Paperwork for the masses

We didn't have anything scheduled until 2 pm today so I went out exploring Chofu a bit this morning. First I walked left up the loud street. (I don't know the name, actually I'm not sure if it even has a name...as most japanese streets don't) After about 15-20 minutes I got to the Sengawa district. There is a station there so there are lot of shops and stuff there. There was this little street kind of like a mall that I went down. I stopped by the grocery store/department store just to see what was there. On the way back to the dorm I noticed that there was a temple closeby, but I think they were doing construction on it. There was also a vineyard selling grapes and eggplants on the side of the street.

When I got back to the dorms I decided to go the other way on the loud street. I basically walked like 20 minutes down that way and came back. I found a little second hand book/music store. It had tons of books and a pretty good selection of music for really cheap. I saw C+C music factory for 105 yen, but I restrained myself. I bought a "Gairaigo Dictionary" and a Russian-Japanese dictionary.

Side Note: Gairaigo=外来語, means foreign words. Basically it's a dictionary for the 1000's of Japanese words that are from english, german, etc. Japanese has a lot of these. Like "アパート”(Apaato, Apartment from English)　"アルバイト” (arubaito, part time job from german)　”コーヒー” (cohi, coffee from dutch). So much of Japanese uses foreign words (mostly from english) that it can be hard to learn some of them. especially when, although from english the english meaning isn't the same. Like ”マンション”、"manshon", actually means a house of sorts.

I got the russian dictionary because I am thinking about taking a russian class at Hosei in the regular course. That means the class would be for japanese students wanting to learn russian. So I would really have to learn russian and japanese too. Hopefully that works out because I think that would be a good learning expirience.

Then at 2 pm we had the dorm orientation. Basically we were told the same things we had been told earlier but in english and we could ask questions and get an answer. And I finally got a list of the actual rules, because I wasn't too sure about some things. When we leave we are supposed to slide this little bar next to our name to the red space meaning that we are out and we we come back we slide it back to the white. Then You have to sort your trash into like 5 different boxes. Burnable trash, non-burnable trash, cans, pet bottles and something else. That's right, pet bottles. I'm not sure where the word comes from, but water bottles and pop bottles and such are called pet bottles (ペットボットル-petto bottoru).

Something I have noticed in Japan is that although everyone smokes pretty much anywhere you go, you can never really smell it like I'm used to. I don't know what it is. In our dorm, people smoke all the time but you don't have that musty smoke smell like I was used to at Shawnee Mission North bathrooms. There are buckets of water outside the bathroom for ciggarettes.

Anyway, Later we went to the Chofu city office to apply for Alien registration card. Which took forever... Japanese companies don't really make you do the paperwork like American companies do like when you sign up for a cell phone or bank account, but government paperwork is 10x what I'm used to. There is a form for everything. We had to fill out a paper to apply for something that we were going to apply for later...blah blah blah. We ended up sitting around 40 minutes waiting for the lady bring back our passports that she was using to put our information into the computer.

After that fun filled paperwork we went to buy a commuter pass for the train. As students we can get a big discount on having to travel 30 minutes everyday. It saves a lot of money because to get to the school and back costs 720 yen...ouch. With the commuter pass you pay for one, three or six month's usage of the train from one stop to the other at a flat fee. Then you can go as many times as you want from the station to station. You can also get off at each station in between unlike a regular ticket. I didn't have enough money at the time but next month I think I'll buy the 3 month cuz you save a lot. There was surprisingly little paperwork involved in it. But we did have to write the address in Japanese which took a long time since I didn't know all the kanji of this place.

Well I'm off to bed. Hopefully I'll get rid of this jetlag soon so I can stay awake longer. I'm afraid the guys here think I am anti-social since I've been going to bed pretty early and am too tired to engage in conversation. But I guess that's better than being a stereotypical american by being loud, obnoxious and insult others' countries.