I`m Alive

I`m currently writing this post from an electronics store in downtown Sendai. I have no internet access in my apartment (possibly ever) and thus I am reduced to this. In other news, Japanese keyboards are a pain in the ass to type on.

Things are going more or less well, aside from several flight delays and other sorts of escapades, which I will no doubt elaborate on if I ever get a better connection than this (I`ve heard that the Kawauchi campus has a leaky WiFi network).

Either way, hopefully we`ll have more to talk about soon.
// Norｍ out (I can`t find the underscore key!)

Stolen Bandwidth

I feel like a thief…which is not a bad way to feel, since that’s basically what I am right now.

I’m currently typing this post from outside one of the buildings (not sure which) on Kawauchi campus. What makes sitting outside this particular building better than sitting outside of others is its open, un-encrypted WiFi network. A WiFi network I am current hijacking to get some much needed internet access.

It’s not like I’m doing it just for the hell of it, mind you. I needed to be able to send some emails to let people know I’m alive, I needed to activate my copy of Windows XP, and I needed to see the hilarious antics of Gabe and Tycho. Okay, maybe that last one wasn’t such a good example. The point is that Tohoku is probably the only university in the modern world that uses 18 phone lines to serve all two hundred odd residents of its international house, a charming little dump whose network deficiencies mean I can’t even pay for DSL. DSL, cosequently, is maddeningly cheap and fast in Japan (about thirty dollars a month for 100Mbps). I swear, whatever I did to piss the karma gods off, I’m sorry already!

Anyway, so far Japan has been mostly cool. I am still reeling a bit from the sticker shock of just how much stuff costs here…I have taken to leaving the lights off in my room pretty much 24/7 because I’m afraid of what my electric bill might look like otherwise. Add that to incredibly high food costs, high electronic items costs (aside from cellphones, which I’ll get to later) and the unexpectedly high nature of my rent (1750 yen for a “management fee”? what the hell is that?) and you have a recipe for disaster. I might just have to eat cereal and eggs (which are suprisingly cheap) for the remainder of my stay, which I may also need to cut down to six months rather than the year I was planning on.

What else? Sendai itself is a pretty cool city, and the downtown area is more or less a picture-perfect example of what you would probably expect a modern Japanese city to look like. Lot’s of neon lights and vending machines, busses and bikes everywhere you look, and some pretty remarkably designed pedestrian crossing signals (of which I’ll hopefully have pictures later). The food is decent, though far different from the sort of things I go for. It’s not that it tastes bad; it doesn’t. In fact, I rather liked their version of spagetti, which included squid (in ring shaped pieces) and some sort of mollusk, either clams or oysters, I’m not sure which. The issue is really with the sort of food it is. American food is quite hardy by comparison, and Japanese food seems somehow watered down or something like that. I’ll get back to you when I have a better metaphor.

Okay, that’s probably it for now…it’s a good hours walk back to the international house from where I am, and it’s already mostly dark. If I can’t get some sort of dial-up service worked out in the near future, it’s likely that my updates will be far fewer than I had anticpated. What updates there are will likely come from the same place I am now, as this campus is reasonably near the engineering one (which is distressingly far from my apartment).

//_Norm out (this is my laptop, so I know where the underscore is)

Quickie

This is nothing important or groundbreaking, but I just thought I should give credit where credit is due. The Pentium-M is simply the best damn notebook processor ever, and when you combine it with a competent multi-standard wireless receiver (802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth) you end up with a lightweight, compact and powerful notebook that you can lug around for an hour and then sit and use for more than two hours while pulling stupid amounts of data over a pirated WiFi network.

If I only had an issue of 2600 to lay on the ground next to me, I would look like the hacker icon. Which is probably not a good thing when you’re trying not to make the local authorities suspicious (and, cosequently, make them lockdown the network).

//_Norm out

Second Class

The Japanese, or at least Tohoku University’s representative sample, treat their international students a bit differently than we do back in the states. That’s not to say that we [the international students] here have been treated poorly, by any stretch of the definition, it’s more that we’re not being treated like real students.

For example, everyone here is all hot and bothered about getting themselves a cellular phone despite the obvious drawbacks to paying ¥4000 (or around $40US) a month for fifty minutes of talk time. Yes, you read that correctly, fifty minutes. And there are no free nights and weekends, free long distance, or any of those fancy features that the Japanese seem absolutely bewildered about when you inquire about them. Anyway, students (who, it turns out, are actually fairly well respected in the arbitrarily hierarchical Japanese society) are supposed to get half off, which makes things a bit more reasonable, especially once you consider that in Japan you’re not charged minutes for incoming calls. Unfortunately, me and my kinfolk here are not entitled to this because we are, and I quote, “special students.” Whatever the hell that means.

It’s not just something so shallow as monetary discounts, either. We can’t check books out of the library (we can read them there, but not take them out) nor can we use the library computers to access the internet because we don’t even have student ID numbers! We are, as I was told once again, special students. Apparently there’s a translation issue here, as I’m pretty sure that when they say special they actually mean second class. At Michigan Tech (and most other US universities) we treat international students like royalty. They are given immense amounts of help and support, they usually get first dibs on the best on campus dorm facilities, and they’re actually treated like genuine students, replete with student ID cards, computer login access, email, etc. Comparitively, Tohoku’s international house is about as far from the main campus as is possible without, say, being in a different city entirely, and the dorm itself is…well, let’s no deal in euphemisms, it’s essentially a dump. The walls are in serious need of a fresh coat of paint, the floors need a good scrub, and finding a truly massive spider web (complete with large yellow spider) in the corner of your room upon arrival do not make for a good impression. Add to that the generally shabby appearance of the outside of the building (they don’t even mow the grass in the courtyard) the myriad of hidden fees they spring upon your rent and the complete lack of a competent internal wiring system that prevents you from getting internet access (you would think international students would have the most need for this) and you can see why we might feel less than appreciated.

This is, of course, borderline bitching on my part, and I should probably give it a rest. The people who have been showing us around and helping us get necessities like bank accounts and our foreigner registration cards have been nothing short of benevolent, buying us lunch twice and just being generally kind and eager to please. Of course, it is telling that most of these people are part of a volunteer ground in Sendai called Group Mori that helps all foreign residents of Sendai and are not anything sent by the university itself, but that’s just being bitter.

Also, I’m not sure if the “Gaijin Ghetto” sign we placed over the one that formerly said “International House” out front will do much to improve our relations with the university, but I’ve never been very good a subtlety.

//_Norm out

Paperwork

For reasons I am completely unable to fathom the Japnese are incredibly fond of forms and the filling-out thereof. You would think that a country that goes this crazy over robot dogs and tiny cellphones would have computerized their record-keeping systems decades ago. In an interesting bit of irony, it turns out that Japanese people are actually terrified of computers. Although they love broadband internet and laptop computers they absolutely will not commit anything truly important to digital format. Not even money. This means that I have to carry disconcerting amounts of cash around with me at all times if I have any hope of paying for services outside of major department stores. To make that better, the Japanese have coins in values all the way up to the equivalent of five US dollars…so I can’t even put them in a jar and forget about them! I have to carry ten pounds of metal in my wallet in addition to several uncomfortably large bills.

I’m not making this shit up.

Anyway, so this means that I have filled out more registration, record keeping, and god knows what other sorts of forms in the past few days than I have in probably all my years in the good ole USA. What makes this even more annoying is that everyone one of these forms wants the exact same information, so I end up repeating things over and over and over. Clearly, all this could be done with one easy form, but apparently this never occured to them. It’s probably a self-initiated attempt to attone for national sins or something like that. If I have to fill in my birthday one more time (on the Magi calendar, no less) I think there will be serious consequences for whoever it is that asks me to do it.

On a positive note, I did find a place to buy a pan that won’t leave its non-stick surface all over the bottom of my pancakes. You would be surprised how hard it is to pick out the phrase “only use with weak flame” (like a damn cigarette lighter) when you don’t understand Kanji.

Speaking of lighters, frigging eveyone in Japan smokes. There are cigarette vending machines everywhere, and they [the cigarettes] are the one thing that is much cheaper here than in the states. Don’t these people read? Don’t you know they cause cancer? Don’t you know that they smell disgusting?

Any Japanese people reading this should feel free to answer the above.

//_Norm out

Heh Heh Heh…

There are so many jokes I could make right now, but I think I’ll just bask in the moment.

You may all go about your business now.

//_Norm out

For the love of god, I don’t speak Japanese

Today started off with a bang as I bombed my Japanese language placement test in a rather spectacular manner. Well, maybe not bombed, as such, since you can’t exactly fail a placement test, but leaving the thing mostly blank is still bad either way. I mean, I knew, mentally, that I don’t know jack about speaking, writing, or reading Japanese, but it was another thing entirely to have my suspicions confirmed in an official manner. Looks like I’ll be in Japanese I, which sucks because it means I’ll have to sit through lesson on Katakana and Hirigana again. Such is life.

I’ll be attending my first class today, which is Japanese Culture. I will also be meeting my academic advisor for the first time, a prospect that has me slightly nervous. I’ve heard some horror stories from the other JYPE students (as well as some good ones) that leave me wondering how I’ll deal with it if I get a bad one. In addition, I’m not actually certain what he thinks I’m supposed to be researching, as I’m not even entirely sure. I believe I put something about cryptography, but Akira (my advisor) is not in the math department, so I’ll just have to see what that means.

In other news, I need a bike quite badly. It takes me about forty-five minutes to walk to Kawauchi campus, and an addition ten or fifteen to make it to Aobayama (where my advisor is). This might not seems like much to most of you, but it’s quite a drastic change from MTU, where I was never more than ten minutes from any given class. Add to this the fact that the route I take is full of long, steep hills, and you end up with shins that hurt like hell (I wasn’t aware that such tiny muscles could get so sore). A bike would probably halve the time it takes me to get here, which will help me recoup all the sleep I’m not getting for my morning classes. Of course, bikes in Japan are rather different than what we in the states are used to. To imagine the typical Japanese bike, think of those bikes from the fifties in the US. Fenders, banana seats, curved handlebars and, more often than not, only one gear (three if you’re a high-roller). You would think that with all the hills in this place they would ride bikes with a few more gearing options, but no. The few ten-speed mountain bikes you can find cost well over $200US, which seems to me to be entirely absurd.

On a positive note, Vaughn and I have located a resale shop that has a ton of electronic stuff for very, very cheap (at least for Japan, anyway). The stuff is in great condition (practically new) and we can get a twenty-one inch TV for about $100US, which we might do. They also have a few Super Famicons for $20 and tons of games for less than a dollar, something that no videogame aficionado could possibly pass up and still sleep at night.

Unless, of course, he needs to use that money to even have a place to sleep at night, but then practicality has never been a strong suit of mine.

//_Norm out

I’m A Big Kid Now

Okay, so I had my first two classes for the semester today and yesterday. It seems that these will mostly be a cakewalk, which I don’t know if I’m happy about or not. On the definite plus, my instructor for Japanese Culture is (ironically) British, and his accent is the soothing sort that makes him easy to listen to. Which is good, because good god does that man like to talk.

I also met my academic advisor, Akira Maruoka, and went over some stuff about the research I’ll be doing. It looks like it’ll end up being in the field of data mining, which is a theoretical area of computer science. I don’t have any experience in the theoretical aspects of computing, so this could get interesting indeed. Maruoka-sensei did calm my nerves a bit by saying that he understands that I’m not a graduate student and has the proper expectations for my work, which is good. As for the man himself, he seems to be right in the middle of the two extremes I’ve seen. Some people have advisors who are so busy that they barely got to speak with them, while others (like Vaughn) have professors who took them out for a drink, showed them around the city, and just generally did anything they could to be helpful. Maruoka seems to be pretty laid back, which fits well with me, and his English is passable, so this should work out well.

In other news, I managed to navigate my way around downtown Sendai (and its bus system) completely on my own, which I am more proud of than is probably healthy. I am starting to be able to pick out the important phrases and words (like Sendai eki, which means Sendai Station) that allow me to navigate properly. I got a pan that won’t leave its nonstick surface all over my food from Daiei, which is a local department store. If I end up getting a bike (which I would really like to do) it’ll probably end up being from there as well. And maybe a toaster oven. That would be good too.

Okay, that’s all for now. Time to make some lunch.

//_Norm out

Photos

Okay, I’ve uploaded the first set of photos from Japan, which can be found in the art section of this site (use the menu up top). I’m not entirely happy with the way the layout and organization of the photos came out, so I will likely be making some adjustments later. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know at norm@plaristocrates.com

//_Norm out

Transportation

So, I finally broke down and got a bike. It’s not a great bike, as such things go, but it cuts the time it takes me to get to class almost in half, which is a great relief. It does not, however, make the transit any easier. There is almost no flat land between my apartment and Kawauchi campus, so no matter which way I go (there or back) it’s about half uphill. The hills are fairly steep, too, and my pansy ass has had some trouble getting all the way up the last few. Not to mention the almost complete lack of sidewalks in Sendai, which can make bike transit somewhat harrowing.

Also, though I hadn’t noticed it at first, it seems that being of the caucasian persuasion (rhyme unintentional) draws a lot of stares while you walk around Japan. The people are, in general, very good about being discrete while they do it, but after a few days I’m now able to notice it. Once in a while, though I sometimes feel bad later, it’s funny to turn to them and ask them if you have something on your face or something like that. They turn the most hilarious shade of red and will apologize profusely. It’s sort of a guilty pleasure, but in my defense I didn’t come up with it (blame Jon).

//_Norm out

Listing to Fill Space

Metropolitan Japan is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not dissimilar from what we in the United States are used to seeing. Aside from the obviously difficult language barrier, the typical American would likely have little trouble surviving in a modern Japanese city. Culture shock, as it were, is not a major factor; with so many familiar brand-names (both US companies that have a presence in Japan, like Coke, and Japanese brands that have a presence in the US, like Sony) and clothing styles the casual observer might mistake parts of Japan for America.

Of course, that’s the casual observer. A more astute observer (or at least, one who spends a substantial amount of time there) will note that it is not the major differences that contribute to culture shock anyway. When you go somewhere and they speak an entirely different language, you knew that in advance. You knew that they eat different food, or that they drive on the other side of the road, or that their books open from right to left. It’s the little things, instead, that get to you. The ones that just sort of bug you from the back of your mind, but you can’t quite say exactly what they are. For your benefit, I have included a list of those I’ve noticed thus far.

• All Japanese people smoke, or at least, all the ones between about 16 and 24 years of age. I don’t know if they’ve just never seen the cancer studies or if they simply enjoy the acrid aroma given off by a cigarette, but they pretty much all smoke.
• Japanese hotdog buns open from the top, as opposed to the side as they do in America. This actually makes more sense, I think, since the bottom is the flat part and they are less likely to roll over.
• In Japan, the only proper way for an employee at any business to greet you is in as high pitch a voice as possible. The greeting also tends to have a chain effect, where every employee immediately shouts out their hello whether or not they can actually see you, or in fact anyone at all.
• The Japanese stick cartoons on everything, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense. Why would you put an anime-inspired character on a box of hair dye? Is that bright orange supposed to represent what my hair will actually look like if I use this?
• Mopeds (more like motor scooters, really) do not obey any traffic regulations, period. Unlike cars, which will pick and choose, mopeds will ride on sidewalks, run red lights, drive in the wrong lane, and just generally put themselves and everyone around them in serious danger.
• Few Japanese people will ask you to move. You could be standing in the middle of an isle in a store for ten minutes, and the person whose advancement you block will stand silently in your blind spot until you notice them.
• Bank in Japan…well, no sense in mincing words, they suck horribly. They keep asinine hours and generally don’t offer ATM access outside of normal business hours. What, I ask you, is the point of an automated teller if it’s only available when I could go inside and use a human one?
• Much like the Europeans haven’t quite got refrigeration figured out yet, the Japanese don’t understand the concept of a dryer (for clothes). The purpose of a dryer is to dry, not to make the clothes lukewarm (but still sopping wet). To top it off, Sendai is incredibly humid all the time, so my clothes have been hanging for 22 hours and counting and they’re still not dry.

This list might seem negative, but it’s really not. With the possible exception of the last two, none of these things are inherently bad, just…different. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes these to become normal and for me to simply stop noticing them. Or at least to stop comparing them to things back home.

//_Norm out

The Least You Could Do Was Send A Memo

The instructor for my “Dynamics of the Earth” class did not show up today. Apparently this is quite common for the first few weeks of class at Tohoku, as you haven’t actually registered for classes yet and the instructors don’t feel like they actually mean anything. This seriously makes me question whether the Japanese actually learn anything at college, and the answer seems increasingly likely to be no. I mean, the classes are once a week for fifteen weeks. Subtract the first three, since they don’t seem to count. Then subtract at least one class for holidays (they have a lot of them here) and possibly two more for the professor just being lazy and canceling, and you’re left with only nine classes total. In an entire semester.

Doesn’t make much sense to me, and apparently it doesn’t for anyone else either.

//_Norm out

Loss For Words

Sorry about the lack of posting action in the last few days…although, in my defense, it hasn’t actually been four days…my Tuesday afternoon is your Monday night.

The truth of the matter is that I haven’t really had much to say lately. The initial shock and awe of actually being in a completely different country have largely worn off, and things have started to become routine. I am no longer phased by the lack of spoken English or the strangeness of the foodstuffs. I can navigate the city, I can find my classes (which have finally started) and the housing situation is, for the time being at least, under control.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not. Maybe it means that I’m just not doing enough, but then again this isn’t really a vacation…I can’t just jump on a train and go to Kyoto or something like that. I have classes to attend and homework to do, so I suppose it’s only natural. I do think I’ll go down to see the relatively nearby botanical gardens, though…at the very least it will provide for some interesting photogenic material.

//_Norm out

French Matters

There is a smidgen of truth in the old stereotype that French guys get girls. This was proven to me beyond a doubt at yesterday’s International Festival, where Chris (or Christoph, if you’re feeling pretentious) managed to exude an almost palpable aura of attraction. I’m not joking either…tell me, how many times have you had a woman call you beautiful? I mean, can you even use the word beautiful for a guy? We were talking to a Japanese girl there when Lain mentioned that Chris was French, to which she [the girl] replied “well of course he is, he’s beautiful.”

No joke.

It has a lot to do with his confidence, I think, which is easy to mistake for arrogance. He just says to himself “hey, I’m French, there’s no way I can fail. And if I do, the Americans will bail me out anyway.”

Okay, when I start taking easy shots at the French it’s time to switch tracks.

Anyway, the festival itself was pretty cool. It went practically all day long, from like ten in the morning until eleven or so at night. There was a ton of food from all around the world (of which I partook extravagantly) including things like Indonesian barbeque and some sort of impossibly delicious apple-donut things from Denmark. There were also various traditional performances from around the world (mostly East Asia, surprise) that included an almost all-female percussion band, which was quite cool. I made a short video of it, which you can view here. The quality is pretty poor, since I used my digital still camera instead of a real video camera, but it works well enough, I suppose.

I also have a bunch of pictures, but on review they mostly seem less interesting than I originally thought. I’ll probably still put them up, but it’ll be a few days at least (and probably sans comments this time around). I’m also making some backend updates to the site itself, so if things break for a bit don’t be entirely shocked. Barring that, you shouldn’t notice any differences (but I most assureadly will).

//_Norm out

iTunes For Windows

It seems that hell did indeed freeze over, although I am somewhat dissapointed that it has chosen to do so for this. Not that I don’t like iTunes…in fact I find that it rocks in ways I didn’t think were legal in the states. The issue is more that I was really hoping that hell would choose to freeze over for something like, say, myself finding a girlfriend.

Maybe the pigs will hold off for that one.

//_Norm out

Love The American, Hate The Country

It’s one thing to know, intellectually, that a distressingly large portion of the world’s population harbors and extreme dislike for America. It’s a different matter entirely to have that fact laid out in front of you. I was in the first session of my Kanji course and was talking with a girl named Monique, who is from the Netherlands. We were in a group working on some game designed to increase our familiarity with the iconic origins of the kanji themselves. Anyway, long story short, we ended up talking a bit about the differences between Europe and the United States (attitude wise) when she said, after a brief apology, that she hated America and everything it stands for. This was after probably an hour of congenial conversation and was followed by another twenty minutes of the same (albeit on other topics) which is, I think what caught me off gaurd. Here was a girl who had, a few moments prior (and actually, now that I reflect, leading to the conversation about Europe) asked for my phone number so we could stay in contact (we live in the same building so it’s no big deal). She said it so nonchalantly, as though I should have been expected it, and did it with a friendly smile.

It’s somewhat of a paradox. She clearly harbors no ill will towards Americans themselves (as evidenced by our conversation) but at the same time actually hate the country itself. Despite being faced with an actually American citizen who was, as she admitted, totally unlike what she thought Americans were, she still tossed the comment out. She’s not the only one, either; most of the European students have made some sort of similar comment at some point, though few at straightforwardly (is that a word?) as her.

In other completely unrelated news, Napster is coming back as a legitimate pay service (which you no doubt already knew). They have a series of flash videos available here that are somewhat humorous. They’re quick downloads so if you have a few mintues to kill, give them a look.

iTunes continues to rock. I put off some of my initial enthusiasm to the delightfully wrong feeling of running Mac software on my PC, but even after the maturing of our relationship I still am completely enamoured with it. The interface just makes sense, everything is intuitive and intelligently laid out, and it doesn’t have some stupid skin that just gets in the way of being useful. The only thing I miss about Media Player 9 is the ability to minimize it into a toolbar on the taskbar…but I’ll get over it. In fact, my affection for Apple’s software (not hardware) is well documented, and I think I might actually get around to digging into XP’s system files and registry to finally do the OSX interface conversion I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I’ll let you know how it goes.

//_Norm out

Oh Wow…

Who says that the Catholic church doesn’t have a sense of humor? Thank to Mac Hall for the article itself, but I can’t help but post the best quote here:

Vatican City – Masturbation is like owning a Ferrari and driving only in first gear, a senior Catholic theologian said in an article published Wednesday.

“Driving only in first gear, not only do you prevent the Ferrari expressing its full power, but gradually you wear it out and thereby ruin a masterpiece of technology,” Father Giordano Muraro wrote in the magazine Vita Pastorale.

Metaphors like that make me think I should just never write anything ever again. I mean, seriously, how the hell am I supposed to compete with that?

//_Norm out

Curses

It turns out that the OSX theme I found earlier is only available for resolutions up to 1280×1024. Normally this would be a big deal because, let’s face it, you can’t use Photoshop at lower than 1600×1200, but it’s even worse this time because my laptop has a native 1400×1050 display.

Foiled again. Maybe I’ll just break down and use Windowblinds or something…there must be a theme on there somewhere, but will it have the dock? This question must be answered.

//_Norm out

And The Posting Continues

I was going to write a post, but then I realized that I really don’t have anything to say. Also, there is someone in the lounge who is eating something that smells like curry and it’s reminded me that I haven’t eaten yet today. So now I’m hungry, and I have to ride all the way back to the apartment to remedy this situation.

Such a hard life I have.

In other news, if the Yankees continue to win I think I may go on strike. I’m not sure exactly what that strike would entail, or how it would properly hurt New York and the Yankees in particular, but I figure I can work out the details later. Besides, at this juncture the Japan Series is far more important to me than the World Series…not because I care about Japanese baseball, but because one of the teams playing (and the one currently leading the series) is the Daiei Hawks. In Japan, sports teams are usually not named after cities but instead the companies that own them, and Daiei is a major department store chain. There is one in downtown Sendai, and I figure that if the Hawks win the will have no choice but to have a big sale so I can get useful things. And maybe frivilous ones too, if I can sneak them in.

Oh yeah, one more thing: the Penny-Arcade store is finally up, and there are several clothing items I find appealing. I may have to order one, probably not now but when I get back, and I suggest you do as well. At the very least you can proudly proclaim that you paid PA to advertise for them, instead of the more common method of being paid to do so. It’s the American way.

//_Norm out

Imoni-kai!

I actually had a pretty full weekend this time around, which is why you haven’t heard from me until now. I suppose I’ll hit it up point by point, and I promise I’ll try to keep the summaries quick and interesting, although I make no promises.

The mainstay of Friday and Saturday were the Imoni-kai parties (which is technically a redundant phrase, since –kai mean party or celebration) hosted by my lab group and the international house, respectively. Imoni parties are only held in the northern part of Japan (and Tokyo, but Tokyo does everything) and occur between the months of September and November as, traditionally, a way of welcoming autumn. The word imoni doesn’t have a direct translation, but it’s a sort of potato-like vegetable that the Japanese put into soups made especially at these parties. The soups contain (in addition to imoni) thinly sliced beef or pork, onions, taro (which are like very small potatoes) and something that looks a lot like cubes of animal fat but is actually a high-fiber vegetable of some kind. The soups also come in two flavors, miso and soyu. The miso soups generally have the pork while the soyu soups usually have the beef, but this might just be a coincidence that both the parties I went to followed this.

Friday’s party was, as I mentioned earlier, thrown by my lab group. It was interesting to actually hang out with them as I haven’t really had much interaction with them (aside from the professor). Though very few of them spoke English, there was one guy who’s going off to Austria in a few weeks and wanted very badly for me to teach him more English. I spent the bulk of the time talking with him, trying to have the sort of conversation he might have when arriving in Austria. I tried to use an Arnold Schwarzneggar voice for a bit, but the joke passed over his head so I dropped it. There was also an interesting bit of social awkwardness when they offered me my choice of beer or tea for drinking…I don’t like tea, but I don’t drink alcohol, so I went with the tea anyway. The assistant professor (who does speak English) was puzzled by my choice, and I told him that I don’t drink. I sort of saw it coming, but this confused him even more that I had expected. All Japanese people drink, period, and the idea of not doing it of your own volition is largely alien to them. After a moments pause, he asked if it was for religious reasons, and then fretted that I might be a vegetarian and thus would have nothing to eat at the party. It was pretty funny, and I eventually managed to convince him that meat was not a problem. There were a bunch of other food there as well, but I can’t particularly remember their names…there was something like coleslaw dipped in a batter than was fried, a sort of fish-on-a-stick (a whole fish, mind you) and little pork pieces dipped in a sweet sauce that were absolutely delectable.

The Saturday party was largely the same except that most people spoke English, at least until the local Japanese population showed up and, as always, tried to get us to agree to teach them English for free. I didn’t mind it much, but some of the other students were actively offended by this, which I guess I can understand. Pontus also made some delicious Swedish bread that was wrapped around a stick and cooked over the fire; it had some cinnamon and other spices in it, I can’t remember what, but it was damn good. Speaking of fire, I neglected to mention that both parties were held on the riverbank, and the food was all cooked on traditional campfires, which was cool.

Okay, this got pretty long, and I still haven’t covered the events of Saturday afternoon. Since they’re a completely different subject, I’ll leave them for tomorrow where I’ll probably mix them in with something far less blogish so that you can be less bored.

//_Norm out

8-Bit Childhood

Here I am, still talking about my weekend (last weekend, that is) which probably says something about how interesting my life is.

Anyway, after the Imoni-kai myself and a few of my fellow American international students (George, Joey, Tim, and Jeshua, for the insatiably curious) headed out to another district of Sendai…I can’t seem to recall the name right now, but it required that we take a short train ride out beyond Sendai station and then hop on the subway and take that until it ended. That was the boring scene setting part, now comes the (in my view) cool part, and which will likely also be deemed cool by 5% of this site’s audience: we spent the next six hours walking around the city going from one videogame/book shop to another. It was like a pilgrimage or sorts. Even the most casual gamer is at least peripherally aware that Japan is a Mecca for all things videogame related. What most people don’t realize is that, in Japan, videogames have an actual heritage. Unlike the US, where most people get rid of and have no need for older, outdated consoles, in Japan it’s hardly a challenge to find mint-condition consoles of old, from Super-Famicoms (SNES in the US) to Sega Saturns, not only can you find the consoles themselves, but you can find a bewildering variety of peripherals and, most importantly, games. In fact, most of the stores we hit had more Super-Famicom games than they did Gamecube games (the Gamecubes lack of titles notwithstanding).

It is a credit to my sudden foresight that I left most of my cash at home (and plastic is essentially useless in smaller stores here) because, despite my steadfast decision to not buy anything and my general lack of funds, I’m not sure I could have resisted. Xboxes that looked brand new went for less than $100US, there were special edition silver and metallic-blue PS2s, there were games I knew still wouldn’t be out for months stateside that I could get used for less than half the price! It was roughly like having walked around my whole life and never seeing the sun, then one day realizing I’d just been wearing too big a hat (thanks Doug).

I will most definitely be going there again, probably next week sometime, and that will only whet my already barely-controllable apetite to see Akihabara in Tokyo. We have a plan to get down there, and though I can’t share all the details yet, it may involve us making use of the Shinjuku loop-line train for sleeping. I’ll keep you posted as events warrant.

//_Norm out

I Don’t Write So Well

Why is it that girls always wind up with assholes?

This is a question that gets posed so often that it’s practically, hell, it is, cliché. You hear it all the time, be it in an article somewhere, from a friend, or just a sort of general consensus among people the world over. It used to be a question that I myself would occasionally toss out, either in reference to a specific situation or just as a general poke at the state of my love life.

Regardless, with time comes wisdom (or so they say) and I no longer think about this. Why? Because it’s stupid, plain and simple. Not just stupid as a question, but stupid as a statement, stupid at its very core. Nothing better symbolizes the general lack of responsibility that people, and guys in particular, take for their own actions. Whether you want to face up to it or not, your lack of a girlfriend (or boyfriend, I’ve heard the phrase from the other side once or twice) has as much to do with your own inadequacies, perceived or otherwise, as it does some genetic predisposition women have towards jerks. The question is self-defeating; by making a blanket statement like that, you shift the blame from yourself to some ethereal, unchangeable natural law and thus make yourself feel better about your situation. Nothing could be worse than this.

Why am I talking about this? I’m not entirely sure, although I do know that it was touched off by a post Rob made about a week ago. I don’t think my ire is even specifically about guys who blame others for their own problems, but about society in general. In our haste to make ourselves feel better, we shift the blame for anything and everything that happens to us somewhere else. Though it might make life easier, you’re doing nothing buy lying to yourself when you harbor these sort of beliefs. Life will not change nor get better without some action on your part, and blaming others for your troubles is definitely not the sort of action you need to take.

//_Norm out

Happy Halloween

Halloween is finally here, and for some reason this is a holiday I’ve always kind of liked. They don’t really do halloween here in Japan so I’ve decided to make do with what I have. There are a few things that can make even an average day feel like All Hallows Eve, and I recommend you do them as well.

First, pick up and read a little bit of HP Lovecraft goodness. The guy basically started the entire modern horror genre, with greats like Stephen King and Clive Barker citing him as a major influence. Hardly anyone has heard of him, but if you pick up some of the collections (he wrote almost exclusively short stories) I promise that you won’t be dissapointed. Well, at least as long as you stick to his later work…some of the early stuff was pretty awful.

Next, if you have broadband, go get yourself a copy of the Silent Hill 3 demo from Konami. This game, next to Eternal Darkness (which, at $14.99US, Gamecube owners have no excuse not to own) it’s one of the best survival horror games ever made. Nothing says halloween like running through dark, foggy locales while haunting noises and etheral glimpses taunt you at every turn. If the game doesn’t scare you, at the very least the absolutely insane 468MB file you’ve got to retrieve to play it ought to.

If you’ve done all this, chances are you might be a little high-strung, which is entirely understandable. Should you feel the need to cool down a bit afterwards, feel free to have yourself a Japanese lesson by downloading and watching this hilarious bit of video I took during my Kanji class on Wednesday. In case you couldn’t tell, the teacher is trying to make motions while counting that more or less corespond to the look of the kanji you use to write it. I’m pretty sure she must have been (or currently is) a kindergarten teacher at some point in her life…things like that just don’t come naturally!

//_Norm out