![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Niigata trip
Aug. 4th, 2008 12:16 amFirst very short anecdote. I just read this horribly depressing news story from Texas which said that some animal shelter there was euthanizing 3/4 of the animals. This is not terribly uncommon, I think, but randomly I read some comments and the first one said "As long as they're not gophers, they deserve to live". This really amused me for some reason XDDD.I've never even seen a gopher... oh wait, maybe I have. I guess parts of the midwest have a problem with gophers or something... or maybe that guy just hates gophers.
Also, it's amusing that I have the lowest score of all the people I saw who took that typing test. I retook it 5 times or something and my score changed by like 1 or 2 points every time, so maybe my averege is like 60 wpm. One friend that took it had a score of like 99 and I find that really impossible. I bet she normally doesn't type so fast, cause if she did, she'd be making mistakes all the time and correcting then and then it wouldn't really be 100 wpm. But she seems to disagree. Oh well.
So right, Niigata thing. So I just came back a little while ago from visiting my 3 young friends again. They're so cute and Japanese! I'll show pictures from this trip :D.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2834.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2836.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2839.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2838.jpg
In the last pic, from the left, is Yumi, Kanako, Hiroki, and a huge gaijin.
So I think I wrote that I'm incredibly bored this vacation. I decided to alleviate this for 2 days by asking my friend Yumi if I could visit her. She had a high school band "contest" and I invited myself to that. I thought that it would be similar to my HS band contests in that we always did about 3 songs to be judges... but theirs were with all classical music in two movements. I don't really like listening to classical. So me and her parents listened to a few groups and then went to a family diner for lunch. BTW I love family diners here. They have a few chain restaurants all over the country and they're a million times better than ours. Also, they stay open very late usually. Until at least 1 am, I think.
So here's one thing to learn about Japanese HS bands. They're quite different from US HS bands. I find that most US HS bands are mostly boys. The percentage is 60/40 in the cases that I noticed throughout HS. In Japan, it's opposite, but more to an extreme. It's more like 80:20 girls to boys ratio. I don't really know why it's like this. I suspect one reason is because students are either forced to, or strongly encourages to enter clubs. In Japan, students are allowed to only join one club and their clubs are so much more hardcore than ours. So anyway, there are many sports clubs and few choices for others. Many girls don't like sports so they chose to enter "brass band club".
So I mentioned how club "meetings" are hardcore here, right. Well if in a club, HS kids sometimes practice from after school to as late as 8pm. So they invest a lot of energy into these clubs and some are really crushed if they do poorly at the competitive matches. Well at Yumi's contest their results were a "bad gold rating". The rankings were bronze, silver, and gold. The band's goal was to get a really good rating so they could move onto this higher competition. Last year they got silver and this year the lowest gold. So to me, this is a nice improvement and I would be happy. NO. ALL of the girls are crying, some of them very hard. They got a very long lecture/speech from their band conductor and all of the girls were really upset, some devastated. Yumi was ok, though. I'm happy she was because that would have been kind of awkward. She is a very cheerful girl though. I think you can tell because in all the pictures, only she is the one grinning in all of them. She's really so cute XD.
Anyway, so that first day we kind of hung out with her family. Her oba-chan(grandma) was so amusing. I came in and she said "Who's this person?!" and they explained that she was Yumi's friend, that same one that came that last time and she did remember after a minute. Obachans are funny XD. Mine apparently has dementia now. Did I tell the story here about how she called me at 4 am once because she intended to set me up with some "Igor" fellow? I told her not to call me at 4 am anymore, especially with stupid nonsense and she insisted I call her back after I woke up. So i woke up and called her and had to deal with the usual "Your boyfriend is terrible, let me find you a new one" business but worse because this time she actually did find a "prospect". It's strange how my mother's side of the family doesn't really have any opinion on the matter and my father's side is all "OMG TERRIBLE BOYFRIEND RAWR". I always respond to my dad's shit with "I thought you said Justin was a very nice boy?" and then that usually gets him to stop annoying me AS much. I don't know why some fathers like to reiterate the same point over and over again. Dana's father is apparently like that too, but a million times worse XD.
RIGHT so where was I? Uh yes... so we hung out with Yumi's family and they made tasty Japanese food. Her mother was concerned about what to feed me and I basically said that I hate spicy food, and besides squid and this disgusting shit called "shio konbu", I'm game for pretty much anything : ). So she made the one food basically all gaijin's love- tenpura, which is fried stuff. Fried shrimp and any vegetables, mostly.
So after sleeping kind of badly{I get kind of fucked if I do this for more than one day so *(#^%@*&%) we went to Niigata city for the day. It was funner than last time :D. This time only the 3 of them came, and for the first few hours we were without Kanako, so we were thinking of stuff to do. We ran into this open market thing and the best way to describe it is what happens at an anime convention when the artistic fans sell their stuff. So there were some interesting things, and I bought that cute goldfish fan featured in one of the pictures which I promptly left behind at karaoke >__>;.
So the first thing we did was go to this 30 floor tower and they had a bunch of cool things going on! We went originally to check out this dinosaur exhibition thing and then decided not to see it because it was too expensive, and ended up checking out this free cultural event they had going on. It was very fun for me. They had a geography quiz game(I knew all the answeres except Bangladesh) where you had this magnetic map thing and you visit each table to learn some things about the country and then tell them which country the table was. They had a hint(but I couldn't read it of course) too if you didn't know. So I spent some time talking at the Russian table to the Russian lady and then to this Lebanese guy about politics and such. He was nice and interesting. He wrote peoples names in Arabic.
I also got my palm read for 10 bucks. Hiroki translated when the lady said things I didn't understand. I was most interested about marriage and I guess we only had one choice, so she said that I'd marry around age 30. She also said that around that age things will be well with my job , etc. Essentially what I gathered is that my life before age 30 won't be too great and around age 30 will be great. It's just too bad that I want kids earlier. If I don't have children by age like 35, I don't see myself ever having them. I would never want to still pay for a child when I'm in my 60s. That sounds terrible to me. My parents had me when they were 24 and my grandma had my mom the same age. I wish I could continue the family tradition, but I don't think that will work out for me.
So anyway, she also said that I need to express my feelings better and I needed to stop being so negative(of course in Japanese she said something like "It's better to be a little more possitive!) about certain things. I don't think I'm a negative person, but that has to do with my philosophy about generally expecting the worst from anyone other than my parents to prevent being crushed. I don't think I've ever really been crushed about something. Maybe the closest time was when Justin said he couldn't visit me this one time and I completely flipped out and gave myself a scar I don't think will ever heal : (. At least it's a small one. I really hate when I flip out though. In order to stop flipping out majorly, I have to hurt myself. But ever since that incident, I haven't inflicted any scars, I think... so I guess it's going well. I never really show sad emotions to anyone but maybe Justin, and that's just the way I like it. Oh right, and the lady ALSO said that I needed to be more open. So maybe fortune telling isn't complete BS. I haven't really decided yet. I think that's about it, though.
So right... the rest of the time we went to Karaoke. I LOVE karaoke despite being a bad singer. I'm not shy about it, though. Hiroki was very shy. He didn't chose so many songs, despite being a singer in a rock band for some time during HS and writing his own music. He's an amusing boy. He's very Japanese in the sense that he is very polite and quite shy about some things. I think he's also a little sensitive about some things too because the first time we said goodbyes he completely burst into tears and I couldn't console him ! His English has improved a LOT. He failed his entrance exams and in Japan if you do that, you have to study for one more year before you get another chance to take them. So I hope he gets into a good school this time around! I asked him what he wants to study in school and he said English and he wants to be some kind of English teacher. I was very proud! When I first met him, in his group, there were 3 good English students. Him, Kanako, and this other boy- http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/IMG020.jpg oh look I found that pic. Tasuku was very good at English , cute, and very good with the ladies XD. I also kind of like this pic with me and Hiroki. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/IMG025.jpg . So anyway, it's great that Hiroki's English has improved a lot and he wants to be an English teacher. He seems to really enjoy English XD.
Back then when I did that program with the kids, it was amusing. There was a huge dichotomy. Seems like some couldn't understand a damn thing and some were very bright. Most in my groups were very shy, especially the boys, so even when I asked them a very simple question, they couldn't really answer. Hiroki was my favorite of both the years I did it because even though he's shy about some things, he seemed to enjoy talking to me and he could do it better than most of the kids. I remember talking to Yumi only once. In her year, she was alright, just a little shy so I didn't know to what extent she knew English, but the leader of her group, a boy, was quite talented. Anyway, only the 3 of them kept in contact with me.
So I guess Yumi wants to be a doctor and she also said she wants to work in impoverished countries 0_o. I wonder if she'll change her mind about that. Maybe it'll be okay if it's not a terribly dangerous impoverished country. She's a very smart girl. Her English has also improved a big amount. In her family, her and her father can speak English, the rest of them can't really. I guess it has a lot to do with talent and interest which also explains my mom's situation. Actually all 3 of them are smart. Kanako is in dentist school. Her father is a dentist and I think she wants to work in her father's business.
So I was lucky twice today. First time was cuz after completing the geography game, all the people get a prize. I think mine was like first prize or something because I got a giant panda plush featured in the pictures XD. I decided to let Hiroki keep it because he seemed to like it and he gentlemanly offered to carry it for part of the day. Also, I didn't want to deal with shipping it back home. I gave Yumi the complementary fortune telling book I received upon doing that fortune telling. I guess Kanako didn't get anything >_<. I need to get her a birthday present or something XD. The second lucky case was because Kanako was supposed to only stay with us for an hour and a half, but instead did for a long time because boat club was canceled due to winds- though I didn't really find it so windy today. In Japan, you can't really skip club activities. Anyway, she ended up staying with us till I had to go home.
So yeah, I guess that was fun and perhaps I will visit those guys once more before I go home. That is, if I DO go home for good in December. I hope I will >_<. I think it's a good time to stop this Japan thing.
I think I hit all the points. Now it's time for nyquil and then sleep. Tomorrow I have to take the new teacher to Shizuoka to get our visas.
Also, it's amusing that I have the lowest score of all the people I saw who took that typing test. I retook it 5 times or something and my score changed by like 1 or 2 points every time, so maybe my averege is like 60 wpm. One friend that took it had a score of like 99 and I find that really impossible. I bet she normally doesn't type so fast, cause if she did, she'd be making mistakes all the time and correcting then and then it wouldn't really be 100 wpm. But she seems to disagree. Oh well.
So right, Niigata thing. So I just came back a little while ago from visiting my 3 young friends again. They're so cute and Japanese! I'll show pictures from this trip :D.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2834.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2836.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2839.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/japan/IMGP2838.jpg
In the last pic, from the left, is Yumi, Kanako, Hiroki, and a huge gaijin.
So I think I wrote that I'm incredibly bored this vacation. I decided to alleviate this for 2 days by asking my friend Yumi if I could visit her. She had a high school band "contest" and I invited myself to that. I thought that it would be similar to my HS band contests in that we always did about 3 songs to be judges... but theirs were with all classical music in two movements. I don't really like listening to classical. So me and her parents listened to a few groups and then went to a family diner for lunch. BTW I love family diners here. They have a few chain restaurants all over the country and they're a million times better than ours. Also, they stay open very late usually. Until at least 1 am, I think.
So here's one thing to learn about Japanese HS bands. They're quite different from US HS bands. I find that most US HS bands are mostly boys. The percentage is 60/40 in the cases that I noticed throughout HS. In Japan, it's opposite, but more to an extreme. It's more like 80:20 girls to boys ratio. I don't really know why it's like this. I suspect one reason is because students are either forced to, or strongly encourages to enter clubs. In Japan, students are allowed to only join one club and their clubs are so much more hardcore than ours. So anyway, there are many sports clubs and few choices for others. Many girls don't like sports so they chose to enter "brass band club".
So I mentioned how club "meetings" are hardcore here, right. Well if in a club, HS kids sometimes practice from after school to as late as 8pm. So they invest a lot of energy into these clubs and some are really crushed if they do poorly at the competitive matches. Well at Yumi's contest their results were a "bad gold rating". The rankings were bronze, silver, and gold. The band's goal was to get a really good rating so they could move onto this higher competition. Last year they got silver and this year the lowest gold. So to me, this is a nice improvement and I would be happy. NO. ALL of the girls are crying, some of them very hard. They got a very long lecture/speech from their band conductor and all of the girls were really upset, some devastated. Yumi was ok, though. I'm happy she was because that would have been kind of awkward. She is a very cheerful girl though. I think you can tell because in all the pictures, only she is the one grinning in all of them. She's really so cute XD.
Anyway, so that first day we kind of hung out with her family. Her oba-chan(grandma) was so amusing. I came in and she said "Who's this person?!" and they explained that she was Yumi's friend, that same one that came that last time and she did remember after a minute. Obachans are funny XD. Mine apparently has dementia now. Did I tell the story here about how she called me at 4 am once because she intended to set me up with some "Igor" fellow? I told her not to call me at 4 am anymore, especially with stupid nonsense and she insisted I call her back after I woke up. So i woke up and called her and had to deal with the usual "Your boyfriend is terrible, let me find you a new one" business but worse because this time she actually did find a "prospect". It's strange how my mother's side of the family doesn't really have any opinion on the matter and my father's side is all "OMG TERRIBLE BOYFRIEND RAWR". I always respond to my dad's shit with "I thought you said Justin was a very nice boy?" and then that usually gets him to stop annoying me AS much. I don't know why some fathers like to reiterate the same point over and over again. Dana's father is apparently like that too, but a million times worse XD.
RIGHT so where was I? Uh yes... so we hung out with Yumi's family and they made tasty Japanese food. Her mother was concerned about what to feed me and I basically said that I hate spicy food, and besides squid and this disgusting shit called "shio konbu", I'm game for pretty much anything : ). So she made the one food basically all gaijin's love- tenpura, which is fried stuff. Fried shrimp and any vegetables, mostly.
So after sleeping kind of badly{I get kind of fucked if I do this for more than one day so *(#^%@*&%) we went to Niigata city for the day. It was funner than last time :D. This time only the 3 of them came, and for the first few hours we were without Kanako, so we were thinking of stuff to do. We ran into this open market thing and the best way to describe it is what happens at an anime convention when the artistic fans sell their stuff. So there were some interesting things, and I bought that cute goldfish fan featured in one of the pictures which I promptly left behind at karaoke >__>;.
So the first thing we did was go to this 30 floor tower and they had a bunch of cool things going on! We went originally to check out this dinosaur exhibition thing and then decided not to see it because it was too expensive, and ended up checking out this free cultural event they had going on. It was very fun for me. They had a geography quiz game(I knew all the answeres except Bangladesh) where you had this magnetic map thing and you visit each table to learn some things about the country and then tell them which country the table was. They had a hint(but I couldn't read it of course) too if you didn't know. So I spent some time talking at the Russian table to the Russian lady and then to this Lebanese guy about politics and such. He was nice and interesting. He wrote peoples names in Arabic.
I also got my palm read for 10 bucks. Hiroki translated when the lady said things I didn't understand. I was most interested about marriage and I guess we only had one choice, so she said that I'd marry around age 30. She also said that around that age things will be well with my job , etc. Essentially what I gathered is that my life before age 30 won't be too great and around age 30 will be great. It's just too bad that I want kids earlier. If I don't have children by age like 35, I don't see myself ever having them. I would never want to still pay for a child when I'm in my 60s. That sounds terrible to me. My parents had me when they were 24 and my grandma had my mom the same age. I wish I could continue the family tradition, but I don't think that will work out for me.
So anyway, she also said that I need to express my feelings better and I needed to stop being so negative(of course in Japanese she said something like "It's better to be a little more possitive!) about certain things. I don't think I'm a negative person, but that has to do with my philosophy about generally expecting the worst from anyone other than my parents to prevent being crushed. I don't think I've ever really been crushed about something. Maybe the closest time was when Justin said he couldn't visit me this one time and I completely flipped out and gave myself a scar I don't think will ever heal : (. At least it's a small one. I really hate when I flip out though. In order to stop flipping out majorly, I have to hurt myself. But ever since that incident, I haven't inflicted any scars, I think... so I guess it's going well. I never really show sad emotions to anyone but maybe Justin, and that's just the way I like it. Oh right, and the lady ALSO said that I needed to be more open. So maybe fortune telling isn't complete BS. I haven't really decided yet. I think that's about it, though.
So right... the rest of the time we went to Karaoke. I LOVE karaoke despite being a bad singer. I'm not shy about it, though. Hiroki was very shy. He didn't chose so many songs, despite being a singer in a rock band for some time during HS and writing his own music. He's an amusing boy. He's very Japanese in the sense that he is very polite and quite shy about some things. I think he's also a little sensitive about some things too because the first time we said goodbyes he completely burst into tears and I couldn't console him ! His English has improved a LOT. He failed his entrance exams and in Japan if you do that, you have to study for one more year before you get another chance to take them. So I hope he gets into a good school this time around! I asked him what he wants to study in school and he said English and he wants to be some kind of English teacher. I was very proud! When I first met him, in his group, there were 3 good English students. Him, Kanako, and this other boy- http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/IMG020.jpg oh look I found that pic. Tasuku was very good at English , cute, and very good with the ladies XD. I also kind of like this pic with me and Hiroki. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v326/MajesticArcanine/IMG025.jpg . So anyway, it's great that Hiroki's English has improved a lot and he wants to be an English teacher. He seems to really enjoy English XD.
Back then when I did that program with the kids, it was amusing. There was a huge dichotomy. Seems like some couldn't understand a damn thing and some were very bright. Most in my groups were very shy, especially the boys, so even when I asked them a very simple question, they couldn't really answer. Hiroki was my favorite of both the years I did it because even though he's shy about some things, he seemed to enjoy talking to me and he could do it better than most of the kids. I remember talking to Yumi only once. In her year, she was alright, just a little shy so I didn't know to what extent she knew English, but the leader of her group, a boy, was quite talented. Anyway, only the 3 of them kept in contact with me.
So I guess Yumi wants to be a doctor and she also said she wants to work in impoverished countries 0_o. I wonder if she'll change her mind about that. Maybe it'll be okay if it's not a terribly dangerous impoverished country. She's a very smart girl. Her English has also improved a big amount. In her family, her and her father can speak English, the rest of them can't really. I guess it has a lot to do with talent and interest which also explains my mom's situation. Actually all 3 of them are smart. Kanako is in dentist school. Her father is a dentist and I think she wants to work in her father's business.
So I was lucky twice today. First time was cuz after completing the geography game, all the people get a prize. I think mine was like first prize or something because I got a giant panda plush featured in the pictures XD. I decided to let Hiroki keep it because he seemed to like it and he gentlemanly offered to carry it for part of the day. Also, I didn't want to deal with shipping it back home. I gave Yumi the complementary fortune telling book I received upon doing that fortune telling. I guess Kanako didn't get anything >_<. I need to get her a birthday present or something XD. The second lucky case was because Kanako was supposed to only stay with us for an hour and a half, but instead did for a long time because boat club was canceled due to winds- though I didn't really find it so windy today. In Japan, you can't really skip club activities. Anyway, she ended up staying with us till I had to go home.
So yeah, I guess that was fun and perhaps I will visit those guys once more before I go home. That is, if I DO go home for good in December. I hope I will >_<. I think it's a good time to stop this Japan thing.
I think I hit all the points. Now it's time for nyquil and then sleep. Tomorrow I have to take the new teacher to Shizuoka to get our visas.
