Five O'Clock A.M.

With a little over ten more days left in the semester, I'm really busy with the final inching towards the finish line. Exams, reports, trying to hang out with old friends (and last ditch attempts to make new ones).

I'm going to miss Japan

Shounan Yosakoi～♪

So that dance team I'm a part of, Tokyo Hanabi? We had our first dance festival of the season, the Shounan Yosakoi Matsuri 2008, and we won the award for Best Naruko Performance~!　　鳴子 (naruko) are the wooden clappers that we dance with. We were all pretty excited to win an award!

It was a really incredible experience, you can see our dance performance here:



鳴子大賞の東京花火っていうよさこいチーム＠平塚市の湘南よさこい祭り２００８
ステージパーフォーマンス

よっさこーい♪♪

So I have been doing cool things lately!

By a random and sudden sequence of events, despite the fact that I had decided not to join any clubs and wanted to just study hard and focus on my grades this semester, I joined a dance team at the very end of April called Tokyo Hanabi. The style of dance is known as yosakoi, which is an extremely high energy festival dance usually performed in large groups. Basically, I get to wear a badass costume and play with a fan called sensu or wooden clappers called naruko (no, not Naruto!) and hang out with a bunch of wonderful people.

Everyone on the team has such a fun and upbeat personality and we're all practicing really hard for our first performance on May 25th -- Shounan Yosakoi, in Kanagawa. Unfortunately, I joined the team nearly a month later than all the other newbies so I've been working really hard to catch up with everyone else in order to appear in the festival. We have regular practices Tuesdays and Saturdays from 7~9PM and every other day of the week there is independent practice from 6~10PM... so basically I have been practicing nearly every day since the day that I joined! Hopefully I can learn the routine well enough to perform by the end of this month~

Here's a video of a combined performance by the two yosakoi teams at my school, Tokyo Hanabi and Odori Zamurai, at the Waseda 125th Anniversary last year. (I was actually sitting at the front of the audience during this performance. Little did I know that six months later I would be joining this team! >:O) The dancing doesn't start until about 4:30 into the video so I recommend loading it in your browser and then watching.

ボッカ・プリン ...or That's Not a Water Balloon, It's Dessert

There was a weird looking tube sitting in my host family's fridge, filled with what looked like water balloon shaped mochi.

Well, after dinner (鮪丼 and a piece of 海老フライ) 母さん brought out the weird tube -- that, now that I think of it, vaguely resembles a canister of tennis balls -- and asked me if I would have some プリン (pudding) from Hokkaido. Apparently, you pierce the balloon with a toothpick and eat it with caramel sauce. Well, I've had water balloons explode on me before and let's just say that I did not want to be covered in pudding.

(Photo: Bocca Purin)

I chickened out on the first stab, but the second time I got it. To my relief, the purin didn't explode; the wrapper snapped right off, and I got to enjoy the most delicious purin I've ever tasted in my entire life. Admittedly, I haven't sampled a great many number of puddings, but this one was so creamy and delicious with the caramel sauce lending it just the right amount of sweetness that I feel it's safe to declare Bocca Purin among the best.

2nd Semester! ...or Back into the Crush of Classes

(Photo: Killing time between classes in the Bldg 22 PC Lab)

April 9th and we've just started our spring semester; it looks like I'm carrying about 18 units this semester - three SILS lecture courses (International Law, Comparitive Econ, and a Japanese Poetry class) at 4 units apiece, できる日本語６A (3 units), and three Japanese electives at 1 unit each - 大愚コミュニケーション５,発音４E, and 漢字５E. Because I'm taking 6 units of Japanese this semester, when the classes transfer back to the CSU they'll be bumped up to 8 units, pretty sweet deal.

FYI, the add/drop period for Japanese starts today and ends two weeks from now; the SILS add/drop period, however, doesn't start until next Tuesday and ends next Saturday. It's kind of lousy since you don't get much time to decide whether or not you actually want to stay in the class, but, interestingly enough, you have until the end of the semester to decide if you want to take a class as pass/fail rather than for credit!

I guess it's kind of nice to be back in classes again... but boy did I enjoy 2 months of vacation just doing whatever I felt like! >_<


(Edit: I'm a bad girl; I dropped 出来る日本語６A and switched into 4A instead. Because I'm lazy.)

The Total Language Immersion Experience...or So You Thought You Could Speak Japanese

Before coming to Japan for the first time, I'd taken about three years of Japanese and gotten A's in all my courses: I was always at the top of my class, received high scores on tests, and was all-around doing very well ...or so I thought. And then I came to Japan, where I realized that I could barely speak Japanese.

Everyone spoke so fast; I couldn't figure out how to say the things I wanted to say and when I did, I made mistakes that I knew were wrong even as I said them; and there were so many kanji EVERYWHERE.

I guess this is what they mean by total language immersion.

Anyway, after about half a year, I feel way more confident in my Japanese abilities. My listening comprehension has gone through the roof; I can even watch ドラマ now without English subtitles (though I still like watching with Japanese subtitles on). I can understand much more kanji than I did a year ago: even when I don't remember the exact reading for a kanji, I usually comprehend the meaning. And I've lost a lot of my shyness when it comes to conversing with others (especially when drinking, haha) and hesitate a lot less when speaking.

Don't get me wrong, though, I still have so far to go in my learning. When I leave Japan in a few months, I won't have daily interaction with native speakers, so all my learning will go back to classroom and independent study. But I won't give up! My goal is to someday get so fluent that people get surprised 「あっ！日本人じゃないの？？」 Haha, a girl can dream, right?

Kimono!! ...or $3000 that I Really, Really Wish I Had

 
 

(Photo: Kimonorific!)

Before I came to Japan, I didn't have much interest in kimono. Really. I mean, sure, I thought they looked pretty but I didn't have any particular interest in them. However, with this year's 成人式 (seijinshiki, Coming of Age Day), seeing all the girls in their beautiful winter kimono made me feel that I really wanted to try it as well. When I talked to my friend Kozue about it, she said she would take me to a department store and try some on!

So we went today and it was really wonderful fun. <3 I wish they weren't so very expensive, haha... I'll never be able to afford one of these. In the pictures to the left, you can see me in the sample kimono they have in the store: the sleeves are way too long and the obi too wide!! But it didn't make any difference at the time because I was too excited～