Rice and Ramen

The above is a fairly excellent depiction of how I've been spending almost all of my time outside of work these past...50 days: studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). You can see I have my pens and paper all ready to go, as well as a fortifying cup of coffee. Now that I'm essentially publicly broadcasting the fact that I'm taking this test I basically have to pass now or else it'll be embarrassing to the extreme. The test itself is on December 3rd so I have about two and a half weeks yet to finish up and catch up on some sleep before the four hour (gulp) exam. The test is broken down into five sections--reading, kanji, grammar, vocab, and listening--and you have to pass each section individually to pass the test as a whole, which is BRUTAL. Oh man, I have so much more respect for people who are part-time students now because once you get done with work and get home and make dinner/eat/clean up the LAST thing you want to do is open a book and tr...

Tomorrow is my last day. It felt strange to write that sentence, knowing that I've been gone six weeks, which feels like both no time at all but also forever. Even though this is my fifth time coming to Japan (and the fourth for an protracted trip), the coming-and-going is something I don't get used to. Just as I start getting over my "ugh, I just want to go home" hump and settling in, well, it actually IS time to go home. What have I done the past few days? Well, on Sunday my host family and I took a drive to Yamanashi prefecture (re: near Mount Fuji) to visit the Oshino Hakkai, the Eight Sacred Ponds of Oshino. According to the signage, when people used to hike up Mount Fuji for pilgrimages, they would purify themselves in the ponds before starting their journey. And having stuck my hand in an (acceptable) corner of the main pond, Wakuike, it was FREEZING. Some other ponds have specific purposes, however. One was for people who wanted a good marriage, for instan...

Well. It's official. I have graduated from PII and this very evening I shall head via night bus to Tokyo to catch my flight to Chicago tomorrow afternoon. It seems rather surreal--it's hard for me to believe that I"m really leaving (yet at the same time part of me just wants to hurry up and leave already, it's a very confusing dichotomy). After finishing up the final exam yesterday, I took myself out for a treat. That, my friends, is a medium fries, hot apple pie, and Japan-exclusive McDonald's menu item: teriyaki burger! (Which was surprisingly delicious...that teriyaki sauce made the usually dry burger quite tender and juicy). I don't think I've allowed myself this much McDonald's in a long while, but after these eight weeks I feel like I'm forgiven. Then, today, was the PII graduation ceremony and farewell party. We all assembled at RIFARE in the morning and were called up one by one to receive a snazzy, and very official, graduation cer...

Today was a very busy day. After our normal morning of classes we were all hustled onto a charter bus (without much time for lunch) and driven to Izumigaoka High School (coincidentally it's the high school that's a ten minute walk from my house so the bus ride there was immensely familiar to me). It was pretty much your standard Japanese high school building, but apparently it's one of the largest and also smartest high schools in the city? Anyways, we were escorted into a room where desks had been pushed together to form groups of tables. There were students sitting at each table, and we were assigned specific table numbers to sit at. No one was able to tell us what we were actually going to DO there, but it definitely looked like some sort of conversation seminar thing. To me they all looked very young...they were only 16! Was I ever 16? The first half of the session was in English, and we had a short discussion (which was fairly difficult to conduct since the...

Back from hiatus (well, if three days counts as a hiatus) since all my in-class presentations and the "first semester" exam is over and done with (results still pending). Now we get a 3.5 day break, 1.5 days of which are already over...where does all the time go?! Regardless, today I did a variety of interesting cultural things. Even thought it was a break day, I woke up at the same time I usually do and caught the same bus I usually do, but instead of getting off at Rifare I got off at a stop called Minamicho to visit Oyama Jinja, a large and popular shinto shrine in the downtown Kanazawa area. The large benefit of being there at 8:45 in the morning was that there was essentially no one there. A shrine maiden was sweeping the stone pathway, a priest was kneeling inside the temple, and someone was praying at one of the shrines inside the complex, but in general all was quiet. I drew an omikuji (fortune telling) from the main shrine and got good fortune! And a sma...

PII certainly doesn't do things by halves, not by a long shot. Classes have officially started and if I thought that Yale's pace was quick, it's nothing compared to the pace PII is going at. Well. No going back now I suppose. Yesterday I was put in the class for level 2 students. The day was purposefully a review of transitive and intransitive verbs (for the most part). Not something English really has, so it's tricky to remember two verbs that (to us) mean the same thing. But me being the academic masochist that I am, I asked if I could move up into the 2.5 level (which was where the Yale teachers said we "should" be). They allowed me to try it out today, and it seems like today went alright so I guess that's what I'll be doing from now on. I think I'm going to work myself to death, that obviously seems to be my academic ambition. Anyways. We cover a chapter a day in the Nakama 2 textbook. There's another textbook, Tobira, that we'll s...

(These past two days have been a whirlwind; here's part 1 of 2). After spending the night in the original Sayama apartment, I took a train to my old high school. I surprised myself by remembering the twenty-minute route from Tanashi station to the high school itself. I guess things like that get ingrained in your body when you do them everyday for six months. Either way, I didn't get lost like my host mother feared. When I arrived I met up with some of my old teachers, and we went to the cafeteria together to eat lunch. Everyone was surprised that I'd A. bothered to return, and B. could still speak Japanese with some degree of proficiency.  I was again oggled at by the students, who also seem to assume I don't understand them when they say "look at that girl over there etc etc etc". But it does wonders for my ego. Then in the afternoon I went with my host mom to see Ryo's university, Sophia University. It specializes in international relations,...

There's just no other way to describe it. Today was a happy day. Life could not get better than today. First of all, the third and fourth periods of our normal Saturday half day was the speech contest that I'd written my lovely rock-paper-scissors speech for. Needless to say, I was sweating bullets. Despite the freezing weather, the contest was held in the gymnasium. Fortunately, everyone was allowed to bring blankets and scarfs so we wouldn't freeze. I was glad of my shivering for one reason: it hid my shaking and gave me an excuse. Of course, as the exchange student they put me as the last person. It went rather well. When it came time to announce the winners (first, second, and third in both English Speeches and Japanese) for some strange reason they announced that I was the second place winner in the Japanese Speech category. Go figure... Then, my friends told me to wait in the classroom once class was over. They contrived something about Gashosai (Music Festival)...

Down to 23 days now (yes, I am keeping a countdown). Winter break is over and it's back to school as usual. I thought my work would be over and I'd be enjoying my last weeks here with my friends. Apparently, I was severely kidding myself. I have been assigned three speeches to write and present in front of large groups of people, all within a week of each other. One of them you already know about, my speech about rock paper scissors that I was toying around with. I did decide to go with it, and over winter break I spent an obnoxious amount of time trying to translate the version I wrote in English. Here's what I wrote in English: あいこでしょ                 There is a saying that goes “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. It can be applied to books, of course, meaning that you shouldn’t judge the quality of a book based on the quality of its cover—or, things are not always what they seem—but it can also be applied ...

So I have lots and lots to tell you guys, and to draw out the suspense, I'm going to give it to you guys in two parts. On Saturday my host dad came back for the weekend (he got home while I was getting my hair chopped...my bangs had grown down to about the bridge of my nose, and constantly flipping them out of my eyes made me seem like I had a tic or something). Since none of us had any plans for the next day (one of my rare, AFS event-free days) he asked if I wanted to go somewhere. My host mom and I discussed some options, and decided to go down to Yokohama for half a day. We left at nine in the morning, and the drive down took about an hour forty-five. I slept for most of it, but before I dropped off one of the last things I saw was Mt. Fuji positively glowing in the morning sun. Hard to top that. This is where we went in Yokohama. I have to say, even if it doesn't tell from that picture, if I have to move back to Japan...Yokohama would be the place. It is very modern,...