By the end of this trip, I will know everything there is to know about the Japanese health care system

Guess who spent four hours at the hospital with her roommate today!
Hint: it was the person who writes this blog.
Fortunately, Louki does not need to have her foot amputated, but she DOES need to sit down and stop walking so much and TAKE CARE OF HERSELF.
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, LOUKI.*

On a random note, Kim gave me stroopwafels, and I am PRETTY PLEASED because stroopwafels are amazing.  OM NOM NOM.  If you don't know what stroopwafels are, well, obviously you don't have Dutch friends who feed you.  Maybe you should fix that!

Otherwise, not all that much going on over here, other than me working on my paper, threatening the other Fulbrighters with alligators,** trying to figure out where to take my dad when he visits next week,*** fangirling at Julia and Ellie (sorry), trying to work out the logistics for my speech in June (for the Chubu Fulbright Alumni Association), planning my trip to Tokyo for the Fulbright 60th anniversary reception,**** fangirling at Julia and Ellie some more (SORRY), planning my trip to Okinawa with a bunch of the other Fellows after that, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Basically, exciting stuff coming up in the next few weeks, but right now, not that much excitement! Sorry.

*I totally know that you occasionally read this blog, Louki, and also that you apparently haven't bothered to save the url and search for it through Google, which seems kind of weird to me, but WHATEVS--I have too many bookmarks.  And if you want to know how I know this, it is either my MAD PSYCHIC POWERS or my DEDUCTIVE PROWESS.  Or maybe BOTH.
...also, I think when they asked on the form if you were living with someone they meant in a relationship OOPS.  They should have been clearer.

**This makes sense in context, and has to do with our wretched handbook.

***I literally just got off the phone with Itou-san, and she said, and I quote, "There is nothing anyone would want to see in Nagoya."  Although then she amended that by saying that there's the castle and the aquarium, but neither is all that interesting.
...by the way, my dad is visiting me next week.  Guess I should have mentioned that earlier.

****Where I might be meeting the emperor.  Yes, the emperor of Japan.  I keep forgetting to write about things on this blog.  I am quite bad at remembering to write about things.

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????

ER adventures and handbooking

On Saturday, I got to experience the Japanese health care system by sitting in an ER for three hours.  It was approximately as exciting as expected.  Basically, my roommate Grace wasn't feeling so great, so I went to the ER at the local hospital with her.  Although the people in the study abroad office had told me that the local hospital had English translators, we didn't wind up with one.  The doctor did put all the medical terms he was using into a Japanese-English online medical dictionary, but, while I don't know what 気胸 means (other than that it clearly involves air and chests), I don't really know what pneumothorax is either.  Fortunately, my electronic dictionary* includes an English medical dictionary, so we were able to look up the terms we didn't already know, and discovered that they thought that Grace might have a collapsed lung.  Three x-rays later, they decided that she didn't actually have a collapsed lung and sent her home with an anti-inflammatory, which apparently worked, so I dunno what was up.
Anyway, it was way faster than an American ER, involved a whole lot less randomly sitting around waiting for results (we only had to wait about half an hour for the x-ray results), and was a lot less expensive than an American ER would be, because the national health insurance pays for 70% of all costs.  THANK YOU, JAPANESE HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM.

Other exciting things that have been going on?  UMMMMMM, I have been doing the reading for my religious history class, which actually isn't too hard, except for the parts where they quote Meiji Restoration proclamations, and then I have absolutely no idea what's going on.  Well, at least I can read enough to get the general gist of what's going on, but they use so many words that aren't in my dictionary (either Japanese-English or Japanese-Japanese), that it's impossible to get everything.

Something I forgot to mention before is that all this year's Fulbrighters have to write a handbook for next year's Fulbrighters.  We...didn't actually know about this until the mid-year conference, and it's due at the end of May, so it's been kind of a scramble.  I wound up as the editor-like-person-position-job-thing, because apparently I am doomed to forever wind up in a position of evil power.

Also, I called to set up an interview and the priest I was calling had forgotten that I existed.  Super awkward.  It was a conversation fraught with awkward pauses until he remembered who I was and that my host family in Tochigi had introduced us. SUPER AWKWARD.  But I have a tentative interview set up for the 25th, so YAY.

On a final note, I just discovered that "Washington, D.C." in Japanese is コロンビア特別区, or "the special ward of Columbia."  HA.

*which I love madly and would marry so hard.  LET'S HAVE BABIES, DENSHI JISHO.