sushi

I figured out why our sushi always tastes so sour, its because we didn't put any sugar in the rice!!

Yesterday my homestay mum taught me how to make sushi, though I think I still need supervision before I can do it by myself.

Anyway I have to finish my homework for tomorrow so bye.

26th june

Quick Recap of last week:

Last week I went to a place called 'Nakano Broadway' which is a popular otaku town like Akihabara only it has less porn and it was full of other gaijin (forginers).  The stores there were either extemey expencive or extremey cheap.  For example some stores had original prints of old comics from the 70's and others just had comics in general.  I bought 20 books for about 4000 yen which is about $45 AU.

Now all I have to do is learn how to read them

Then for the rest of the week I spent my time going to school, slacking off and leaving my homework to the last minute and then doing a bunch of essays.

That brings us to this week:

On Saturday I did... absolutly nothing.  Because it was the weekend I slept in late and by the time I actually got up and got ready it was raining outside.

End of saturday's adventure.

I need to remember to wake up before 9:30am on Sundays because that's when One Piece starts.  I learned that the hard way when I just made it for the last 3minutes of the show. 

After that I went to Ikebukuro (my new play ground).  In Ikebukuro is a giant book store called Junkudo which has 10 floors. Thought I only payed attention to B1 - comics and 9 - English books.  

After I walked around and bought a few things I was walking back home and a guy stopped me and asked if I wanted to be a model for his tallent agency and he gave me his card and told me to call him later this week, which is really cool since one of my original plans was to be a model when I came to Japan.  However if i'm caught working with on a tourist visa they'll kick me out of the country for 10 years so I have to wait until I come back in July to apply for my working visa.  If everything works out well I can call him again in July/ August when I have my visa.

last saturday

Hello everyone I'm back. Ok I'll admit it! The real reason I haven't updated in a while is because I've been reading One Piece!.. It still counts as research though because it's Japanese!!

Anyway on Saturday I went to Harajuku again, In case you couldn't tell Harujuku is one of my favourite places, especially Takeshitadori AKA the main fashion street full of awesome clothes.

For this special occasion I decided to wear my 'Fancy Pants' after all I didn't want to look TOO normal. Anyway a lot of the punk stores have similar clothes with slight variations eg. Different coloured belts, zips, whatever else... So when I went into a shop, the shop keeper asked me if my pants were original (which they are.) It was pretty cool that she was able to tell right away.

Normally that kind of comment could either be compliment or an insult depending on how you look at it. However since granny helped me make it, there's no way it would obviously look shabby and homemade category.

My 'Fancy Pants'

Most of the clothes in the main street were pretty expensive (between $50-$100 each.) The same shop keeper who noticed my pants said that all of the clothes in her store were handmade so that probably explains the prices.

I even found some H.Naoto stores (My favourite Japanese designer) however brand name clothes always come with brand name prices. One T-shirt cost up to $50 and actually garments and dresses probably cost up to $100-$300.

Luckily enough my 'Cheap-skate' instincts kick in and I was able to discover all the secret, cheap stores. If you go around the back into the side streets some of the stores have cheaper clothes.

I got this shirt for 1000yen, which is aprox $10

I got this shirt for 1000yen, which is aprox $10

This is obviously the most Japanese shirt I've bought so far... yes that was sarcasm. $30

I also discovered a 345yen shop (which is about $3.80) I’m not sure why the price is so specific however everything in the shop was 345 yen. The shop was pretty random it had clothes, party stuff, things shaped like a marijuana leaf. They had some really cool fluoro coloured belts (pink, blue, yellow, green)

I got a blue one. this also cost 345yen



For lunch I decided to try a Japanese McDonalds. They used the boards at the top to advertise new products and had the menus at the front counter. Even though I can Katakana I didn't want to spend the next 10 minutes deciding what I wanted to eat so I did what any gaijin (tourist) would do. I just pointed at the pictures.

I noticed while I was eating my teriyaki chicken burger that a lot of people like checking themselves out. The two girls sitting in front of me had their mirrors propped up in front of them as if they were desperate for more company. There was even a guy fixing his eye shadow as well... Did I mention how fashionable Japanese guys are? (He had bleached hair, nose rings and awesome clothes.)

If this was Australia it would probably go like this: "Wow that guy's hair is perfect, he's got a great fashion sense... oh wait he's gay."

... I need a break, I'll write about sunday later if I remember to do it.

"If Blogger keeps messing with me i'm going to be forced to use a different blog website!!  The good news is that I saved a copy of todays entry on microsoft word."
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I've been pretty busy lately which is why I haven't writen very much lately, sooooooooooooo i'll just write a little bit of everything.


First of all, I can't believe I forgot to upload this photo with my last post. Here is the proof that i'm in a Japanese call. Actually it was pretty had to get this picture since everyone kept running away. There's one girl that everyone keeps calling 'black' however she's barely tanned. Can you guess who she is? Seriously, you can't even tell from this picture.

Ok, next point. I sunday I went with my aunt and uncle to Yokohama. (I didn't even know I had an aunt and uncle in Japan until I came here two years ago.) We went to china town, which was kind of disappointing since I came here to learn about JAPANESE culture, but all people there had japanese mannerisms even though they were Chinese. I also saw this amazing acrobat guy peform.

After that we went to the 'land mark' building which is suspost to be the tallest building in Japan. (The tallest tower is called 'Sky tree') The elevator went from level 1- level 69 in about 5 seconds. It went so fast that I could feel my ears suction cupped.



There was a massive heart inside where people wrote down love letters and tied it to the giant heart.

They also had caricature artists there and I portrate drawn.

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Nothing too interesting has been happening at school. I think all the student have gotten use to me/ don't give a damn anymore. (This making friends thing is hard.) Anyway I joined the kendo club and now I have a massive bruse down my arm, but thats because the teacher thought I was good enough to join in with everyone.

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Here's some random photos:

A pastry with strawberry chocolate inside of it .  As nice as it looks It didn't taste that great and it had heaps of sugar.  

yummy, dried mangos :D

A really yummy lemon tea.  The good news is that it doesn't have any sugar so i'm actually allowed to drink it. 

Green tea chocolate chip cookies.  I haven't tried them yet though.

  At school there is a bread vending machine (which is awesome) and I got a beef curry bread, and it tasted SO good, though I don't remember it having any beef.  I don't have a picture because I ate it. 

Thats all of the food photos.

I've been living here for a month thinking the sink was normal...

but its actually a "Transformer"

Also I'm still scared to use all the functions on the high tech android toilets (no photo) however the one thing i'm probably going to miss the most when I come back to Australia in July is... the heated toilet seats. (Especially since its going to be winter over there.)  The toilet at my home stay even has a weird carpet thing on it.  (I to scared to use it when I first came here)

As you've probably guessed, i'm avoiding my homework again so I should probably go do it now instead of talking about space age toilets.

sports day

Yesterday was my school's sports day (Thats right, I had to waste my beautiful saturday on a school event.) 

In Australia everyone is randomly split up into different house colours (red, green, blue and yellow) but here the homerooms get split up into different colours (red, green, blue, yellow and purple.)

Also each homeroom got to design their own flag and t-shirt (though I wasn't involved in that process since I have homeroom in the international classroom.) Also the T-shirts were professionaly made, none of this paint your own stuff.  I'm still getting use to this private school stuff.

I also noticed that a lot of the homerooms use their homeroom teachers as  mascots.  "Holy cow, the drawing looks exactly like the teacher!! Hahahaha"
Either that or they stole copyrighted images or logos and change them.  I saw mcdonalds "i'm loving it," the simpsons, ghost busters, coca cola, one piece and my personal favourite... 'Fatman'

I wish I was in the 'fatman' team

front

My homeroom's t-shirt wasn't very creative compared to the others.  I think the name is a combination of "sono" our teachers name and "territory" with a barcode at the bottom.  On the back is our class '2C' (the rooms at school are named after the class compared to in Australia where the classes are named after the rooms.)  I have no idea what 'Mitsuhisa' is, it might be a football reference since everyone schemes to love soccer except for me.

back

On the back has everyone's nicknames... in english for some reason.  Maybe they think english words are cool, who knows.  But who cares, they included my name!!!!! Yay, acceptance!!! 

they included my name!! :D

Anyway I had to wake up at 5:30am because the oval was really far away. It was practically country side area. 



a rice field near the oval

At the oval there were a bunch of tents with tarps under them for each different homeroom.  Since I got there early I fell asleep on my tarp.  It is so weird when you fall alseep alone and then wake up with heaps of people around you.

All the events were done in teams like group jump rope, 30 legged race, chucking balls into baskets and a bunch of other stuff.  Aparrantly they were selecting who would compete on wednesday but I had no idea what they were doing, therefor when I went up to join one of the races they sent me back.  I was so pissed off, friggin language barrier! I should have just put my name down for everything, though I still wouldn't have know what I was doing.  Luckly enough I got to do a few of the bigger activitys.

these are obviously different classes, other wise who would take the phots.

Also they had a cheer leading team who liked highschool musical music... oh boy.  But they were really good, they stood on each others shoulders and started chucking people into the air.  It was awesome.

i was too distracted to take propper pictures.

  The breakdancing club also did a dance too. (Was eating luch so I didn't take a picture)  After school I always ended up getting lady gaga songs stuck in my head evertime I went past them practising.  I swear, do any of these people listen to Japanese music?

what else did we do hmm..... Oh yeah, aparrently every school/ sometimes companys have their own exercise routine.  So we all walked up in rows holding out flags.  (I held our flag since no one else wanted to be at the front) and did the exercise routine, listen to a bunch of teachers talk, listen to the school long and national anthem (I don't think the japanese anthem has any words, either that or no one knew it.)  Now that I think about it, it was like the olympics.

I'm going bed now so... bye

recap from sunday

This is going to be a pretty long post since I haven’t written anything all week.  Just to be safe I’m writing this down in word before blogger decides to delete it again.

I guess I’ll start at the beginning of the week.  On Sunday there was a kendo tournament, my international teacher said that it would be good if I went and saw them compete since I was intending to join the club. 

Knowing my terrible sense of direction I made sure I come prepared.  My home stay dad printed me a map and taught me the names of the train stations in Japanese. I even left an hour early to make sure I got there on time.  So I took the train and changed lines and got off at “Hakusan 白山” station and walked all the way to the school.  The only problem was that… I went to the wrong school.

The security guard was very nice though, he even drew me a map of where I was.  It turned out that not only had I walked in the opposite direction of where I was suppose to go, I also walked off the map completely. I really live up to my reputation.  But trust me I wasn’t out of the woods just yet.  Eventually I got lost again in another direction, so I called my teacher and he said to find a police box or a “koban 交番” and ask for help so… I ended up getting lost looking the police station too, oh boy.  But I found them eventually (I can’t believe I got lost when all I had to do was go straight.)  Anyway after an hour of walking in the rain, (oh yeah, did I mention we had a massive down pour thanks to an oncoming Typhoon.) I finally made it to the kendo hall.  You may all be wondering how I make it in the end.  The truth is, I got so lost that I figured out which ways not to go… or rather which way did I go down already.  Yep, now you know my secret of how I know all the back streets around the town hall. Oh boy, I should get a title for being so directionally challenged.

Huh? What actually happened at the kendo tournament? Well I stood by myself and watched about two hours worth of people getting hit in the head with bamboo swords.  Don’t get me wrong, they had some amazing fighters, watching the girls was funny.  Some of them sound like baby dinosaurs when they scream.  However it got boring quickly especially since there was no one to talk to.  Here's a pictrure.

Wow, thats heaps long already so i'll write the rest later.