Sayonara furui jibun!
Another one of those fabulous Summer posts. I'm (very slowly and not so surely) catching up.
Friday july 31
The Chinese kids from my Japanese class invited me out for dinner and karaoke. Yay! I don’t get to hang with them often since they all have jobs. Most of them were going back to China within the next week so they’d gotten leave already, therefore enabling us all to go out. Yay PARTAY.
Decisions are hard to make in a group, and because I was the only not-Chinese kid, it got pushed on me (logicwhut?) They all swore they didn’t kow Sannomiya that well (And I do? They’ve all been here a year or two longer than me. I’m six months in guys….) But okay. They required it cheap so I let them know about a little Italian-ish place I’d been to ($6-8 a person or so. That’s cheap. Right?)
I fail at cheap, according to them.
But then again, when comparing ANYTHING to Chinese prices, It’ll seem expensive. AND YET THEY INSIST ON COMPARING.
Don’t blame it on me. It’s not my fault your money isn’t worth anything here. Don’t feel so bad China. Lately mine isn’t either. Stupid exchange rate. Let's all be poor together comrades.
Honestly, when eating out, you don’t get much cheaper than about 7 a person. Unless you’re at McDonald's.
But okay.
Besides, this included drinkage, which the guys said they wanted, so they dealt with it.
The original plan was Karaoke after that, but the two random guys that came who weren’t even in our class and I’d never seen them before wanted bowling, and badly. Like..vein popping aneurysm bad.
But…But…. T_T
A bunch of the girls, a few of which who, like me, came pretty specifically for karaoke, were kinda like… ”Uh....Bowling?”
Bowling is also a little more expensive, and although I don’t dislike it, I’m particularly bad at it. I don’t feel quite comfortable enough with these kids to fail epically in front of them yet. I get the feeling they’d pull no punches mocking me.
A couple of the other girls really disliked bowling and spoke up, so after much male grumpiness, we headed to karaoke as per plan.
HA!
Us girls had fun. XP The guys boycotted singing (Who the hell were they anyway? I think they were graduates) but they started requesting silly anime songs, which I obliged to, so they probably enjoyed it a bit.
The Chinese names are widly different for anime though, so there were a few I couldn’t figure out.
Apparently China renames ALL their released anime, usually a transliteration into crippling Chinese characters loosely based phonetically on the original name. Rarely they’ll just translate it. America just plain translates it sometimes if it’s a really complicated name like ‘Ookiku Furikabutte’ into 'Big Windup' or something but it’s usually pretty close and fans know the original Japanese name anyway, because we’re hopless and nerdy (Nerd status symbol = knowing the original of everything.)
Not so in China.
It makes it hard though, when the guy is all like, can you sing the opening to QiYanLiu?
I’m like…
“…..No? Let’s try that again. Um, can you describe it?”
“The main character has a super long weapon.”
LEAST HELPFUL INFO IN THE WORLD.
That’s every shonen anime EVER. Congratulations.
Never figrered that one out.
All I could think was Seirei no Moribito, but she’s a girl, so the description would have been easier to figure out. Like : ‘Bad ass giant lady with a spear toting a cute little boy in a dress’……Spears are cool, regardless.
Towards the last few minutes, Ko showed up out of nowhere!
Apparently she decided on an impulse to watch the new Harry Potter movie instead of dinner with all of us.
…uh….Okay.
I Like ‘My Pace’ people. I simultaneously completely don’t understand and yet totally follow their logic.
So we went home together, which counts as ‘quality time’ I suppose.
On the way back home, there was a dude that'd fallen down stairs in a puddle of drunk old-man-passed-out-fail. 0_0 There were like, police and everything.
Scary stuff.
There should be an elevator down there. Anyone who's ridden the Yamate Line from Sannomiya knows what I 'm talking about. Those stairs are pure stone vertigo traps.
Ko and I ate dessert at Royal Host even though it was almost midnight. We talked a lot. Ko is really interesting, if a little flakey. She has actual hobbies and aspirations, which is always interesting…(And surprisingly rare among the kids I've met...Which is kind of a depressing thing to say O_O) She’s also the only Chinese kid I know that has more Japanese friends than Chinese friends. She fits in really well here, likes history and a bunch of other stuff I like (fashioooooon) so I like talking to her. I don’t often have a chance to spend a lot of time with her, so it was nice. It sucks they have to go back next week ;_;.
Saturday, August 1
Okay, thought I would mention right fast that ‘Sham Wow’ should not have made it to Japan 0_0
NONONONO.
Okay, so today was the Kobe fireworks festival out on the water right near the shiny tower and sparkly ferris wheel.
One of the Chinese kids said she was going and I managed to get her to go with me. YAY!
Because it counted as a festival, I decided it would be a good idea to wear a yukata. Especially since I just so happen to be the right age group for it right now (middle school - college girls.)
Apparently no one else did. D: Awkward.
I mean, lots of random Japanese girls, but none of the Chinese kids who said they were going to wear one with me did.
Pssh.
Well whatever, I was cute. It was super fun,
It kinda strated to rain a bit towards the end but the fireworks sure were purdy. We were kinda stuck behind a tree the whole time though. They were going off from two diffeent places and although they didn’t quite mirror each other symmetrically, it was the same idea (shiny things in the sky) so it was cool. If the tree was blocking one side, I could kinda see the other.
Silly lollipop hedge trees.
Like all festivals, there was tons of awesomely bad for me food around, so we made sure to have a bunch of that.
You know what sucks? I have no idea what the name of the girl I went with was. 'Gi'? Something like that. I think she’s been in Japan for over two years, close to three, and I don’t think she’s actually in any of the same classes I’m in.
She was really nice though, and she was an interesting person. Wanted to go into business, really down to earth. Motivated but not totally batshit (unlike me D: I’m totally unrealistic Oh ho ho ho, Imma live in a cardboard box!)
It was a cool day.
Sunday, August 2
I’ve been to the Sanuki Udon shop in Kagawa that’s on T.V right now. That’s kinda bizarre. Like…”Hey, I think I drew that tree….” I still have that picture. You have to line up outside of this place 'cause it's all famous and so I drew the giant epic tree outside of it.
Whoa twilight zone.
It’s like if I were to see a favorite DC resuraunt on T.V It’d be like “Oh Snapple, it’s Giffords Ice cream. Hi there. Am I can has fudge and sprinkles?”
Cell phone failure. I need to buy ANOTHER phone card. I swear I have to buy those every two weeks these days. NOT COOL. They should totally last me a month.
Chinese kids be talking slow so I’ve used up all my minutes. It’s like, they’re technically better at Japanese than me (or is it that they’re better at technical Japanese than me?), But they all talk so slow. WHY? I don’t care if you leave particles out. No one uses grammar these days. Pssh.
Anyway, lack of phone’ll make tomorrow infinitely more complicated.
Also: Fail at drawing bricks and drawing my own characters.
It’s a sad thing when the characters you thought up are too complicated for you to draw ;_;
Monday August 3
T.V News: No! Japan, don’t watch Waterworld! That was an awful movie. Just go to Sea World and see the live show…..
Yukiko and I had lunch together (we bought Takarazuka tickets today, and so we planned a lunch date then too, because I mean…..If we’re going to meet up anyway why the heck not?)
Origionally both Ko and Rai were supposed to join us for project ‘Totally Tubular Takarazuka Fun in the Sun Summer Spectacular’, but Rai bailed on us pretty early on, not really wanting to spend the extra fourty monies on tickets for something otherwise not-tangeble.
….Because an amazing cultural performance you can only see here isn’t enriching or anything.....
Ko, on the other hand, really wanted to go, but things kept coming up and she wasn’t sure about the timing. Because she fails at school, she ended up having to meet a teacher that day but didn’t bother telling us about it until the day before.
….This means that we only tried to buy our tickets the day before we planned to go.
The Takarazuka e-ticket-conbini-god frowns upon that.
No tickets.
So we decided to take our chances and just go really early tomorrow and try to get unsold seats on the cheapy-cheap.
Let’s see if that works.
If not, I’ll uh…
Get to look at the Takarazuka-Tacular pictures outside the gate ;_;
…Almost like the real thing…..
Anyway, so for lunch we went to Bikkuri Donkey, becaue it amuses the hell outta me.
Think Arizona, but horribly bastardized by people who have never been there.
THEN ADD AWESOME, and Donkies...
And you have Bikkuri Donkey!!
After that both of us had about three hours to kill. I had something at three, and then another something at five, and Yukiko had something at three thirty (Job? I think.) So we decided we needed karaoke therapy.
Except it was super busy, but we had time, and we only wanted an hour, so Its cool. We had two and a half hours to kill. It couldn't possibly take that long.
Yes it can.
By the time we got a room, we’d used up almost two hours, and only had 35 mintues to sing ;_;
FAILURE.
I enjoyed both songs XD
Rai’s going away party with her tennis friends and a few upperclassmen was after that. I was invited too, and it was supposed to be kinda potluck tacular.
Unfortunately, it also happens to be on the same day as the ESS 3rd year ‘graduation’ nomikai.
See, in Japan, once you hit the middle of your third year, you have to spend between that until the middle of your fourth year job hunting (there’s particular season for that). This means that people in the middle of their third year have to ‘graduate’ from clubs.
Pretty much, they’re just too busy to go to club anymore. Especially since clubs are always on Wednesday, and Japanese schools get out early on Wednesday JUST for job hunting and clubs.
Yes, so no more 3rd years. We need to say goodbye.
By drinking a lot.
Anyway, first was Rai’s thing. It was supposed to start at three, So that’s when I got there, although it had at somepoint turned into four (When did that happen?)
Then EVERY single one of the other people she invited called and said they’d be an hour late
So…Five.
I needed to leave at five at the latest to get the bus to Tarumi to meet the ESS club.
Oh snap.
I never did meet those other kids.
Rai was working super hard on food and stuff like that, so I’m sure they enjoyed it whenever/if they decided to show up.
So at Five I skedattled on to Tarumi, where Shouki met me at the station (I’m not super sure why, but he’s always the one to meet me or calling me if people need to contact me. Hmm. I don't’ mind, he’s a cutey head.)
So, although I was out of it (already a pretty eventful day, like WHOA) I started recognizing my surroundings on the walk from Tarumi station to the coast.
HOOOO SNAPPLE
Apparenly, the ESS club is going to be the seminar house I stayed in for a couple weeks last year with Setsuko's class for their nomikai.
It’s been like a year scince I saw that place! Oh the memories.
There was nabe (Hotpot) and various other assorted munchies for the lovinz’
I ended up sitting near Tsubasa, the guy with the nice voice, and Kimi-chan.
Tsubasa is a third year, and pretty good at English (He’s been to New York, where he was super hit on because of his one earring thing. And well.... Japanese boys dress nicely and play with their hair, so they end up looking nice enough to be considered gay (the dangers of looking cute when you're a boy in Amurika.) So I talked to him a bunch. He’s fun.
There’s a camp I didn’t know about starting next week (English camp? I’m not sure. It could be the fourth year annual trip. I know there is one. Because I’m just an honorary member (mascot), I could go if I wanted to.)
A bunch of them asked what I was going to do this summer scince summer vacation starts…oh…just about now. I told them I was going to go back to Tokyo for a few weeks. They were all like: "Again? Weren't you just there?".... I was but I had plans with friends.
Then they asked what those plans were.
How can I tell them in the least overtly nerdy way possible that the reason I’m goint to Tokyo is for Comiket and GIANT GUNDAMS?
Well, considering the guy with the nice voice had a Gundam shirt on right that second, I decided to tell them about the gundam thing anyway.
Yeah. Everyone likes Gundam. It’s mainstream. You can’t not be into robots.
It’d be like not-liking Spiderman or Batman.
Cool.
That went over well.
This spurred a LONG and in-depth conversation about Gundams.
I wish I had Tavis there. I like me some Gundams, but I underestimated the guy with the nice voice's knowledge of more obscure stuff. I'm like..."I like ROBOTS. And....The cute boys piloting them?" I really didn't watch 'Wing' with a critical eye for politics and mirrored current events y'know? I was like: "Hur hur, 'Shining finger' hur hur."
But anyway, Guy with nice voice (I should learn his name XD) and I had a lot of fun roping nerding about 90's Gundams from our childhood. Consensus is 08thMS and Z were awesome and SEED will always fail.
Ayway, he made me promise to take a coslpay picture in front of the Gundam and show it to them.
OH! And after the girls got tipsy (didn’t take long, weak D:) we (of course) stated talking aout boys, and I found out that The guy with the nice voice started dating the cute evil girl who makes people drink too much like a Kabajou girl (Kimi-chan) last month <3
SOOOOOO CUTE.
They’re really cute together. Both are good looking, charismatic, and tall. They’re also both the really nice but sometimes jokingly bully-types that have vaguely nerdy hobbies. I think they make a really nice couple. (The club aggrees with me ^^)
There was some talk of hand-held fireworks on the beach (WOO! I haven’t done that yet this trip) so I followed a pack of people dragging a giant rocket-type to the beach about fifty meters away (I like that seminar house, I really do.) We had fun with the fireworks...Until Mr. Bicycle Policeman came and told us to stop.
In Japan, handheld fireworks in the summer are totally legal, although there are certain places that don’t allow it (dense residential areas and protected property.) Apparently this was one of them even though there were no signs or anything.
The policeman really couldn’t get all that upset with us since there was no way for us to know. He let us finish off the fireworks we had. There was no one around but old men staring off into the Akashi Straight contemplating the whirlypools (I love stereotypical old sea-men.)
After that we headed back to the seminar house. Some of our group had problems walking correctly and lagged behind. Oops. I don’t exactly remember why, but I decided to hang around downstairs. I think it’s because people had mostly cleared out of the upstairs room (where we had the food) in hopes of avoiding clean-up XD
I was sitting near a fourth-year girl I’d never met and a Chinese guy I’d never met (there were a lot of fourth-years and alumni I’d never met. I got used to it.) The girl was super plastered, and so was a random kinda greasy lookin’ guy sitting next to her.
The Chinese Dude sitting next to me was nice, if a little creepy.
... As in... It’s weird when people comment on my eyes a lot.
Why…Yes, they ARE blue. I’ve been aware of that fact for a while now.
Stop staring at them please. No, hypnostics don’t work on me.
They mentioned that it must be hard for people to see what I’m thinking.
I was like…
"Yeah, I gue-Huh?"
'Because My eyes aren’t mirror-y.' They say.
....
I see?
So, this is where I learned dark eyes make good mirrors, and not being able to see your own reflection in my eyes freaks people out here. It’s bad luck or something, and means I’m difficult to understand.
I’m sorry my eyes don’t absorb light and scare you? If it helps, it really painful in the summer?
Wait…So because you can’t check your hair in my eyes mean I’m mysterious and hard to understand?
That’s not just me failing at Japanese? XD
Good to know...
The drunk-in the-face girl and drunker dude the sitting across from me started getting weird. He was laying it on pretty thick, and she was okay with that. So the point where they were the closest I’ve ever seen to Japanese people making out. O_o
That’s when the Seminar-house care-taker came. (Yay! Old grannies to the rescue. That girl woulda regretted it in the morning. Dude was a skeezemaster.)
Old lady started getting on the girl’s case for being easy and the guy for being gross. All like "This place isn't a love hotel! You kids these days should be more careful of who you let ....ect ect ect"
Then she saw me.
I was like 0_____0 and trying to tell her telepathically as hard as possible I had nothing to do with this, foreigners aren’t all like that, it’s not our influence, please don’t blame my culture for corrupting your youth pleaseplease)
She was like
=_____= Staaaaare
Me: O_O
Her: =_______________=
Me: llllO_O;
Her: #______#
Me: ;_;
Her: ^___^ "I remember you!”
Me: @_@???
Her: ^_^ “You were here last year! Here, I have the card you signed. See? That’s you right? How are you? *hugs *”
Me: OwO Yay!
She then asked me where I was living, what I’d been doing, and foisted delicious peaches on me ^______^
It was about then I needed to get going home. Tsubasa and a first-year girl happened to need the same bus as me, so they went back with me.
I’m bad at names. Just letting you know.
Unless I talk to someone many times (Shouki) or I happen to like your name a lot (Tsubasa) or you leave a ridiculously huge impression on me (Ganaha Taka-san, crazy sandals man from Okinawa who looks like a foreigner) I won’t remember it. I have to say I’m especially bad with girl’s names since they’re shorter and usually mean something along the lines of beauty or sincerity. Pssh, whatever.
Boys on the other hand, sometimes have cool names. Like Ryuu or Atsushi. I can remember those.
So I felt bad I couldn’t remember anyone’s names in that party.
'Skeezy guy on the couch’ and ‘drunk girl ‘ aren’t good ways of remembering people.
Anyway, the three of us on the bus talked a lot on the way home. At one point we started talking aout uniforms, where the two of them discovered I’m an old man about SCHOOL UNIFORMS!!!111one!....one.
In Kobe it’s the style for girls to wear super long skirts (down to their ankles) and black socks along with big sweaters.
Yes, you heard me. Kobe girls enjoy looking like yankee-bag ladies.
NOT CUTE.
NO! School girls should have knee-socks, not super short but still mini mini-skirts, cute poofy sweaters or sweater vests, and wear their bows propery! It’s the cutest. Not having super long torso-elongating pulled down skirts and open buttons at their collar =_= Grrrr.
It’s only Kobe. Even in Osaka thay usually have cute uniforms. So unfortunate.
Tsubasa and the other girl concluded I would be hilarious on T.V.
The girl also promised to make me a fan club, and they both liked the idea of my PENKA. . Gatherin’ fans One by One.
Soon Japan will be mine.
Friday july 31
The Chinese kids from my Japanese class invited me out for dinner and karaoke. Yay! I don’t get to hang with them often since they all have jobs. Most of them were going back to China within the next week so they’d gotten leave already, therefore enabling us all to go out. Yay PARTAY.
Decisions are hard to make in a group, and because I was the only not-Chinese kid, it got pushed on me (logicwhut?) They all swore they didn’t kow Sannomiya that well (And I do? They’ve all been here a year or two longer than me. I’m six months in guys….) But okay. They required it cheap so I let them know about a little Italian-ish place I’d been to ($6-8 a person or so. That’s cheap. Right?)
I fail at cheap, according to them.
But then again, when comparing ANYTHING to Chinese prices, It’ll seem expensive. AND YET THEY INSIST ON COMPARING.
Don’t blame it on me. It’s not my fault your money isn’t worth anything here. Don’t feel so bad China. Lately mine isn’t either. Stupid exchange rate. Let's all be poor together comrades.
Honestly, when eating out, you don’t get much cheaper than about 7 a person. Unless you’re at McDonald's.
But okay.
Besides, this included drinkage, which the guys said they wanted, so they dealt with it.
The original plan was Karaoke after that, but the two random guys that came who weren’t even in our class and I’d never seen them before wanted bowling, and badly. Like..vein popping aneurysm bad.
But…But…. T_T
A bunch of the girls, a few of which who, like me, came pretty specifically for karaoke, were kinda like… ”Uh....Bowling?”
Bowling is also a little more expensive, and although I don’t dislike it, I’m particularly bad at it. I don’t feel quite comfortable enough with these kids to fail epically in front of them yet. I get the feeling they’d pull no punches mocking me.
A couple of the other girls really disliked bowling and spoke up, so after much male grumpiness, we headed to karaoke as per plan.
HA!
Us girls had fun. XP The guys boycotted singing (Who the hell were they anyway? I think they were graduates) but they started requesting silly anime songs, which I obliged to, so they probably enjoyed it a bit.
The Chinese names are widly different for anime though, so there were a few I couldn’t figure out.
Apparently China renames ALL their released anime, usually a transliteration into crippling Chinese characters loosely based phonetically on the original name. Rarely they’ll just translate it. America just plain translates it sometimes if it’s a really complicated name like ‘Ookiku Furikabutte’ into 'Big Windup' or something but it’s usually pretty close and fans know the original Japanese name anyway, because we’re hopless and nerdy (Nerd status symbol = knowing the original of everything.)
Not so in China.
It makes it hard though, when the guy is all like, can you sing the opening to QiYanLiu?
I’m like…
“…..No? Let’s try that again. Um, can you describe it?”
“The main character has a super long weapon.”
LEAST HELPFUL INFO IN THE WORLD.
That’s every shonen anime EVER. Congratulations.
Never figrered that one out.
All I could think was Seirei no Moribito, but she’s a girl, so the description would have been easier to figure out. Like : ‘Bad ass giant lady with a spear toting a cute little boy in a dress’……Spears are cool, regardless.
Towards the last few minutes, Ko showed up out of nowhere!
Apparently she decided on an impulse to watch the new Harry Potter movie instead of dinner with all of us.
…uh….Okay.
I Like ‘My Pace’ people. I simultaneously completely don’t understand and yet totally follow their logic.
So we went home together, which counts as ‘quality time’ I suppose.
On the way back home, there was a dude that'd fallen down stairs in a puddle of drunk old-man-passed-out-fail. 0_0 There were like, police and everything.
Scary stuff.
There should be an elevator down there. Anyone who's ridden the Yamate Line from Sannomiya knows what I 'm talking about. Those stairs are pure stone vertigo traps.
Ko and I ate dessert at Royal Host even though it was almost midnight. We talked a lot. Ko is really interesting, if a little flakey. She has actual hobbies and aspirations, which is always interesting…(And surprisingly rare among the kids I've met...Which is kind of a depressing thing to say O_O) She’s also the only Chinese kid I know that has more Japanese friends than Chinese friends. She fits in really well here, likes history and a bunch of other stuff I like (fashioooooon) so I like talking to her. I don’t often have a chance to spend a lot of time with her, so it was nice. It sucks they have to go back next week ;_;.
Saturday, August 1
Okay, thought I would mention right fast that ‘Sham Wow’ should not have made it to Japan 0_0
NONONONO.
Okay, so today was the Kobe fireworks festival out on the water right near the shiny tower and sparkly ferris wheel.
One of the Chinese kids said she was going and I managed to get her to go with me. YAY!
Because it counted as a festival, I decided it would be a good idea to wear a yukata. Especially since I just so happen to be the right age group for it right now (middle school - college girls.)
Apparently no one else did. D: Awkward.
I mean, lots of random Japanese girls, but none of the Chinese kids who said they were going to wear one with me did.
Pssh.
Well whatever, I was cute. It was super fun,
It kinda strated to rain a bit towards the end but the fireworks sure were purdy. We were kinda stuck behind a tree the whole time though. They were going off from two diffeent places and although they didn’t quite mirror each other symmetrically, it was the same idea (shiny things in the sky) so it was cool. If the tree was blocking one side, I could kinda see the other.
Silly lollipop hedge trees.
Like all festivals, there was tons of awesomely bad for me food around, so we made sure to have a bunch of that.
You know what sucks? I have no idea what the name of the girl I went with was. 'Gi'? Something like that. I think she’s been in Japan for over two years, close to three, and I don’t think she’s actually in any of the same classes I’m in.
She was really nice though, and she was an interesting person. Wanted to go into business, really down to earth. Motivated but not totally batshit (unlike me D: I’m totally unrealistic Oh ho ho ho, Imma live in a cardboard box!)
It was a cool day.
Sunday, August 2
I’ve been to the Sanuki Udon shop in Kagawa that’s on T.V right now. That’s kinda bizarre. Like…”Hey, I think I drew that tree….” I still have that picture. You have to line up outside of this place 'cause it's all famous and so I drew the giant epic tree outside of it.
Whoa twilight zone.
It’s like if I were to see a favorite DC resuraunt on T.V It’d be like “Oh Snapple, it’s Giffords Ice cream. Hi there. Am I can has fudge and sprinkles?”
Cell phone failure. I need to buy ANOTHER phone card. I swear I have to buy those every two weeks these days. NOT COOL. They should totally last me a month.
Chinese kids be talking slow so I’ve used up all my minutes. It’s like, they’re technically better at Japanese than me (or is it that they’re better at technical Japanese than me?), But they all talk so slow. WHY? I don’t care if you leave particles out. No one uses grammar these days. Pssh.
Anyway, lack of phone’ll make tomorrow infinitely more complicated.
Also: Fail at drawing bricks and drawing my own characters.
It’s a sad thing when the characters you thought up are too complicated for you to draw ;_;
Monday August 3
T.V News: No! Japan, don’t watch Waterworld! That was an awful movie. Just go to Sea World and see the live show…..
Yukiko and I had lunch together (we bought Takarazuka tickets today, and so we planned a lunch date then too, because I mean…..If we’re going to meet up anyway why the heck not?)
Origionally both Ko and Rai were supposed to join us for project ‘Totally Tubular Takarazuka Fun in the Sun Summer Spectacular’, but Rai bailed on us pretty early on, not really wanting to spend the extra fourty monies on tickets for something otherwise not-tangeble.
….Because an amazing cultural performance you can only see here isn’t enriching or anything.....
Ko, on the other hand, really wanted to go, but things kept coming up and she wasn’t sure about the timing. Because she fails at school, she ended up having to meet a teacher that day but didn’t bother telling us about it until the day before.
….This means that we only tried to buy our tickets the day before we planned to go.
The Takarazuka e-ticket-conbini-god frowns upon that.
No tickets.
So we decided to take our chances and just go really early tomorrow and try to get unsold seats on the cheapy-cheap.
Let’s see if that works.
If not, I’ll uh…
Get to look at the Takarazuka-Tacular pictures outside the gate ;_;
…Almost like the real thing…..
Anyway, so for lunch we went to Bikkuri Donkey, becaue it amuses the hell outta me.
Think Arizona, but horribly bastardized by people who have never been there.
THEN ADD AWESOME, and Donkies...
And you have Bikkuri Donkey!!
After that both of us had about three hours to kill. I had something at three, and then another something at five, and Yukiko had something at three thirty (Job? I think.) So we decided we needed karaoke therapy.
Except it was super busy, but we had time, and we only wanted an hour, so Its cool. We had two and a half hours to kill. It couldn't possibly take that long.
Yes it can.
By the time we got a room, we’d used up almost two hours, and only had 35 mintues to sing ;_;
FAILURE.
I enjoyed both songs XD
Rai’s going away party with her tennis friends and a few upperclassmen was after that. I was invited too, and it was supposed to be kinda potluck tacular.
Unfortunately, it also happens to be on the same day as the ESS 3rd year ‘graduation’ nomikai.
See, in Japan, once you hit the middle of your third year, you have to spend between that until the middle of your fourth year job hunting (there’s particular season for that). This means that people in the middle of their third year have to ‘graduate’ from clubs.
Pretty much, they’re just too busy to go to club anymore. Especially since clubs are always on Wednesday, and Japanese schools get out early on Wednesday JUST for job hunting and clubs.
Yes, so no more 3rd years. We need to say goodbye.
By drinking a lot.
Anyway, first was Rai’s thing. It was supposed to start at three, So that’s when I got there, although it had at somepoint turned into four (When did that happen?)
Then EVERY single one of the other people she invited called and said they’d be an hour late
So…Five.
I needed to leave at five at the latest to get the bus to Tarumi to meet the ESS club.
Oh snap.
I never did meet those other kids.
Rai was working super hard on food and stuff like that, so I’m sure they enjoyed it whenever/if they decided to show up.
So at Five I skedattled on to Tarumi, where Shouki met me at the station (I’m not super sure why, but he’s always the one to meet me or calling me if people need to contact me. Hmm. I don't’ mind, he’s a cutey head.)
So, although I was out of it (already a pretty eventful day, like WHOA) I started recognizing my surroundings on the walk from Tarumi station to the coast.
HOOOO SNAPPLE
Apparenly, the ESS club is going to be the seminar house I stayed in for a couple weeks last year with Setsuko's class for their nomikai.
It’s been like a year scince I saw that place! Oh the memories.
There was nabe (Hotpot) and various other assorted munchies for the lovinz’
I ended up sitting near Tsubasa, the guy with the nice voice, and Kimi-chan.
Tsubasa is a third year, and pretty good at English (He’s been to New York, where he was super hit on because of his one earring thing. And well.... Japanese boys dress nicely and play with their hair, so they end up looking nice enough to be considered gay (the dangers of looking cute when you're a boy in Amurika.) So I talked to him a bunch. He’s fun.
There’s a camp I didn’t know about starting next week (English camp? I’m not sure. It could be the fourth year annual trip. I know there is one. Because I’m just an honorary member (mascot), I could go if I wanted to.)
A bunch of them asked what I was going to do this summer scince summer vacation starts…oh…just about now. I told them I was going to go back to Tokyo for a few weeks. They were all like: "Again? Weren't you just there?".... I was but I had plans with friends.
Then they asked what those plans were.
How can I tell them in the least overtly nerdy way possible that the reason I’m goint to Tokyo is for Comiket and GIANT GUNDAMS?
Well, considering the guy with the nice voice had a Gundam shirt on right that second, I decided to tell them about the gundam thing anyway.
Yeah. Everyone likes Gundam. It’s mainstream. You can’t not be into robots.
It’d be like not-liking Spiderman or Batman.
Cool.
That went over well.
This spurred a LONG and in-depth conversation about Gundams.
I wish I had Tavis there. I like me some Gundams, but I underestimated the guy with the nice voice's knowledge of more obscure stuff. I'm like..."I like ROBOTS. And....The cute boys piloting them?" I really didn't watch 'Wing' with a critical eye for politics and mirrored current events y'know? I was like: "Hur hur, 'Shining finger' hur hur."
But anyway, Guy with nice voice (I should learn his name XD) and I had a lot of fun roping nerding about 90's Gundams from our childhood. Consensus is 08thMS and Z were awesome and SEED will always fail.
Ayway, he made me promise to take a coslpay picture in front of the Gundam and show it to them.
OH! And after the girls got tipsy (didn’t take long, weak D:) we (of course) stated talking aout boys, and I found out that The guy with the nice voice started dating the cute evil girl who makes people drink too much like a Kabajou girl (Kimi-chan) last month <3
SOOOOOO CUTE.
They’re really cute together. Both are good looking, charismatic, and tall. They’re also both the really nice but sometimes jokingly bully-types that have vaguely nerdy hobbies. I think they make a really nice couple. (The club aggrees with me ^^)
There was some talk of hand-held fireworks on the beach (WOO! I haven’t done that yet this trip) so I followed a pack of people dragging a giant rocket-type to the beach about fifty meters away (I like that seminar house, I really do.) We had fun with the fireworks...Until Mr. Bicycle Policeman came and told us to stop.
In Japan, handheld fireworks in the summer are totally legal, although there are certain places that don’t allow it (dense residential areas and protected property.) Apparently this was one of them even though there were no signs or anything.
The policeman really couldn’t get all that upset with us since there was no way for us to know. He let us finish off the fireworks we had. There was no one around but old men staring off into the Akashi Straight contemplating the whirlypools (I love stereotypical old sea-men.)
After that we headed back to the seminar house. Some of our group had problems walking correctly and lagged behind. Oops. I don’t exactly remember why, but I decided to hang around downstairs. I think it’s because people had mostly cleared out of the upstairs room (where we had the food) in hopes of avoiding clean-up XD
I was sitting near a fourth-year girl I’d never met and a Chinese guy I’d never met (there were a lot of fourth-years and alumni I’d never met. I got used to it.) The girl was super plastered, and so was a random kinda greasy lookin’ guy sitting next to her.
The Chinese Dude sitting next to me was nice, if a little creepy.
... As in... It’s weird when people comment on my eyes a lot.
Why…Yes, they ARE blue. I’ve been aware of that fact for a while now.
Stop staring at them please. No, hypnostics don’t work on me.
They mentioned that it must be hard for people to see what I’m thinking.
I was like…
"Yeah, I gue-Huh?"
'Because My eyes aren’t mirror-y.' They say.
....
I see?
So, this is where I learned dark eyes make good mirrors, and not being able to see your own reflection in my eyes freaks people out here. It’s bad luck or something, and means I’m difficult to understand.
I’m sorry my eyes don’t absorb light and scare you? If it helps, it really painful in the summer?
Wait…So because you can’t check your hair in my eyes mean I’m mysterious and hard to understand?
That’s not just me failing at Japanese? XD
Good to know...
The drunk-in the-face girl and drunker dude the sitting across from me started getting weird. He was laying it on pretty thick, and she was okay with that. So the point where they were the closest I’ve ever seen to Japanese people making out. O_o
That’s when the Seminar-house care-taker came. (Yay! Old grannies to the rescue. That girl woulda regretted it in the morning. Dude was a skeezemaster.)
Old lady started getting on the girl’s case for being easy and the guy for being gross. All like "This place isn't a love hotel! You kids these days should be more careful of who you let ....ect ect ect"
Then she saw me.
I was like 0_____0 and trying to tell her telepathically as hard as possible I had nothing to do with this, foreigners aren’t all like that, it’s not our influence, please don’t blame my culture for corrupting your youth pleaseplease)
She was like
=_____= Staaaaare
Me: O_O
Her: =_______________=
Me: llllO_O;
Her: #______#
Me: ;_;
Her: ^___^ "I remember you!”
Me: @_@???
Her: ^_^ “You were here last year! Here, I have the card you signed. See? That’s you right? How are you? *hugs *”
Me: OwO Yay!
She then asked me where I was living, what I’d been doing, and foisted delicious peaches on me ^______^
It was about then I needed to get going home. Tsubasa and a first-year girl happened to need the same bus as me, so they went back with me.
I’m bad at names. Just letting you know.
Unless I talk to someone many times (Shouki) or I happen to like your name a lot (Tsubasa) or you leave a ridiculously huge impression on me (Ganaha Taka-san, crazy sandals man from Okinawa who looks like a foreigner) I won’t remember it. I have to say I’m especially bad with girl’s names since they’re shorter and usually mean something along the lines of beauty or sincerity. Pssh, whatever.
Boys on the other hand, sometimes have cool names. Like Ryuu or Atsushi. I can remember those.
So I felt bad I couldn’t remember anyone’s names in that party.
'Skeezy guy on the couch’ and ‘drunk girl ‘ aren’t good ways of remembering people.
Anyway, the three of us on the bus talked a lot on the way home. At one point we started talking aout uniforms, where the two of them discovered I’m an old man about SCHOOL UNIFORMS!!!111one!....one.
In Kobe it’s the style for girls to wear super long skirts (down to their ankles) and black socks along with big sweaters.
Yes, you heard me. Kobe girls enjoy looking like yankee-bag ladies.
NOT CUTE.
NO! School girls should have knee-socks, not super short but still mini mini-skirts, cute poofy sweaters or sweater vests, and wear their bows propery! It’s the cutest. Not having super long torso-elongating pulled down skirts and open buttons at their collar =_= Grrrr.
It’s only Kobe. Even in Osaka thay usually have cute uniforms. So unfortunate.
Tsubasa and the other girl concluded I would be hilarious on T.V.
The girl also promised to make me a fan club, and they both liked the idea of my PENKA. . Gatherin’ fans One by One.
Soon Japan will be mine.