Week Six

well hello,
how are you?
i am fine.
thank you for asking. hehehe...

hahaha ok ok i'm back for part two in which i will catch you all up, up until this very day that is march the 2nd 2008. the valentines are still unfinished, although a few more have been accomplished. hmmm (a tap on the nose one or two) where were we where were we... the weekend of february 17th and 18th (nothing too notable happened at work i dont think... oh! i got sick on i think thrusday or friday and it was not my finest day). on saturday night i went to this little bar called the red spanky with mamiko who is the manager at okubo amity.
i met her for drinks and we talked and the bartender was really cute cause he was really shy to speak english but he tried and he was really nice and it was a lot of fun. mamiko is really cool and i really like her and im really glad i work with her and im really lucky she is my manager. we stayed at the bar until it closed meaning until aboslutely everyone went home and then we packed it in. on sunday morning i woke up really early... i think i have seen the sun rise in okubo quite a few times since i here. once i had decided it was a decent enough hour to get up and about i went grocery shopping for the second time since i have been here (now 6 weeks). in okubo as far as i know we have vivre and suty which are large shopping malls that have a department store like layout and all the stores are arranged in an open concept. suty is really huge... there are several buildings that comprise the suty complex. on the top floor of vivre is a movie theatre with english and japanese films (my blueberry nights is coming out on the 22nd and im really really excited cause it looks exceptionally good and i kind of want to see evening has anyone seen it?) and on the bottom floor of both are huge grocery stores that have a bakery and fresh sushi rolls
and other yummy things and an ice cream shop and lots of other good things. the bakeries here are excpetional and ive been taking full advantage of them (i just ate this savory curry donut thing that was really good and what looked a little like an english muffin pocket with brie and ham in it they were very yummy). i spent along time wandering around suty and vivre and perusing (is that how you spell it?) until i decided to buy groceries at vivre. i will have you know that the fruit is very expensive i saw a mango for 10 dollars and strawberries for 15! and i bought what i thought were oranges because they were on sale and they turned out to be grapefruit yuck! i also bought what i thought was oatmeal but then i took it to work and it turned out to be just plain wheat that you're supposed to mix with rice but chika told me that there is oatmeal like the stuff for breakfast but it comes in boxes in the cereal isle (how do you spell isle? aile? i have no idea) there is no where near as much cereal here as there is in canada. also dried fruit and nuts are also very expensive which makes me sad and miss the bulk barn in fairview mall and i think there was one in the scarbrough town centre too. after careful deliberation i chose two freshly made sushi rolls and some freshly sliced pinapple and decided to go home for a picnic. (when i went shopping all the sales ladies and girls were really nice to me and tried to speak to me in english or just smiled and pointed and when you try something on you have to put a weird paper hat bag thing on your head). i think i got salmon with luttuce and japanese mayonaise and what could have been eel or some type of fish with a sweet teriyaki sauce and cucumber. so i went home and sat on my beautiful wooden floor took out my cutting board with the little fishy symbol on it and my super sharp sashimi knife and had a picnic on my floor that was very satisfying. it was lots of fun and i was very happy with me meal but i think picnics are more fun with two eating in bed is more fun alone.

after i was through with my picnic i went to akashi to meet yuka (my language exchange partner) and have my first japanese lesson. we met at a starbucks (there are lots its the primary coffee shop) right outside the station and practiced english conversation for an hour and then she tried to teach me some japanese for an hour. im not sure how successful it was... watashi wa samantha desu which mean my name is samantha watashi wa is I and desu is the to be verb... i think.

i know some words in japanese but i really have no idea how to put sentances together. the grammar and word order is sentances together. the grammar and word order is completely different. its all very confusing for me. and different. and i cant pronounce half the words correctly... im still saying most of my students names wrong although they are very sweet about it and just quietly correct me or ignore it...apparently you're not supposed to move your tongue when you speak like in english. in japanese there are no r or v sounds so when i was teaching my students the letter v i made them bite their bottem lip and blow.

yuka is a really nice girl. she is in her first year as a high school teacher and just finished making her first exams which sound really hard and shes an expert japanese teacher cause she taught maggie before me and jon before her. after we were done learning we packed up and i came home to take a shower and get ready for our midnight trip to the mountain.

around 11pm i headed out for sannomiya where i met ayako's friend chie who is a very nice girl and we headed over to the bus terminal where we met ayako and her boyfriend. after getting something to eat at lawson's for breakfast in the morning (i got a rice ball with chicken and mayonnaise- mayonnaise is everywhere) we mounted a bus to the mountain (i couldnt tell you where this mountain is or what it's called) with a bunch of kids going on a class trip. going to the mountain was a very surreal experience, surreal in that we left at one in the morning got on a bus with a bunch of kids with all their ski gear, i had no idea where we were going or what was happening when we just randomly stopped in various locations and at the end of the 2 hour ride the parked the bus outside a ski lodge and left us there.

so at like 3 in the morning they parked this bus in that parking lot and turned off the lights and i kept waiting for them to let us out and tell us where we were going to sleep but no they just left us there. we were just supposed to sleep in this big bus until it was time to get up and go snowboarding. it was very weird and of course i couldnt sleep and all i kept thinking was how bad it was for the environment to leave this bus running all night. at 6am they turned on the lights and told us it was time to get up and go. we drove 15 more minutes to the hill and then it was off to the slopes. given my lack of sleep and awkward position i didnt feel too bad as we got up and went to rent my equiptment and get all ready (although the next day my neck killed from sleeping on the bus i think).

i was fully outfitted in ayako's old gear except for a hat and scarf which i supplied and i rented boots and a board. ayako and chie are avid snowboarders while i am if anything a beginner. but i didnt fall down too much so it was ok. we snowboarded for a good long time until it was ok. we snowboarded for a good long time until it was time to get ready to hop on the bus at 5pm.

ayako and chie were really good and they helped me out and gave me some tips and snowboarded with me even though they could go much faster and we stopped and got curry and rice for lunch at the ski lodge on the hill. the boarding wasnt too bad but i had a lot of trouble getting on and off the chair lifts and by the end of the day the guy knew to stop it for me. it was just like canada.

the snow was really good and powdery and fluffy and stuff cause it had snowed all night and there was lots of it which was strange because we hadnt travelled too far and there was no snow in okubo. it was really pretty. it was a lot of fun, but by the end of it i was pretty sleepy and tired and happy to go home.

we headed home on the bus and after another two hours arrived back in sannomiya. chie went home because she had work in the morning and was tired but i decided to wait with ayako with her boyfriend and we went to this burger place called mos burger. mos burger is a fast food chain in japan but its like a million times mos burger. mos burger is a fast food chain in japan but its like a million times nicer than any wendys of macdonalds and the burgers were really yummy.mine had a tomoto and this chilli stuff on it and it was really good. after a couple of hours her boyfriend come and gave me a lift it was really good. after a couple of hours her boyfriend come and gave me a lift to the train station and i got on my way home. the end.

the next day at work i was pretty sore most notably my neck and thighs...snowboarding is hard thigh work at least for me. the work week was ok i was sick off and on the whole week and have had a cold since so i havent been able to sleep very well because i cant sleep when i cant breath through my nose.

i decided that my warm-up for all my table classes (those are the ones for elementary aged children and above) would be jobs because we had this topic card with a bunch of different jobs on it. by the third class i had a routine in which first i went through all the jobs with them and then explained what a job was ie. my job was to be a teacher and their jobs were to be students and thats our work and then we thought of other jobs while i drew pictures and acted out things to help them out. we played charades (which im pretty sure they all thoroughly enjoyed even the shy ones) and i asked them what even the shy ones) and i asked them what their parents jobs were and then i asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.

i explained to all of them that my mom was a nurse and i was a teacher and when i was little (10 years old) i wanted to be a marine biologist which is a scientist that studies animals under the sea (i drew a dolphin and showed them a picture of a mad scientist) and asked them what they wanted to be when they were 22! years old.

i got a cartoonist, a fisherman, a kindergarten teacher, a baseball player, a flourist, and a lot of a baseball player, a flourist, a video game designer, and a lot of i dont knows... they're only eight. they are pretty cute i must admit. i think it was a pretty good warm up and they seemed to enjoy it...i was pretty proud of myself.

on saturday last week i went with ayako to watch her friends soccer game, we went after work and we had beef bowls for dinner which is a bowl of rice and slices of beef from this apparently famous fast food beef bowl restaurant...ayako told me there is one in new york and it is really famous. the soccer game was somewhere in kobe at a place where they have a bunch of outdoor fields with big huge nets around them where the boys meet every week to have some fun. ayakos boyfriend couldnt come cause he had to work but chie was there with her boyfriend and a bunch the other people i had met at dinner and a lot of other boys.

we sat under this little tent and watched the boys played soccer. it was cute they were such little kids and when it started to snow they were all playing in the snow and had a big snowball fight and it was cute and everyone and the whole field was covered in pretty powdery snow and they were slipping all over the place it was funny. it was also very cold... my toes froze. we got home late.. i fell asleep in the car and chie and her boyfriend gave me a ride home.

on sunday i went to OSAKA!!! Osaka is cool no doubt. i mean its pretty awsome. i mean i was in awe. to begin at the beginning i went with a boy i only know as glasses (because he wears big thick glasses) that i met at the dinner with ayako and her friends. ayako asked him to take me because he knows osaka and she doesnt really like osaka cause its too busy for her. he is really nice and he speaks some english.

we met on sunday morning at i think around 11pm cause i was late oops (although i have been early by 15minutes at least for everything else cause thats how they do it here!) in sannomiya and then we took the train to osaka. its an hour train ride to osaka from sannomiya station so an hour and a half from okubo but i dont mind cause i like the train. haha hes really funny... on the train he got out his english dictionary which is a dictionary of all the beatles songs and all these phrases and some of them are pretty odd and he asked me what all these strange words meant and i tried to explain.

when we got to osaka we had to cross over from JR station to the subway where we took the subway to some stop i forget the name of.first we had lunch and i took pictures of all these pretty pictures painted on the walls. we had lunch at this pretty restaurant that reminded me of the ones in the distillary with the dark unfinished wood and the tall ceilings and the big farm beams.

for lunch i had something that sounds like chicken rice although i think that is incorrect because im pretty sure there is no chicken in it. it came in this really hot stone bowl and it was rice with this tomato paste stuff and on top of it with this tomato paste stuff and on top of it they cracked a raw egg that cokked when it touch the bowl. it was pretty good and i was really full. before that they brough us this trio of a little salad and potato salad and a little cup of soup it was really good and beautiful it made me quite delighted.

after lunch i had tea and it was utterly perfect i was quite delighted. there was a perfect white china saucer and a perfectly round white white teacup and little lumps of raw brown and white sugar and a little jug of cream and a little cup of hot milk. i cannot tell you how my stomach bubbled and i grinned and how giddy i became when they brought it. it just seemed so nice.

at the restaurant they had all these flyers for clubs and shows and stuff and i stuffed them all into my bag on the way to the washroom.

after lunch we walked around this area where there were a lot of clothing store and i think its where the cool kids hang out and that is where we went to the bape store and i looked around for aaron. after that we went to this area that was another shopping area but it was a lot more colourful and everything was kind of closer together and more piled on each other and jumbled and there were lots of kids wearing colourful clothing and there was this little circle square and it was called american something or other.

and then we crossed a bridge and we went to this area called namba. namba is spectacular. it is everything you could imagine japan would be. all i did was look up with my eyes wide and my mouth gaped and my head tilted way back and more than once he had to pull me out of the way of a passing car. there were so many things and they were so big and tall and colourful it gives me chills just thinking about it. i cant describe it i took pictures. being there made me ecstatic, ecstatically happy. it was all bubbly glee. the boy just laughed at me cause i was so amazed and happy i think i skipped.

there was this really tall building with a running manon it that i think it something of a landmark and i stopped to take a picture every five seconds. we crossed a bridge over a river that chika told me the osakians every five seconds. we crossed a bridge over a river that chika told me the osakians jumped in when their baseball team won the big game but its really dirty so lots of them got sick. there was this other really big building and it had this gigantic picture of a smiling mans face on it. we went in and inside it is this recreation of old osaka and there are all these little stands and restaurants and this alleyway with all these fortune tellers and palm readers it was really cool and the elevator you took to get up was it was plastered in these colourful pictures of little asian men with long beards and wiskers on all sides and it was magnificant. when we got out of the elevator they took our picture and at the end glasses got it for me... its in sepia tones and there is a string of chinese laters with the longest word i have ever seen written backwards, its pretty cool.

in namba and the rest of osaka there are a million zillion takuyaki venders cause its really famous in osaka and people love it like our street meet. takuyaki are these little balls of fried dough with octopus in them and you make them on these special metal trays with all these little ball holders and the venders use these little sticks to turn them really quickly its cool. i tried takuyaki in okubo cause there was this truck outside the pachinko place and i wanted to try some street food but i didnt really like it cause its kinda gooey and the dough tastes kinda yucky and uncooked to me but i took the rest to work for lunch and everyone else really liked it.

oh! apparently as we were walking through namba there were a bunch of these men and they all bowed to me as i walked by in a line but i didnt even notice and they were yakuza! yakuza are the chinese mafia in japan i know becasue it was in my book out. im not sure why they would boy to me but glasses said so im sad i missed it.

after we left namba we walked through a big arcade and this area where they sell a lot of electornics. we went to a cafe. i had hot chocolate and a peice of cake that was all these really thin crepes with creme and yunny syrupy stuff sandwiched inbetween that was really good.

then we walked to namba station and headed back to JR so we could take the train back to sannomiya to meet ayako and their other friend whose name i dont know but who i identify as aerobics and who is really funny. we met them at macdonalds and walked over to motomachi (another part of kobe close to sannomiya...just the next stop over) to meet chie at the department store she works at... its a really fancy department store... all of them seem to be. motomachi seems more like the yorkville area or the financial district of toronto and it was pretty quite.

ayako drove us to the harbour and we decided on a place to eat. its really pretty and there is this big complex of restaurants to eat at. we wanted to go to this restaurant where you eat a lot of different food on sticks but it was too busy so we went to a brazilian restaurant that has a buffet and then they bring around this big sticks of roasted meat and shave you off a peice. it was really good and we got lots of pinapple.

after dinner we went to the carnival grounds across the street where they have a merry-go-round and a really really big ferris wheel and an arcade. in the arcade glasses won us some ice cream from this machine and it was really good... they were these weird little balls that were gooey rice paste stuff on the outside and ice cream inside. there was also this place that had all these sticker picture machines... we went in and took a bunch of funny pictures and we shared the stickers... it was fun... and we shared the stickers... it was fun... i'll show you a couple of the pictures that i have on my phone. and that was the end of the night. the end.
ok well i'm gonna stop there cause this place is gonna close in a few minutes,
but i can't believe i'm not done yet. almost.
ok i'll talk to you again soon
byeeee