JOURNAL:
ErMaC
-
August 1st offline entry, no title
2002-08-06 01:36:43
August 1st, 5:30PM
Day two began pretty uneventfully. I got up, met up with Nathan and Courtney and we went downstairs to go eat breakfast. Down in the cafe we met up with all but one of the other students who was going on the Tsuru program. We all caught a bus together to the Internation al Christian University campus after checking out and made our way to the classroom we were supposed to be getting our orientation in.
Make no bones about it - it is HOT around here. Jesus christ, it's not necessarily the heat it's just so goddamn humid it's like breathing water. Thank God for air conditioning. Anyways we met up with Chris, the one other person we were missing. Our party now consisted of Me, Nathan, and Chris from UCI, Courtney from UCSD, Mike and Te (I'm not sure if that's how you spell it but you pronounce it like "hand" in Japanese) from UC Berkeley, David and Davee from UCLA, Sarah from UCSC, and Laura from UCSB. We had our orientation and they took us out to this "Italian" place before we took the hourlong busride into Tsuru. The food was OK, I had a pizza with a bunch of Italian meats and tanked through the whole thing in a matter of minutes. It was like Italian-style pizza in that it was thin and kinda light, and sadly wasn't terribly filling.
We then took a bus over to Tsuru and I just listened to my Move CDs while reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (by Heinlein, of course) over again. Once we got there we were introduced to a bunch of new people including the people who would be our individual "tutors" or more accurately mentors. Mine's this _really_ cute girl named Reiko, and she helped me set everything up in my apartment and we went shopping at the super market together to get my initial necessities (Ramen, Diet Pepsi, Frosted Flakes - sadly they don't have Life over here) and then she left at around 5PM. I have to go meet back up at the campus at 6PM and it's getting close to that time so I'll have to wrap up this entry.
Biggest complaint - there's no internet access yet! The packet said that the rooms would be "wired for computers" which I assumed meant ethernet jacks, but instead I have some flier for ADSL sitting in my mailbox. Grumble. So looks like it'll be several more days before I can get internet access and actually put these entries online. I may write another one after the party that starts in 15 minutes or later this evening.
Initial impressions of Japan: aside from the almost unbearable heat, the streets are really narrow and most of the cars are really small. I'm not exactly living in a typical Japanese apartment so I can't make any observations about those, but it's all very tightly packed. Everything in Japan grows vertically. You'll be hard pressed to find a building without multiple floors. I guess that's both a good and a bad thing. It's good because it means everything's really close to each other in terms of distance - I can walk to the supermarket and back very easily which will probably be very convenient. It's bad because it means I've got someone above, below, to the left, and to the right of me (in front and is the catwalk into the various apartments and behind is a balcony where I can hang my clothes since I get a washer but not a dryer).
But biggest complaint is no internet accesss. I'm such an addict.
Maybe I should go find a DDR machine tonight.
-
July 31st offline entry, no title
2002-08-06 01:35:51
July 31st
This is my first journal entry from Japan.
Well I survived my flight. My family saw me and my friend Nathan off from the airport. The flight was uneventful, although coincidentally the two in flight movies were Monsters, Inc. and then Ice Age... both all CG films. Weird. They were also dubbed into Japanese on one of the other audio channels, but I only listened to that some for Monsters, Inc. and I was sleeping for the vast majority of Ice Age.
Once we got off the plane we had to ship our baggage to the place where we'll be staying once we get to school, and then take the train to the hotel where we were going to stay that night. We managed to ship the baggage without too much trouble, and we met up with Courtney who is also doing the same EAP program as us, she's an Art major from UCSD. We then took the Narita express into Tokyo and on to Shinjuku where we really got our first taste of the sheer amount of PEOPLE that are here.
First off, it was hot, but even worse it was REALLY humid. We're talking swimming through air humid. And the vast number of people wasn't making it any easier. We made our connecting train on the Chou-sen to Mukashi-sakai where we got off and went to our hotel. We checked in, and we three decided to meet up to go to dinner in about an hour. I took a nice, much needed shower, finished up part of a Civilization game I'd started on the plane, and then met them downstairs. We walked around for a couple minute looking for a place to eat and settled on this one place. We managed to piss off the guy running it because we weren't really on our game when it came to Japanese (I haven't been speaking it in at least a month and a half, so I'm not in practice). In japanese he said something to the effect of "If you're in Japan you should speak Japanese!" Anyways...
So now I'm back in the hotel watching baseballand writing this. Tomorrow we have to take a bus to the International Christian University for an orientation meeting, then we take a bus down to Tsuru.
-
Japan Journal Entries begin here
2002-08-06 01:35:11
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Above here are journal entries written from Japan. The ones above this line until noted were written offline so they were all posted simultaneously but were written at different times.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Under one week
2002-07-24 05:20:46
Yup, I leave on Tuesday of next week. The day draws closer and closer... dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnn!!
Read this comic:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2002-01-23&res=l
That's how I feel with SimGolf. I LOVE this game, and yet I feel like a pussy for recommending it to people. Everytime I mention the game to someone new they raise an eyebrow and they're like "Sim _GOLF_?" To which I answer "Well, it's not like you play golf, you manage a golf course!" And then I realize how even more pathetic that sounds.
Oh well. Honestly, it's a great game, it's really fun. You should get it - it's only like $29.95 and runs on almost anything. I am Sid Meier's bitch.
So tonight I went down to golfland to play more DDR. Yay. And on the drive there I realized that there's something I'm really going to miss while I'm in Japan.
Driving.
If you've seen Japanese roads you know they don't quite compare to the open roads and the sheer massive road system we have in America. Not only that but since I'm just there for 18 weeks I'm not gonna spend lots of ее on getting a drivers license (because it does cost lots of ее for the required courses, tests, and training, etc).
Maybe it's something genetic. I mean, my Uncle's one of the top amateur autocross racers in the country and president of the Corvaire club of America, my Dad's always been into cars somewhat and got his very own souped up BMW for his 50th birthday... and well, we both love driving games - one of the few video games we've both always enjoyed.
There's just something about driving really fast out on the open road that I love, this weird illicit thrill as I break the law by driving at over 140kph, and it just is so exhilirating. I LIKE driving. I would rather drive 6 hours up interstate 5 from SoCal to NorCal than fly most of the time, because I enjoy driving. I'm really going to miss that in Japan.
Of course, I could just seek out the nearest Initial D: Arcade Stage machine. For those who don't know this is THE BEST RACING GAME EVER. OH MY GOD!!! Take Sega's racing game design team, pair them with Initial D and all the background for tracks and characters, throw in licensed cars all with stats, CUSTOMIZABLE by taking a little card with you when you race on the machine, Super Eurobeat music blaring, and you've got the most incredible racing game ever. Yes, even better than Super Mario Kart.
Plus if you've seen the TV series it's lotsa fun to race against the various teams in the show. Itsuki is the second person you race and since it was my first time on the machine I was kinda losing to him on the 2nd lap and my friend was like "Dude, you're gonna lose to /Itsuki/!" And very loudly, I said "I am _NOT_ losing to ITSUKI!" and then half the people in hearing range laughed cause I guess they'd seen the show and would know how DEGRADING IT WOULD'VE BEEN TO LOSE TO ITSUKI. But it's OK I pulled way ahead on the third lap. I'm a far better downhill racer than uphill in that game, and you race him uphill, so I sorta have an excuse, oh well....
-
The countdown begins.
2002-07-21 20:34:19
We're now at 9 days and counting.
Yup, 9 days till I fly to Japan for 18 weeks. The whole magnitude of this hasn't quite set in yet, I still sorta am in the mindset that I'm just gonna be hanging here at home for the next month playing Civilization 3. I suspect that either once the plane really takes off, or when I actually land in Japan, the whole gravity of the situation will hit me like a pan-dimensional hammer and I'll freak OUT! (so fabulous! so fierce!)
Ya been playing lotsa DDR. I've beaten the Naoki Platinum Oni course now, I've full comboed all of Soul 6 (that's like 1300+ steps), and I've also beaten From IIDX cause I finally survived Burning Heat. I can still beat Tempo Changer, Naoki Standard, Pop 8, Nearly 130, etc with regularity, but for some reason I always just choke on Paranoia Brothers. I don't know why either - it's not like they're really hard compared to stuff I can do like Burning Heat or Tsugaru and full combo. Ah well. I expect to be playing DDR in Japan as long as I can actually find a machine close enough to me.
I'm bringing along this dinky little P2 366 laptop (that is if it gets to me in the mail on time) which should be sufficient to play Civilization 3 and Sim Golf, so that should keep me from getting bored. I doubt it'll play them very WELL, but it'll play them. I sure as hell ain't installing Premiere on that thing, though. And I don't expect the actual classes to be too demanding as Japanese Colleges are notoriously easy, and all the returnees from this same program that I've talked to have all said it was a huge break compared to UCI.
Since I should have net access (the pamphlets say there's ethernet in the apartments we're staying) and I'll probably be keeping a journal of some sorts here on AMV.org kinda like iserlohn is. We'll see if I actually manage to update it with any irregularity.
Oh yea - who thinks I should bring my J-list shirt that says (in japanese) "currently searching for Japanese girlfriend"? I wore it at AX and I could tell a couple groups noticed it and got a giggle out of it. At least I won't look any weirder to them than they do to me when they wear shirts like this:
http://www.konami.co.jp/am/AM/beforu/profile_noria.html
"red ruuuuum, red ruuuuuuum!"
Current server time: Jan 15, 2025 10:38:04