Last weekend

Every weekend has been busy since I have been here. Last weekend was the same way. Just like I was invited to visit a castle the week before, last week my boat family took me to a local aquarium. It's not the biggest aquarium around but there was still a lot to see. I don't remember the last time I was at an aquarium, so there was a lot to see.

There wasn't anything particularly Japanese about it except that in couldn't read anything, but otherwise it was what you would think of when you think of an aquarium. Lots of exotic sea animals. It was hard to get good pictures so I took videos instead, and I'm not sure how well I can upload them so I will see what I can do. Also interesting things I found out at the aquarium about Japanese are

Corn dogs are called American dogs
There are different names for various eels. In other words English groups together different things and calls them all eels when they aren't the same
But Japanese groups together turtles and tortoises. They are apparently all turtles.
Also when the park was closing one of the seals we saw earlier in the day was floating in the tank vertically near the people on the other side of the tanks glass to pose for pictures for the guests, or so it seemed. Damn, that was cool. A "smart" seal for sure. My host mother got a picture.

After that, Sunday, I went over to my host brothers friends apartment, which was surprisingly just one building over. They had a slightly larger apartment than I had as a kid. My own host family has about the same size as I had. The father had lived in England for a few years as well as America so he knew English but I try to talk without English around English speaking Japanese people anyway just to not be lazy.
Funny though that my host mother basically has two friends that speak English. The other was an English teacher. And yet my family speaks none. Except I did find out my host mother went to many countries as a kid because of her businessman father, and lived in Singapore at 3 and so knows some English words, but not grammar. It's helpful that she knows some words so that I don't need a dictionary all the time.

We'll that's all for now. Going on a field trip to the capital this weekend. Should have something to say about that later.

Ps picture is me watching spiderman 3 lipsyned in Japanese with my family. It's like a reverse Jackie chan movie!

6/19 mini update

Well.. it's 6/19 here anyway.

A typhoon is coming today.  Which is like an eastern hurricane if you didn't know.
Because of that, school was canceled at 11 am.  I only went to school from 9:30 am to 11 am.
The system was that if a warning was declared, and was still in effect by 11 am, that school would be canceled.  So, that happened today and I got out early.  Only I had to make sure to get to the trains by a certain time too, because they would be shutting down in the early afternoon for the storm as well.

But before that, me and my friends when to a low price restaurant for dumplings.  It was like ~$3 for 6.  So it was cheap and filling and tasted good.  Now I'm back home and can enjoy my day off.

Ask questions if you want answers!

To anyone who is reading, feel free to comment in articles about questions that you have whether or not they are related to what I wrote about.  So much has been happening that I can't remember all at once, and perhaps if anyone had specific questions I would be able to answer them better that way.

Also, I can answer questions a lot faster than writing whole blog posts depending on the question.

My sunday was occupied. To visit a castle.

First off, here is some long awaited photos that I finally uploaded.

Second, I originally planned to update my blog on sunday since I should have had a lot of free time, but my very nice host family said how about we go to the second largest city in the country, osaka, to see the osaka castle.  It's not the biggest or most famous castle in the country, but it is close by and still has interesting history associated with it.  It was built by one of the most famous people in Japan (toyotomi hideyoshi) so part of the museum inside of it is dedicated to him.  It's a tall building on top of some tall foundation made out of large rocks.  And the building is very pretty, with parts covered in gold.  The inside isn't much of a castle at all, it seems to have been ripped apart to make way for a museum inside, so there are probably other castles that are closer to their original state than this one.  But still, there was a lot to see both outside and inside.

The castle was surrounded by a few layers of rivers and small strips of land, connected by bridges.  There's an inner section that surrounds the castle which has various buildings.  Currently souvenir shops, some archer turrets, a temple, guest houses and so on.  There's lots of nature that surrounds the whole castle, lots of trees, bodies of water, animals, fancy looking architecture, small parks, and so on.

I also saw a bunch of locals just hanging out in the parks on the outer edges of the castle grounds.  Some teenagers practicing dance moves, other people walking dogs and such.  It was a pleasant place.  There were also a few white people, which you don't normally see in Japan but then again it is a big city and the castle is a tourist location.

Also, I really stand out more than my asian classmates who are from china or korea.  Since I rarely, but do, get approached by strangers because you know, I'm white in a place where white people aren't so common.  At osaka castle some asian girl came up to me and asked in english if she could take a picture with me.  So we did.  Just a strange thing that happened out of the blue.

It was also my host family's first time at this castle since the area that they live in they only moved to recently.  So, we all had a good time because they got to see something new too.

In any case, have a look at the later pictures in my new album for the castle pictures.  The nice thing to see is the osaka city next to, or from the castle.  Osaka is a very big city that goes way off into the distance, with mountains visible in the far distance too.  Many tall modern buildings that surround this old castle.  Pictures of the city itself with the mountains in the back, and pictures of the castle side by side with skyscrapers were good images I wanted to take.



Oh, also, after seeing the castle we went to a fancy dinner on the top floor of some kind of shopping location.  It was a sort of all you can eat fried food place.  In this restaurant, the chefs were visible just a few feet away behind an open counter, and they would prepare rounds of fried things to eat 2 at a time.  There was various kinds of sauce to dip the stuff in.  You would just tell the waiter when to stop.  The food varied.  There was some fish and some land meat that was served deep fried on a stick, as well as some vegetables.  But then there was also squid and crab.  I didn't like squid.  It tastes fine but the consistency is such that you could only like squid if you wanted to eat pure cow fat.

I ended up not paying for any of this despite my attempts.  Because my host family is very nice.  They also today mentioned the possibility of going back to osaka next weekend to see the large aquarium.  While I wont take pictures inside of a restaurant, I will try to in an aquarium.

Where have I been? School!

I don't think I've talked much about school, but it's basically the reason why I don't have time to update this blog daily.

My daily life in Japan at the moment is to go to school from 9:30 to some variable time depending on the day of week, but like 2:30 to 4:30.  After that, I end up hanging out with my host family which helps me practice my Japanese, and then eat dinner, study, shower, and go to bed.  Really quite busy.

The class schedule is interesting.  Every day of the week I have a quiz on vocabulary I study the night before.  So that takes some time out of my day to study.  After that, we learn a new piece of grammar / sentence structure for 2 hours.  After that there is either a listening test or reading practice which would help people who needed that practice, but I get enough of it just being in my house.  Each class is 50 minutes long with 10 minute breaks in between.  But after the third class, the reading practice or listening test, there is a 1 hour lunch break.  During breaks I go to either school vending machines or the school convenience store.  The vending machines have some pretty interesting items for under the equivalent of 1 dollar.  Things like corn drink, cold strawberry cocoa, banana milk, and regular drinks.

Then the last class of the day is either some sort of writing practice or 'experiential learning' which varies but 2/3 times so far has involved interaction with native japanese public.  Which is something I'd rather do at my own pace instead of doing it for school.  An example of experiential learning was last week when my group of 2 was tasked in buying some item from some store in the city around the school.  The local sweets shop we had to find the item at was operated by some very nice lady who gave us additional free food and asked us about being foreign students.  It was nice of her to give us free stuff and want to talk to us.  It was a bit of a learning experience though because she talked in a way unlike anyone else I have met so far where words sort of blended together.  Hard to understand but nice.

Also, on certain days of the week there's a 5th class for some special activity, like on mondays it is a lecture in english that talks about japanese culture.

Oh, and every friday there is a test on the grammar and vocabulary learned.  There's also daily homework to reinforce the stuff learned.  And on top of that every week there seems to be some variation to the schedule that results in me having more work to do at home.  So I don't have much free time with daily homework, studying for daily quizzes, and weekly tests along with extras.

Besides the rapid pace of the classes, one issue with the classes is that they are taught in japanese.  So it could potentially be challenging to learn something new when I don't understand what it is supposed to do since we are doing this all in Japanese.  The teachers know english, they just don't use it unless they need to.

What I eat & A view of the house

So it has been over a week in Japan, and I still haven't had time to mention what's really been going on, but I'm catching up.

When I came to Japan I had the thought that I was going to hate all the food and was going to have a very difficult time with meals and finishing them to be polite.  When I arrived I wanted to tell the family things that I wouldn't eat but to not be rude about it, which I thought was impossible so I thought I was going to be stuck eating everything.

But luckily my host family is so accommodating, and also I told them things that I didn't like during normal conversation so that it wasn't rude to do it at something like dinner time.

However, I figured I would pick my battles and not list everything since if I did that there might not be anything left to eat.  So first I told them that I would like to eat similar portions to what the kid eats.  Japanese really can eat a lot, so I want to make sure I can finish what I am given.  For food, I just told them that I don't like shrimp and that I don't want to eat things with faces attached.  Unfortunately I didn't mention mushrooms and it's too late now since almost every meal has mushrooms in them, and mushrooms are terrible.

But I have had a bunch of different meals.  There has been lots of variety.  Last night was non-instant ramen which is extremely good.  The night before that we went out to a restaurant which was western styled and I had some kind of pork with a blueberry-containing sauce that was good.  Before that, I had italian - some kind of alfredo pasta.  I also had chinese one night with dumplings.  One night even had something named hambugu, as opposed to hamburger, as they have both.  Hambugu is something like hamburger meat with other things added into the patty like onions, and with cheese in the middle.  So it's some sort of hamburger-meatloaf combination that is really tasty, but isn't eaten like a sandwich but like meatloaf, bunless.

As for japanese food of course their has been a lot and I guess I would say I like it the least but that it's not horrifying but just boring in comparison.  Oh, and that too often the japanese food I have had has been a bit too soft in texture.  To the point where the consistency is the gross thing, not the taste.  I would say the worst food I have had to put up with so far is mushrooms and tofu.  Both are edible but not really fun to eat.

One Japanese food that I did like was hot soba.  soba is a type of japanese noodles among many types, and it's either eaten cold or hot as a soup.  The hot soba soup I had had a flavor of cinnamon so it was pretty good.

Tonight for dinner we had some salad, which we have from time to time and it's just any normal salad.  Then some soup with those damn mushrooms.  Then potato salad!  Then also a bowl of rice which is common for side dishes here, and some sort of noodle imitation dish which was sliced carrots and the root of some plant.  It was alright.  But the main dish was a fried chicken of sorts.  Something between KFC and chinese.  It was good.

As for Japanese food overall, while I haven't had this at my house yet, I have had katsu and tempura elsewhere.  Those are two kinds of deep-frying for meat.  So, basically it means that they must be my favorite japanese food.

Also, all japanese snacks and drinks are good.  Which means there is a lot that is great tasting over here, but that a bunch of it is just junk food.

Oh, also, chopsticks.  Lots of chopsticks use.  I'm bad with chopsticks but I have improved to the point where it's usually not a big deal unless dealing with noodles as those things are as slippery as possible.


Lastly, I still haven't gotten around to putting my pictures online to show, or posted anything about daily adventures, but I do have a video I took when I walked through my house when the family was away which only happened that once.
The last room that I was in is my room.  That's a  matress on the floor, not a futon.  They eventually bought a bed frame for me, although it's a mini one so I'm only like 2 feet off the ground.  It's comfortable either way.

How accommodating can a host family be?

Two posts ago I wrote about what the guidelines were with what students should expect and how students should act around their host family.  It was all common sense stuff but taken to the extreme compared to other places.  I was prepared to deal with those things, but instead you can just disregard all of that since my host family is much nicer than they could have been.

On arriving in my host family house, I waited at the door for slippers because I know it's sometimes the case that a family will have some for guest use.  However from what I understood of what they said, they were ok with me just wearing socks in the house.  And that's what everyone has done since.  Either they always do this or they made an exception while I am here, and if so that would be nice of them since I didn't even ask.

On the second day, my host mother had asked a question which needed to be rephrased once or twice until I understood, but basically what she said was that she would like to do my laundry for me unless I really wanted to do it myself.  So thanks to a very nice host mother I don't have to worry about laundry, although I am still on my best behavior and bow and thank her every time I get the laundry returned.

Also, fridges were supposed to be off limits, but that same day she showed me into the kitchen and showed that she cleared out one shelf in the fridge just for me, along with some stickers to keep track of what is mine, and told me that I am free to have anything in the fridge whenever I want.  Although I was like you don't have to do that.  It's too kind of them.

For bathing, I was going to shower the first night and told them that I wanted to in order to announce that I was going to before I did anything without permission.  I noticed that I didn't bring a towel and too little shampoo, but before I said anything about a towel, they went in to my room and showed me that they have towels ready for me to use every night.  I got out my shampoo but they told me to just put it away since I could just use theirs.  There also seems to be no order to when I can shower.  I shower after the child does, since he showers before bed so I know when it's 'shower time' from that.

Also,  I have a key to their house.  That's really nice of them and it means that I can come back when they are away.  They also gave me cards for using the public phone booths in case I needed to call them.  I didn't understand what they said when they gave them to me, so I don't know if they bought them for me or if they were around the house, but either way it's extremely nice.

Also, I'm the only one in the family apparently that doesn't need to worry about finishing my food.  I do every single time except for once when they brought over something for me to test - a bowl of very very tiny whole fish, where I ate one and then said sorry but I don't want to eat the rest since I don't want to eat anything with faces.  But anyway, I am apparently allowed to be super rude by not finishing meals if I wanted, and they always ask me if I am doing ok with the food.  But I be polite and finish everything since there's no reason to be rude just because you are allowed to.

Also, every day or every other day they tell me that I am super polite and that I don't need to speak so formally if I don't want to.  They said that I should just call them by their names without suffixes if I want - which is something only family members or really close friends do.  I still speak formally to be polite, but basically overall I'm being treated like close family.  But I continue to be as polite as they day I arrived.  At the very least I will be collecting good behavior points so that if I do something bad later it won't ruin everything.


I have a bunch of pictures to share, so I will be doing that, but not tonight ( it is 12:30 am here ).  I even have a video I took that shows off the apartment that I live in.

So how is my host family?

Last time I wrote about my adventures I had said how I was worried about communication with my host family, and that I had a tough time introducing myself and talking on the way home from the school.

However, things are not as bad as I thought they would have been. In my opinion I have one of the better host families but there is also more work involved for me than some other students perhaps.
What I said before about language is still true.  My family can't speak English, and I can barely speak Japanese.  However, it's not been an issue at all.  I think it could have been an issue, but because I have an extremely nice and accommodating family, everything has been perfect.

I spend most of my days so far at home from around 5pm to midnight.  During that time I actually end up talking to my host mother almost the entire day every day.  It means that I've been too busy to update this blog or even do things that I normally do, but it also means that between that and school I am 'studying' almost every hour that I am awake.

There's really no english inside the house.  Once in a while I will tell my family what a word means in english, or ask them what a word means in english, and they might know, but they don't know enough grammar to form english sentences.

So, how do I communicate with my family?  Just a bunch of trial and error, along with a little Japanese knowledge and a little hand and body motion.  I am able to talk to my host family because they are very patient.  We will rephrase sentences until we either understand or give up, but usually we can get a rough idea of what each other is trying to say, so we are able to talk about many things.  I spend hours with my host mother talking about all sorts of random things, and even though I can rarely understand a whole sentence it just doesn't matter as long as I can recognize the main words of the sentence.

For example, tonight we had talked about how my day went at a party I attended, phone technology, and I talked a bit and showed off a bit of what I do in some of my computer engineering classes.  The night before I remember finding out that my host mother took economics in college but that most Japanese like to party in college as opposed to studying, and that she likes spanish as a second language, that she grew up right outside of tokyo but then moved to singapore, then china, then back here due to her father's occupation.  Then I remember talking about japanese names where she told me that her maiden name is uncommon, and she also told me that when she was my age that she took a trip to america and visited new york, vegas, and disney land. Even at a super market a few days before the host family's child was telling me by demonstration that in the tokyo area people go up escalators on the inside wall and in our area people tend to go up them hanging on to the outside rail.  It's impressive to be able to have this communication with my lack of language experience.

I can't remember everything that shocked me when I was able to talk about it in Japanese, although I'll write down what I remember later.  It's just that I'm really happy that I am fortunate to have a patient and fun family where we can talk about anything as long as we have the time to use any means possible to get the idea across.  The family also has one of these children's toys which has proven to be extremely valuable so that we can draw out some of our explanations - it's sometimes like a charades or pictionary game over here.

Also I hear that some people are busy hanging out with friends or even staying in their room most of the day.  By contrast by spending all of my free time out in the living room with my family, I am getting a huge amount of practice.  I'll learn some new words, but I think the main thing that it will help is the speed at which I can speak and listen in japanese.

Supposed guidelines of Dos and Donts with Japanese Host Families

Before I talk about my host family more, let me mention how life with a host family was supposed to work:

All of the international students were previously talked to about rules and issues that may be experienced with a host family.
One rule would be to never walk around with shoes inside a house, and to wear slippers around the house whenever possible.  It was also suggested that students should buy these slippers on their own if possible so as to not inconvenience the family.

With showers there were also rules and guidelines.  Students should observe the order in which the family takes a shower, as there may be an order defined by social status within the family.  Also, the student should be prepared to buy their own towels and bath supplies as a host family might not want to share with anyone but their family.  Also shower timing may be important, as apparently most japanese shower only at night, so a person wouldnt want to shower in the morning and risk waking family members up.

There were also issues of ownership.  Students should not expect to have a key to the host families house, as students are just visitors.  And the fridge should be considered off limits.  No storing or taking from the fridge as it would be rude to make yourself at home in someone elses house.

There was also mention of laundry.  Students should not expect the family to do laundry for them, and they might want to buy their own supplies to do laundry.

Also, food.  It is supposed to be rude to not finish a meal in Japan.  And with all the crazy food they could eat, I imagined that it would be a huge issue.  I also found that they eat really large meals compared to how much I can eat at one time, so that's another issue for me.  I haven't really seen many/any fat japanese, so what they are eating may be a lot, but either it isn't fattening or they just have good habits to keep weight off.

Last guideline that comes to mind is the issue of speech.  Verbs have plain and formal forms and commands like please do this/that have varying degrees of politeness.  So, being a study abroad student it makes sense that you should be on your best behavior and use polite language at all times.  This also extends to naming.  There are suffixes to names in Japan which denote social status relative to the speaker.  You'd want to make sure that you refer to your host parents in a respectable way.

First day at school and meeting the host family

After the one day at the hotel, the next day we got on another large bus and headed for the university.  There were a few group pictures along the way, which maybe I will get back later so that I can have some nice pictures of everyone.  I ended up meeting some new people both at the hotel and on the bus ride.  I took some nice pictures and videos too of the hotel, the area, and stuff that I saw on the bus ride.  It was all very nice as the residential areas of Japan are very clean and interestingly/beautifully decorated from time to time.

When I arrived at the school, the staff showed all the students to the Ajisai room, named after the city's flower.  This room is the room for international students.  Not just people from our program, but people who are going to the university full-time.  Since my Japanese isn't perfect, it's nice to have one or two rooms where I can go for shelter or to speak in English without disturbing anyone.  From that room, we went to a nearby room that the international student center uses, and we went over Japanese culture dos and donts for living with host families, since it was only an hour or two before we were to meet our families.

I was extremely worried about meeting my host family since from the emails we had exchanged it seemed that their english wasn't perfect - and my japanese even worse.  After introducing myself to my host family in a room filled with all the host families and students, I found out that it was even worse than I had thought.  My host family speaks so little english I wouldn't even say they know english.  Just a few words.  So, then I had the feeling that this was going to be a very difficult summer.

From the school, I had received 9000 yen to use right after I got done at the school in order to buy many train tickets for transport to and from school every day.  It used to be that a good way to estimate yen to usd was to place a decimal point 2 digits from the low end of the number.  For example 9000 yen would become 90.00 dollars.  But these days the yen is strong, and the conversion rate is near 1.27 pennies = 1 yen, so you'd say the 9000 was about 1.3 times 90 dollars.

On the way to the train station to use the money I was given to get a 6 week supply of train tickets, there wasn't much to say with my host family since I would have had to say it in Japanese.  I was top of my class at buffalo for my first year of Japanese, but 1 year of language isn't enough for casual speak.  Thankfully I got my train tickets with a bit of pointing and button pressing, and was able to learn how to use the train through even more pointing and demonstration by the family.

More on my life with the family in the next post!

First post in Japan

Hey, sorry everyone, it's been a while since I have posted.

First I was without Internet, and then super busy, so I was unable to post before.  I'll explain.

After my last post, I arrived in the Japanese airport - nothing special about it exactly, it looked like any airport would.  I had to go through the customs area and fill out forms and then I met with one of the staff from the study abroad program.  Me and the other students dropped any luggage we didn't need for the next day at a sort of shipping place with a certificate already filled out for us by the school.  That's how we got any heavy luggage transported to a host family's house even if they didn't have a car.

After that, we were given money for bus fare and took a bus from the airport.  It was one of those large tour-sized buses, although in Japan they are apparently called limousine buses, which was pretty funny.  After taking the bus I arrived at a hotel which all the students stayed at for one night before meeting host families.

The hotel was also pretty normal apart from the bathroom which had a super fancy toilet including a bidet and heated seating.  Oh and that it was connected to a sort of indoor mall on one side.  All the students ended up eating at a nearby restaurant with money provided by the school.  Unfortunately, nothing on the menu was in English so it was extremely hard to pick anything.  So, I ended up picking one of the items on the menu which had the least choices so that I couldn't screw it up.  It was an average meal as far as the menu went, but it was humanly impossible for me to eat all of what I was given, even though I tried my best since it is rude not to finish meals in Japan and perhaps in some degree everywhere.  Also, my chopstick skills were horrible when I started but I had improved by the end when I figured out that holding them closer to the end improved everything.

While we were walking around the area of the hotel we checked out a few tiny stores but the best one that we walked by was a Denny's.  Because you know, if you were in Japan you'd want to go to an American chain restaurant.

That's pretty much it for the hotel area.  I enjoyed that one day since I didn't yet have to meet my host family which worried me most, since from the emails that we had exchanged I had gotten the feeling that my host family was not good at English, although better than I was at Japanese.

Overnight at an airport

Got in to the airport a few hours before departure (5:10pm) at Buffalo yesterday.
The Buffalo airport is a little larger than the one in liverpool, but they have those nasty full body scanners which I don't think have yet arrived in liverpool, so I can't say I approve.
Met up with my friend who is traveling with me, David. We were lucky to be able to have enough seat choices on Delta to be able to sit together on all the airplanes to Japan.
There were some surprises at the airport however with checking bags. International flights to japan from america should be 2 bags free, but they originally wanted to charge $60 for 2 bags when I got to the airport because of the 12 hour delay between flights breaking them up to different days, the first flight not counting as a connection to an international flight.
I don't see why they can't get around it being on different days, but you know, they want as much money as they can get. Luckily we worked out baggage pricing and me and David were on our way to JFK. Pretty short flight, but then again we didn't leave the state.
Unfortunately, due to the overnight wait, they wouldn't transfer my bags so I had to go through airport security again.

So I waited overnight at the airport. Didn't want to sleep and leave all of my baggage open to other people, but we didn't have plans to find a hotel.
However we walked around various terminals and went to the wrong places or got slightly lost along the way, so it was a fun way to waste time. After most of the terminals had closed at around midnight, we ended up at a terminal with a strip mall inside. But it was a pretty gloomy place overnight, since everyone there was also staying the night so they were all tired or sleeping.
It was however very quiet. Except of course that we ruined that by talking for hours. So me and David are pretty tired from staying up all night, but we are waiting near the gate now for the flight that will take us to Japan. Just two hours left before the plane takes off and that will be my last time in America for several weeks.

I'm a bit worried about being stuck in another country where I haven't mastered the language. But there is nothing that I can do about it now, so I shouldn't worry too much and just get prepared fast.
The plane flight is quite long (with a transfer in between I am calculating 19 hours!) and the plane leaves at 7:30am. They have wifi on the airplane for only $12, which seems like a good deal considering the length of the flight, but then again I will/should be asleep for most of the flight.
It will be saturday in Japan when I arrive - funny thing about that plane flight is that you add a 13 hour time zone difference and you get a 32 hour plane flight! That can't be good!
But well, when I arrive I will also be 13 hours in the future compared to America. But I don't think that's enough to give me cool psychic abilities.
So in short, I leave at 7:30am friday and arrive 3:30pm saturday. And after clearing customs I will have until sunday before I meet my host family - which is what I am most nervous about.