Confessions of A Working Girl

I hate spam comments, by the way. I logged in and there were six of them today…better than other times, where I’ve logged in to find about 14 of them. >.<Anyway…I like my teachers and the classes…actually, it’s only one class, and it’s continued by all three of the teachers. That is: Monday and Thursday is one teacher, Tuesday and Friday is another teacher, and Wednesday is a third teacher. All of them are nice, and they obviously communicate since one class always picks up where the last one left off.Most days have been just class and English support study group…that is, that is the one “class” where the teacher will explain things in English. It’s optional, but it probably helps, so I go.Hmmm…what else has happened…? (This is why I should be updating this more frequently…then I’d remember everything!)KCP gave me a three month train pass, since I’d be traveling about 40-60 minutes by metro every morning and every afternoon. (A total of about 80-120 minutes travel time). To get to the school from my homestay, I have to change trains twice. One of the school officials, “Mr. Yamada” said that we might prefer to buy one of the plastic “Passmo” cards. The train passes that the school gave us were paper, so I thought that that was a very good idea. The Passmo cards, Mr. Yamada said, cost 500 yen, but they could combine the plastic card with the train pass that the school had already given us. Another benefit to the card is that instead of putting the ticket into the machine and pulling it out on the other side, with the card, you just touch the screen and it reads the card and you’re good to go.It took me, with less than a week of Japanese lessons, “asking” three different people on two different days where I could get the card. In other words, if I spoke Japanese, it probably wouldn’t have been that hard to find. Anyway, I bought the card, and it is much easier. Plus! The drink machines in the train stations? If you’ve charged extra money onto the passmo card, you can use that to buy a drink from the machine, rather than searching for coins or paper money. Of course, I had to try that just once. ^_^What else have I done…oh, getting a cell phone.  I went with a boy…”Michael”…who is in level 6 Japanese. (for comparison, I’m in level one) Well, first I researched online (in english) and decided that overall, since I was here for six months, a contract phone (including cancellation fee) was about the same as a pre-paid phone, price wise. Well…maybe a tiny bit more but I decided I would rather have a contract phone, since the phone company that sounded best–AU–doesn’t, as far as I know, have prepaid phones. Michael wanted a phone as well, and so when I asked him to go with me to get my phone he said sure.He invited a friend of his, a boy who lives in Japan, “Zach”. We met up on saturday. By the time we met, it was lunchtime, so we decided to go get lunch first. To my surprise, Zach insisted on paying for lunch. “You payed a lot of money to get here.” he told us. “I can buy lunch.”Next we went to the phone store. Michael and I picked out the phones we wanted, and were ready to buy when we found out that just passports aren’t enough to purchase contract phones. You also needed a foreigners card or a paper saying that it was all right for you to buy the phone. Since the town halls were closed, since it was saturday, we simply wandered around a little, then went back to our houses, saying that we would meet up again on Tuesday. Before that, Michael and I had to get that paper from our respective town halls.Getting the paper wasn’t that hard. It did cost 200 yen, but I figured that was better than waiting until February 8th, (James Dean’s birthday) which is when they said I could go back to pick up my foreigners card. So I got the paper on Monday, and Tuesday night after class we went back to go get the phones. Once we had gone through a bit of paperwork (with Michael and Zach translating for me) they asked us if we could wait an hour. We said sure, and went to get dinner. Dinner wasn’t bad, but I learned how hard it was to eat salad with chopsticks.We went back, collected our phones, and that was it. We exchanged numbers and emails, of course.The following Saturday, KCP had a culture class excursion to the Edo Tokyo Museum. It was pretty neat! We went around with a tour guide, I made new friends in the group…speaking of groups, since there were 14 of us and 2 tour guides, we split into two groups of 7…and somehow or other, I ended up being the only girl in my group! I thought that was kind of funny.Then, Sunday, my host mom, “Mrs. Hanako” took me and her son, “Peter” to a conveyor sushi belt restaurant. That was kind of fun. I got to try peach juice, candied sweet potatoes, and dango. I also had edamame and a little bit of sushi. I’m definitely going to end up back at that restaurant at some point–or one similar. It’s kind of fun, having to pull what you want off the conveyor belt. But you have to watch the color of the plates, since different colors mean different prices…anything from 100 yen to 500 yen per plate.Then we went to a small onsen–that is, heated, public baths, or hot springs. I still can’t believe I did that, since it required getting naked in front of who knows how many strangers. We were all girls, but still, it was sort of embarrassing. I’m glad I did it though…now I can say that I’ve been to a hot springs.  It was odd…there were baths outside that you could sit in and watch the sky. Some of the baths were really hot though!This week…more school…another culture class this coming saturday…if I think of anything I’ve missed, I’ll add it later. But that more or less brings me up to date on Japan…

2 Comments » Dad:

January 27th, 2011 @ 8:57 am Wow ! You are some busy person. Who would have guessed that the girl who lived in her room most of the time is now living and doing things all over the world.

AUnt Roz:

January 27th, 2011 @ 9:12 am What is the subject of the class?

Answer: the class is just japanese language, unless you mean the culture class, which is only japanese culture