January 25

私のパソコンが直した！！！

For those of you who don't understand or who can't figure it out from the situation, my computer was fixed :) They even replaced my data for free, although not my applications, which means I'm writing these entries in TextEdit from now on. But it could be worse.

The funniest change is that I now try to use shift-7 to make an apostrophe. It's actually pretty hard for me to do it the normal way. Perhaps it will get better.

Today's events started off a bit badly, but ended up awesome. My last class was sumie, and I was failing at making leaves correctly and it really upset me. Then we had to spend forever waiting around for people who took way too long to get there. It was around 6 pm by the time we left. We got to Osu and it was around 7 pm when we split off to eat. I went with Ksenia and Nathalie and Natalie to a たこ焼き屋(takoyaki is kind of fried balls with octopus inside). It was just closing, but they let us order provided that we didn't want rice. I had the most delicious yakisoba ("fried noodles", more like stir-fried noodles with cabbage and meat and tasty sweetish sauce). It was actually less sweet than usual, which was perfect for me, and had cayenne or something on it which was really tasty. The two guys working there were really sweet. I tried to ask them if I could take a photo of them but I think I asked wrong. So there is an amusing serious of photos of two confused 店員.
Nathalie:

Ksenia:

Natalie:

The guys:



After that, we wandered around the covered street in Osu while waiting for the other group to contact us. We took purikura in an arcade. I hadn't experienced the drawing-on-photo-stickers thing, which was kind of weird but cool. I think those photos are made for Japanese faces, but that makes sense. We looked a little weird and blotchy. Anyways, its something of a fad here so it's pretty important. They work similarly to American photo stickers, but more awesome. At home, you just stick your heads in a booth and smile and it takes the picture and prints a bunch of stickers of that image, and the fanciest thing you can do is choose your border. Here, you choose your background as well, and take a whole bunch and then choose maybe six that you want. Then you go around to a screen where you look at the six photos and add preset images or write on the pictures. I don't think I can scan the resulting photos, but they're pretty amusing.

We took our time getting to Sakae. We stopped at a pet store that was selling only the most adorable and tiny puppies and kittens. I snuck a photo of a sleepy kitten.


We met up with the rest of the group (John, Stephanie and Danielle) as they were reserving a karaoke box. Ksenia was a little annoyed because we could have gone to a cheaper place, but it definitely ended up being fun. Even though we were only ordering English songs, they all had katakana transliterations of the lyrics above the English lyrics, so that Japanese people who can't read English but yet want to sing something resembling an English song can sing along. We tried to, and it was pretty funny.
Ksenia, Natalie and Nathalie:

Natalie and Nathalie:

Stephanie and Danielle getting into the Li'l Jon:

Ksenia and Jon:

Nathalie and Danielle being cute:


I'm really happy about my friends. I don't have to follow them around - they seem to have a reason to want to hang out with me. And there's a lot of them. My host mother asked me who was my closest friend at the moment (naka no tomodachi, or "inside friend") and I honestly don't know, which is kind of unusual for me. But it's super fun.
On the subway ride there:
Jon, Nathalie and Soren

Jesse, Jeremy and Jon:

Jeremy, Jon and Nathalie in a typical expression:



I had a long chat with my host mother after coming back. We talked about Japanese programs in English education and how they suck because they don't start speaking practice until age 13, which I think is likely too late to develop the extra vowels and sounds that you need for English. Maybe the government wants all Japanese to have an accent in English...? I have no idea. I learned that Reiko started her English education at 11 months, and apparently her first words in English were, in an attempt to copy an instructor's "My name is Reiko", "Mayonnaise is Reiko".

Kaori also told me that she thinks I've been getting better at Japanese. I'm really happy...! Yesterday she told me that I should call her "Kaori" instead of "Kaori-san", which made me happy - although, this being Japan, that emotion was immediately followed by worry about whether I had been doing it wrong the whole time instead of progressing towards a point at which I could drop the suffix. Sigh...There are SO many things to be done wrong.

But at the same time, there's a lot of fun. At one point Kaori asked me something along the lines of 「クラブに入った？」("Did you enter the club?") and I assumed she meant the 南山写真部, the photo club at school, so I replied that I'd sent an email but hadn't gotten a reply. She shook her head and clarified that she meant the ID Bar, a club in Sakae that the students like to go to sometimes, and laughed that "This is the weekend - this isn't the time to talk about school things! The week is for school, and the weekend is for play". Having just finished a unit on complaints, specifically host mothers complaining about their students not helping out or not coming home early enough or not doing all sorts of good-student things, I was relieved and pleased.