We had a SARS questionnaire to fill out on the plane where we had to declare whether we experienced any symptoms of the flu in the past 3 weeks. Just quietly I’ve had a bit of a sore throat since the weekend but I failed to disclose that fact, I didn’t want to be quarantined by immigration, with my limited Japanese I would have probably ended up at the animal quarantine.
We caught a bus from Nagoya airport to Shingifu station where we got our first glimpse of Japan, little houses, little cars and blooming cherry blossoms. We’ve just arrived in time for the cherry blossoms, they started blooming only this week and will probably start disappearing next week. Once we got to Shingifu, it didn’t even cross our minds to take the bus which would have been cheaper, with about 100kgs of luggage between the 3 of us, the taxi was the way to go. We piled everything into a taxi and a crazy taxi driver drove us to the University. Our taxi driver was definitely a character. He spoke mostly in Japanese but he definitely knew some English. When he pronounced English words it didn’t have that typical Japanese twang to it, Nelani I think his accent was quite modified hehee. He was telling us that there had been incidences where women walking alone on sidewalks had been stabbed by someone riding on a bicycle – gives a whole new meaning to BMX bandits. And I thought Japan had a low crime rate.
We were dropped off at the International Student Centre at Gifu University where we got our keys. A Brazilian guy by the name of Rodrigo who arrived the day before helped us with our bags. After many rest breaks, mind you the International Student Housing is only about 5 minutes away, we found our rooms, mine in Building A Room 204. First impressions….no comment…hahha, after a semi big clean up it started to look much better. If only there was an Ikea around here…
Went out to lunch at a sushi train type restaurant... My very first dining experience and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. It was only 100 yen per plate of sushi, much cheaper than Sydney sushi trains.
Later that night we went to the Curry house, where I tried to order a level 7 curry (they have 10 levels of spiciness) and the waiter got his manager over to our to table to talk me out of it. Even though I didn’t understand what he was saying, I pretty much got the idea when he was indicating to me with his forefinger and thumb that a level 7 curry contained about an inch of curry powder. I guess that would have been very hot for Japanese standards but I go by Malaysian chilli standards. Ok so I ended up changing my order, to just a regular level of spice. While eating my pork curry and rice, I began perusing the menu and came across the descriptions of the levels of spiciness. Level 3 “smoke will come out of your ears, Level 5 “3 days off work required, Level 6-10 “Danger zone danger zone, you will breathe fire out of your nose”. Hehehe we’ve already decided that the next time we go back we’re going to order 1 plate that is level 10 spicy and we’re all going to have a try of it.
* A couple of weeks later we went back and ordered the Level 10 curry and to say the least, it was pretty "oishikunai" - not tasty
Friday
5/4/03 – Waking up to new surroundings
Lacking a quilt I slept pretty well with just a blanket and thank goodness I decided to buy my Kathmandu goose down jacket. I’m going on a mission to find someone whom I can scab a pillow and quilt from.
10am – Japanese placement test. It’s been 4 months since my brains been turned on and till now I think it’s still warming up. I think I should have used my spare time in Oz studying my Japanese rather than walking between letterboxes delivering meaningless junk. It was 6 pages long and all in Japanese…I eventually gave up when it required me to construct sentences (you think I’d be able to do that by now…ummm no). After having lunch at a restaurant called Gusto with interactive television screens, and overdosing on eggs (I ordered something called Katsudon which is basically chicken and half cooked egg on rice), we had an international student house orientation where they showed us how to…recycle. The Japanese are very conscious about their recycling. All garbage bags have to be white/see through so they can catch out the suspects who put the combustibles with the non- combustibles with the cans with the bottles with pet bottles. Though I commend how strict they are about recycling.
It was then off to meet Muta sensei the International Student adviser who advised us that our Japanese was crap (in other words) We are in between A and B levels – A being beginner and B being slightly better than a beginner. I tried explaining to her that it was because we had been on holidays for 4 months and hadn’t studied in a long time, first in my limited Japanese and then had to break out into English. It just sounded like we were lazy arse students. So now we have been put in the Intensive A class. We have classes Monday to Friday from about 9 to 4. We’ll be starting from scratch so it’s going to be pretty easy in the first few weeks. I’m sorry Yasushi sensei! Damm my memory recall!
Elliot – is the given name to my new set of wheels and silver bicycle – ooouuuu yes it’s silver, one would think that that colour would light someone’s eyes up like mine did when I first saw my laptop. Well no it’s nothing special, every other bike is silver but I must say I was pretty impressed with the attached front basket so I can find my very own ET and sit him in there and ride into the night. Not only is there a basket, there’s a bell….a briiing briiing bell…hehhee can you guys hear me now singing, “Bicycle! Bicycle! I want to ride my bi-cy-cle…I want to ride it now…” by Queen…no? c’mon I always use to sing it in school, Tash I know you remember very well.
So we dumped our bicycles (the novelty wore off quite quickly) and walked over to the electrical store called Kojima to find a rice cooker – an essential appliance for Japanese living, something I will rely on for my survival. Actually I bought some rice the other day and one would think this would be dirt cheap given that we are living amongst rice paddies. But I actually paid about 2000 yen which is about $28 AU for a 5 kg bag of rice, now I never actually bought rice in Australia but surely it wasn’t that expensive back home. Anyway I regressed….so we were in the electrical store and lets just say that variety is not a problem. I was fairly impressed with the MD collection in terms of designs and stuff, as for features of these MD’s who knows. I think for a basic MD with a pretty cool cover would cost about $250. I think one of these will be a worthy purchase before going home. Well back to the original purchase of going to the electrical store, we made our purchase of the cheapest rice cooker available and brought it back to our kitchen to find that every other student had the same cooker. Also went on a mission to find a kettle but to no avail so another day goes by without my coffee (word round the campfire is that there’s a Starbucks in Gifu city – cross fingers that I won’t have to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow to buy myself a coffee.) I found out later that night that Japanese kettles look like thermoses.
For dinner we were invited to the level 3 common kitchen, where Jessica a girl from Brisbane cooked us thai chicken curry with vegies on…you guessed it rice. It was a really nice meal and quite cosy because there were 9 of us and I got to meet more people living in the International Student House.
Later that night I managed to finally get on the internet to send a quick email to Mum and Dad on Rodrigo’s laptop just to let them know that I hadn’t fallen into a storm drain somewhere in Gifu. Not that they have any storm drains in Gifu but you know what I mean, so maybe “green algae turtle infested rivers” would be more appropriate. I also finally managed to get my laptop hooked onto a power point, up until today it was running on battery because I couldn’t find an adaptor. I eventually found a cord to connect the transformers…robots in disguise….no I mean that black rectangular thing that laptops have, I think that’s what it’s called. But there was a bit of trouble at first but lets just say that the swiss army knife had to be whipped out. I won’t go into details because I ain’t no computer expert and my descriptions would be something like…”so the thing with the 2 holes couldn’t be plugged into the thing with the 3 pins so we had to cut…” ok so I’ll stop there because my uncle that sold me this laptop is going to have a heart attack. But in the end it connected up and now I sit here typing this entry. Tomorrow night I’ll be installing a program onto the computer so I can hook it up to one of the terminals here and start uploading my online journal and photos onto my page.
Saturday 6/04 - A typical Saturday morning
Now with my laptop plugged in, I’ve spent the morning typing up this journal and playing with my hacky sac (yes in the room, though it’s a small room I can still kick the thing around, and the walls help to keep the sac in close proximity so I don’t have to walk to far to get it. Actually I just had a kick around just then and the hacky sac nearly ended up in the toilet bowl, it missed it by an inch and landed where the toilet seat cover and seat join. I’ve also been listening to the music I’ve brought with me and it definitely helps to break the silence.
Kitee plays a good damsel in distress. We both went to the supermarket to pick up more essentials – food. Between the two of us we had 6 bags to carry and heaps by Gifu shopping standards. So we stood there and contemplated whether to expand some energy and carry the bags back to the House (only takes 5 minutes) or try to scab a lift of someone to drive us to the house (would have taken 1 minute). We chose the latter. In a mere matter of minutes, our driver was spotted, it was a male, he was young and he had a car….”quick Kitee go before he leaves” off she went to coerce him to give us a lift whilst I looked after the grocery bags. A few hand gestures and a couple a minutes later bingo, we scored ourselves a lift, so we piled our shopping into the boot and judging by the plastic wrapping in the back seats, I’d say this car was brand spanking new. He drove us to our house and left…whata a champ!
I’ve introduced the hacky sac to a few people in the house now and I must say hidden talents are coming out. The Koreans are really good at it, they call it hacky sacky hehe cute.
For dinner we went to a Gusto, a family restaurant now far from here. Shiho (pronounced She-Hoh) the Japanese resident adviser from last year wanted to meet the new people. I’ve been here 3 days and I’ve already eaten at Gusto on 2 consecutive days. I asked Daniel (from Sweden) how many times an International Student would eat here, the response was a cheeky smile – many. Rodrigo had already eaten lunch here earlier today and also yesterday. I won’t be surprised if I end up here tomorrow.
What started as a pretty quiet Sunday morning turned out to be pretty eventful! Apparently every Sunday, announcements are made over the loudspeaker (something I will use and abuse in the future – I’ve already made a stupid announcement already) where they invited students to go on an ‘outing’. Today because it stopped raining and the sun was beaming, we went to the local park to view the cherry blossoms (sakura) and ‘play’ games. We rode our bikes in one big convoy to the park, whilst everyone went off to play little games, Kitee and I took off to take pictures of the sakura. We then found ourselves wandering off and exploring the outskirts of the park when we saw Japanese men dressed up in coloured jackets (I wouldn’t know what you call them) carrying a portable on their shoulders. We stopped two men who were trailing behind carrying a huge bottle of sake so we could take pictures with them. They posed for photos with us, poured us each a cup of sake and invited us to go to the temple where different groups of people with different coloured jackets were congregated. It looked like a local festival. They wore jackets corresponding to the area they were from and each group carried a portable shrine and what they do is walk around the streets stopping at different shops to get money. A group of old guys took an immediate interest in Kitee because she’s gorgeous and though our understanding of Japanese is limited, we pretty much gathered that the wanted to get her drunk, take her home and sleep with her hehehe. I think it went something like, in their broken English “If you have money problems…come and see me”. Kitee drunk her can of Asahi beer very slowly and declined frequent offers of more beer. We tagged along for a bit behind one of the groups but stopped as we got too far outside the area around the temple.
Old man: You have money problems?? Come see me!
We got back in time for our free lunch of curry and rice, I’m getting the feeling that the Japanese perhaps only in Gifu are very found of their curry and rice. The last activity was a bit of a lucky dip but instead of dipping to get a prize you had to throw a bamboo ring onto prizes laid out on the ground. I was pretty determined to get a set of hangers on the matt. I think I must have been the only one that was desperate to get some hangers as everyone went for clocks, mugs, Japanese ornaments and other cheapo stuff. You should have seen how excited I was when I managed to get them hangers. Yes…yes sad stuff…haven’t you ever noticed the words ‘DAG’ scrawled on my forehead before?
Once we got our prizes, we took off once again this time back to the house and then to MASA the local shopping centre, where there is a 100 yen store, the Australian equivalent of the $2 shop or Clints Crazy Prices. As we walked into the shopping centre, our jaws dropped, our eyes widened and we went ‘wowww’. – it was the first time in Gifu that we have seen anything bigger than the local supermarket. It had a 3 level Jusco, a few shoe, bag and cosmetic shops AND the 100 yen store! It was like we were kids in a candy store. We picked up all the nick nacks we needed for our room like soap dishes, pegs, bowls, chopsticks, containers and the like. It was strange because I don’t think I would have gone around such a store with such enthusiasm in Sydney – perhaps you could think of it as me going crazy in Officeworks.