sing to us in the morning..."
"All they do is die and crap on our balcony."
"You're awful."
*pigeons continue to coo loudly*
"And what the hell kind of noise is that anyway?"
"It's kind of like purring."
"Yeah, but stupid sounding."
"They probably think the noises you make are stupid."
"That doesn't matter. I don't live on their balcony."
"Well... technically, they were here first."
"Do they pay rent?"
"That depends on what you think of as money. If their money is crap, then yeah, they pay a lot of rent."

Photofun.

I just did a bit of photo retouching fun. We have an heirloom suit that the Cummings boys have been wearing for a picture since like, the late 1800's. Dad's copy of himself in that suit (from when he was probably 4 or so?) got ripped, so I fixed it in photoshop so he can reprint it. I also went in and got rid of some of the damage to the photo and just retouched it in general.

*nods* Weekend!

Thank goodness it's the weekend! I've been losing my voice all week. I lost my voice almost completely on Tuesday, so that was rough. And at night, I would try to talk minimally, and in the morning, I'd be a little better, then lose it again.

Mandy had her 2-month probation observation on Monday... she had a few days of notice. Monday I came in, and my AT was talking to one of my coworkers about switching schedules with me for the first period because I should have a "full class for my observation." Excuse me? And so I said, "Ah, I have an observation?" And she was very snotty and said, "Didn't you look on the calendar?" I hadn't, but then, I rarely do. I was sickish and had no voice, so I was a little upset. So I said, "But I just had an observation last week..." And she persisted in her know-it-all tone of voice, "Aim, you have a probation observation, you know." First of all, Ali's really the only one who's allowed to call me "Aim" because I hate it. So that rubbed me the wrong way, as did her tone, "Isn't that supposed to be at two months?" "Well, it has to be in two weeks before the end of your probation. Is this a problem?" "Well, I'm not really feeling well and I'm losing my voice..." But at any rate, she made me do my observation, and I kicked some regal butt in the lesson. And then after the observed lesson, the AT takes you back and tells you what you did wrong and how to fix it. I think she was really scraping for something, since I didn't make any mistakes. But she managed to fill most of the 40 minutes making me practice setting up language drills. Toward the end, I asked, "By the way, which calendar are observations written on?" And she said "Oh, that one. But this one wasn't. I usually like to give a day's notice, but you weren't here yesterday." Mm-hmm. I've been doing help shifts at Sakae on Sundays since I started, how is that my fault? I was beyond pissed off with her for pullign that, and then acting like I should have known. And then NOT apologising when she realized it wasn't on the calendar. What a bitch!

But the rest of the week has been pretty good.

Nova has also changed my schedule, starting in December. I'll have Thursdays and Fridays off, same as Mandy. I'll also be doing a help-shift in Hara on Saturdays... so while I'm not thrilled about the early shift or the distance, it will be cool to work at Mandy's branch on Saturdays. And it means that I'll only be at my own branch 3 days a week - and I'll only have to see my AT on one of them! W00+!

Hmm... what else? Tomorrow is my day off, hurrah!

I'm a little grossed out by the public etiquette of many of the Japanese businessmen who I have seen lately. Many of them spit on the streets, walk around with their hand tucked into their trousers.... last night, there was a drunk man peeing into a bush outside our building. ^_^*

Mandy did really well today on her day off - she found a copy of Young Frankenstein at Book Off (No, you book off!). It's in English with Japanese subtitles. We're watching it now. Yaaaaay! She also found Hello Kitty cookies. Mmmmm.

So I'm pretty cheerful now. :)

This is how I feel about teaching kids classes.

Dayoffdayoffdayoff...

Today is my day off... Mandy and I have both been steadily getting sick over the last week, and today I feel like poo. So though it's my day off, I plan to stay in and watch movies, maybe do a little bit of sewing.

This week was pretty unexciting, except for discovering a store called Sofmap last week... and having visited there several times this week. No big purchases, though, but a lot of thinking. Mandy and I are thinking about purchasing a Playstation 2. Why, you ask? So we can play games... and also because it functions as a dvd player. Only thing is, it probably only plays NTSC J dvds, meaning that we couldn't watch our dvds from home. And that is a bit of an issue. ^_^* So we'll see. They also have a bunch of craft materials that I use for about 30% cheaper. So all around, it's been a good find.

The crowning achievement of last Day Off was also finding a store called ANIMATE. It's a really cool store - they have all sorts of manga and character goods (posters, calendars, costume-pieces, figures), not to mention a floor of music. They also have a lot of art supplies for making comics - stuff that I used to use a few years ago. Except where screen tones (for comic book shading) would cost about $10 per sheet in the US, they're about $3 here. Too bad I don't really draw comics anymore! Maybe I'll start up again.

Yesterday was Follow-up Training #2. They skipped #1 because it's being redone. So I can now level people up in classes, which is nice. I felt really bad before because I kept getting this really brillant high school girl who really needed to be levelled up, but I couldn't recommend her for it. So next time I have her, I'm gonna recommend her to level up.

I also started teaching kids this week. One of my classes is the spawn of Satan, and I hate them. They're so badly behaved; I have three hyper, disobedient boys, an antisocial girl, a bitchy little girl, and one little girl who refuses to come in (as in, cannot be bodily dragged in by her mother). They're in the "Kinder" level and range from the ages of about 3-5 years old. They're terrible. Basically, they're the class that none of the other teachers wanted to deal with anymore, so they were given to me. My other class is really pretty cool. It's a much smaller class, and the kids in it are pretty well behaved. I enjoyed them more, though I still prefer to be teaching adults.

I'll write more in a day or so.... I think I'm gonna go sleep a bit.

Okay, continuing...

Okay, yesterday I got busy with somethign else in the middle of posting... then realized I didn't have much of interest to write about.

Today was pretty mellow at work. My students were all pretty cool today, with only a few exceptions. I have a student named Naoki who's a very cool guy, very enthusiastic and personable... but he's really having a tough time getting and retaining the material. He thinks he's ready to move up to the next level, but he's really not. He's very average for his level, probably in a few weeks he'll be ready. At Nova, you can so something called "zoning" where you take a lesson that's a level above yours. Today Naoki decided to try zoning... he didn't pass it, but he did make a good effort. I felt bad failing him on the lesson, but he's just not that level yet. The other person in that class is a really cool girl named Miki, who I found out today is into anime, manga, and a lot of stuff I like. She's into drawing comics the way I am. So that was cool. ;)

I also had an insane lesson with a 7B student. At Nova, the no-english-at-all level is 7C, and it moves up through 7B, 7A, 6, 5, 4, and then to 3, which is near-native speech. So as a 7B, he's pretty much no-english. Which was fun. Add to that? He's a brand new student, so he doesn't know the usual "flow" of the lessons or the usual "commands" we use. Which made it super fun. Even more fun? He had no interest in actually following the language given on the page... So we got a little sidetracked at times, and the lesson didn't go too smoothly. He had a helluva time though. :D At one point, he got off topic, and asked me who my favorite singer is. I always answer one obscure American band which is my actual favorite (They Might Be Giants) and one Japanese singer, Gackt ("Gackto"). He got really excited about that and said "Gackto is handsome... you like?" And I said, "Yes, I do..." "Gackt is handsome... you are..." He paused, then flung his arms out wide, "You are beautiful!!!!!" The lesson kinda progressed from there, with me trying to get back on topic. Later he randomly asked me "You like your husband?" I sort of paused "Um, I don't have a husband." He gestured to his neck, and then to mine, "Kiss mark?" He thought I had a hickey! EEEEEK!! ^_^* My skin is just very reactive to anything!

Anyway, the rest of the day was pretty mellow, unexciting. The students were pretty cool all day, entertaining at times for certain. :)

And my Kurismasu shoppingu is almost done! I just need to get gifts for a few more people, then things can get shipped. I got the MOST CUTE AND FUN present for Sydney and Ryan and Josh. Man, I wish I wan't afraid of our bathtub, else I'd get one for myself.

I also sort of discovered areally cool store called ANIMATE. It's very... AWESOME! Lots of fun things with anime and manga, and character goods and whatnot. SUPER FUN. I also found a great store called Sofmap (Gigastore) which is a mix of electronics, video/dvds, and hobby stuff. Really cool! And really good prices. They have a ton of stuff that I want someday!

That's really about all I have to post about. Below is an example of why Becky is the coolest pumpkin carver ever.