Melting, melting, melting

On Tuesday 5th May, I went with Miyuki and Hikaru to the famous Japanese shopping area, Shibuya. Kinda unfortunate that it was raining but it was still superb. First off we went to take more Purikura (sticker photos). Yeah, people are pretty obsessed with those in Japan. Did you know they even have Purikura DS? Yep, you can buy a DS which is able to take photo booth photos and allows you to decorate them like an actual Purikura machine then send it to your phone etc. There was even an entire shop filled with Purikura machines, I'm estimating there was around 20 or something of them in the same room, and whaddayaknow, the room was full with people and their mirrors, waiting in line.

That's something else I've noticed about people in Japan. They're very careful and care about the way they look. Everyone carries mirrors, lip treatment, bandages etc (Well at least the girls carry around lip treatment and bandages). However the guys do carry around mirrors too. You see a lot of guys looking at themselves in their mirrors and fixing they're hair.

We had a fun time walking around Shibuya and had lunch at First Kitchen after Purikura. It was sort of like McDonald's but seemed to have better food which were less oily and a better selection. There were pastas and more and I even had BBQ flavoured fries and a really nice chocolate drink with great cream and ice cream inside (Though I do admit I kind of regret ordering it because it was overly sweet).

After that we went to 109 (Ichi maru kyuu [<-- q] ) which was... HUGE!! Eight floors full of clothing! Really nice clothing too. It really reminded me of China which made me a tad homesick but I had great fun trying to weave past people and look at all the clothes. In the end, I came out of 109 with new boots, a nice top and funky pants from Album (http://www.shibuya109.jp/shops/index.html). I'm still waiting to go to Harajuku to buy more clothes.

We took off to 109-2 after 109 but by that time it was around 6pm so soon after we headed back home. Pretty mad rain by then.

Next day, Miyuki and I took too to Kichijoji and met up with some friends there, Saori, Akagu, Mayu and Aya. Again we went for Purikura (really obsessed with it these days I guess). We all bought matching Rirakkuma (A cute bear character) keychains and watched the most amazing magic show. I'm still wondering how that guy did it! He placed a small empty contained on my hand and after tapping the top of the container while it was still in my hand, five 100 yen coins appeared. When I examined the container, there was really nothing there and the bottom was too small to even hide the coins not to mention he put the container over the 100 yen coins while they were still in my hand and they suddenly changed to 1 yen coins. Unless he managed to turn my hand into a robot, I still don't see how that was possible.

We went off to lunch after that at Sweets Paradise, a buffet. They had the best spaghetti there! I had 4 platefuls of different flavoured spaghetti and 3 plates of dessert filled with all types of cakes and mochi (Sweet rice treat) and jelly plus melon juice! Was completely stuffed afterwards. We could barely move after all having downed so much food so we went to the Kichijoji station shopping centre and walked around for a bit there and they discovered bluetooth... Yes, that's right, Japan has probably some of the most amazing technology I've ever set my eyes on but hardly anyone seems to know what bluetooth is. Japanese phones all infrared and not many have bluetooth. It's a little odd to have phones which enable you to watch TV on them yet have something as undeveloped as infra sending (Since the two devices need to be touching to sending, a pain).

We stood around in the station for quite a long time after. Actually, I'm such a freak I remember the times exactly. It was 3:00pm when we got out of the shopping centre and into the Kichijoji station centre, then we talked until 4:24pm before all departing to our separate gates and heading back some.

Then the next day... SCHOOL. But it wasn't too bad because we really only just had a normal day on Thursday. Friday the 8th of May was barely school because it was Health Check and sports test day. I was slightly dreading it I suppose since you all know I'm probably the most uncoordinated person you've ever met and some people from my class had said that we get timed to run 1000m. Basically as soon as they said that, my brain rebooted because I was too shocked for a second. Turns out, we didn't do anything hard at all.

Every homeroom had a different time for their health check and sports test and my homeroom was at 9:10am so we got the benefit of getting up a little later, and also leaving school early. The health check was pretty strange though. There was an ear check first and didn't understand the lady conducting the test at first until halfway when I realized she meant for me to press the button when I hear a noise through the headphones. From her actions, I thought she was telling me to hold the button down the entire time and when she told me to let go, I just left it until she asked me if I could hear any of the sounds. It made me look rather retarded and deaf. After that, the others went for heart and x-ray checks but I didn't need to do any of those. Then there was the mouth, teeth, tongue, neck and nose check... Not sure what's up with some of those random checks but it sure was a tad odd.

Then it was the sports test. All we had to do was do as many sit ups as possible in 30 seconds, jump as far as you can and move rapidly from side to side in 30 seconds and count how many times you moved. We finished at 11:50am and were free to go home. It was quite funny when Miyuki kept saying she was sore from all the exercise. I guess if it wasn't for my constant exercise I would have been complaining like a grandma too since Japan seems pretty stressful on your body with the long hours and lack of sleep but somehow I've managed to keep up with 60-80 press ups a day and 200 sit ups a day. Mainly because I'm not moving a lot here and I'm eating too much even when I'm rarely hungry here. It's far too hot to really eat here but the food's just too good!

Saturday we had to go to school at normal time to watch a 2 hour play which was interesting. I didn't really understand it but everyone had to write something about it so I just described what I thought happened. My Bible teacher wrote a response to what I wrote and turns out, the story was talking about morals and family. After that, Miyuki, Hikaru and I went to an International Gathering in the blistering heat. Maybe blistering is an understatement. It was probably hot enough to cook eggs on my head.

There were numerous different activities at the International Gathering, some rather pointless to tell the truth but it was all a laugh in the end. There was a drill where 4 people could go up into a truck where they had a dining room environment set up and the truck would begin shaking madly while you had to all squeeze under the table. It couldn't have shook us any harder if it tried, I hit my head countless times on the table. Which push the thought, "If I'm going to get 10 boo boos on my head while trying to hide from an Earthquake, I wonder if it's really worth it" into my head. There was also a fire drill and a rubbish drill. Yes, you did just read that, a rubbish drill. We practiced throwing rubbish bags into a truck. A really fun drill was the rope tying one since many people got stuck trying to tie knots in the rope. Two girls actually managed to tie their hands together. We were typing escape/emergency ropes and then learning the fast way to undo it all. Sushi making was after that and that's when I was paired up with a Chinese lady and made some new Chinese friends who I now constantly email. I seems they all thought I was 20 which was a laugh. It was bit regretful to have the event finish since we all had to part ways again even though it was a relief as it was ridiculously hot and many people were quite horribly sunburnt. We're going to go to the next one on 20th of June, 8 days before I depart Japan.

It's been crazily hot here during this week. Last 3 days has been 25°C - 30°C. I'm melting, really melting.

I didn't have music last period Tuesday because the class which I have music with were away on a trip. It was nice to have another free period. The American exchange student currently at the school is in the same music class so we went to the library instead and talked heaps which was fun. I think the poor thing's a big homesick though, she's been here since last September and still has a while to go yet. It was nice to have a proper conversation in English since I've been mostly speaking Japanese with broken English at school.

Chemistry lessons seem to be getting more hilarious day by day as my Japanese improves. At first, I knew the Chemistry teacher had a great sense of humour because all the students love having him as a teacher and being able to joke and talk with him in class. Albeit that's all I knew in the beginning because I couldn't understand him but now when he asks me questions, I can understand him a bit and am able to reply. For some reason he was talking about toilet button shapes one day and asked me what toilet flush buttons in NZ were like so I drew some pictures for him which was a crack up. Then when were walking past him after school this week Miyuki and Yuka told me to say "Oshiawaseni" (May you be happy) to him, which was when I made the silly mistake of saying "Oshiawase" meaning happiness. He gave me a blank stare and repeated what I had until I realized I'd skipped out the important ending "ni".

The next day he told the whole class about it which embarrassing but amusing. Today was another funny lesson as he did some experiment and passed around a bottom of acid with a pill inside. After it got to me he asked if he could have it back and the students refused to let me give it back to him so we ended up passing the deadly bottle around the class until he finally managed to squeeze past the bags on the ground and get to the bottle. At some point after that I yelled out "Teacher, please drink that" in Japanese. Of course he refused and instead asked me out of CaCl and HCl, what my favourite compound was. I chose HCl and everyone wowed and laughed for some reason. I found out later it was because the teacher said I pronounced my L in a cool way. There is no L sound in the Japanese language so everyone usually says eru. He also made me choose a number, my favourite number and what luck that it turned out to be 12. It ended up being changed to 10 because 12HCl was slightly ridiculous and hard for working calculating the weight of the molecules (At least that's what I think he was doing, he was saying the words, mol and grams a lot.

There are some things I'm missing I guess. I miss being in a house where I can walk around and do whatever without someone asking "What's wrong?" and I miss being able to not eat if I'm not hungry. I don't want to offend my host family so I eat everything they give me but it's too hot to be eating anything or very much sometimes and they don't eat a whole lot of fruit because Japanese eat a little bit of everything. I also miss drinking water. Since I came to Japan, I've had about 4 glasses of water. My family don't seem to be big on water so they drink green tea or hot tea or just cold tea of some kind all the time. I like rarely having wind here in Japan but I'm starting to think I'd prefer NZ's usual cool/cold weather to Japan's warm and muggy weather. I do miss school in NZ and being able to just say something floating around in my head sometimes. I'm also missing friends and my parents. I miss doing the housework for some reason. I nearly feel bad that all I'm able to do is the vacuum here. Yes, I'm crazy, don't remind me.

Zoe and I have picked up on some strange and interesting aspects of Japan. Everyone and I mean EVERYONE carries mirrors. You even see guys walking along the street and indoors and they suddenly stop and take out a mirror and look at themselves, check their hair etc. Girls are constantly reapplying their make-up everywhere. When we were at First Kitchen in Shibuya, when I turned around to survey the restaurant, all the girls there had a mirror in their hand and where reapplying make-up.

The Japanese also seem to take a strong liking to uniforms. The school I'm at has no uniform rule (except they have to wear a skirt) but everyone wears Japanese uniform style clothing because it's fashionable. Interesting how when there's no uniform, the girls want one and when Zoe and I think back to our school Mufti-days, we realized wearing uniform styled clothing would never happen in NZ if we were given the choice of what to wear.

And shoes... When we go into school, we have to change out of our normal shoes and into special school shoes called wabaki. I'm still trying to figure out if we change into the Wabaki's to keep the school grounds clean or to keep our normal shoes clean because we're allowed to go outside in our Wabaki as long as we keep within the school gate. Changing rooms in shops and sometimes in restaurants you have to take off your shoes too.

Did I mention also that the price tags in supermarkets are electronic? YES! THEY'RE DIGITAL. Have a look in my pictures to find what I mean but I was surprised when I walked into the supermarket and saw digital instead of paper price tags!!

Ah well, I'll go for now and try to update my blog more often. It feels like time in Japan is going really slowly or standing still but when I think about it, we've already been here for one month. I seem to be losing my sense of time here as well as rest. I'm off to catch up on sleep now, finally Saturday tomorrow!

Laters!