01.15.07
Posted in Japan at 12:20 am by Daniel
Yeah, its been almost 11 months now and I’m finally gonna be on my way home in a few days time. I pretty much have my bags packed and I’se already sent two big boxes home by seamail. Now, on with the details…
I did post the rough details before but I’ll do it again in case anyone else wants to know.
I’ll be getting flying out of Osaka at 9:35pm (Japan time) on Tuesday the 16th of January.
I scheduled to arrive in Sydney at 11am (Aussie time) on Wednesday the 17th of January.
I get on another smaller plane at 2:05pm and am scheduled to arrive at Canberra Airport at 2:55pm on the 17th.
So there ya go. Anyone who is free or bored or wants to come meet me when I get off the plane now knows when I’ll be there 
See you all again soon
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Posted in Japan at 12:11 am by Daniel
Well I was wrong. I was also lazy. I wrote this about the end of December, and its now almost half way through January. Go figure. Anyway…
So on the 23rd I woke up late as usual. I sat around the house for a while before deciding to go get some shopping out of the way. So I went into Sannomiya by about 3pm and wandered around for a while. It was absolutely packed out with people since it was right before Christmas. I went to Animate (big anime and manga shop) to check out if there was anything new. They have heaps of calendars for sale, though I don’t really need one. They had them all hanging from the roof so they ended up just above eye level and people could see the pictures. Well that’s all well and good if you happen to only be 160cm tall. It was a right pain having to weave through masses of people only to smack my head into a stupid calendar in the middle of the aisle. Calendars aside I did manage to pick up a copy of the Okami art book which was 3200 yen very well spent. Also in my wandering around the shops I managed to pick up a few more souvenirs as well. About 5pm I got a mail from Ryuta asking me what I was doing that evening. I ended up going with him and his mum out to his aunt and uncle’s house (my first homestay) and we had a bit of an impromptu Christmas party. So that was pretty fun catching up with all of them after so long.
On Sunday the 24th I really didn’t do much. Just the usual wake up late only to sit around at home for the day.
Christmas wasn’t like any Christmas I’ve ever had before. Aside from all the hype in the shops, the Japanese really don’t celebrate Christmas like us Aussies do. Living at a Buddhist temple I really wasn’t expecting anything much. Which is exactly what I got; a normal day. I went over to Tim’s place by about 1pm or so and we sat around chatting. His host brother Yoshiteru had decided to go and buy himself a Wii since he’d played mine and enjoyed it so much. A bit after 3pm we all packed into Tim’s host family’s car and headed off to Osaka International Airport. It took us about an hour to get there from Tim’s house. We went and ate some early dinner at one of the restaurants in the Airport before sitting around and waiting for Tim’s flight. He went through the gates at about 7:45pm and headed home to Australia. It’s starting to get a bit lonely around now without him, but I’m sure I’ll meet up with him at some point in the future. Now if only I could get him to reply to my emails… Anyway, his host family was kind enough to drive me most of the way home afterwards and I caught the train the rest of the way. So my Christmas ended without any Christmassy things being done at all.
I’ve already forgotten what I did on the 26th which probably means that I didn’t do anything at all. Though I do remember that I managed to screw up my sleeping patterns and have been going to bed at like 4am and not waking up until midday or later. Oh well, it is holidays at the moment so its not so bad. Just as long as I can wake up for school.
The 27th was another one of those do nothing days. Though in the evening I had to dress up a bit (shirt and tie) and go into Kobe’s Okura Hotel. Henrique the Brazilian exchange student at Konan was having a bit of a party. His (rich) parents were in town and staying at the hotel. They hired out a small hall and invited anyone Henrique wanted as well as a few more people including teachers at Konan and even the school principal came. They had some pretty good food and it was a pretty good time just chatting with lots of people. I was surprised when the principal even came up and chatted with me a bit. I think I passed that test, I didn’t seem to offend him anyway which was good.
28th was another sit around at home day. I’m slowly wearing down the batteries in my Wii-motes ;-D
On Monday the 29th I met up with Ryuta and some of his friends and we went and ate Okonomiyaki at the shop that his friend’s family owns. After lunch we went to Karaoke for a few hours as well which was fun. I’m just glad that we spent most of the time inside since it was almost snowing outside. Where we were we only got sleet for a while. But you could see it snowing in the mountains behind the city and the wind was freezing cold. I came home by about 7pm and had dinner. Afterwards my host mum pulled out this strange machine that looked like an oversized rice-cooker. Which is almost what it was, but not quite. It turned out to be a Mochi-maker. Mochi essentially being rice cakes. If you don’t know what it is, they’re really hard to explain. They’d pre-cooked a heap of some special kind of rice and put it in the machine. After leaving it to cook for about 40 minutes they took the lid off and hit the next button. It has a kind of spinning thing in the bottom of the bowl the rice is in. Kind of like a blender only not sharp at all. It span the rice around and after a few minutes the individual grains of rice could no longer be seen. Only a big spinning ball of what looks like pastry was left in the middle of the bowl. So then they take the big blob of rice out of the bowl and break it up into smaller chunks. We then had to knead them in our hands and make them into a sort of hemispherical shape. It was interesting to see how they made it, even though it wasn’t the traditional method.
So thats about it for this post. I’m still too lazy/busy to write up the rest just yet though I”m sure I’ll get to it eventually…
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12.23.06
Posted in Japan at 1:39 pm by Daniel
Well its been almost two weeks since Ive actually written anything about what Ive been up to. I know that I posted my last entry not too long ago, but that was written quite a while back. I have been really really busy recently and haven’t really had much time to be writing blogs. However, luckily for anyone reading this, things have calmed down enough over here that I can sit down and write up something for you all. I’ll try not to make it too long, but considering how much Ive been up to and that its been so long I cant make any guarantees 
My last post left off with my third trip to USJ on Sunday 10th of December. The Monday afterwards was one of those days which I really dislike. Since all the regular Konan students have tests it means that I have no classes except for my two hours of Japanese lessons. So I travel for an hour to get to school, sit in my class for two hours and travel for an hour to get home. Its not so bad really but it just annoys me. At least I have a school train ticket to get me there cheaper.
On Tuesday the 12th we had our normal Japanese lessons except that we had one new member join our class. A guy called Andrew came from New Zealand and will be studying at Konan for two months. I was glad to hear that he actually came because he has an interest in Japanese unlike the last guy… Anyway that was pretty cool getting out of work to chat with him for a bit. After the lesson we went with out Japanese teacher Fujikawa-sensei and our advisor Sawabu-sensei out to an Italian restaurant for lunch. Since Tim is leaving on the 25th of December it was a farewell of sorts for him as well as a welcome for Andrew.
Wednesday the 13th was the same drill with school except that this was Tim’s last Japanese lesson with us. I also packed up my Wii and dragged it with me all the way to school so I could go round to Tim’s place afterwards and play it with his host family. Even with all the accessories and bits ‘n pieces it still ends up considerably lighter than my laptop. Ofcourse by the time school finished it had started raining pretty heavily. So Tim and I trudged down the hill, me wearing my backpack on my chest to keep it under the umbrella better and Tim without an umbrella hoping that his laptop in his bag wouldn’t get soaked. By the time we arrived at Tim’s place we were both relieved to find that none of our things had gotten wet. I spent the afternoon playing Wii Sports, Red Steel and Elebits with Tim and two of his host brothers Yoshiteru and Yugo. They all seemed to enjoy it heaps which was good.
On Thursday the 14th I had the day off school so I went into Sannomiya and met up with Kaori. We went and ate lunch together while I looked over some of her students work and helped her correct it. Apparently one of her students really wants to go to some really good medical school, and as part of the exam he has to write some medical stuff in English. Well its not too bad fixing up broken English stories about ‘My Favourite Movie’ or ‘What I did on the Weekend’ but trying to fix up a page long piece on the difference between a dignified death and euthanasia is something else entirely. Not to mention that the next one was about the ethics of cloning. I can certainly Kaori wanted me to look over them for her. That stuff was confusing even for me. Though it was fun and I was certainly impressed at the level they were doing even if it was quite broken. At about 3pm I said goodbye to Kaori and met up with two of Ryuta’s friends. We then caught a bus all the way out to Kansai International Airport to await Ryuta’s return to Japan. He’d sent a mail to his friend earlier in the day saying that his plane was going to be about 3 hours late. So we ended up waiting for a bit over an hour. By the time his flight landed there were 6 of his friends from school, his mum and me all waiting for him. When the big signboard changed to say his flight had arrived his mum was quite literally bouncing up and down. Trying desperately to see past the masses of people for any sign that he’d come out. It ended up taking him about 25 minutes to collect his bags and get through customs before he finally came out. Then we all went and sat in the Airport’s food court area for about an hour and chatted. I ended up getting home at about 9:30pm at night.
Friday the 15th was officially the last day of the second term for Konan students and as such they had their closing ceremony. That went from about 9:40am until about 11am or so. Tim had to get up and do a farewell speech in front of everyone. Somehow I don’t think mine will be as good as his but anyway… the vice principal was even commenting on it in his speech after Tim’s. After that I had to sit in homeroom for around an hour or so while test results were handed out along with a lot of notices that as usual had nothing to do with me. When that was all over I went with Tim, Yoshiteru, Henrique and Andrew into Kobe and spent the afternoon at UPARA. We did all the usual arcade games, played some soccer, some darts etc. Had a pretty good time overall and its probably the last time I’ll get to go there.
Last Saturday (16th) I slept in until about 12:30. I got the usual comments from my host family of ‘Oh you are still alive, good to know’ etc. I had lunch and sat around for a while before I packed up my laptop and headed over to Tim’s place. We still needed to finish off a bunch of video editing that we had left over from before. I’d already arranged to stay over at Tim’s place that night luckily. We ended up staying up until about 6:30am on Sunday morning fiddling with the videos and photos. Tim’s host brothers Yoshiteru and Yugo stayed up until about 3am or so playing some new Gundam game on the PS2 so it was interesting trying to decide on music for our videos with their game noises and screaming going on in the background. Though we eventually got all that we needed done.
I woke up at about 9:30or so on Sunday morning after about 3 hours sleep. Tim seemed to feel a lot worse than I did after such a little amount of sleep. I guess I’m a lot more used to it. He was also complaining of a sore eye for the next 2 days. Probably from staring at a computer screen all night which he also isn’t used to. Anyway so we went into Sannomiya together by about 11am. Once we got there I jumped on the next train and headed home. I couldn’t be bothered to drag my laptop around the shops all afternoon so I took it home then made my way back to Sannomiya, about an hour long round trip. I then went to the Kobe Mint (a new shopping center with a weird name) and met up with Tim and Maia at the cinema on the top floor. We planned to go see Eragon but since it was the first day it was out and a Sunday the cinema was packed out with people. Luckily Tim and Maia had already started lining up and by the time I got there they were about half way through the line so I jumped in with them. Luckily we were able to get tickets to the screening that we wanted. We also bought tickets for Henrique, Andrew and their host brother. They all met up with us later and we all saw the movie together. Considering I hadn’t read the book all I knew was that it was about a dragon. Tim had read the book and by the end of the movie wasn’t too happy with the way it went. I didn’t mind it too much, but it was pretty obvious that they’d skimped out on bits. I guess I’ll have to read the book myself and see.
On Monday the 18th I somehow managed to sleep in until about 3:30 in the afternoon. Luckily I didn’t have anything planned for that day. I was finally able to get a good amount of time to play some Zelda.
Tuesday the 19th was Tim’s big farewell party at his host family’s house. I think about 30 people must have come. They had a barbeque which actually wasn’t too bad. They managed to keep food coming continually from about 5pm through to 10pm or so which was impressive. I also brought my Wii over and most of the people there had a go at some point I think. It was a pretty fun evening with good friends and good food. Couldn’t ask for much more than that.
From Wednesday through to Friday (yesterday) I had a few free days. After waking up at roughly midday each day I ended up spending a lot of my time at home playing Zelda. Then last night at about 2am I finally beat it. I have to say it was well worth it. Even though I couldn’t play it as much as I’d wanted to earlier on I still got through it and had a lot of fun doing it. Even the fact that it was all in Japanese didn’t really bother me too much.
Catch yas later
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12.20.06
Posted in Japan at 8:52 pm by Daniel
So I guess I’m trying to make up for all the times when Ive had nothing to do, I’ve suddenly found my time packed out with different things. Which is good, I’m having a lot of fun… except for one thing. I haven’t had nearly as much time to play Zelda as I would have liked. But I’m sure things will quiet down again soon enough.
Just a note, this entry was written on December 10th and I have only had time to post it now, December 20th. So this is all stuff Ive done a couple of weeks ago. I’ve just been really really busy recently. I’m hoping to have enough time to fill in the next entry in the nex few days though.
On Wednesday last week David sent me a mail asking me to come over his place after school. One of the conditions was that I bring my Wii. Which I was more than happy to do, it ended up being a good chance to get in some multi-player action. I don’t remember if Ive mentioned David before… Anyway, he’s from Brisbane and doing a gap year in Kobe like me, I met him at the AJS about 2 months back. Aside from getting there everything else went well. I almost never seem to have good luck with trains. Though this was more of a mis-communication than luck. David lives near a station called Kosoku-Nagata. There are also two more stations on different lines, one called Shin-Nagata and another called Shintetsu-Nagata. I think there is also a subway station with Nagata in the name. So long story short, I ended up in the middle of nowhere at the wrong Nagata and it took me about 30 minutes longer than it should have to get to where I was supposed to be. But after all the hassle with trains we ended up having a pretty good time. Wii Sports went down a treat with Tennis, Bowling and Boxing being the favourites. Next on the menu was Red Steel. Although Ive read a lot of bad reviews about it, we did have a pretty good time once we worked out the controls (the manuals are only good for the funny pictures not learning how to play). Then to top it off 4 player Elebits was absolutely insane. Mostly in a good way though. Two of David’s other friends were there as well and it was the first time for all three of them to be playing a Wii. I can definitely see how its going to be a lot of fun playing with 4 people again in the future.
Thursday was interesting. I technically had no classes or tests or anything that would warrant me coming to school. But, and there is always a but. Sawabu-sensei (my advisor) didn’t want to give me a four day weekend starting Thursday, which meant that I had to come into school anyway. Luckily there was actually something cool to do. Since Tim is an assistant teacher as well he teaches a few classes every week. So I got roped into helping out with his lessons from 8:30am until 12:30 or so. Which aside from the whole going to school thing was actually pretty fun. We helped the grade 10 kids to write short speeches about what they’d done in the past year and then played a game with them. I would say that it beat sitting around at home all day (which is what I would have done otherwise) but for the fact that I have my Wii at home…
But all that was fixed on Friday. Apparently a three day weekend is allowed but not a four day one. Meaning that I was able to spend a good chunk of Friday playing my Wii and getting a bit further into Zelda. My host family was pretty busy on Friday. Apparently they had a funeral going on at the temple among other things. Though I didn’t see any of that since Zelda had kinda taken my attention away from anything else.
I had a bit of a scare on Saturday morning. Tim had arranged to come over to my place and we’d edit some videos he’d taken. So he called me when he was on his way so that I could go meet him at the train station. I got off the phone and decided that I’d better turn on my laptop so we could start using it as soon as he got here. Well that was all good up until the point where my laptop wouldn’t start. I swear its something to do with my DVD drive but I have no way of telling for certain. So when I presses the power button my DVD drive would spin (with nothing in it), then it would stop and then spin again. It just kept repeatedly spinning and then stopping, no matter of a disc was inserted or not. Then to make things worse, my screen just stayed black, then every 5 seconds or so a grey blur would move from the top left of the screen to the bottom right. Neither the keyboard or mouse was responsive at all. Oh and ofcourse, my warranty had run out mid-way through November, not that it would have been much use all the way over here in Japan. So I went and met Tim at the station anyway and we came back to my place. I spent about 30 minutes fiddling, plugging in different monitors, pulling out the battery etc. Everything I felt game to do short of ripping the case open since I know nothing about laptops really. I was just about resigned to having to take it into a shop and try to explain in Japanese what was wrong to some (probably) clueless person in the shop. Then my host mum came and brought a snack for Tim and I. No sooner had she entered the room and it started working again. I hadn’t done anything different or touched anything but for some reason it was working again. I guess my host mum has some magical aura about her from living in a temple or something. I don’t know. Either way I’m greatful that so far its continued to work. So once that was mysteriously resolved Tim and I were able to spend a good part of the day fiddling with videos. Then the only problems we had were with Adobe Premiere and After Effects. No matter how well things seem to go, somehow Adobe always manages to help us screw something up that makes everything take at least 30 minutes to an hour longer than it should.
On Saturday night I also had my last AJS meeting here in Japan. I had to get up and do a ‘5 minute speech’ in front of everyone or so I’d been told. I did my usual thing and ‘forgot’ to prepare anything. So I ended up trying to wing it on the spot. Which would have worked well, had it been in English. I found out that I have a ways to go before I can ad-lib well in Japanese. All that aside, whatever I said seemed to get the right meaning across and a number of people came up to me afterwards and told me they liked it. So when the speeches were over we got into groups and played a game of chinese whispers. All I’m going to say about that is that I now have a permanent mark in my mind never to play that in another language again. You try remembering a tongue-twister like string of words / sounds that you don’t know and then try to tell it to the next person in line. Needless to say, all the teams that won prizes didn’t have foreigners in them. They also had a man do a bunch of simple magic tricks which was cool. I was sitting the right distance away that I couldn’t really tell how they were done so I was able to get a decent laugh out of it. A couple of the guys going to teach in Australia next year also made a Christmas themed rap song and sang that. By the time all that had happened it had gotten a bit late so they rolled out the tables and bite-sized bits of food for everyone as per usual. I had a good chance to talk to the girl who is coming to Canberra next year. She told me that she hasn’t worked out whether to go into year 10 or year 11. So I spent a good amount of time trying to convince her that year 11 is better. I had a pretty good time at my final AJS meeting and I’m sure I’ll be able to meet up with quite a few people again somewhere in the future. When they kicked us all out of the hall because we’d run out of time, around 20 of us went to a bar / restaurant and had dinner. So that was cool, I got to spend another 2 hours or so chatting with the guys who are going to teach in Australia next year before my host sister Chisa and I went home at around 11:30pm.
On Sunday I went with my host sisters Chisa and Yoshie as well as Yoshie’s husband to Universal Studios Japan. Only my third time this year. This was actually the first time that I’d been by car and I was surprised at how quickly we were able to get there. The slowest part was getting into the carpark. So we spent most of the day going on rides and just wandering around. We rode Jurassic Park twice, Spiderman once and saw the Shrek 4D movie as well. Also since its almost christmas they had a giant christmas tree as well as all the rides and souvenirs being christmas themed. All in all we had a pretty good time. We stayed until about 5pm in the evening when it started to get bitterly cold before we came home.
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12.05.06
Posted in Japan at 7:57 pm by Daniel
Well Ive been pretty busy since my last post but I’m going to try and not let this post get too long since I have other things waiting for me to do as well.
So the Saturday after my last post I didn’t do anything in particular, just sat around home all day. Then that Sunday I went into Kyoto with a bunch of people from the AJS. Jess came along too and we also got to meet four other aussies who had just recently come to Japan and will be staying for about 2 months. We went and sat by the bank of a river and all ate lunch together. We were pretty lucky with weather, they’d been predicting rain. As it turns out the rain waited until after we’d had lunch. So we spent a good part of the afternoon walking around in the rain. We went to Kyomizudera which is actually one of around 20 finalists to become one of the ‘New’ 7 wonders of the world. Apart from the rain it was pretty good, especially since I didn’t really remember much of the first time I went there about 4 or 5 years ago.
Monday came around again and thus began another week of classes. School sort of dragged on and on. Nothing particularly special happened. Though Tim and I had our last Table Tennis class which was pretty fun. We also did the 2005 Japanese Language test as practice for our upcoming test.
Then finally after what seemed like ages Friday came. I couldn’t say exactly how long I’d been waiting but its been a long time. 24 hours until the Nintendo Wii would hit Japan and I intended to be there right at the start. So I skipped school on Friday and headed into Osaka’s Yodobashi Camera. The shop is absolutely huge and I figured that the amount of people buying a Wii there on the Saturday morning would also be huge, I was right. I got to Yodobashi at around 9:45am, about 15 minutes after they opened for the day. I went up to the games section and asked the guy behind the counter if there was somewhere that people should line up or what. He gave me the standard look of “I hate you and every other one of the 50,000 people who have asked me that question in the last week” and responded with something similar adding in a few “I don’t know yet”s for good measure. So there I was, nothing really to do and no real line as such. I ended up hanging around the shop for a couple of hours before I decided to go wandering in Umeda. I went up the Umeda Sky Building since I hadn’t been there in about 3 years so that took a bit of time. I just kept wandering around and coming back every hour or so to pester the guys in the shop some more. By about 5pm I was getting a bit bored. Luckily my friend David sent me a mail and said him and some friends were coming into Osaka. So we met up and went and had some curry ramen for dinner. Afterwards we sat around playing our DS’s near the games section of Yodobashi. Henrqiue even came to say hi at about 8pm or so. At shortly before 9pm when the shop was closing I got David to go and ask again about the Wii. I figured send someone different to ask rather than the guy whose been annoying them all day. Apparently they’d been handing out tickets on the first floor of the building since 6pm. I was surprised about that, but it didn’t really matter, I’d been having fun anyway. So we went down to the first floor and I got myself a ticket, number 636. From there I said goodbye to David and his friends and was ushered into an elevator. So the real wait began at 9pm at night in the 11th floor carpark of Yodobashi Camera. I waited and read my book until roughly 4am or so. Then the staff started calling out groups of 100 people and getting them to line up. I actually lucked out in a sense with getting a slightly later number. I ended up sitting next to a journalist from kotaku.com and another guy whose name I didn’t catch. So that was pretty cool chatting with them for the last 2 hours or so while everyone else finished lining up. By 6:30am there were well over 2000 people. A staff member came out the front and announced to the crowd that the shop had a total of 2800 consoles. A sigh of relief swept over the crowds. Around 6:45 they started letting people through to buy their Wiis. I got mine at about 7:10am and proceeded to head home.
I got home at about 8:50am and was pretty tired after having been awake for just over 24 hours. I had a shower and ate breakfast before plugging in my Wii and firing up Wii Sports for the first time. I played for about 2 hours before I decided that my brain wasn’t awake enough to play properly. I ended up just sitting around for the rest of the day. I didn’t go to sleep until roughly 8:30pm on Saturday night after being awake for about 36 hours. I decided that since I had the big test on Sunday it would be really stupid to screw up my sleep pattern. So I stayed awake in order that I could sleep at night again instead of during the day. I have to say that it actually worked, although I was very tired on Saturday.
Sunday and it was time for the big test. Not really much to say about it. It went ok I guess. Though they gave us a 45 minute and then a 60 minute break between the tests which really wasn’t needed. Winter decided that it would arrive right on time. Since Sunday it has been freezing cold and sitting outside waiting for the next test in the freezing cold was not fun. After it was all over a bunch of us went into Sannomiya and did Karaoke for a bit over an hour. I also managed to go buy a bunch of goodies for my Wii. I picked up Zelda, Red Steel and Elebits as well as an extra remote and nun-chuck and an S-Video cable. So I came home and played Zelda until 2am in the morning.
Yesterday was back to normal again. We’re now counting down until the last day of school. I have a few extra days of holidays as well as a few half-days before then though which is good. But now Zelda is sitting here waiting for me to start playing again so I’m afraid that’s all for now.
But here is a short video that I took right before buying my Wii….
Yay for hyperactive people…
Catch Yas Later
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