Good News/Bad News: Part Deux

Some good news.

A lot of people have been moving out of the dorm lately, so they have been leaving all the stuff they can't take with them in the halls. So I got a stereo system for free. You can't beat that.

I'm leaving tomorrow to go to Iwate prefecture. If you are wondering where that is, don't be embarassed. Of all the people I have told where I am going, very few Tokyo-ites know where it is. And they say Americans are bad at geography. Here is a description of where it is. My Japanese teacher from high school lives there and offered a long time ago to anyone coming to Japan to visit. So 3 years later, I'm taking him up on the offer. The difference between Tokyo and Iwate is kind of like the difference between New York and Waco. Well maybe not exactly like that, but Iwate is thought of as country by people from Tokyo. I'm looking forward to seeing something besides cement and buildings. Plus my lungs are probably aching for non-polluted air.

Then some partly good partly bad news. Being a study abroad person I get to be the first to sign up for new classes. Which will be really nice. So I am pretty much guaranteed to get the classes I want. So I've been looking at the classes I'm needing and surprisingly I need very few. The bad news is I'm not too sure. Since my classes from Hosei haven't been recorded as taken yet, so it doesn't come up on my degree audit. And my emails about classes for this spring semester have yet to be answered. So who knows.

Then actual bad news. I got some pompus email from the St. Gallen Symposium telling me I wasn't one of the finalists. Which I can understand sort of since my essay was probably pretty bad. But they are required to pick 20 people from each country and they told us they really wanted someone from Hosei to go. And I was the only person from Hosei to apply, and I highly doubt the number of applicants from Japan was even above 20. So they must have really not liked me. Oh well, Europe is overrated. My relatives left there a while ago for a reason.

Other bad news slash funny news. I caught myself using the word "afraid" as a verb. As in "This afraids me". And that indeed does "afraid" me.

Rando Japan

Earlier this week one of my students, Masa, had asked me to go to dinner with him and his friends. Which was last night. It was a good time. We first went to a sort of Japanese BBQ place. It was much like "yaki-niku", which is where they give you the meat and you cook it on the grill in the middle of the table. But I guess this was an "Osaka" style resturaunt. It's called "Horumon", which I was tolled that "horu" in Osaka dialect means "throw away" and I assume "mon" is either thing or meat. So most of the meat was...interesting. Unlike in America where this kind of stuff is cheap and no one eats it, it's a delicacy in Japan and more expensive than "normal" meat. I put it in the same "I don't get Japanese culture" category as the fatty meat being more expensive in the super market.

So first up was the appetizers of sort. The meat was arranged on the plate kind of neat so I was wondering why they would go through all this trouble if you just put it on the grill. But I was told that this is the way you eat it, raw. Definately my first raw meat expirience. I've had plenty of raw fish, but never like beef or pork. They asked me if people in America ever eat raw things like this, and they were really surprised when I told them that Americans never eat raw meat. And even raw eggs now a days are frowned upon. Which illicited a mandatory Japanese "EHHH?". One of the raw meat things was actually quite nice. It was the most foul looking thing I have ever eaten though. I think it was stomach or intestine. Not sure. Then was the actual BBQ part. First was something from a pig. But I didn't know the name since all the words for the food are really technical. But after chewing on the crunchy thing for a while and asking them to explain it I got the jist. "Soft pig bone". And when I looked back at it it made sense. I think it was a pigs leg cut in a cross section. After the soft bones, there was some stomach, intenstines and all sorts of lovely delacacies. Oh, new experiences. I never though I would be eating a raw piece of a cow's liver and then grilling a bone.

After that we went to the top of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building office. The top floor is a viewing tower and gift shop etc. At night you obviously could only see lights, but you see a whole lot of lights. It's a really nice view on the top of there. I'd make it a recomendation to Tokyo-visitors. Oh and this is the place we tried to go on New Year's morning but you had to have a special ticket they didn't tell us about. But I guess any other day it's all right. After that they wanted to go to Karaoke. It was of course really funny. Only in Japan is it acceptable for middle-aged men to go to Karaoke and enjoy it.

The weather here is quickly becoming spring time. It's all sunny and warm. But that just means allergy season is on it's way. And apparently Japan has some of the worst pollen in the world. Right now on TV, almost every other ad is about some sort of Allergy medicine. Then afterwards is the phrase "SELF-MEDICATE". Which is a poorly translated version of the Japanese. I explained to my french friend that to "self-medicate" kind of implies that you are drinking or doing drugs to kill your feelings. At least that's how I've always used it. I don't really know the reasoning behind the self-medicate thing is. I saw at the east exit of Shinjuku a group either protesting or supporting Koizumi and either asking or opposing for a plan about allergy medicine. I never got the full story. The east exit of Shinjuku always has interesting people about.