Next I would like to discuss something that is very strange to me, but it is something I have honestly never thought about before. I met someone, who is handicapped, and doesn't speak English. You might be wondering to yourself why I find it so strange, but for some reason it was honestly something I never thought about before. I'm not sure if I thought handicapped kids don't exist in other parts of the world or something of the sort, but honestly I have never been in the situation I was placed in this past Monday in class.
So the class was one for the HUSTEP students, aka the class is all in English, however higher level English speaking Japanese students are allowed to attend these classes as well to meet us tall foreigners to practice their English. So I sat down and one of my friends (he is Japanese) is sitting across the aisle from me, and next to him, sitting down is a Japanese girl. We begin talking a little bit because we are in the same group and we have a project due yadda yadda yadda and he introduces me to his friend.
So her name was Fumi, and something about her seemed slightly odd. Now I know that I previously said handicapped, but I think she had a slight case of Autism. In Japanese culture, asking someone else for something is considered, like, well it's just something you try to NOT do I suppose you could say. I'm not saying that it's bad that you ask someone else for something, between friends and such obviously this happens all the time. But I introduced myself, and she introduced herself, and instantly she held out her small hand, and asked me "Can I have some candy?"
I honestly don't know why it struck me so much, but I was honestly speechless. I just sort of stared at her hand for several moments not really thinking about what just happened. Like I said I don't know why, it just surprised me so much and yeah I don't really know. My friend after a second whispers something to her and he grabs a piece of bread (Japanese bread is basically like candy bread) out of his bag and gives it to her and she seemed to be satisfied with that.
I actually ended up not even responding at all, and just sort of turned back towards the front of the class. I really have no idea why I was shocked so much. I still think about it from time to time, I really don't know why...
Last for today, is a short story about a boy being late. So a couple weekends ago, me and the soccer team went to Niseko, which is Japan's most famous ski resort. We were to meet at 7:30 in the morning, to catch the 7:45 bus, but alas, like most group trips, there's always that one late kid. Now it's been awhile since I've been on a group trip, but I was pretty shocked by what happened.
So 7:45 rolls around, and we hop on the bus at the train station, and so we are sitting on the bus, and a couple of the guys have been in contact with the late kid, and he is apparently on his way to the station via taxi. This is 7:45. 7:47 rolls around, and supposedly the kid has gotten out of the taxi and is making his way towards the bus. At 7:49, I see him round the corner, and like a little kid, my face lights up because I am super happy the kid made it. The bus driver was nice enough to wait 4 minutes, and I turned to the kid next to me to express my happiness about the late guy still making the trip.
Much to my surprise, the guy next to me, along with the rest of the soccer team, was completely silent, sitting there looking rather solemn. I was pretty shocked by this. I stopped and tried to think for a second about what would happen in the states if this had happened, and well I am pretty sure everyone would be pretty happy the guy had made it, even though we DID make the bus way (4 minutes) they would still be happy he made it.
This was not the case with the Japanese guys. When the guy finally put his stuff down, he came back to where most of the soccer team was sitting and started to apologize, but no one really said anything to him. And I don't mean any kind of apology either. In Japanese there are levels of ways to say sorry, from friends using slang that would translate as "my bad" to saying sorry to your boss which would literally translate as "I humbly have no reason for my terrible actions." Lets just say he was using something that was closer to the latter. None of the other Japanese guys did anything though. He apologized several times, to everyone, and we all just sat there, completely silent.
After about an hour or so I asked the kid next to my why and he said it was because we had made the bus wait for us. I appreciate the Japanese system of transportation and how prompt and on time it is, but damn, this was pretty ridiculous. Before the late kid had arrived a lot of the guys had been saying "残念ですね” which translates as 'that's too bad,' so I hope they were using it in, a regretful manner, rather than the more literal meaning of the translation, but honestly after seeing how the situation unfolded I can't be sure which one they meant.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
googuru
Hello everybody!
So I've got 4 finals, 4 papers, and 4 final presentations...not much time to write a blog, but here I am!
I've got a couple of things to write about, but I will try to keep it short n sweet. So a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to go drinking with a couple of guys that work here at Nestle in Japan. I was able to meet one of them through my Japanese zemi, and he had expressed interest in the possibility of me teaching English to a couple of guys at Nestle. So we went to this American style bar which had a ton of import beers and drinks and stuff, and we sat down, me and 2 guys from nestle for a while to discuss things over.
In case no one knows, Japanese business men are called salary men, or sarari men in Japanese, and there is no limit to how much they work and sacrifice for their company. The one guy had worked a 20 hour day previously, and had already worked 11 hours before meeting up with me to go out. That is crazy.
We arrived at the bar around 7:00, but around 9:00 one of the guys got a call from work. He excused himself and spent 15 minutes talking on the phone, before coming back and saying that he has to actually go BACK to work. This is at 9:15 on a Friday night, that he is going BACK to work. He said that the majority of the employees were actually still at work. So it was just me and another guy talking and eating and drinking till around 10:30 the other guy came back from work. Honestly ridiculous.
So Japanese bars are extremely expensive by the way. For the 3 of us, from 7-11, the bill was 190$. Honestly ridiculous.
At around 11, another guy from Nestle got off work and decided to meet us, so we decided to meet him at a different place, so we walked a couple of blocks over to a Chinese joint where we met up with him. We were there till around 12:30 when we finally decided to call it a night. It was actually a lot of fun. We talked a bit about Japanese and American business, some other business type things, the difference between a cute girl, and a beautiful girl, and it was overall a very enjoyable evening.
Japanese researchers, and other academics studying Japanese language have been unable to figure out where the heck Japanese language comes from. Their written system comes from China, but their grammar is closer to Korean, but neither of them really make sense. There's not so much correlation between languages English and Latin, but I think I have finally found the answer.
Japanese people, and their language descend from WOOKIES!! That's right, the walking carpets from Star Wars are ACTUALLY the ancestors of the Japanese people.
Now of course I am joking, but I will tell you why I think this is true, Japanese people love food. If you remember, in episode 6 of Star Wars, on the moon Endor, chewie sees a small dead animal strapped to a tree, and without thinking, grabs it to start digging in. ITS A TRAP! haha. But really, Han states that chewie is "always thinking with his stomach," which I think applies perfectly to the Japanese people.
I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were talking about Europe. I was talking about how I wanted to go there to see the museums and architecture and to see a real soccer game. He commented that he wanted to go there...to eat the food!!
In my reading Japanese class, we were reading an article about Japanese people smoking, and a company that took a survey. The results of the survey showed that people who smoked, and were shown pictures of diseased lungs, yellow teeth, and other nasty things that go along with smoking, were actually LESS LIKELY to quit smoking, than people who were simply told "if you stop smoking, food will taste better." I was shocked by the results of that survey.
And finally, Japanese people eat like vacuums. Traditional Japanese portions are pretty small. You get some rice, some oddly shaped balls of things here and there, and boom that is dinner. But man sometimes Japanese people eat like 3 times as much as I do. Last Sunday night I went to a ramen joint with a couple of the guys from the soccer team, and we all got giant bowls of ramen. These are huge bowls, like a 4.5 inch radius bowl, with tons of noodles and other floating goodies inside. At each table though, were baskets of boiled eggs that we could eat along with our meal for free. So before we even get our ramen, we all open 2 up and chow down because we were mega hungry. Once we got the ramen though, they didn't stop. By the end of the meal, the SMALLEST guy at the table, had eaten all of his ramen, and 7 hard boiled eggs. SEVEN!!! That is nuts. I think like 4 hard boiled eggs would fill me up, let alone 7, plus all the ramen and stuff on top of that. I was honestly shocked.
Oh, and in my dorm we have a tv in the lobby. There are only 6 channels, though, which is kind of lame. But 2 of them are news and show channels, 1 is 24/7 soap (zz) channel, and the other 3 channels, yes 50% of the channels, are 100% of the time cooking show channels. They make the food network look like pretty bad. I mean, they are constantly cooking good on these 3 channels, with different shows and different hosts going around Japan finding strange foods (haha yeah imagine that, Japanese people finding something STRANGE in Japanese cuisine...) and eating them and yelling 'umai!!' which means basically tasty!
So whether or not Japanese people are actually descendants of Wookies (Hey it was a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away) has yet to be proven, but I think I may have found an interesting clue.
So I've got 4 finals, 4 papers, and 4 final presentations...not much time to write a blog, but here I am!
I've got a couple of things to write about, but I will try to keep it short n sweet. So a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to go drinking with a couple of guys that work here at Nestle in Japan. I was able to meet one of them through my Japanese zemi, and he had expressed interest in the possibility of me teaching English to a couple of guys at Nestle. So we went to this American style bar which had a ton of import beers and drinks and stuff, and we sat down, me and 2 guys from nestle for a while to discuss things over.
In case no one knows, Japanese business men are called salary men, or sarari men in Japanese, and there is no limit to how much they work and sacrifice for their company. The one guy had worked a 20 hour day previously, and had already worked 11 hours before meeting up with me to go out. That is crazy.
We arrived at the bar around 7:00, but around 9:00 one of the guys got a call from work. He excused himself and spent 15 minutes talking on the phone, before coming back and saying that he has to actually go BACK to work. This is at 9:15 on a Friday night, that he is going BACK to work. He said that the majority of the employees were actually still at work. So it was just me and another guy talking and eating and drinking till around 10:30 the other guy came back from work. Honestly ridiculous.
So Japanese bars are extremely expensive by the way. For the 3 of us, from 7-11, the bill was 190$. Honestly ridiculous.
At around 11, another guy from Nestle got off work and decided to meet us, so we decided to meet him at a different place, so we walked a couple of blocks over to a Chinese joint where we met up with him. We were there till around 12:30 when we finally decided to call it a night. It was actually a lot of fun. We talked a bit about Japanese and American business, some other business type things, the difference between a cute girl, and a beautiful girl, and it was overall a very enjoyable evening.
Japanese researchers, and other academics studying Japanese language have been unable to figure out where the heck Japanese language comes from. Their written system comes from China, but their grammar is closer to Korean, but neither of them really make sense. There's not so much correlation between languages English and Latin, but I think I have finally found the answer.
Japanese people, and their language descend from WOOKIES!! That's right, the walking carpets from Star Wars are ACTUALLY the ancestors of the Japanese people.
Now of course I am joking, but I will tell you why I think this is true, Japanese people love food. If you remember, in episode 6 of Star Wars, on the moon Endor, chewie sees a small dead animal strapped to a tree, and without thinking, grabs it to start digging in. ITS A TRAP! haha. But really, Han states that chewie is "always thinking with his stomach," which I think applies perfectly to the Japanese people.
I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were talking about Europe. I was talking about how I wanted to go there to see the museums and architecture and to see a real soccer game. He commented that he wanted to go there...to eat the food!!
In my reading Japanese class, we were reading an article about Japanese people smoking, and a company that took a survey. The results of the survey showed that people who smoked, and were shown pictures of diseased lungs, yellow teeth, and other nasty things that go along with smoking, were actually LESS LIKELY to quit smoking, than people who were simply told "if you stop smoking, food will taste better." I was shocked by the results of that survey.
And finally, Japanese people eat like vacuums. Traditional Japanese portions are pretty small. You get some rice, some oddly shaped balls of things here and there, and boom that is dinner. But man sometimes Japanese people eat like 3 times as much as I do. Last Sunday night I went to a ramen joint with a couple of the guys from the soccer team, and we all got giant bowls of ramen. These are huge bowls, like a 4.5 inch radius bowl, with tons of noodles and other floating goodies inside. At each table though, were baskets of boiled eggs that we could eat along with our meal for free. So before we even get our ramen, we all open 2 up and chow down because we were mega hungry. Once we got the ramen though, they didn't stop. By the end of the meal, the SMALLEST guy at the table, had eaten all of his ramen, and 7 hard boiled eggs. SEVEN!!! That is nuts. I think like 4 hard boiled eggs would fill me up, let alone 7, plus all the ramen and stuff on top of that. I was honestly shocked.
Oh, and in my dorm we have a tv in the lobby. There are only 6 channels, though, which is kind of lame. But 2 of them are news and show channels, 1 is 24/7 soap (zz) channel, and the other 3 channels, yes 50% of the channels, are 100% of the time cooking show channels. They make the food network look like pretty bad. I mean, they are constantly cooking good on these 3 channels, with different shows and different hosts going around Japan finding strange foods (haha yeah imagine that, Japanese people finding something STRANGE in Japanese cuisine...) and eating them and yelling 'umai!!' which means basically tasty!
So whether or not Japanese people are actually descendants of Wookies (Hey it was a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away) has yet to be proven, but I think I may have found an interesting clue.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Happy Happy new year!
My first blog post of 2010! Yay for insignificance!
So 'happy new years!' in Japanese is akemasite omedetou gozaimasu. Just use the same vowel sounds as Spanish and you can get pretty close without knowing any other Japanese. I thought it would be handy to know this phrase in preparation for the new year, but, well, not really.
Japanese people do xmas and new years a little bit backwards, or should I say the total opposite from Americans. We get together with family, eat tons of good food (wish I could have some :/) and give out presents. Then on new years eve we party like it's 1969, 1999, or 2009 yay, and we see our friends and have fun.
Japanese people don't exactly party on xmas, but it's traditionally a time for couples to go out together, grab a drink and spend a good evening together. And new years is the family time.
So I actually didn't see any Japanese people on new years eve, and thus never even said the phrase so a Japanese person...fail.
But I did learn that happy new years is feliz anyo nueva in Spanish!! hooray! You may be wondering why am I spouting out Spanish in Japan, well it's because I went to a fiesta for new years! wee!!
By 5:00 on new years eve I still had no plans. Hadn't really figured anything out, and time was winding down. I made a couple of calls and one of my friends said that he was meeting up with an American buddy of his, and he invited me to come along. So we showed up at said friend's place around 8, and we hung out there for around an hour and a half, and then we set out for this party that he knew about.
We got to a little restaurant that had been rented out for the evening, and converted into a small party room. There were only a few people there, but they streamed in as it got closer to 11, and by 11:15 the tiny room was jam packed with people from all around the world. For the most part everyone at the party was Spanish speaking, or of European descent. People from Spain, Finland, Columbus, Poland, and Libya. If we were in Tokyo, or maybe Kyoto I would have not been so surprised, but it was really amazing to see so many people from different backgrounds in Sapporo Japan. Turns out the only Americans that were there were me and the 2 guys that had brought me.
12:00 rolls around and everyone was singing, laughing, and dancing the night around. I shared a couple versus of feliz navidad with a guy from Panama, that was pretty funny. A Brazilian (brazziolion, how much is that again) was lighting fireworks in the street from his hand....which was rather dangerous, but he was able to not blow his arm off. darn.
Overall it was a pretty fun night. I am not going to lie and say that I didn't miss any of my friends/family/everyone and everything in America, but it was nice to meet some new people from different corners of the world, and share the joy of ringing in the new year.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that the Buckeyes won? WOOHOO!! Finally we weren't beaten by some crap SEC hicks, or crappers from the PAC. I actually got to watch the 3rd quarter via skype and my dad pointing the camera at the tv. Believe it or not the picture was actually pretty good.
Finally, if someone were to ask me what I miss about America the most right now, I would honestly have to say food. Typical American yes I know, but the 5-10 meals that I have cooked for myself the last 3 odd months have begun to lose their taste a bit. I find myself thinking in my head "Gee brain what do you want to eat tonight? The same thing we eat every night pinky, eggs, bacon, and toast!"
However, cooking allows me time to sit back and think. And I've been thinking a lot about how much homework I have. I have 4 final papers, 4 final presentations, and 4 finals. That's really not so bad, but this last week has been absolute murder. Never before in my existence have I had to do work at this time of year. Normally in between xmas and new years, I vegetate like a mushroom, or go skiing, or do anything...besides homework. So it's been really tough to motivate myself recently, but I found out why!!
Yes...I have finally found the answer. People of non-Asian descent are genetically lazier than people of Asian descent. You see, some odd 3-4 thousand years ago (maybe a little more recent I have no idea...) a couple of guys were sitting around a campfire looking at pictures they drew. A couple of the guys had created this cool new system where if you put pictures of stuff together, it means things! Like let's draw a cliff, with a rock in front of it, and that will be the picture for rock! SWEEETTTT!!
Some of the other guys at the campfire weren't so impressed though, they were too busy checking themselves out in the mirror or something, so they didn't really pay attention. When the other guys tried to teach them the language of writing, they said 'screw this' and they decided to use symbols that represented sounds, not ideas, to write with. So today, we have 26 letters, and the Japanese language has....5k Kanji...including this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biang_biang_noodles
That kanji has 57 strokes, and you have to do all that work just to write NOODLE....
And therefore, we have found my ancestry, and why I am lazy...sometimes.
So 'happy new years!' in Japanese is akemasite omedetou gozaimasu. Just use the same vowel sounds as Spanish and you can get pretty close without knowing any other Japanese. I thought it would be handy to know this phrase in preparation for the new year, but, well, not really.
Japanese people do xmas and new years a little bit backwards, or should I say the total opposite from Americans. We get together with family, eat tons of good food (wish I could have some :/) and give out presents. Then on new years eve we party like it's 1969, 1999, or 2009 yay, and we see our friends and have fun.
Japanese people don't exactly party on xmas, but it's traditionally a time for couples to go out together, grab a drink and spend a good evening together. And new years is the family time.
So I actually didn't see any Japanese people on new years eve, and thus never even said the phrase so a Japanese person...fail.
But I did learn that happy new years is feliz anyo nueva in Spanish!! hooray! You may be wondering why am I spouting out Spanish in Japan, well it's because I went to a fiesta for new years! wee!!
By 5:00 on new years eve I still had no plans. Hadn't really figured anything out, and time was winding down. I made a couple of calls and one of my friends said that he was meeting up with an American buddy of his, and he invited me to come along. So we showed up at said friend's place around 8, and we hung out there for around an hour and a half, and then we set out for this party that he knew about.
We got to a little restaurant that had been rented out for the evening, and converted into a small party room. There were only a few people there, but they streamed in as it got closer to 11, and by 11:15 the tiny room was jam packed with people from all around the world. For the most part everyone at the party was Spanish speaking, or of European descent. People from Spain, Finland, Columbus, Poland, and Libya. If we were in Tokyo, or maybe Kyoto I would have not been so surprised, but it was really amazing to see so many people from different backgrounds in Sapporo Japan. Turns out the only Americans that were there were me and the 2 guys that had brought me.
12:00 rolls around and everyone was singing, laughing, and dancing the night around. I shared a couple versus of feliz navidad with a guy from Panama, that was pretty funny. A Brazilian (brazziolion, how much is that again) was lighting fireworks in the street from his hand....which was rather dangerous, but he was able to not blow his arm off. darn.
Overall it was a pretty fun night. I am not going to lie and say that I didn't miss any of my friends/family/everyone and everything in America, but it was nice to meet some new people from different corners of the world, and share the joy of ringing in the new year.
Oh yeah, and did I mention that the Buckeyes won? WOOHOO!! Finally we weren't beaten by some crap SEC hicks, or crappers from the PAC. I actually got to watch the 3rd quarter via skype and my dad pointing the camera at the tv. Believe it or not the picture was actually pretty good.
Finally, if someone were to ask me what I miss about America the most right now, I would honestly have to say food. Typical American yes I know, but the 5-10 meals that I have cooked for myself the last 3 odd months have begun to lose their taste a bit. I find myself thinking in my head "Gee brain what do you want to eat tonight? The same thing we eat every night pinky, eggs, bacon, and toast!"
However, cooking allows me time to sit back and think. And I've been thinking a lot about how much homework I have. I have 4 final papers, 4 final presentations, and 4 finals. That's really not so bad, but this last week has been absolute murder. Never before in my existence have I had to do work at this time of year. Normally in between xmas and new years, I vegetate like a mushroom, or go skiing, or do anything...besides homework. So it's been really tough to motivate myself recently, but I found out why!!
Yes...I have finally found the answer. People of non-Asian descent are genetically lazier than people of Asian descent. You see, some odd 3-4 thousand years ago (maybe a little more recent I have no idea...) a couple of guys were sitting around a campfire looking at pictures they drew. A couple of the guys had created this cool new system where if you put pictures of stuff together, it means things! Like let's draw a cliff, with a rock in front of it, and that will be the picture for rock! SWEEETTTT!!
Some of the other guys at the campfire weren't so impressed though, they were too busy checking themselves out in the mirror or something, so they didn't really pay attention. When the other guys tried to teach them the language of writing, they said 'screw this' and they decided to use symbols that represented sounds, not ideas, to write with. So today, we have 26 letters, and the Japanese language has....5k Kanji...including this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biang_biang_noodles
That kanji has 57 strokes, and you have to do all that work just to write NOODLE....
And therefore, we have found my ancestry, and why I am lazy...sometimes.
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