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.