ER (again), Golden Week, and text-based adventures

...and I'm bad at updating.  May the fourth be with you, and all that.*  I would like to say that I have been so insanely busy I haven't had time to update, but it's more that I haven't had stuff to write about.  It's been Golden Week, and as I found out on Monday, during Golden Week, everything is TOO CROWDED.  I went with some of the other girls from the dorm to Osu Kannon to find shoes and other necessary articles of clothing, and it was like everyone in Nagoya had suddenly decided that day that the BEST POSSIBLE THING to do was to go to Osu Kannon.  So, yeah, that wasn't fun.  So I've been avoiding going out, 'cause I don't really feel like fighting through crowds of people.  Also, since it's Golden Week, I only had class on Tuesday night, and all my regular activities (i.e. penmanship class and/or anything else related to shrines) are on hold because everyone else is off reveling in the yellow color of this week.  (I genuinely have no idea why it's called Golden Week.  If you know, please tell me.)  So I've spent a lot of time reading.  A LOT of time reading.  And it's not very interesting to write about me reading.

One of the few exciting things that has happened this week is that I got to take Louki to the ER because she sprained her foot and may or may not have additionally infected it.  It was basically very exciting, because I got to be a medical translator, a job which I have no qualifications for whatsoever! Also, I have no idea why Japanese doctors are incapable of using language normal human beings can understand.  They could just say, "You sprained your foot and it might be infected," but instead they have to use words longer than I am, that obviously I can't understand in Japanese and then I have to translate the Japanese words to English and then the English words to real English.  VERY FRUSTRATING.  It has given me great respect for the American doctors who just tell you what is wrong without using insanely complicated words.

The weather here has been alternating between gorgeous but so humid you feel gross again the minute you're out of the shower and rainy/miserable.  It's too bad that the actually decent weather at the beginning of April only lasted about two weeks...  Perhaps I am spoiled by California's weather (okay, I am spoiled, but that's beside the point), but I kind of like my seasons to be, you know, SEASONS.  In Japan it feels like fall lasted for about three or four weeks and spring-ish weather will last for maybe a month total, if you count the gross humidity as spring-ish.  That means you have TWO MONTHS of nice weather, and the rest of the time it's too cold or it's oh gods I wish I could strip my skin off hot.  (I am really not looking forward to summer.  At all.  AT ALL.)  UNACCEPTABLE.

On a final and completely unrelated note, I screamed at worked myself into a tizzy over played an aggravating weirdly fun badly coded interesting Doctor Who text-based adventure game that some demonic person someone made.  It's basically Ellie's fault, and she was far too gleeful about me trying multiple times to sonic the stupid hinges on the gate trying to convince the game that the floor existed trying to bribe the constable playing it.  But, in the end, I was able to kiss the villain play the entire game whilst** naked and apparently none of the other characters noticed or cared sonic ALL THE THINGS meet Sherlock Holmes*** finish the darned thing.  I now feel compelled to link to the game, simply because as far as I can tell, your enjoyment of the game exponentially increases with each person you watch suffer through it.****  Also, if you don't enjoy suffering, I wrote up a list of all the bugs in the game and how to get around them, so you can just pester me for those.

YAY, THIS IS SUCH AN EXCITING UPDATE.

*If for some reason you are unaware of the implications of May fourth, well...click here.

**Is "whilst" a word real people use anymore?  According to certain people, chunks of my vocabulary can only be found in 1960's sitcoms.  I don't think "whilst" is a 1960's sitcom word, though.

***I am not a fangirl.


****I'm currently at 2.  Shannon somehow managed to pick up the TARDIS and carry it around.  Don't ask me how she managed this.  I think she's secretly a Timelord.*****

*****What do you mean "Timelord" and "TARDIS" aren't words, spell check????

All kaiten sushi all the time

I am so bad at updating.  SO BAD.  Part of the problem is that I've been going out/actually talking to people in the evenings, so instead of writing my blog posts after dinner, I come home exhausted, talk to Nick for a little bit, and then fall asleep.  The dangers of having friends!

Anyway, here are the answers from the super short words challenge!

1. pasokon = personal computer (paasonaru konpyuuta)
2. rimokon = remote control (rimooto kontorooraa)
3. meruado = mail address (meeru adoresu)
4. kaanabi = car navigation system, aka GPS (kaa nabigeeshon)
5. santora = sound track (saundo torakku)
6. furima = free market (furii maaketto)
7. kopipe = copy and paste (kopii ando peesuto)
8. ama = amateur (amachua), which is the opposite of puro (pro, short for professional)
9. infure = inflation (infureeshon)
10. shinse = synthesizer (shinsesaizaa)

...the highest anyone scored (that they told me; I dunno, maybe someone got all of them but was super secret about it) was a 2.
Say it with me:
:'D
Perhaps I have been in Japan too long, but a lot of these seemed pretty intuitively obvious to me!  (Well, not kopipe* and santora and shinse.  I got shinse after I thought about it, though.)  I have probably just been in Japan too long, you guys.  Probably.

Let's see.  What has happened since the last time I updated?

Monday was Louki's birthday, and I made her a cake, because it was either that or read stuff for class.  Anyway, it turns out that some people think being able to bake a cake is impressive?  I dunno.
Also, somewhere in the middle there I discovered that Grace is a brony which means that OUR BRONY LEAGUE IS NOW AT THREE.  We are UNSTOPPABLE.
Anyway, a bunch of people went out to a kaiten sushi** place, which was really good AND really cheap!  And I ate a bunch of saba (mackerel), because I am into saba.
Then, when we came back, it turned out that basically the entire dorm was waiting to sing "Happy Birthday" to Louki.  It was exciting!

Almost immediately after that we all trooped up to Ashley's room to wish HER happy birthday at midnight.  And I wanted to play her the ponies happy birthday song, but then I realized it was from an episode she hadn't seen yet and I was sad.

The next day I had penmanship, and one of the women who I haven't seen in almost five months was there.  It turns out that she injured her knee and was bedridden for a while, which is (obviously) why she wasn't coming to class, but it's great that she's able to get up and walk around again!  Also, she was shocked to see me, because apparently Nakano-san had told her that I had gone back to America...and failed to tell her that I was coming back.  OOPS.
But anyway!  It was a pretty good class!  I actually did some pretty okay penmanship and was super proud of myself until Nakano-san, 15 minutes before the end of class, handed me a string of about 20 incredibly difficult kanji and told me to try it "as a challenge."  ...it was pretty bad.  I shall take pictures and put them up here at some point.  Prepare your eyeballs.
Also, people in penmanship class have realized that actually maybe I kind of know something about Japanese religion, because:
A. I can understand the weird, obscure Shinto terms Nakano-san uses
B. I got into HARVARD, so clearly I must be kind of okay
C. Nakano-san was describing an amacha*** ritual, and I correctly identified it as being created by Gedatsu-kai,****
D. I knew what Gedatsu-kai was (I just read a book on it...)
E. I know the difference between Amaterasu-oomikami and Amaterasu-no-mikoto (one is from the Nihon Shoki and the other is from the Kojiki).
It's amusing, because a couple of new women have started coming, and Nakano-san keeps introducing me as knowing "all this random stuff even I don't know about Shinto."  Ahahahaha, what.

That evening I had Japanese class, where we finished reading a mystery novella we started a couple of weeks ago.  In the end, it turned out that the person I suspected from the beginning did it, and when we were just reaching the climax, our teacher asked if anyone knew who had done it, and I said I did, and she was SHOCKED OH MY GOODNESS.  It was kind of obvious, though.  If you're going to include a character and not have him/her DO anything, OBVIOUSLY HE/SHE DID IT.  Especially if it's a novella.

Wednesday I went out to Toyota City to interview Aoyama-san, the priest who the Yamaguchis (my host family in Tochigi) introduced me to.  He answered negative to almost all of my questions, which is interesting, but not entirely unexpected.  Anyway, I got some good information out of it, so now I just have to write it up into my paper.  I've been trying to work on my paper a little bit each day, but that's not actually how I work on papers, so it's more like on Wednesday I worked on my paper for a couple of hours and doubled the word count and I haven't touched it since then.  Oh well.  It'll get done.

Thursday I had Japanese class, where we were learning kanji compounds with two or more readings/meanings.  For example, 心中 can mean "in [someone's] heart" (しんちゅう) or it can mean "a love suicide" (しんじゅう).  They are pretty different words!
After class I went out with a bunch of other foreign students to kaiten sushi AGAIN, because we are all about kaiten sushi.

And now it is Friday and I am writing this in the afternoon so that I don't forget in the evening.  GENIUS.

Next week is Golden Week, which is a week with a million holidays in it, so everybody goes traveling.  Everybody except me, that is.  I don't really have any plans.  Maybe I'll figure something out or maybe I'll just bum around or maybe I'll go on a day trip somewhere.  WE SHALL SEE.  On the other hand, we have to finish a draft of the handbook by Monday, so maybe I'll just work on that...

*Which may be my new favorite word.  It just sounds so perky!

**Rotating sushi.  It's where the sushi is on a conveyor belt or in sushi boats.  People are always shocked when I say that we have kaiten sushi in the US.

***Sweet tea.

****As it turns out, Nakano-san belongs to a more Shinto-centric spin-off of Gedatsu-kai called Kamunagara-no-michi (which is the old reading for the word "Shinto," by the way!).  I need to find infos on it, basically.