...and A Happy New Year!

Ah yes, one of my least favourite holidays approaches. I never got the big deal about New Years. Seems like a rather pointless day to me. Is there really that much difference between Dec. 31st and Jan 1st? Despite my dislike of the holiday, for once I will not be staying home on New Years Eve-curse my socially in demand self. New Years is actually the biggest holiday of the year here, but at least they know how to celebrate it properly by turning into a 3 or 4 day extended holiday.

Somehow I managed to spend almost as much money as I usually do around Christmas time, even though I actually had very few people (one not including myself) to buy presents for. The biggest purchase involved a videogame item. I won't tell you what I got, only that it's initials are PSP. That cost me about 19,000 yen and the very next day I changed my mind and decided to return it. The only hitch was that they wouldn't let me. Yes I had opened it but it was barely 24 hours later. I'm sure in Canada, Futureshop will take returns up to 30 days after purchase. Anyways that had me seething at the general Japanese populace for the next couple of days. It's their fault after all that that the store wouldn't allow me to return my purchase. It's their weak, aquiescing personality that allows things like this to happen. That's why my phone company is able to charge me an entire month for a phone that I only used for a week of that particular month. It's disgusting. No wonder this country isn't a world power.

Speaking of my phone bill, I think I must really be Turnin' Japanese (both the good along with the bad) because I never could be bothered to walk into the shop and give the staff a piece of my mind. The language barrier really is that-a barrier. If I was fluent then I would really let them have it. Then again maybe I wouldn't. They would probably just look at me and think "Ohh look at the funny talking monkey that actually has a spine-I've never seen one of those before." Don't get me wrong I still love Japan. It's just a lot of fun to curse the Japanese-something I seem to be doing with increasing frequency, whether it be the idiot pedestrians or the idiots on their bikes or that idiot girl in the store today who would not stop shouting in her highpitched nasal voice.

I'm not leaving Tokyo for the holidays (something that a lot of teachers do) but I am doing some sightseeing. Yesterday we went to an aquarium in Shinagawa which was really quite interesting. Here are a few pics:

I purposely made these pictures small for those who use 56k. If you want to see a much larger version then just click on the pictures! And also if you're interested, I have a short clip of Shibuya. This is a short clip of the Hachiko pedestrian crossing, the WORLD'S BUSIEST CROSSING. Basically all the traffic lights turn red and people cross the street from about 8 different directions. I would love to get up high to be able to see it. Anyways here it is.

http://www.geocities.com/brendansparling/Harajuku.wmv

And finally, to reward those people who actually read through the entire contents of the blog and not just look at the pictures (ANDREW!) here is a picture of a gender non-specific person called Fumiko.

*edit* My Geocities data transfer limit is very low so you might find that you get an error when you click on the links. The limit gets reset every hour so just keep trying!

Merry Christmas everyone

Well Christmas is over. It's hard to tell it was even here. Back home people say that we're always too early to put the Christmas decorations away after the holiday. Here however it's ridiculous. The ginormous Christmas tree that was sitting out in front of Parco for probably the past two months disappeared the day after Christmas and so did all the decorations inside the store. It's like it never happened. I worked on Christmas day for the first time in my life. And I worked on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day too. I wasn't too bitter towards my students though-that they could see. Certainly none of the teachers were happy with the students but I guess it's not their fault-it's not their holiday.

They don't seem to celebrate it in too big a way over here. I mean it's all over the stores but that's just for commercial reasons. I'm not even sure if it's a big gift buying occasion because most of the people I talked to didn't receive presents (of course they were the same idiots who came to school on Christmas Day.) Oh well! I had my own little Christmas tree, with my own little presents (thanks Emily and Laura!) so it wasn't too bad. Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of the tree with the presents under it.

Christmas Eve, Fumiko came over and I made dinner (yes you read right-I made dinner.) Actually the rice was kind of a joint effort. I was making my signature dinner (which I named Chicken Carbonnara) and rather than be ghetto and just buy the precooked rice from the grocery store like I usually do, I thought it would be nicer to make homemade rice. The only problem with this was that I rarely cooked rice in Canada and every time I did I needed to read the directions that Mom had markered onto the jar-I also haven't cooked my own rice in the nine months I've been here (contrary to what you believe-rice is actually pretty expensive here.) Fumiko is Japanese of course, and I assumed that Japanese people were born with the innate ability to make rice. The truth of course is that probably nobody under the age of 40 knows how to cook rice without an actual rice cooker. The very idea of actually cooking rice in a pot is horrifying to them. Anyways to make a long story short, the rice turned out ok and it was a great Christmas Eve.

Christmas was also interesting as I had dinner with my private student. I went over after work and we had some kind of crab nabe. It's really hard to describe it-it's like meat that's been cooked in a soup right there on the table in front of you. Anyways it was my first time having crab and it was pretty good on the whole. I'll never understand the Japanese and their cameras though. At one point during the dinner, the woman I teach got up and started setting up a tripod! I thought that that was going a little far just to take a simple picture and then she took out a little video camera and started recording our dinner! Very strange. And then after dinner they put together a little cake. Then they insisted of taking pictures of it and us sitting behind it. And then they started taking pictures of the cake itself! Litterally standing over it and snapping pictures! All the time saying, "Chee-ZU!"

An anecdote

Something funny happened to me the other day. These things don't happen to me often so I have to relish it while I can. Yesterday when I got to work and took off my jacket, I noticed that I had forgotten to put my belt on before coming to work. I thought it looked a little funny to not be wearing a belt so I went down to the 3rd floor of Parco to the 100 yen store hoping to find a 100 yen belt (to go with my 100 yen ties-I LOVE the 100 yen store.) No such luck unfortunately. But as I was about to turn and go, this little old lady came up to me and said "Sleepers wa?" It took me a second to realize that she was talking to me, and when I finally did I was able to respond in perfect japanese, "Huh??" She said again, "Sleepers wa?" and at this point I realized that with my shirt and tie, she thought that I worked in the 100 yen store and she wanted to know where she could find "sleepers" whatever the heck those were. All I could say was "Wakarimasen" (I don't know) to which she probably wondered why the hell I was working there in the first place. God knows why she thought I worked there. I certainly don't look Japanese. Anyways just thinking about it makes me laugh out loud.

Dangers of having a social life

I almost had my first life-endangering Christmas conflict today due to a confusion in my Christmas bookings. My private student had invited me over for Christmas dinner with her husband and a friend on Saturday. I said sure, since I wasn't doing anything much anyways. Then today I emailed a gender non-specific person and asked if they wanted to come over on Sunday. [Nichiyoubi ni, anata wa watashi no ie hoshi kimasuka?] (who knows if this is correct Japanese)

The response I got was: "Ehh!? Ehh!? Nichiyoubi!? Sun!? [at this point I realized I was in trouble] I was thinking that I can eat dinner with you tomorrow(Sat). You invited me to dinner when we went to the tower [Tokyo Tower], didn't you? [That was 3 weeks ago! Surely everybody knows that guys only have a 3 minute memory-we're like mice.]

Anyways, I had to frantically email my private student and ask if it wasn't too late or too inconvenient to switch the dinner party to Sunday night instead of Saturday night. Fortunately I didn't get in trouble for forgetting my promise. Because I wrote the original message in japanese, I was able to feign being an ignorant english person (which I actually am) rather than an ignorant person in general (which I might be) and just say that I accidently got the japanese Saturday (Douyobi) and Sunday (Nichiyoubi) confused.

All's well that ends well, as they say!

XBOX 360 anyone?

I hear these things can't be found over in North America. Not so over here. I could walk into any store and pick one up at will!

6 days till...you get the idea

I lost 500 yen playing poker today. I can't tell you where I was lest you lose faith in me as a teacher. It was supposed to be a one period seminar to polish up our skills but tomorrow is my superior's last day and he could care less about giving some cookie cutter seminar. So the three of us polished our bluffing skills in the voice room. Obviously mine need a lot of work. My first and probably last time playing-I just don't find it that entertaining.

Just so you know, I'm sitting here in our great (but freezing) living room, watching the Bremen-Hamburg soccer game, listening to Christmas carols by St James Choir of Angels and drinking ice coffee (pronounced EYE-SU KOH-HEE). Here's a picture of our Christmas tree.
Not too shabby, EH? And here's another pic I took today, just because it made me giggle a little.


Nothing funnier than seeing a whole row of bikes tipped over like dominoes. If only I had been there to see it in action.

Someone was asking me today how my Japanese is and I have to tell you that it is gosh darned terrible. I took a three month course before I came over here so I make fairly decently grammatically structured sentences but my vocabulary is so bloody low that it's frightening. It doesn't matter how good you are with structure and tenses if you don't know the words to fill up the sentences. Also my listening comprehension is atrocious. Unless someone is speaking purposely slowly I probably won't understand what they are saying.

I heard from someone that you will speak like the people that you hang around with (men and women have small things that they say differently depending on their gender.) If that is true then I must sound like a little kid when I speak because that's where I pick up a lot of my japanese. Today I learned how to play the japanese version of "Patty Cake Patty Cake" (the japanese version is more complicated and actually has a catchy tune.)

8 days till Kurisumasu

I'm really loving this "X days till Kurisumasu" thing. Sometimes I have so much trouble thinking of a good title that it completely demotivates me to write in this blog. I think after Christmas I will start an "X days till New Yearzu" and then an "X days till Gloundhogu Dayu" after that.

I have a reputation for being a cheapskate (insert your comment here Chad) but that isn't always fair. For example the other day I bought a $6 pencil. How many of you big spenders out there can lay claim to the fact that you own a $6 pencil? It's one of those mechanical pencils. I bought it after seeing a few highschool girls use them in class. I would literally stop the lesson and demand that they let me try it. Now maybe I'm a few years behind the pencil technology curve because I've never seen these things before. In the old days we used to have to click the eraser on our mechanical pencils if we wanted to get some lead. Now all you have to do is shake the pencil and the lead comes out by itself! It's quite a feather in my cap to own a pencil like that.

12 days till Kurisumasu!!!

I went out and bought a Christmas tree today and a few lights for it. I've even got a present under the tree already thanks to Laura.* It's better than Charlie Brown's Christmas tree but not by much. It's potted though so hopfefully it will last for quite a long while. I had to bring it home on the train and although it's only about 3 feet tall at the most, I don't think I could possibly have gotten more stares if I had dragged a 10 foot tree on in one hand and had an axe in another. I even had people pointing at me. Ok so they were only a couple of 10-year old girls, but even still.

It's been a while since I posted a picture, so here's a crumb to those of you who are literate challenged like Andrew.
This was on the packaging for my new boxer shorts. I don't know who comes up with this stuff but their prose is pure brilliance. Take a careful read through that-the more you read it the less it makes sense.

*If you want to make a contribution to the presents under my tree and make me have a Merry Christmas then please contact my parents for my address details. :)

Fuming in Tokyo

The truth about the Japanese is that they do a lot of things that seem stupid to us. It's best to laugh at it and not let it bother you. Usually that's what I do which is why I still love Japan despite all of the stupidity. Usually is the key word of course. Some things are just too much though. As most of you probably know. I just got a new cell phone because I lost the previous one. Anyways I just got the first bill for it. It was 4022 yen, a little higher than the old phone but still not too bad I thought, until I saw the billing date: Nov. 23rd-Nov.30th. Those...people at AU billed me for an entire month for a phone I used for a week of that month. Anyways they are going to hear about it tomorrow.

There are lots of annoying things like that in Japan and usually you just let it pass. For example, there's no such thing as buying in bulk here. I was at the pastery shop today and they had some type of pastry for 63 yen each. Or if you wanted, you could buy a bag of five for 315 yen each-exactly five times the price of the single ones. I felt like buying five individual ones just to make the lady go through the trouble of bagging them. Anyways that's my rant for this year. I think I cut those happy clappy jappy chappies quite a lot of slack considering how silly they can be sometimes.

16 days till Christmas

I haven't bought a tree yet but I'm planning to go to Kiyose, a couple stations over, to buy a small potted one. Apparently they only cost about 2000 yen each. I will probably eventually download some Christmas music to play on the computer as the time gets a little closer. I've already downloaded A Muppets Christmas Carol and Charlie Brown's Christmas and burnt them to CD so I can watch them on TV. I went to Odaiba with Fumiko on the weekend and every store had "Merry Christmas" plastered everywhere! God bless their little heathen hearts!

I taught my first private this morning. What a scam! 2500 yen just to sit there for an hour and listen to this lady talk! Actually it was more like an hour and a half. She was just so talkative and fascinated with foreigners! I'll have to be a little more strict next time. And she has a friend who wants to learn english too. And her husband is also interested. So I'm going to try and see if I can get them to all do it at once if I reduce my price a little. I'm really jealous of her apartment. It has a nice big balcony and it faces south so the bright sun made it nice and hot even though she had the balcony door wide open.

Our house, on the other hand, is still a freezer. I'm not sure if I related this little anecdote to ya'll before so I'll do it again. One night I went out to the grocery store and bought a nice chicken breast. Upon coming home, I have no idea what I did. Anyways, the next day I went off to work and on the way home that day all I could think about was the fantastic chicken I was going to cook. I opened the fridge and there it wasn't!! Then I saw it sitting on the shelf. It had been sitting out for a full 24 hours uncooked. Was I ever angry at myself! To make a boring story short, I cooked it anyways and I was fine. That's how cold our bottom floor is.

Adventures in spending

I bought an $80 pair of pants the other day. That might not seem like much in of itself but when you consider the fact that I've probably never spent more than $40 on a pair of pants before in my life then you can see the significance. I know Chad likes to refer fondly to me as "cheapass." When I told him the news this morning he, the very astute person that he is commented, 'What's her name?'

Adventures in cooking

I commented earlier that my cooking has improved significantly since my roommate arrived and it has-sort of. My repetoire is still a little bare but I can cook a mean chickenbreast now. I'm a perfectly humble person but I have no problem saying that my chicken cooking is amazing. Tonight I had...I have no idea what. I cut up a boneless chickenbreast, threw it into with the pan with some oil and let cook on a small flame. Then when it was close to being pretty well cooked I threw in some chopped up green beans along with some garlic powder and some kind of special pepper that Jared got his dad to send him. Then when that was done I added some kind of "carbonara" sauce, let it soak up in the chicken for a couple minutes and then poured it onto a bowl of rice. "OISHII!!!" as the Japanese would say. Yummy. Along with a garlic bread picked up from the pastry shop, I thought it made a pretty good meal!

Unheard of..!

If i go out to soccer tomorrow night then that'll mean that in the past 3 weeks I will have gone out on 5 of the possible 6 weekend nights. That must be some kind of record. I gotta slow down a little before I make myself sick.

Let's talk about privates

No not that kind! Come on people. I'm talking about private lessons. Apparently I just got my first student practically by accident. Before I came here I had the idea in my head that I would be teaching tons of privates in my free time and I would come back to Canada super-rich. Well reality bites as they say. Actually it's neither good nor bad. Believe it or not, the Japanese aren't falling over each other to get you to teach them privately. Apparently that boat sailed a long time ago. But it doesn't really matter because I've found that after teaching students all day, the last thing I want to do is sit down with some more students in my free time. Life is too short to be teaching all the time.

Anyways I just happened be buying groceries at the grocery store one night. I paid for my food and then went over to the counter to bag it. A lady packing her own groceries across from me noticed that I had a little maple leaf pin on my lapel and she commented on it and asked me if I was Canadian. So anyways I talked to her for about 5 minutes and then she said that she wanted to learn english and she wanted me to teach her. So I gave her my email and we had our first meeting the other day just to get the details figured out. So I should end up doing my first private next week sometime. I'll let you know how it goes!

How much is that 950 yen hamburger in the window??

On the upside, I no longer need a calculator to do my currency conversions in a the grocery store. That 180 yen chicken breast is now worth $1.80 Cdn. That 178 yen litre of milk is now worth $1.78 Cdn. That 350 yen apple is still worth a $&%#*!~ fortune.

Ouch redux

When I came to Japan eight months ago, the Canadian dollar was worth 86 yen. Today it's worth 103 yen. Looks like someone chose the wrong time to come to Japan. I won't convert my nestegg to Canadian dollars until the dollar drops back to 86 yen so it looks like I might be in Japan for a long, long time. I suppose there's always hope that the seperatists will somehow win a majority and tear the country apart in January, causing the dollar to plummet.

My social calendar...or lack thereof

It's minus-352 degrees celcius tonight. Actually it's 10 but it feels a lot colder. It's ok during the day but on the bike ride home I freeze my BUTT off! Which officially makes me the world's biggest jackass for buying a $400 leather jacket one year and then leaving at home in Canada when I left for Japan the next

One person commented to me the other day how much they enjoyed my blog, to which I flabbergastedly (is that a word?) replied, "Really!!??" Apparently I have good writing skills or something. I admit that this blog has potential but it's severely handicapped by the fact that, to be perfectly honest, I am quite a boring person. My idea of a good time is staying home. If videogames were interesting then I would be on the front pages of all the tabloids. Actually that's not quite true-I don't even play games that much anymore which is really sad because I've lost my only passion-such as it was.

As a result of this social inactivity, I've found it really hard to keep a schedule book. They always told us to do this in school and I would faithfully fill it out for the first couple of days of school and then never look at it again. The fact of the matter is, I just don't need one. There's so much empty space in my social calender that you could park a big Mack truck in there. Despite my flaws, I recently bought a new scheduler and I am determined to be one of those people who carry it around everywhere and always need to consult it. The reason why I bought one was because the kids in the tv drama "Nobuta o Producer" all had one and I was inspired to get one myself. Anyways I went to this amazing store called Tokyu Hands (it's got EVERYTHING!) to look at schedulers and this is what I came out with:


Isn't it kawaii???? It's Tintin! Can you believe it, it's my childhood comic hero! In Japan of all places. Anyways I'm gonna make a go of this scheduler thing so we'll see how it works out. It would probably help more if I did more stuff. I have dates this Saturday and Wednesday so we'll see if that helps fill up the space (how was the bolding on that Andrew? Now you can just skim through and look for the interesting words.)