Halloween Party

Last night I left my room key in a Taxi cab in Roppongi, so I spent part of the night sleeping on Quentin's floor. But I was tired so it didn't matter too much. I thought the dorm manager would get mad at me since I lost the key, but when I finally found him he just gave me the key and told me to be careful next time. That I will, if I hadn't been with friends I'm not sure what I would have done.

This afternoon was the Halloween party for the school I am teaching at. It was pretty funny. All the kids that came dressed up, sort of. There was one kid about 3 maybe and was just dressed in a black trashbag. I'm not sure exactly what that was meaning. Maybe some sort of artsy thing. We played some games with the kids and then handed out candy after they all said "Trick Or Treat, Happy Halloween!". I forgot to bring my camera so I didn't get any cute Japanese kid pictures. Sorry.

Tonight Quentin, Atilla and I went to a pizzeria sort of place. It was pretty much greatness. The pizza actually tasted good and wasn't sweet like every other Japanese pseudo-western food. They also had a "drink bar" where you could pay 300 yen to have all you can drink soft drinks, coffee and tea. I took them up on that. I am definately looking forward to free refills back in the US. Also, the restaurant took credit cards. Pretty exciting, it was the first time I was able to use a credit card here.

Tonight is another construction night. This time they are re-laying the same road that they layed down the other week. This feels like Johnson County: constant road construction and no real progress. Although at least in the JoC they weren't right outside my window. Atilla described it as having a "Discotech" because of the lights.

Lonely Planet lies

Today I met Rachel and went to Ginza. Ginza was I think the first place in Tokyo to be westernized and has the location of the first McDonalds and such. Rachel had mapped out some places in her Lonely Planet Tokyo book for us to visit. The first thing we set out to find was a park. And we found it after 30-40 minutes of walking. They were about to open the Edo Festival. Edo is a period in Japanese ages and also the former name of Tokyo before 1850's. So then we decided to see the supposed "must-see" Godzilla statue. Then we found out we had found the wrong park. Oh well, it was still neat. So onto the Godzilla event. We went looking all over for this thing. And we almost died laughing when we saw it. It was maybe at the most a meter tall. The dumb book had made it seem like a big statue that would be impressive. Then we wanted to head over to this place called "Magazine World". According to the book it was to have magazines from all over the world and you can sit down and read them. Once again, another lie from lonely planet. There was one floor of magazines from Japan. And it was only 2 or 3 magazine titles. Not from all over the world. So we took the elevator up to see if maybe it was on another floor. A nice man on the elevator thought we looked confused so he asked us where we were going. Since I had no idea he sent us to a random 6th floor. It was an office. And so were the rest of the floors. Liers. Then we headed over to the Sony Building. It was actually neat and not a lie. Every floor up the the 6th floor had all sorts of displays. You could try out all the new stuff. And on the 6th floor it was all video games. Good times. After that we decided Ginza was a lost cause and went to Shinjuku. We looked around for a while and I went off to go to work and Rachel stayed to see more sights.

The first class I taught tonight was 2 7 year old boys. They were really quiet and good little students. When we were practicing numbers they kept on trying to mimic exactly how I was counting on my hand. Pretty funny. The next class I had was in someone's basement. They called it a "studio" since the mom teaches a ballet class there, but to me it was a basement with a mirror. There were 5 girls. I think 4 were 10 and one was 8. They were quite energetic and pretty eager to learn. Which is good. They were really funny and tried to ask me all the questions they knew in english. So I'm now officially "Scott-sensei".

Becoming a Teacher

This morning was pouring down rain of course on the way to uni. And by the time class was over the sun was out and it was no longer raining. Now we can definately start feeling that siberian air making it a bit colder in Tokyo. As long as it quits raining I'm fine with it getting cold.

I had my first semi-day at my teaching job. I got an email at about 2:00pm saying that the class was at 3:30, not 5:30 as I had thought. Thank goodness I emailed them this morning to make sure. Since it usually takes about an hour to get back from uni to the dorm, I was kind of nervous. I still had to go back to the dorms, change clothes and walk to Tsutsujigaoka station. I made good time somehow and was fine. The dress code for teaching was "office causual", leaving me to a dilemma since I had never worked in an office before. So I thought it would be better to be overdressed than underdressed. And overdressed I was. Maybe that makes me look more professional or something.

Anyway, I observed one class at 3:30. In the first class there were a boy and a girl ages 7 or 8 I think. They were pretty rowdy and didn't really want to do anything except play. But I suppose that's normal. Than the teacher let me take over his next class and I taught four 10 year old boys. I had been told they were also quite rowdy but they were pretty much model students for me. I think they were shy or something. Basically I got the jist of it. Tomorrow is my real first day because I will be on my own. I think I will be fine. Supposedly the group of girls I am teaching tomorrow are excited to meet me. So if tomorrow goes as well as today, I think all will be good.

Bureaucracy in action

Today I got up early, even though I didn't have a class until 3:10, to apply for the work visa. In Japan they are supposedly really strict about this because of the declining economy. So I was encouraged to go as soon as possible. The immigration office is in the Shinagawa area. So already it is kind of far away. But then you also have to take a bus to get to the office because it is a long ways off and hard to find. So after finally getting to the office we figure out where we need to go. We were told to get a ticket and wait for our number to be called. They were currently serving number 101 and I was given lucky ticket 241. So my time was quite a ways off. We wanted to find some sort of interesting area nearby, but the office is on a man made island near nothing except docks. So we waited for 3 hours with all the other foreigners. Finally we were called and the process took about 1 minute to complete. I gave them my forms, filled out my address and was done. They told me that I would recieve a postcard in the mail and have to go back to the immigration office with the postcard and I could recieve my documents. So I get to return once more to the fake island of Japanese Bureaucracy. Why they can't just send me the documents and save us both the time I don't know. After all that fun we headed back to Hosei because we had a class at 3:10. We pretty much got there right on time.

After class, Aiko (the apparent leader of the Hi-C group) had invited us to go to Kabuki with her. Kabuki is one of those must do's in Japan. But since it often runs for 3-5 hours and can be quite expensive, I wasn't really planning on it. But she told us that we could go and see one act and pay only 600 yen. So I thought it would be a good chance to do that. So we went to Ginza district. Ginza has basically any store a baylor girl would want. Tifanny's, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Bvlgari, etc. And all of them are massive. In the middle of this captitalistic goodness was a big kabuki theatre. When we got there we were told that there wasn't enough room so we would have to stand. But we didn't mind. The play was quite interesting. I'm not sure if I can really describe it. Basically it was about a woman who was mad at some guy in a boat and turned into a snake to chase after him. I think. In the middle of the play, people would randomly yell the names of the actors. But there wasn't really any certain time people would yell, just at random. The play was kind of neat though. They had effects for like the water and the woman turning into the snake that were pretty cool. But I don't think I could have sat through 4 hours of it.

After kabuki Aiko wanted to go to a place and have dinner. We went to this really neat resturaunt underneath the station. If you have seen Kill Bill Vol. 1, it looked exactly like the garden scene. They had little waterfalls and bridges all over. Very neat. I ordered something that was basically an omelette with soba noodles inside. It was actually pretty good. That was my first omelette believe it or not. I had just never got around to eating one until now. But everyone else did not have so much luck. There was this strange bowl of blackness described as "sea ooze" and it tasted as so. Daniel got something that resembled what an omelette would be if it was uncooked. It also had a slight bacon taste. Nicole, the other American here, ordered a cassis cocktail with "fresh squeezed grapefruit juice". And they brought out a glass with a spoon and cassis in it and a grapefruit cut in half on a juicing plate. Definately was not expecting to be squeezing your own grapefruit. Maybe that is why it was so cheap...

Tomorrow I am observing a class at the school to see what I should be doing. It is apparently a halloween lesson. Hopefully I can figure out what to do because friday, I will be in charge. So scary.

Monday/Tuesday

Yesterday I went up to University early to see about applying for the work visa. And in the middle of the conversation with the International Centre Liason, Kitao, he starts telling me about tutors and how "we should speak in Japanese from now on except for important matters". Kitao would be called "metro", to say the least, in America. He is quite trendy.

Then I went to my classes and endured another day of all classes in Japanese. I always feel pretty stupid after monday because I realize how illiterate I really am here. Japanese is insanely hard and lving in Japan I am realizing this more everyday. It's pretty discouraging when everyone around you can speak at least two languages fluently . And you still have think pretty hard to hold a decent conversation.

Today Kitao got back to me and said I would have to go to the Tokyo Immigration Office to apply for the visa instead of him applying for one as a proxy. So tomorrow I'm going to do some more paperwork. If I don't get lost, I'll consider it a success.

Today in the Families and Sexualities class we were talking about "Marriage in Transition" in Japan. I thought it was pretty interesting that to 90% of divorces in Japan are just filed at the local ward office without any court appereance. It's supposedly the most simple divorce procedure in the world. She showed us a sample application for divorce and there was nothing to it. Then we talked about "international marriages" in Japan. Quite an interesting topic. Unlike most countries where you can marry and apply for citizenship automatically, in Japan you must apply for a spousal visa and renew it every 1-3 years. There is a lot of other crap you have to deal with if you are the international couple here.

On a side note: it's really funny the stereotypes people have of Americans. I usually am often asked if I have a gun, drive a car a lot or have ever got mugged. Just like how many Americans think London represents England, Paris represents France etc., most people think New York is how the rest of America. Also, people are quite surprised to learn Americans do not have the same accent. Since most movies and news are done in the generic midwest accent. They always ask me to do the texas accent because they think it's really funny. One guy tries to talk southern, but everytime he ends up sounding like he is from boston. Who knew talking like a redneck took skill.

Kukking Paatii

I didn't have a seizure with that title. It's how you would pronounce cooking party in Japanese. Which was the event of the day. After some confusion on which line to transfer to at Shinjuku station, I arrived at Kanda station to meet the Hi-C (Hosei International Club) for a cooking party. You may remember these people from that party they threw for us. They came off as quite wierd. But today I guess they either kicked those people out or calmed down or something. Because they were all really nice. It ended up being about 12 Hi-C students and Daniel and I being the only exchange students.

Anyway the first thing we did after everyone finally showed up, (japanese university students are pretty much never on time for anything.) was shopping together at a "wholesale market". It was like the japanese equvilent of a sam's or aldi's. Without the low prices. Nothing was really that large of quantity but it was quite reduced from the normal Tokyo prices. After finally figuring out what we needed we went to Kanda community centre where the Hi-C had rented a room for us to cook in. It looked exactly like a home ec classroom. Complete with chalkboard. I really hoped they would use it to explain how to cook but they didn't. Basically we were going to cook two things, 焼き鳥 (yakitori) and お好きみ焼き (osukimiyaki). I think that was the name of the second one, not sure. Yakitori is basically shishkabobs with pieces of chicken and green onion marinated in a "toriyaki" sauce. That was the name of the sauce honestly, it was sort of like a teriyaki sort of sauce. The osukimiyaki was made two ways. Hiroshima style and Osaka style. Osaka style was to first semi-fry soba (buckwheat noodles), then place the pancake batter with cabbage into the frying pan. After it makes a sort of pancake looking thing, put the noodles back on and put an egg on top and let it all bake for a little. Hiroshima style was just without the noodles. It actually tastes a lot better than it sounds. It also looks better than what it sounds. Mainly because in America we think of pancake of the things you put syrup on, whereas the rest of the world's pancakes are a bit thinner and can be used in a variety of ways.

The cooking was pretty funny. We had to put on aprons. One girl even put on a surgical mask. I kept on trying to help but they wouldn't really let me a lot of the time. I think the whole sexism thing here makes the thought of a man cooking unappetizing. All for the better though, I had no idea what was going on most of the time. I did of course cut the onions which made my eyes water like crazy. And cooked some of the toriniku.

When we ate we drew chopsticks to see where we would so to mix things up. Of course I was put with the table that didn't want to talk. So it was an awkward 20 minutes or so. The food was all really good, but the osukimiyaki was a bit much all together. It was like a huge layered dish. A good one, but quite a lot of stuff for one dish.

After eating, we cleaned up and did the mandatory end of the party pseudo-jewish clap. (at the end of parties Japanese people do a big clap to end the event) We walked to the station and went our seperate ways. One girl, Andrea, lives farther down the Keio line and went back our way. She was really nice and wanted our phone numbers and emails because she wanted to hang out with "germans and americans". She has classes at a different Hosei campus about 2 hours away from Ichugaya campus, which doesn't have any western exchange students.

All in all a good time. I guess it just shows you first impressions aren't always true. Oh, and dad pointed out I didn't tell the score of the baseball game. Hosei won 3-2. We were playing Rikkio University, a catholic university in Chiba prefecture. I guess even with the pope and mel gibson on your side you still can't escape loss.