January 7

January 7, 2008

Breakfast today was a set meal, not the buffet. They had this amazing technology for getting butter and jam onto bread at the same time. Both were in a little packet, and you break it and them squeeze it so that ribbons of each come out from each side. It took me a while to figure out that you could cheat the system by just squeezing one side at a time.

Today on our way down to the post office (where we waited forever for Nathalie to fail to get her traveler’s checks cashed) we stopped in this cute little shop of hand-made beads, and the little old man who was melting glass there started talking to us in Japanese about the history of beads and the history of the town (five-hundred-year-old buildings…!). I should have bought a bead, but they were all ¥1000 or over.

We eventually got to the デパート (department store), which was AMAZING. Everything the Japanese make is beautiful. It seems that if something isn’t beautiful, they don’t feel it’s worth making. I found a purse and some fabulous stationary.

Writing will be slow right now, since the girls are all watching RENT. We have a girly group now (Natalie, Nathalie, Brittany, Kate, Ksenia and I hang out together often, and they’re all awesome). We went to the onsen again tonight. I find I get anxious in the hot water, because it’s harder for me to breathe. But it’s a fun experience.

The evening was a sort of worrying experience though. It hadn’t occurred to me to try to replicate frat parties in Japan, but apparently the other group that I don’t usually hang out with wanted to go to karaoke, so I followed because some of my friends were going, but it turned out that they were going to get alcohol at the デパートfirst. So by the time we got there, they were still coming back. We checked in the place, but they told us that they weren’t open. When the rest of the group came back with all their drinks, we tried to tell them that we’d been told that it was closed, but of course they decided they wanted to check for themselves. And apparently they were told that also they weren’t welcome because they had brought drinks last time. College students….It was, for lack of a better word, a sobering experience.


Things I Didn’t Know:
1. You can write a song using a seven-note melody lifted from another song, but if it’s eight notes, it’s plagiarism.
2. Pakkupakku, onomatopoeia for eating quickly and steadily, is the origin of “pacman”.
3. You have to take off your shoes when you go in a changing room. You also have to try on the clothes on top of your existing clothes. This makes us wonder what the protocol is for trying on shoes.
4. You can’t step off the raised platform of a house with your socks, and you can’t put your shoes on the platform. So you have to make sure to have your shoes right there and facing the right way, and not overbalance (like I often do).