shoeboxinfukuoka

Aaaaah, sunday today, still som free air to breathe before the next week starts..! This week went by quickly though, and ,as always, so did the weekend. Nothing too special happened, except maybe for a job offer that one of the teachers at the school offered! Well, nothing to be too excited about since it's only for one hour one day, but I said I'd go for it! It was a school nearby that wanted some foreign students in their english class, which would make me some kind of english teacher for a day. Sounds fun enough, can be interesting to see a glimps of a real japanese elementary school as well. If nothing else, the fact that everyone will bow before me when I walk in might be reason enough!! ;) Nah, maybe not, but it's something new to try out! This won't be until about two weeks, but the school has apparantly already booked a taxi that will take us (me and three other students from the school) there :O

Friday night was spent at home with some pepsi, pocky, and "poteeto-chippusu" :) And yesterday really had no plan at all, it started with me and my roommate walking to the hyakuen-shop (hundred yen-shop, everything cheap as hell, and you'll end up going home with stuff you never thought you needed...) and coming home later that afternoon. Later one of the guys from class stopped by, trying to gather people to a halloween party that evening in some kind of international bar. So half seven, we departed for Tenjin Core, and well there met up with -which I really didn't expect- 20 or more japanese folks. The international bar (called "The Party" hahaha...) was pretty nice, 1500 yen in entrance fee, but with that came a free drink and free food! The evening itself turned out pretty nice, at least parts of it. Met some nice japanese people, and some... well, other japanese people with doubtful interest... It was nice being there, talking both english and trying out japanese (as good as it got), but I think for me and Emma (both blond swedish girls) it was a little bit uncomfortable, since it was a bit like being some kind of movie star. EVERYONE and their freaking mother wanted photos of us, I don't wanna know where I am on facebook now.. Photos, photos, photos. But to be honest, I think my hair was a lot more popular than me myself! Everyone was like "oooh, kawaii, kawaii" to my hair. Hmm... and I think I got offered a model job. Not totally sure, but she was a hairdresser, and wondered if I had a job yet. Was something about a wedding collection I think (hair then I guess). I'll see if she'll get in contact, other wise nothing lost!

Oki doki, this will be it for today, have some homework left as well before I can relax. XXX

Tuesday evening. Dark outside, dinner eaten, homework done. A god damned failed dinner though, but we tried... I mean, considering we many times have NO idea what it is we're buying, I think it's pretty amazing we haven't made poison more than a few times! Today we cooked rice (land of rice over here) and we found some kind of white somewhat innocent-looking root vegetable and a few long dark purple thingies I'm pretty convinced was a new form of egg-plant (do you even say egg-plant in english..? Who knows..) in the shop earlier this week. Cheap is good we thought, and we chopped it all up and threw it in the rice after a bit of frying. Yuck.
Now, I think it was egg-plants alright, but that root vegetable... It tasted like radish, EXACTLY like radish. But it was big, and white, and.. didn't do too good with rice and egg-plant =_=

Hmm... dinner aside, not very much has happened since last time. School feels like it's gotten a lot harder and more advanced only since last week, and in a sense that's a totally good thing (I mean, more "write-prettier-exercises" would have killed me), but my teacher actually expected us to write with kanji on the exercises today. Uuuuuuh, not gooood... That shit is gonna be the death of me, I know it!!

Also, sat a bit and tried to read a few mangas I bought here! I mean, so far I don't even have a chance reading a real book (if it doesn't have furigana I'm screwed, and of what I've seen, only mangas do..) but well... I didn't do too good on that either. In fact it was quite depressing when I realized how little I understood without the help of my dictionary -which is useless anyway-, but I will get there slowly I hope! :) Have been oogling in Tenjin for digital dictionaries with a small writing board; shit expensive. Do you know I'm getting 20 soon mom...?(worth a shot)

Oki, done for now, will try to make a bit more interesting (and a bit more.. well written?) next time, when time and will to make an effort is on my side. Until then!! :*

Wohooo, the weekend is here!! Took my chance to sleep a bit, but then it was off into town! Bus 152 took us into Tenjin as the first goal of the day, where we finally discovered where all the people have been hiding. And all the shops. And like, everything.. So, when we went down to what we though was the stairs down to the subway (well actually, it is that as well) and what we find is an enourmous shopping mall underground. Whaaaaa... So we got lost there for a while, and went out with a bit more aching feet, and a bit less money in our wallets! :D

The second goal for the day was to manage our way into the other downtown area Hakata, and well there to a place called Canal City. And actually, we didn't get lost even once!! I'm still surprised, but it's actually pretty easy to find your way around here once you know your starting point! Canal City is actually just another shopping mall, but with a few tricks to it. The arcitecture is really cool (and slightly confusing inside. A maze would probably be easier) and you can find pretty funny little shops. They had a little studio Ghibli souvenir shop!! I REALLY had to drag myself away before I went home with a big, stuffed, fluffy Totoro! Though seeing the price tag made leaving him a bit easier...
Otherwise I wouldn't say things are so expensive here. I'd say most of it is actually quite a bit cheaper! Of course, you have to know your places, especially when it comes to food, but it generally isn't so bad. Meat is very expensive, but leaving that out, and you have a pretty cheap shopping bag with you home. Anyhow, back to Canal City... Every hour they have a kind of a water-fountain-music-show -in lack of better words- which turned out to be really cool! Basically just water fountains moving and gushing out water in tune to the music, but it was a nice add to the place.

Hmm... lots seen and done today, but I don't think it would be too interesting for you to hear every detail of it (nor do I have the energy to write it down...) but maybe a few pictures might make you forgive me...? And with that, a few people might stop nagging about it as well ;)

Soooo; ladies and gentlemen, todays efforts for the big photocompetition!!! (ok, not so, but it's all I've got...)



This would be the view over Nakagawa -the Naka river- on our way from Tenjin to Hakata.



In the other direction!! :)



Canal City



A bit of Canal City seen from second floor ;) Halloween-theme with lots of pumpkins!!



THEY HAVE MOOMIN WAFFLES!!!!!! I promised myself I'm gonna have one before I leave this place!! This was inside Canal City, and a bit... surprising :D



And this is the same place as the second photo, but later the same day. Every evening these "Yatai"s are put up, little food stands that look really cute and invitning. And looks like very japanese menues, so I think I will wait with that until I'm more secure with the language...



And this, my friends, is our toilet paper, and it ended up here on my blog now, because I thought I had to make this officially known: our toilet paper has no flavor. Disappointing... :S

So, it will be a short little thing today, since I'm up to my ears swimming in homework. Almost anyway, for tomorrow I think it was all together something like 10 pages of different assignments. A big tired sigh on that (it's actually very easy stuff, but it sure take time doing them), but otherwise my three first days of japanese school has been a lot of fun! Well, fun for a school anyway. It feels good to be doing something ou WANT to learn, and therefor of course it all gets the more motivating. I just hope it won't be this much homework every day in the future...
School here is pretty strict and diciplined as one might have guessed, but I have a hinch that we probably are getting easier off than normal considering our school and their teachers are used to foreign students that doesn't know up from down in the japanese world, so may it be language or etiquette. But even though we are going through some very basic stuff at the moment, it's all fun so far! :)

Tired as hell, so I'll probably end it here. The sun has set hours ago, and that bed of mine is starting to look very tempting. So until later folks!! XXX

There you go! More coming when I've gotten out of my lazyness and actually taken some good ones

Helloooo!

Saturday afternoon now, so I guess all of you uropeans are snoozing soundly still. Or actually, you might be up working, mwahahaha.. So it’s Saturday, wchich means that I survived the welcome cermony this morning (wohoo)! I managed to find a skirt yesterday down in the Tenjin-area, and I think nobody will believe how much money I spent on such a boring skirt.. A real suit skirt, but I think it was worth its money, saving me the emarrasment of coming in a pair of jeggings today :S

The cermony went fine, even though one of our teachers told us swedes (he apparently thought it was our turn this year) that we had to give a speech on the cermony representing all of the new first year students. In japanese. Feel my horror.

But well, believe it or not, somehow we managed. On of the swedish girls really wanted to give the speech, so… who am I to stop her..? I don’t want to be rude or anything… We wrote it everyone together, and she did well giving it today! Pheew! A few more or less awkward thing happened of course, say like one of the teachers asked the students from the different countries to one after one together say their morning greeting. I mean in japanese you rabble your polite “ohayou gozaimasu” and then bow. The indians said it in their language and also bowed following their custom. The taiwanese and the chinese all had their different bows and then it was the swedes turn… So we stood up and errr… said “gomorron” so not in unison that is possible. No bows, but we all kind of did some kind of weird half-bow just because it felt so stupid to be the only ones not doing anything. Well, people laughed at least…

Otherwise the cermony might have showed a bit of the seemingly strict and precise japanese school world. They called our names one by one –and gosh, my name really sounds silly in japanese- and -some more energetic than others- had to stand up and half-shout “haaai” for marking ones presence. Following they told us to “stand up” “bow” “sit down” when the principal and founder of the school went inside the room. A bit weird in contrast to my experience of the swedish extremely easy-going schools.

Rest of the day was free, so me and my roommate went for some shopping! Really exciting; table cloths, toilet paper and stuff like that. And a chocolate bar named “Crunky” just because the name was awesome! XD

Anyhow, have a nice weekend people! Here are some –not very good I know- pictures of the downtown-area Tenjin and some other stuff! XXX

Started the day completely sure that I had overslept.  We had our test today to place us in different groups, and that was supposed to be at around 11 in the morning.  So I was lying fretting about for one hour in the bed -my roommate was supposed to wake me at 8, but I thought it was just too bright outside for that early time. Well, I went up and it turns out she’s not even 7. So we had a lot of time for breakfast!! Which consisted of Tropicana juice (much cheaper here than in Sweden) white bread (extremely thick slices and tasted sugar. Yuck.) and a yoghurt I’d bought in believe that it was blueberry. Turns out it was blueberry and aloe vera. Strange but actually tasted totally normal!

Hmm… in short: test went crap, as in CRAP. Out of like 8 pages I managed to get to page 5 before the time run out. And those pages I did… well, let’s not talk about that =_=

Went home, instant ramen for dinner. Yum!! Our stove is not working yet (the company hasn’t turned on the gas yet), but we went for a walk in the afternoon, and managed to get hold of a waterboiler so we would manage. So I have a good enough excuse to stuff my face with ramen for a while! :D

Free tomorrow, looking forward to that!^^ Although we have some kind of school orientation day on Friday, and on Saturday (weeeeep, they touched my weekend) there’s some weird formal schoolcermony for the new students. And of course, on of our teachers gently told us, we will have to ewar formal clothes. Hmm… what formal things do I own..? I have a white shirt but that’s it. Hopefully we will manage to go to downtown tomorrow and find something. Or else I’m doomed to look like an idiot on Saturday…

Hello again!

So, I finally made it to Fukuoka, Japan!! Everything went fine, the ten hours from Copenhagen to Tokyo was the slowest ten hours I had for quite a while… didn’t manage to sleep at all. But finally, finally, we made it to Tokyo!! And… err… it wasn’t quite what I imagined it to be… In my mind we would arrive to an extremely busy airport with lots and lots of people crammed everywhere. What I didn’t imagine was that the airport would be totally empty aside for us…  but the service was good anyway, kind of strange to walk down all the empty hallways, but the staff gladly showed us the way. And they all assumed we could talk Japanese as well… It was just to smile and nod, and hope that we got the most important parts!

After  going trough customs, security control (oh my god, I had to take of my boots off, poor security guy) we made it to a boring little room to wait for our next flight. So the first thing I did was to go to the toilet and CHANGE MY CLOTHES!! Remind me again to never be so stupid as to wear thick clothes going here again. And hahaha, the signs for the women’s toilet is all pink and the men’s blue, didn’t know what to say about that..

Anyhow, now in shorts, top and sandals I boarded my flight (and it’s by the way the smallest little thing I ever been on, the closest thing to a private jet!) and went off to my final destination! I must say, that little thing was a good adrenaline ride, since they had much shorter take off areas here at the airports than I’m used to, which means that it reeeally was one heck of a takeoff and landing. But we got picked up by two of our teachers and that was… well… just as awkward as I feared it to be.. they talked in Japanese, we answered in English. I really have to get over this and actually open my mouth in Japanese! But so far, no good. But they we’re nice and helpful, and later they took us for some grocery shopping and to a chakkuen shop. Like a euro shop or one/dollar shop.  Got the most important stuff, but  we will have to go for some more stuff tomorrow I think. But damn hell, it’s right now freaking embarrassing just to go pay for your things in the shop! The cashier bows and smiles, and I have no idea if I should bow back, how and if I should say thanks and all that jazz. But all that will be fine in time, I just have to get out of my little comfort zone and get over it.

And the place I stay in is actually better than I had dared to hope! I mean, it’s no luxury hotel (worn out furniture, a kitchen not even worth the name and curtains that DEFENITELY have seen better days. And we have nasty little bugs) but it’s quite spacey -for being in Japan- and I thought I would have to share toilet, shower and kitchen with all the other students. Turns out I only have to share it with Emma, the girl I went here with, so that was a very nice surprise! And we have a big balcony and biiig shower (of some strange reason considering the lack of space. But I’m not complaining!).

 

Wohooo!! I finally did it! Creating my blog that is ;) Hopefully it will be a way to stay in touch with family and all you good old friends. And hmm… this way I will have to practise my English a bit I guess... It would have been easier in Swedish of course, but then a few certain people wouldn’t have been able to read it (so I hope you certain people really will read this shit now!!) so I guess I will have to move out from my lazy spot for a while! :)

 

So, it’s only like… *counts on fingers* … 5 days left!??! Oh my god, I’m leaving for Japan in 5 days! I guess there’s nothing to be nervous about to be honest; everything is done already. My bags are packed, unpacked, checked, and packed again. My passport was FINALLY sent back from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm (with a cool student visa inside) so I don’t have to bite my nails about that either any more. So yeah, in a way I just wanna go now and have the journey over with, knowing that I have arrived safe and sound in Fukuoka, with all bags and body parts intact. Urrghhh, fucking airplanes…

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, ooh, before I forget, I’m NOT responsible for this blog design (I wish), I got it for free from blogghjalp.se, because I’m too lazy to figure one out on my own. Frankly, it’s too much time and trouble :S