yeah, wow… it's july. as in, the seventh month of the year. i left in the first. that's crazy…
i can't believe how fast this exchange has gone so far. it's "insert superlative word here".
my english is pretty shocking atm. i'm at a point where i notice i'm using the wrong grammar, or the wrong spelling, but only AFTER i've written it. before i left, it was pretty automatic. that's fairly appalling, but my japanese is getting better, so i guess it's alright.
recently, it's gotten really hot. as in, revolting. it gets humid here, and today, it was about 35˚C, with high humidity. it doesn't do the whole "set your clock to the fact that it'll rain everyday at 5:30pm" or anything, but it's still really humid, and somedays, it'll just rain from the moment you get up, to the moment you go to bed. or sometimes, even better, the moment you leave the shopping centre, to the moment you arrive back at home, without wearing rain pants, and having to stuff notebooks down your pants, and wallets and phones into plastic fruit bags from a supermarket, so that they don't get destroyed.
so yeah, i'll just do a list of things i've done recently, and then i'll complain about school. because that's what most exchange students to japan do, right? :D
- during golden week (a long time ago… woops), I went to kanazawa, for 3 hours. we bought fish, and various other veges, and then went home again.
- i see a brand of tissues/paper towels called scottie everywhere, and it makes me laugh
I went on my school trip to Hokkaido. it was pretty good, but i felt quite alone, in that not many people in school will talk to me. but, i got to sleep on the bus, go rafting (no pictures, unfortunately), see sapporo, enjoy non-humid weather, eat lamb for the first time in 4 months, have a crash course experience in traditional ainu culture, go to a great zoo, and to an onsen, which was great fun.
enjoy some badly formatted photos, courtesy of blogspot.
a view of sapporo
another view of sapporo
the sapporo clock tower, which is famous for a reason i don't know of.
first lamb in four months, on a bed of cabbage and onions, cooked on a hot plate. i didn't care how it was cooked, i just wanted to eat lamb, which i did. happy!! :)
me and mari-mokkori, a character that, for japanese people, means "hokkaido"
me wearing dear antlers, of course
the obligatory japanese deer photo
a polar bear at the asahi-yamada zoo
some japanese monkeys. apparently, japanese monkeys are the most northernmost native monkeys in the world.
some people of ainu descent. they're the original people that lived in japan; the majority of the current "japanese" didn't actually come from japan, but from mainland asia.
my host parents and I went cherry picking in a nearby prefecture about a month ago. i ate probably over a kilo of white cherries, fresh off the tree. i then got to go to a winery and cheese factory, which reminded me of adelaide/south australia quite a bit. the wine was quite different in taste though, very tailored towards the japanese palate, compared to australian/nz/european wines.
my host parents and a cherry/cherry tree.
we had the school sports festival, which involved me playing badminton fairly badly for 6 hours. these are some first years (year 10s), that, at the stage of this photo, hadn't gotten over the fact that i looked different to other people. oh the joys of a monoracial society… :/
I, and a friend went on a walk to the top of a nearby hill, where we put a new japan flag on the flag pole. this photo above was taken during the walk down again. really pretty!!
said japanese flag. the clouds behind the flag were just about to start BUCKETING down an hour after the photo was taken. it rains so much/hard here!!
i went hiking with some teachers from various schools near where i live. we went up a mountain, and i took heaps of photos. it was a great day!
this is my ALT (assistant language teacher), who teaches english at my school twice a week. he may be 40, but he'd easily be my best friend at school.
this photo is showing it's age; i'm wearing a jumper, which just hasn't happened anytime recently.
me and my aussie hat/japanese mountains. this was still taken during the hiking
there was a festival in my city, with a huge fireworks celebration. unfortunately, my iPod and great headphones got stolen from my bike that day, not cool. :/
my host nephews, and their friends, at the festival.
If you're a japanese teenager, you don't go to house parties. you don't go to pubs, or bars. school forbids them, and people just don't have enough space in their house to allow for 50 people to come, so instead, teenagers go to karaoke, and to shopping centres. we, as exchange students, are teenagers living in japan, so we too do the same things now. so here's a slightly inappropriate montage of puricura photos.
for those that don't know: puricura （プリクラ）is a japanese version of a photobooth. imagine a photobooth, and then give it an overdose of LSD, and you're getting close to what puricura is like. you take 6 photos, standing in front of a greenscreen. through a touchscreen, you select the backgrounds, and how much you want the computer algorithms to make your faces free of all blemishes and eyes larger. i've had puricura, where you couldn't see that i had a 4 day beard, and my eyes were about 1.5x the size of a 50c piece. it's incredible. this is because it's aimed entirely at japanese teenage girls, and so it sometimes has trouble with western faces, especially guys, when some puricura booths automatically add on makeup to your face (ie. rouge, eyelashes, mascara, foundation etc)
after you take the photos, you head into another booth on the side of the box. in this booth, there's another touchscreen, with two pens connected to it. here, you have about 5 minutes to annotate the photos you've taken, such as adding in comments, placing on "stickers" and the like onto your photos, while chemically sweet j-pop plays in the background. after the timer counts down, you're forced to stop "editing your photos, and you head to the front of the booth. here, while you wait for your photos to be printed out, you get to choose a variety of different ways to get your photos digitally.
in "normal" photobooths, the ones used for passport photos, you only get a physical copy. but here, it's different. japanese girls LOVE their mobile phones so much, they use them more than almost anything else in their lives. so the puricura booths have got a multitude of ways to transfer your photos to ur phone. with the photos, you can email them, transfer them through the infrared port on your phone, or use a touch panel on newer phones and booths. sometimes you'll have to compete in minigames on the touchscreen to see how many times you can receive the photos. after about 3 minutes, the photos have been printed, and are given to you on a small sheet of sticky-backed paper.
then, you go over to the cutting station, where you cut them into half, or thirds, or sevenths, or whatever, depending on how many people you've done it with. (i've done it with seven before!) then, most girls (and me) stick them onto the backs of their phones. i currently have 8 puricura photos, each the size of a postage stamp, affixed to various places on my phone, and another as the background picture on my screen.
so yeah, that's what most japanese teenagers will do if they go socialising. it's like a day isn't complete, unless you've taken puricura, as a way to seal the occasion. this weekend, i took two of them, with two different people, and it's so much fun. and all this, cost just ¥400, or A$5.40.
and that's just 5 of 6, that i took with another exchange student (not girlfriend) yesterday. so much fun!!
so yeah, that's a quick description of things i've been doing recently.
i can't really be btohered talking too much more about school; it's just not very interesting, is very strict, and i don't seem to be able to make many friends. bit of a shame it's the main thing i'm here for, but the weekends make up for it; i'm literally going out and doing something every weekend, once, if not twice.
hope everyone that's reading this isn't too pissed that i'm not doing many updates, i just can't find the energy to sit down for an hour to upload photos and think of things to write about, a lot of the time.
cheers
ben
No comments:
Post a Comment