Yesterday

One of the reasons I love my life here is that I never know where I'm going to end up.

Yesterday morning, I discovered that there was a new series of Never Mind the Buzzcocks just started. I was meeting my Japanese conversation partner for lunch, so I couldn't watch it straight away, but I was going to be back in a couple of hours so I thought I'd watch it then.

Halfway through lunch, I got a call from one of the girls: "We're going to Saijo Town in a couple of minutes, so when you finish lunch, call us and we'll tell you where we are."

Luckily the halls are on the way to Saijo by bike, so I got to outside the halls and phoned. "Oh, we only just left, we're at the bus stop." I cycled to the bus stop at 1pm.

Some very confusing bus timetables and some lunch later, we arrived at Saijo at 3. I decided to go with them on the bus, since we had still been at the halls and I could just put my bike back there.

At 4, one of us got a call from another student. Did we want to come to someone's house for dinner? Meet at 7:30. We decided to go straight there, since we hadn't finished shopping yet and it would take at least an hour to get back.

In the end, it was more than dinner - we left his house at 2am. The others decided to go to karaoke, but by that time I was completely out of energy and dragged myself back to the halls. Then I remembered Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Oh, whatever, it can wait until tomorrow. Which is today.

Super Mario

These two photos are too good not to share.

Evening in a large, multi-storey entertainment store in Saijo City:

And five minutes later...

What were they looking at?

I'm going to be really mean and leave that to the imagination.

Pink

I wanted to share this photograph with all those who have never been to a Japanese department store.

In every one, there is a corner, or in some cases practically a whole floor, which looks like this. Pink, fluffy, cute and generally vomit-inducing. This is Japan at its very Japanese-est. After a while you get used to it. Even I, a staunch advocate of banning the colour pink since I can remember, have succumbed to the Japanese obsession with it, and have added bright pink laces to my new purple shoes.

Oh, yeah, that's another thing. Japanese people, both men and women, love shoes. Girls wear all kinds of heels and flats, even just to normal university lectures, and men seem to love very brightly coloured trainers or expensive looking boots with skinny jeans tucked inside. I should have taken a photo of the store I bought mine from - it was like a shoe palace. I think after this year, English fashion is going to be such a disappointment.

Bikes

This is the place where you leave your bike when going somewhere from Higashi-Hiroshima Train Station. It may not look particularly significant, but if you think that there's 3 rooms of this and most of them are just day trippers, you realise why. Everyone in Japan rides bikes.

As soon as we got there they encouraged us to buy a bike, because it is the main mode of transport. Bikes here don't have gears, but it's completely normal to have a basket on the front, which is useful for transporting stuff while not looking like an old lady, which you would with a basket in England.

I'm just about to hop on my bike for the 10-minute cycle to Saijo Town and the massive department store there (as well as the Muji I noticed last time).

No Explanation Needed

Aaah, Engrish.

Karaoke

Yesterday night was my first experience of that great Japanese tradition, karaoke.

For the record, karaoke is not pronounced as "carry-oakey" in Japanese. It's exactly as it looks: ka-ra-o-keh.

Anyway, this is the only karaoke bar in our little town. It has about 20 rooms, all different sizes, to accommodate different sized groups - ours was a fairly large group, maybe 15, so they put us in one of the biggest rooms. Every room has a table surrounded by squashy benches and a massive television at the front with a space in front of it. Most people don't like to make fools of themselves when they're sober, so they have two options: either you pay 1000 yen (about £7/$10), get one free soft drink and buy your own alcohol to take in, or you pay more for all-you-can-drink alcohol from the bar. The karaoke place happens to be right next door to a huge supermarket, so we chose the first option.

Even though I was one of only two people not drinking, it was actually fun. We got given three microphones, but generally the songs people picked were ones everyone knows so we all ended up singing everything. The song choice is absolutely huge - as well as every Japanese pop song ever written, there was also a massive selection of English and American bands. We did Queen, The Killers, System of a Down, Spice Girls...

Karaoke isn't cheap, but worth it every once in a while. At least if you don't drink, you remember everything.

Lessons

Since this is a blog about studying in Japan, I suppose I should mention studying. I started lessons two days ago, on Monday, and I’ve had all but two of the courses I’m taking. So here’s an overview:

Language Level 3

We did a placement test so they could put us in the classes that were at the right level. Unfortunately, the “right level” is a class where you’ve already learnt everything they teach. I’m not sure whether it makes sense to the Japanese teachers, but none of us students understand it. Anyway, I was put in Level 3 (out of 5), but I think I must have been at the top end of level 3 because the teacher heard me speak and said “This class may be a little simple for you.” It’s not just simple for me. It’s simple for all the people who were put in level 3.

Language Level 4

The upside is, as well as the level you’re placed in, you’re allowed to take the classes for the level above. This class was much more what I’m used to in Sheffield, where the teachers speak and you only understand half of what they’re saying – but it was actually very refreshing to be challenged like that. The work is perhaps the same or of a little lower level than what we were given in Sheffield, but in fact it’s just right for me, because it means I won’t find it so hard I give up hope.

“What is Peace?”

This was quite a bizarre lesson, actually. It’s taught in English, but the lecturer is Japanese, and it’s designed for Japanese students who want the challenge of being taught in English. Unfortunately, the lecturer’s English isn’t completely fluent either. All the foreign students have to take this course, though, because it’s Hiroshima and one of the university’s aims is to teach about peace. We sat through an hour of a weird mix of simple and complicated English; he used some words which I didn’t even understand, let alone the Germans sitting next to me, the Russian in the next row, and the hundred or so Japanese students. I’m not sure I’m going to enjoy this course, although if I sit next to the right people, it could be quite entertaining.

Tomorrow I have the first lesson of a course about linguistics, which compares English and Japanese, and on Friday there is one called “An Introduction to the Theory of Inter-Cultural Communication”, which sounds dull, but might turn out to be interesting. I will update you on that.

Fooooooooooood

Those of you that know me will know that I was very apprehensive about coming to Japan. I don’t like fish, I thought, how will I cope?

Very well, as it turns out. Japanese food is unbelievably good. Here are a few examples of what I’ve eaten so far:

Okonomiyaki

This is a Japanese specialty dish which actually has variations depending on which city you’re in. Every Japanese person I spoke to before I came said “you must have okonomiyaki!” because apparently, Hiroshima okonomiyaki is especially good. Incidentally, the name “okonomi yaki” literally means “fried stuff you like”: お好む (okonomu) is “to like” and 焼き(yaki) means fried. What they do, basically, is make an omelette, shove a load of fried veg and meat and whatever else on top, then turn it over so the omelette makes a kind of lid. Then they smother it with the most amazing sauce you’ll ever taste. It’s incredible.

Ramen

This is incredibly cheap to eat out (300 yen, about £2), and is nice enough that I’d eat it if it cost three times that much. It’s basically noodle soup. But it’s the most amazing, salty, flavoursome soup I’ve ever had, and the noodles are perfectly cooked. It gets a bit messy, with the whole slurping thing (in Japan, it’s actually polite to slurp your noodles up noisily), but if you wear something you don’t mind getting oil splashes on, you’re fine. Plus, if you don’t want to eat out, you can get the instant variety from some vending machines and all convenience stores, which is surprisingly nice.

Katsukare- (katsu curry)

Japanese curry, usually served with a huge amount of sticky rice. You get a chicken breast, in breadcrumbs, sliced into maybe five pieces, which is placed on top, in the middle of the rice and the curry. Even in the university cafeterias this curry is worth eating, it’s that nice. Worth eating with a spoon instead of chopsticks, though, as the rice gets less sticky when covered in curry. The Wagamama version is surprisingly authentic, actually, but still can’t compare to the real thing.

Japanese Italian food

It’s not all good. There’s an Italian restaurant quite near where we live, and I went with a couple of the girls yesterday, having been told it was quite good. It was strange. It was pasta and pizza, but it was absolutely nothing like any Italian food you get in England. The pasta was in an Italian-style sauce, but they had over-flavoured it (as I’ve been told, the Japanese like their strong flavours) so it actually tasted strangely Japanese, and the pizzas had very strange ingredients on them. Everything on the menu was based on something Italian, but had gone slightly wrong somewhere, and ended up as a kind of Italian-Japanese hybrid. It was expensive, too.

I have only been here for a week, but I do wonder whether I’ll ever tire of Japanese food.