Sushi, Fun, and More

Yesterday was just a whirlwind of activity, filled with awkwardness, emotional ups and downs, and amazing adventures. In this entry I'm going to address things by topics rather than in chronological order. First I'll address a few of the questions that came up from my last entry! "How did our presentation go?" Well, considering the fact that we didn't "formally" prepare, it was....interesting. However, we hit up on the major points that were necessary to impart to the rest of our SCTI group (e.g. there are 1001 Kannon statues; 1 of them is the major deity, 5 meters tall; the other 1000 are all made of japanese cyprus painted gold etc. We couldn't take any pictures because they don't allow that inside the temple...). The least to say I kept the presentation up in an articulate manner and Yan (who only speaks in Japanese) contributed in only Japanese, which amused everyone. "Is the politics class in Japanese?" No. That would be positively awful if it were. The only class I have exclusively in Japanese is Japanese. "Do you write the 10 page paper in Japanese?" Absolutely not!! My written Japanese is most definitely not that good yet! "What's the third class I'm taking?" I'm taking Religion and Culture in Contemporary Japan. It meets on Thursdays in the afternoon for three hours like Political Economy of Japan. However, the field trips for that class are usually on Fridays and sometimes Saturdays. "How is Nancy managing?" HAHa, she's managing. I teach her words that might be necessary for her to know. :) Last night we went over the numbers 1-10, 100 and 1000 and some other words related to food.

Japanese Class yesterday was so much fun! We had our other teacher Fuji-sensei and she is so so nice!! Seriously, I kind of wished she taught every day...we did "Survival Japanese", meaning we studied more of "Kansai-Ben" (the Kyoto dialect of Japanese) and learned about Japanese menus. It's funny, in Japanese, sure the first thing they teach you is your name and how to introduce yourself. But they don't do units like "the Supermarket" or "Colors" etc. The way we learned vocabulary and grammar is very strange. So occasionally you'll run across words like "vegetable" (yasai) or meat (nikku) but it's not like a chunk of words devoted to a certain subject. Anyway, she was really nice; much less intimidating than the other teacher (Ueda-sensei).

I change to a slightly less than fun subject. Yesterday I decided that I wanted to move out of my homestay. I don't really wish to go into the details, but I actually had packed my bags yesterday morning before I went to school. I chatted with the staff and eventually the outcome was that I would stay in a hotel for the evening and then move into the international students dorm until a new host family could be found for me. I'm really so very grateful that they responded to me with such speed. Both the director and head of the staff at Kyoto SCTI were absolutely understanding.

However, yesterday evening, I had an absolute blast! Nancy met me at my hotel and we decided to go to a conveyer belt sushi restaurant, which was absolutely delicious. In the restaurant, you could either sit at the counter or at a table. We decided to sit at a table. However, upon being seated, we had absolutely NO IDEA how the restaurant worked. So...we first just assumed that we took plates off of the moving conveyer belt. Since we were both super hungry, and since one plate of two sushi is just 100 yen (basically equivalent to one dollar), we both took three at first. Of course, we neglected the computerized monitor mounted above our table. After having a preliminary discussion with one of the waitresses (of which I understood about only half) and then another conversation (well...it was mostly a one-sided monologue from another waitress whom seemed to be possibly frustrated to have to teach two American students who clearly had no idea what they were doing), we understood that we used the monitor to order which ones we wanted, and then a cute little train above the conveyer belt would bring the sushi from the kitchen (even if the food hadn't been delicious, I would go back because the train is so cool!!). And then halfway through the meal, we realized that the chopsticks were in a box on the table (we had been eating with our hands before, foreigner faux paus two; of course we'd washed our hands!!!). During the course of dinner I tried octopus sushi, eggplant sushi (ew), of course I got tamago (love!), inari (my new favorite), some salmon, tuna, and then extra special tuna topped with some cabbage and avocado and mayo (?). At the beginning of this meal though, when we were just figuring out the mechanism, Nancy and I accidentally ended up getting 4 plates of the last sushi dish I described; lucky us it was delicious, lol! After we had our fill of sushi (many plates after; there was just so so much to try!), we ordered dessert from the cute monitor. I ended up ordering a cute little flan (yes I realize I've used the word 'cute' excessively in this one paragraph so far -- welcome to Japanese culture where everything is small and dainty basically) and a mochi/bean paste sweet (so good!) while Nancy got a small chocolate mousse and the same mochi/bean paste sweet. Take a gander how much this all cost each of us? $13.00. AMAZING. And paying ended up being pretty painless and easy. Definitely a place to go back to during the quarter. Oischikatta (it was delicious)!

After our sushi adventure, we decided to walk around a bit in the downtown area as Nancy wanted to get some tights and skirts. As we ambled around we happened upon a store that had a clearance on all tights and socks...inevitably I bought a few pairs of over the knee socks (a definite weakness of mine) for only $9.00 (only my second purchase this trip!). Finally I've started to get a grip of the layout of the downtown of Kyoto. It's not that I can't read the street signs (they have the japanese in roman characters so you can read it in "english" versus just in kanji), I just get so turned around while I'm there! But Nancy and I ended up happening upon the nightlife scene, so we scoped it out a bit and now we have preliminary plans for Friday and Saturday evenings. Exciting!

Then we went our different ways; I headed back to the hotel and began my Japanese homework (lucky for me I'd done some earlier in the afternoon so it didn't take me as long as it could have). I just had to write a short two paragraphs introducing myself for our teachers in strict Japanese essay format (meaning writing from top to bottom, right to left). I popped into the shower afterward, washed my hair, and then studied for my quiz that was also the next day (yes, I had a quiz day three of class - welcome to the intensity that is Japanese at Stanford). Japanese itself is probably going to be 7-10 units itself, so I have made the conscious decision to NOT take the Intro to Anthro course and put myself at 19 units, despite how this does grieve me so...I wanted to do a research project on the Geisha or something about the changing role of Japanese teenage women in Japanese society or something to do with Gender Identity (thank you Westridge education). Anyway, made it in bed by 1, couldn't fall asleep till 2ish, ended up getting up at 6:30 to pack up my stuff, study more for my quiz, go over the Doshisha extracurricular group info (as I had my 15 minute meeting for that today), and get breakfast before my taxi arrived at 8:45.

I managed to do all but get breakfast, lol. No worries though. I checked out, loaded my luggage into the taxi, and then was taken to the International Students Dorm a few blocks away from Doshisha. I found out my room wasn't ready, but I could store my luggage and come back later in the afternoon. So I headed out for school, had my quick meeting, went to Japanese, aced my quiz, found out we had another quiz tomorrow (ARG, when will it end?!?), and then went to lunch.

Later, I came back to the dorm and unpacked. I live right next to Nancy, which is really wonderful. :) So this is only temporary right now (boo face) while they find a new host family for me...but I won't lie. I would much rather just stay here. It's close to school, close to the subway, near a friend, I don't impose on anyone, I can run on my own schedule...it's very very calming and relaxing.

This evening Nancy and I, since both of us were so tired from last night, actually decided to just brow the stores nearby, find portable food, take it back to the dorm, and watch a cute chick flick! We actually had a bunch of fun going into convenience stores, and a few 100 yen shops and a grocery store, seeing what we wanted to eat for dinner. We finally settled on two obento boxes, chocolate, and bread with some drinks. Fun fact: we found juice boxes for sale at the convenience stores; however these weren't juice boxes, but SAKE boxes. HOW amazing is that? They're super cute as well!! We ended up just watching Valentine's Day off the internet, eating and bonding (it was super cold today, as was also a factor in our decision to stay in rather than go out and explore). Now though I'm back in my room, happily full, contemplating which to do first: shower or make my flash cards. I plan to go to bed on the earlier side tonight because I'm rather tired off the four hours of sleep I got. It's all good though; at least I'll sleep well tonight.

Basically life in Japan is amazing.