Back to America: A Crazy Ride Home

Alright. First. Some business concerning previous posts. It has been brought to my attention by one andrewh that the download link I provided for the Magic the Gathering Computer Game was not free, and since no one likes things that aren't free, I invite you to try this link instead. I haven't used it myself, but don't blame me for any spyware or viruses. Freedom has a price.

Also, I discovered that the kanji game I have is not 250 Mannin no Kanken but rather Minna no DS seminar. It's pretty hard to understand and there really is no easy setting, so I'd recommend this game only for advanced students. I'm currently looking into getting some simpler games. Also, I found a good website for buying these games in America. Yeah.

Oh. So. On my flight home. I first flew from Central Japan Airport in Nagoya to San Francisco. There were these two babies on my flight who decided the time had finally come to see who could cry loudest, longest, and with most evident distress. I enjoyed the competitive spirit, but not the 90 minutes of sleep. There were also so many movies I wanted to see. I ended up watching The Darjeeling Limited, and Once. The Darjeeling Limited was funny and had a lot of great shots, but for some reason the sound came through so quietly even on full volume that I ended up missing some key lines of dialogue that explained the thrust of the movie. I still recommend even though there were gaps in the plot I couldn't hear.

Once, well, I really liked Once a lot. I've never really liked musicals, but I really like music, so I feel that there is a quality of overacting and insincerity in most musicals that are completely absent in this one. It's just people singing a bunch of good songs all the time. Man, I really dig Irish music, and there's this one scene when they're recording an album when they're singing and playing a song, and then they just start yelling in harmony and it's just so loud and so perfect. I cried a little during this movie. It is good.

Anyways, so I got to San Francisco and after picking up some See's candies for my Dad, I got on my flight to Chicago. I was planning on sleeping the whole flight, but fate had something else in mind. Have you ever seen that episode of House where he's on the airplane? It was like that, well, almost. There was a guy sitting three rows in front of me who was apparently having some sort of heart trouble. Luckily for him, the people sitting next to, behind, and across from him were all doctors. So these doctors would take a medical history and try to figure out what was wrong with him and the flight attendants were rushing back and forth bringing first aid kids and blankets and other passengers were standing up trying to see what was going on. Then they set up an IV and brought out the defibrillator, which they thankfully never had to use. It was all really intense and interesting, so there was no way I was gonna sleep. We called in to Air Traffic control and we got to enter immediately, and when we got there paramedics came on and took the lucky guy away in a stretcher. The diagnosis was some kind of arrhythmia (sp?). I wonder what would've happened if there weren't all those doctors right there.

Anyways, when it was all done, two of the doctors, who happened to be married to each other, commended there two small children on being quiet and letting Mommy and Daddy help someone. Then the first thing the little boy says is, "I hated that." Kids.

So that's why I got 90 minutes of sleep in the past 24 hours. I guess I'm gonna go to bed.

My Last Night in Japan

Well, it's finally here. My last night in Japan. It's gonna be tough going back to America, but i do sort of miss everyone. Anyways, here's some stuff I've learned/done over the past few days.

I bought a DS and some Kanji learning software. You can buy software here. Sorry that it's in Japanese, but the games are too. The game I got is called ２５０万人の漢検　or Kanji Practice for 2 million 500 thousand people. Again, one of those words that's much more efficient in Japanese. I haven't played it much yet, but it seems real fun. You can find a review here. I'll post my own review as I get used to the game. But right now, I'm pretty excited.

Other news, a revelation I had earlier this weekend, speaking a lot is important. I study Japanese a lot, but always vocab, grammar, listening, and kanji, never speaking. So i know a lot of words, even some my buddy Alex who has been here for the past 8 months doesn't know, but I'm just garbage at speaking. I mean, I can have a conversation and usually understand what's going on, but it takes me a while to say what I want to say, which makes it a real burden to have a conversation with me. So, what you can do, is find someone who is fluent in Japanese, and talk to them about anything. BUT, try to convey what you want to say as quickly as possible. Try to eliminate any time where you're just sitting there thinking or saying "uhhhh." You're going to make mistakes, so practicing with your Sensei is probably sub-ideal (unless your sensei is real cool), but you're ability to say what you want to quickly will greatly improve. Think about it like this: if you want to get in shape to run a marathon, you don't do it by walking 26.3 miles every day and then gradually picking up speed. You start out running short distances and then build up to the full distance, all the while improving your form. It's the same in languages, you need to force your brain run or it won't get in shape. I find that slow and awkward speaking a major flaw in most language education, and especially the way Japan teaches English. For example, my host sister Natsumi in Nagano has a huge vocabulary because college entrance exams judge you on how many words you know. However, she struggles in even simple conversations, so we always talk in Japanese even though her vocabulary is way bigger than mine. It's fucked up.

Back to the point, the way you use language in real life isn't like a test, you don't get to take your time or come back to something. You have about a two-second window to find exactly what you want to say and say it correctly. Japanese people will tell you to take your time, but inside they're thinking of all the useful things they could be doing rather than waiting for you to say what you want to say. This goes for looking things up in a dictionary as well, try to use other ways of saying what you want to say, or describe the word in question until the other person knows what you're saying. That's what you'd do if you didn't know a word in English, so that's what you should do in Japanese as well. For example, if you didn't know the word eki-in (train station attendent) and also didn't know the word eki (station), you could say 電車が着く所で働く人、densha ga tsuku tokoro de hataraku hito, the person who works at the place where trains arrive. I know it's long and awkward, but so is the 45-second gap in conversation while you pull out your dictionary and look it up. Any time spent speaking Japanese is infinetely more productive than not speaking Japanese. As a general rule. Learn to live without the jisho.

Well, that concludes my rant. I'll finish up my post with some pictures I took at a shrine-temple complex near Toyokawa. Really what trip to Japan would be complete without a good temple-visit. Sayonara suckaz:

Magic the Gathering: The Computer Game

One might be wondering why I'm typing this at 4:40 in the morning. Well, the short reason is because of Magic the Gatherings single player computer game. If you enjoy the real life card game, or card games in general, this computer game is very faithful to the cards as well as highly addictive. The single player mode, Shandalar, puts you into the game as a wizard, playing with whatever color you choose to start, and then　evolving into all sorts of crazy deck ideas. You fight all sorts of monsters enemies (in card games with your deck) and you can take cards from them if you win. You can also explore dungeons and do quests, and travel to different merchants to buy a certain card. The ultimate goal is to defeat the five wizards (one for each color) and then the main bad guy, who's name I forgot, so we'll call him Deathmaster. Deathmaster is extremely difficult, so you need to have built a very strong deck to beat him.





This game shows so much more creativity and imaginative gameplay than the string of Yu-Gi-Oh games that dominated the video card game genre years after this Windows 95 wonder's release. I'd really like to see some kind of game like it, but as this kind of game does nothing to show off graphics, but rather it's poor homeless cousin "art", it probably won't be made. Well, actually, they could make a sweet fantasy world with great CG and stuff and then the card games could use good art. I hope someone in a game developing studio reads this. Bring back Shandalar. It worked.

If you want to download the game, click here. Don't be afraid if you don't already know how to play. The game is pretty simple to pick up, and there are rules available online and in the program. That being said, it is now time to go sleep on my fresh futon. It's fresh because the dog peed on my old one. Ha ha, goddammit.

Mountain Climbing in Toyokawa

Alright. So. I drank so much yesterday that I couldn't do Air Alert (shitty jumping exercises), so I did that this morning. Then I rode my bike 20 miles and climbed a mountain. This is my story.

So Alex had it planned out that today would be what he likes to call an Adventure Day. Basically we left home on our bikes and biked towards these mountains that were way off in the distance, and didn't stop except to visit his host mom in the hospital. We basically just trucked it for 10 miles until there wasn't a road anymore, then we climbed. We climbed through this forest with a dried up stream bed, and it was really beautiful, and there was this old decomposed vehicle of some kind too:



We finally reached the top of that mountain, which was a construction site on the mountain we had originally intended to climb. I think they were turning it into some sort of residential area, kinda sucks that they need to destroy a mountain to do that.


We tried to go to the very top, but some construction workers told us we couldn't, even when we told them we work for a magazine (we don't) they said that today wasn't good and to come back another day. Anyways, the top of the mountain, even though it wasn't the very top, was still really high up, so we took some killer pictures.





Then we climbed to the top of the mini-mountain in the photo above, and we reached a small shrine in the middle of the woods, which we took as a proverbial sign that we had reached the end.


So we climbed back down, stopping briefly to carve our names into a tree and got back to our bikes. Now this is the part where I'm and idiot. I don't know how much you know about Japanese bike locks, but they are basically part of the bike, and then there's this metal piece you can pull out to stop the wheel from moving. Well, the little metal piece must have fallen out of my pocket at some point during the climb, because it wasn't there when we got back. Oh Fuck. First I tried to pick the lock with tweezers and a toothpick from Alex's swiss army knife, then Alex just beat the shit out of it with a rock until it finally broke. It was actually sort of cool, overcoming adversity like that, except for the fact that the lock broke. I hope it's fixable/replaceable.

From there it was a ridiculously long bike ride home during which we sort of got lost, but then we asked for directions and this lady guided us to a station Alex knew. Then we took an extra long way to go to a liquor store to reward ourselves. I bought the requisite 6-pack of Yebisu Black as well as a can of every beer I've never had before. It looked something like this:


It was at the register of the liquor store that I realized I was yet again out of money. Fuck that.