What.

I just used the Japanese word for "chromosome" in an actual conversation.

WHAT IS THIS.

My shock is so great that I can no longer use question marks.

Day one of classes and I am already preparing to riot against the homework load

Things that are awesome about this trip:

The food. Can I just swoon a little bit? Seriously, I haven’t had a bad meal. (The curry rice got close, but it wasn’t bad, just bland.) I had tempura and sushi and super good pea-and-cucumber-and-broccoli-and-ham salad for dinner, and it was SO GOOD. I bet you’re all jealous.

My host family. I really like them. And they seem not to be utterly repulsed by me. The little brother, despite his shyness, seems to have taking a shining to me, because last night he pulled out a whole bunch of picture books about Ghibli movies (he saw that I had a Totoro bandana) and started showing them to me. Oh, and last night we (me and my host mom and the little brother) went down to the river and saw fireflies! They were everywhere and gorgeous! They even landed on the little brother’s hand, so I got to see them up close. (And then I had terrible Grave of the Fireflies flashbacks and started irrationally fearing fruit drops.)

I haven’t talked much to the older brother, mostly because he hasn’t been around much (and he is also very shy), but I also got to have a proper conversation with my host father. He’s really nice, although I have a little bit of trouble understanding him, because he has a suuuuuper thick Kyoto accent and, unlike my host mother, he doesn’t make any effort to switch to Tokyo dialect when he’s talking to me. I keep having to convert “hen” to “nai” (not) and “haru” to “rareru” (can do) in my head. (At least I’m be learning Kyoto dialect this way. OH WAIT, THAT’S BAD, ‘CAUSE MY SENSEI WILL KEEP MARKING ME DOWN FOR NOT SPEAKING THE STANDARD DIALECT. AUGH.)

My Japanese teacher. We were discussing the article about the Toyota recall today, and she was explaining one of the phrases used in the article (which, roughly translated, was “the spearhead has not yet dulled” which meant that the media and governments attacks had not died down). This was how she explained it:

Sensei: [holds up a pen] Pretend this is a spear, okay? See, this is the head? It kind of looks like a spear, right? Okay. Now, Mike-san is Toyota. [proceeds to pretend to stab Mike-san with her pen] Like that, okay?

Things that are not awesome about this trip:

The homework. Ye gods, the homework. The homework, according to the syllabus, should only take about two hours per day. I’ve been working for 3 ½ hours and I’m still not done. (But I’m taking a sanity break, because I was almost at the point of curling up in a ball and crying pathetically while plotting the downfall of badly written paragraphs about cough suppressants.) Of course, it probably helps that I have to look up half the words in the handouts they’ve been giving us; how am I supposed to know the word for “bronchial tubes”?

Texting on Japanese phones. It is a universally known fact that I am the slowest texter known to humankind, and if you add in the fact that I’m texting in a foreign language with a weird keystroke system where you have to hit a special button if you want to add tenten and also you have to remember that “n” is on the key with “wa” and “wo” and not on the key with “na,” well…it took me an embarrassingly long time to write “konnichiha.” (If you were wondering why I was texting, we were all supposed to text our language practice partners today to see when they’re available. (Our partners are students are nearby universities. Mine is apparently overly fond of emoticons.))

And more about the homework: I have about 80 kanji compounds to memorize by tomorrow morning. YAY.

Also, giving having to improvise a presentation because the teacher's instructions weren't clear enough? Not fun.

Raw okra. It is so delicious, but if you eat it, it looks like you are drooling uncontrollable onto your plate. Not appetizing at all. (Raw okra exudes this…slime; I really have no better way to describe it. Imagine drool but thick and slippery. And clinging to your chopsticks. Yum.)

And things that are different in Japan (because apparently Ann wants to read more about these):

There are no light switches in my host family’s house. Instead there are little pads at the doorways and you have to hit the correct button for the light to come on. Needless to say, I hit the wrong button every single time.

Toilets. Ha ha ha. Okay, I’m done talking about this now. (Although I’ve found out that being the only foreigner who knows how to use a squat toilet has some advantages. I never have to wait in line for the bathroom.)

Sinks coming out of the top of toilets. Seriously. It is extremely odd. When you flush, water comes out of the faucet for you to wash your hands.

Bedding. Can I just say that Japanese bedding is forty times more sensible than Western bedding? You don’t have to worry about sheets and blankets and whether the sheet is flat when you put the blanket on top and whether the comforter will wrinkle the bottom blankets. It is all one thing together. Best system ever. Also, easiest bed to make in the world.

Tubs. (Okay, it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember that word. I was about to write お風呂, but then I realized that since only two people (that I know of) reading this blog speak any Japanese at all, no one would have any idea what I’m talking about.) Anyway, now that that exceedingly long parenthetical is out of the way, tubs! My family has a Japanese-style bathtub and shower. That means that you shower outside of the bathtub before you get in. Last night was showering only, so I haven’t gotten to try the tub yet.

THE SHAMPOO AND CONDITIONER ARE FRIGGIN’ EXPENSIVE.

I have now not spoken a single word of English for 33 hours (other than saying "ow" when I managed to bite my own tongue while brushing my teeth; don't ask). WHOO.

京都べん喋はる！素敵じゃないの。

。。。うそをついた。ごめんね。

(This little bit down here is for Opal, so if you haven't been following the Shizuo-claiming battle occurring in the comments in Japanese, you can just ignore this:

Opal said...

Arguing in Japanese is harder than I thought. I'm not entirely sure if I'm translating correctly... Is the "because" of the last sentence the previous sentence? My pain is like hate??? And what is the "の" in "のかい" referring to? Unless "かい" is a noun, then I understand.

It probably doesn't help that I'm using super slangy terms. Sorry about that.

Yes, it is.

No, I said "you hate pain." The そう is the "I heard" version of そう.

のかい is the super slangy form of んですか. の is ん and かい is か. (Note that guys are pretty much the only ones who use かい. Which is totally why I am using it.)

私、勝った！静雄君は私のだよ。)

Homestay day one, singing rocks, and oral squid

Last night a small group of us (along with our residential director) hopped on the subway and went down to Sanjo (which is a district of Kyoto). We went to a sushi restaurant, and one of the other girls and I had far too much fun reading the menu in English. I don’t know who they got to translate their menu, but I’m pretty sure that they didn’t mean to offer “oral squid.” Then again, it was a kind of strange restaurant, because they appeared to be selling “bacon” nigiri…made of horse meat. (One of the other girls tried horse meat sashimi and said it wasn’t too bad, but she never wants to eat it again, because it was still bleeding, and that was kind of gross.) Meanwhile, I had a rather unpleasant surprise when I discovered that the nigiri was made with wasabi underneath the fish, so I didn’t know that it was there until I bit into it. (Needless to say, there was lots of coughing and choking and chugging green tea on my part. Despite my love of spicy things, I have no tolerance for wasabi.) Fortunately, it turned out that you could order everything on the menu “sabi nuki” (without wasabi), so I got some saba, which was amazingly delicious.

After that, two of the other students and I wandered off to get school supplies. Once we’d picked up notebooks (and listened to the store’s Father’s Day song (Thank you, Daddy! Thank you…Daddy!) about fourteen thousand times), we met up with the rest of the group and got bubble tea before heading back to the subway (where we were serenaded by a guy with a guitar who apparently thought he was singing in English, although you could have fooled us).

And then I did homework, because I am a masochist. If you’ve ever wondered how to say “National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” it’s 高速道路交通安全局. (Our first article is about the Toyota recall.)

I think there must be something about Japan that makes me wake up far too early, ‘cause I got up at 5:30 this morning. (That’s not even properly morning. That’s more like the mythical hour between college students going to bed and high school students waking up.) My roommate was still unconscious, and the room had this bizarre feature where you couldn’t turn on any of the lights unless you put your room key in this special slot…in which case the main lights in the room turn on and stay on, so I wound up using my flashlight in the bathroom. That flashlight has been surprisingly useful so far, actually. So, thanks, Mom.

After breakfast, we all went downstairs and waited awkwardly for our host families to show up. Mine was actually the first to show up, which was both good (because I didn’t have to wait terribly long) and bad (because everyone else got to see me trip over my luggage and fail at simple Japanese phrases). And before you say, “You couldn’t have failed that badly at simple Japanese phrases,” my host mom asked me whether I spoke Japanese or not. I have been studying for four years. FOUR. YEARS. AUGH. Seriously, when it comes to speaking, I curl up and die inside a little bit, and everything comes out in staccato bursts of ungrammatical, incoherent Japanese. UGH. Fortunately, she was really nice about my total inability to form a complete sentence and didn’t throw me out on the side of the road.

It turns out that my host family’s house is not only really close to Doshisha, it’s on the same street as Doshisha. And they run a restaurant (right below the house) which made it onto a list of the top 100 restaurants in Kyoto. How cool is that?

Anyway, so far I’ve met the mother in the family and the younger of the two boys (and said hello to the father, but haven’t really had a conversation with him yet). The mom’s really nice, and the kid is super cute but very shy. He hasn’t said more than about ten words to me. Mostly he’s just been hiding behind chairs and grinning at me when he thinks I’m not looking. HMM, THIS REMINDS ME OF SOMEONE. OH WAIT, IT’S TOTALLY LIKE MY LITTLE BROTHER.

After lunch (which was totally delicious and there were these swoon-worthy pickles with ginger that I now know how to make…in theory) the younger brother and I walked over to a shrine complex nearby, which was awesome. There was a rock there that had one of the sacred ropes tied around it (to mark it as a kami) because apparently it had started singing the national anthem. At least, that’s what the sign said. I took a bunch of pictures, so once I figure out why the SD card from my camera won’t fit in my computer (even though it’s the right size…I’m seriously confused) I’ll try to upload some of those.

Anywhosen, I should get back to my massive pile of homework. So…many…kanji! Also, I need a three minute anecdote that says something about my personality and I’m completely drawing a blank. Hopefully I’ll think of something before my presentation tomorrow…

Random facts:

There are female boy scouts in Japan. You learn something new every day.

A lot of the other students who had done homestays told me that they wound up having to deal with a lot of weird American stereotypes. I haven’t run into any yet…except that apparently all Americans shower in the morning.

オパル、お前の男って？静雄くんはそれを知っているのかい？絶対に私を選ぶよ。お前は痛みが嫌いだそうだから。

Orientation (again, but in Japan this time)

I wound up going to bed super early...earlier than my roommate got back, actually, so she just banged on the door and I woke up for long enough to let her in, and then fell back asleep. But then I wound up waking up at 6:30 a.m. Oh well. I suppose I'll be getting up early this entire trip anyway.

Have I mentioned how much I love Japanese breakfasts? I love Japanese breakfasts. I don't even like breakfast normally, 'cause breakfast foods always seem to be too sweet. But Japanese breakfasts are excellent. I had walnut bread and rice and pickles and green tea, and it was so good. Also, fresh grapefruit juice. SO GOOD. Grapefruit juice from the vending machines is also ridiculously tasty.

Anyway, after breakfast we took the subway to Doshisha University, where all our classes will be. (Oddly enough, it's the university right across from the imperial gardens, if you remember it, Meab.) We wound up taking a 2 1/2 hour placement exam, which was kind of horrible. The grammar and kanji sections weren't too bad, and the interview went surprisingly well, but the listening section was rather terrible and I couldn't even finish the reading section. Then again, neither could anyone else, so I feel a little bit better.

After that, we went to lunch, which was...pretty okay, I guess. Kind of tasteless, but I suppose that what I get for ordering curry rice. And then we had (another) orientation, where we found out that we'll actually be traveling for the last part of the program, and we're going to TOKYO (among other places)!!!! YESSSSS~! I want to go to Akihabara. And I kind of want to go to Ikebukuro, if only to look for vending machine throwing men (so I can ask them to marry me). (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you obviously haven't seen Durarara!! You should go rectify that immediately. But just so you know, I saw him first.)

Something else awesome: we get library cards for Doshisha University. So much research material accessible! Please excuse me while I swoon.

Don't really have any plans for tonight. Some of the other students are planning on going to karaoke, but there will be alcohol involved, and I am exhausted, and we already have homework, so I think I'll probably just stay in and stare at my bus map and circle all the shrines. (I am going to find material for my thesis on this trip if it kills me.)

The language pledge starts tomorrow morning officially (although I've been speaking almost all Japanese today) when I meet my host family.

Some random facts:

Japanese phones can send contact information through infrared. However, it takes 15 people 30 minutes to figure out how to do that.

Even without a language pledge in action, everyone will speak Japanglish.

Even in Kyoto, which has a huge number of foreigners, people will stare at you and then try to talk to you in English.

そして、日本語！　私は毎日の単語があまり分からないと気付きました。「染色体」とか「自然の摂理」とか「過酷な運命」が分かったけど、日本語でstaplerという意味の言葉が分かりません。先生、どうして毎日の単語を教えませんでしたか。

Jet-lag, which I just tried to spell "jet-leg" just to prove how jet-lagged I am

Well, I didn’t wind up sleeping. At all. And that worked out surprisingly well. I was a lot more alert than the people who took one or two hour naps and then got up at 3 a.m.

The flight to San Francisco was pretty uneventful, other than my falling asleep and waking up to discover that my passport was missing. Fortunately, it turned out that it had just fallen off my lap and under my seat, but that definitely could have ended badly. I’m sticking my passport and ticket in my book* from now on.

Anyway, now I’m sitting on the flight to Osaka. We have traveled 1440 miles, according to my handy-dandy seat display thing. But then again, the seat display says that we’ve been traveling for 13:40, and I can tell you that we have not been traveling for either 13 hours and 40 minutes or 13 minutes and 40 seconds.

I watched the second half of How to Train Your Dragon in Japanese, mostly ‘cause it seemed like a good way to avoid eating the god-awful airplane food they gave us.***** I was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood of what they were saying. Of course, every time the blacksmith/trainer guy (I’m forgetting his name; I want to say “Horst,” but that’s the blacksmith in Eragon) opened his mouth, I got totally lost. And I could only understand Hiccup’s dad****** about half of the time. Still, it was good practice, I suppose.

Okay, I’m going to stop typing now. I will probably type more when I actually land in Osaka, and cut up this earlier stuff so it is interesting to read and not me rambling on about random things because I am stuck on an airplane and don’t have a whole lot else to do. じゃ、またね。

*I’m currently reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell**, which is fatter than I am...literally. So far it’s okay, if exceedingly verbose. I’m not sure whether I enjoy the writing style yet, because the author keeps telling me what to think about the characters, which ticks me off, and then balances that out by inserting an awesome bit of narration.

**Silly British people, not putting periods after their abbreviated honorifics.***

***I just footnoted a footnote in a footnote.**** I’m not sure that’s legal.

****I blame the footnoting on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Although those footnotes’re nowhere near as interesting to read as the ones in The Bartimaeus Trilogy.

*****Seriously, it was so bad that I didn’t even finish it. I think this is the first time I haven’t finished a meal on an airplane since the upside-down cheeseburger incident.

******Or should I say “Hikku’s dad”? They changed basically all the names in Japanese, probably so that they would be the same number of syllables as in English. Hiccup became “Hikku”; Astrid became “Asuti”; and Toothless became “Tuusu.” I think Ruffnut and Tuffnut stayed the same, but I only heard their nicknames, and I couldn’t tell with anyone else. Oh, wait, “night fury” became…”naito fyuri.” But, really, the dub was surprisingly good. Way better than most American dubs. Probably because they had voice actors who could actually act.

This is me writing again, but this time I’m at a hotel in Kyoto. I have a lot to write about, but I’m exhausted ‘cause we wound up being traveling for 27 hours, so I’m gonna try to keep it short. (Plus I think I'll forget a lot of important stuff, but oh well.)

I spent the rest of my flight to Japan watching Wall-E in Japanese (surprisingly similar to the English version, except when Auto and the captain showed up and I had no idea what anyone was saying), reading, and generally hating air travel. We got off the plane and through customs okay, and then rode a bus for an hour and a half from Osaka to Kyoto.

On the bus ride, I found out the name of the host family I’ll be staying with. It’s a mom, a dad, and two sons, ages 8 and 12. They’ve never hosted a student before, so we’ll see how that goes. Fortunately, their house is only a ten minute walk from the university, which is awesome, given that some of my classmates have hour-long commutes. Anyway, I’ll be meeting them on Sunday morning.

We all went out to dinner (except for my roommate, who went out to meet her boyfriend), and now I’m back in the hotel room, typing this up and wishing I could go to sleep, even though it’s not even eight o’ clock yet. I kind of have to stay awake for a while longer so my sleep schedule isn’t totally out of whack, plus I’m going to need to let my roommate back in, ‘cause we only have one room key, and I’m the one who has it right now. Oh well. It gives me a reason to try to stay relatively awake.

Anyway, we have placement exams first thing in the morning tomorrow, and then ANOTHER orientation. YAAAAAAAAAAAY. By the end of this, my brains are going to be orientated out of my friggin' skull.

Orientation (part I)

Well, today was our long orientation day. Mostly it was a lot of information that we'd already read about in the handbook (we're not allowed to stab anyone or smuggle narcotics into the country), but we also had a really cool panel on job opportunities in Japan. (The panel consisted of a guy from the state department, a professor, and a woman who works for the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (I think that was the name of it).) We also got to do exceedingly awkward role plays about various situations we may run into while we're in Japan. My group's role play was about what to do if a member of the group becomes intoxicated and wants to leave the rest of the group. (The hilarious thing was that our group of three had two teetotalers in it.)

However, we STILL haven't gotten information on a lot of important things, like who the heck our host families are! So everyone's a bit worried about that. Hopefully we'll find out who we'll be staying with BEFORE we're supposed to actually meet them.

There are 14 people total in my program, 5 men and 9 women. (Almost all the participants are Caucasian; we have two African-American girls and two Asian girls, but no other Hispanics as far as I can tell.) 2 are working on Master's, 3 are Ph.D. students, and the other 9 either just graduated college or are still doing undergraduate work. I've been spending a lot of time talking to the graduate students, because they're doing fascinating research. (One is studying Japanese political structures, one is studying mandalas in the 12th and 13th centuries, and one is studying women's education in Taiwan during the Japanese occupation.) I had an awesome conversation during dinner about Buddhism and pop culture. (Yeah, okay, I'm a bit of an East Asian Religions nerd.) In any case, I'm learning a ton from people in the program, which is exceedingly cool.

Our check out time tomorrow is 3 a.m. (UGH), so I'm trying to decide whether I even want to try sleeping. I'm not sure I'll be ABLE to sleep, and I don't particularly want my alarm to wake up my roommate. (I have two roommates--one is coming to Kyoto with me, and the other is going to Ankara, Turkey, so she doesn't have to leave until 5 p.m. tomorrow, lucky duck.)

We're also not entirely sure when our language pledge goes into effect, so there are a group of us who are planning to start speaking Japanese when we get on the airplane. We'll see how that goes.

じゃ、練習のためにちょっと日本語でタイプしようと思います。他の奨学金の学生は私より日本語の話すのが上手ですから、ちょっと恥ずかしいです。でも、頑張ります。たぶんプログラムの終わりまでに日本語の話すのはそんなに苦手じゃありません。

In any case, I should go finish packing my things up. My next post will be from Japan!

Super jet-lagged posting is probably a bad idea

Greetings from a ridiculously large hotel room in Washington, D.C. I'm supposed to be sharing it with other people, but the other people haven't shown up yet, so I have this ridiculously large hotel room to myself. How ridiculously large, you ask? So large that it has a hallway in it. Also, the bathtub is big enough for me to lie down in. I would go do it, too, 'cause I'm terribly jet-lagged, but that would involve, you know, standing up.

Also, I have officially been awake for more than 24 hours. YAY. I'm so tempted to just give up and take a nap, but it's almost noon, and the last thing I want to be doing is screwing up my sleep patterns. ...but I might do it anyway, because I am seriously exhausted and I'd like to be semi-coherent this evening. Plus the bed looks very comfy.

Anyway, orientation starts tonight and then runs all day tomorrow, and then I'm hopping on a plane and flying for a really long time (about 15 hours not counting layover, I think) to Japan.

In other news, when I went to get my seat assignment last night, the gentleman behind the counter asked me if I was old enough to be sitting in the emergency aisle. And apparently he didn't believe me when I said that I was, in fact, older than 15, because he decided to reseat me in a non-emergency aisle.

Well, I think I'm going to go pretend that I will maybe take a nap now. More updates when there are actual things to talk about.