Last Days in Fukuoka

June 28, 2009

Picking up where my last post left off, a couple weeks ago my host mother, a couple of her friends, another student that was also staying at her house (from Italy), and I went to an onsen (Japanese hot spring). No pictures for obvious reasons. First off, let me say this for those who don’t know: in an onsen, everyone’s naked. You get a hand towel if you kinda wanna cover yourself up, but that’s it. That said, it wasn’t really that embarrassing. At first it was kinda awkward, but it’s really…not that bad. You’re there to relax and everyone’s very civil about it. One of the nicest parts about it was the part of the bath that was outside. Unfortunately it was overcast that night so we couldn’t see the stars, but it was still pretty cool. By the way, the water is…really hot. I can’t give you an estimate for how hot it was since I don’t have any benchmarks to go off of, but I’ll just say that I had to get out and just sit down on a bench for a while to cool off. I suppose that’s probably normal, though. We were there for about an hour, so that’d be a pretty long time to be immersed in a hot spring. One of the (male) friends of my host mother that we were with gave us the advice of going into the cold water bath for about 10 seconds before leaving because, as was the case, you felt warm when you got out. It felt like sitting in an ice bucket, though.

After that there was a bit of a gap in me doing interesting things because going sightseeing almost every day is tiring, especially when I have 5 hours of intensive Japanese classes every day. I need time to chill, yo. This is also why I haven’t posted in a while.

The next few weeks saw me going to my host mother’s friend’s house to eat a few more times. While free food is always nice, I always felt like I was being rude because I’d never finish all the stuff they seemed to be expecting me to eat. A line I often heard during these meals was “takusan aru kara, takusan tabete kudasai” which means “There’s a lot, so please eat a lot”. I’m…not a terribly big eater, so it was kinda troubling, stressful even. She’d keep putting more food in front of me and I’d just smile and say thank you while mentally wishing she’d stop because I don’t know how to politely refuse something like that in Japanese. Anyway, here are some pictures of my host mother and said friend. Also, me and my host mother.

I went on another expedition with my pop culture class, this time to one of the local game centers. We, uh, studied the games there and I had to ask the employees what the most popular games for male and female customers were and why. For men it was, predictably, the Gundam vs. Gundam games (based off of the popular anime, Mobile Suit Gundam). For women, they said Puyo Puyo (a puzzle game). Oh right. This was around the time when my ATM card decided to stop working. I guess my bank was trying to confirm some account details with me, but couldn’t because my cell phone doesn’t work here and they decided to close my account. Meanwhile, I couldn’t fathom why the card worked when I arrived in Japan, but then suddenly stopped. Despite this, my pop culture teacher was cool enough guy and paid for us to play some games. He also bought me ice cream for some reason, which was cool. Kinda surprised that there was an ice cream vending machine in the game center, considering how ice cream and arcade games don’t tend to mix well.

On the topic of the ATM card, I had to go through a bunch of stuff with calling my bank and being on hold for a million hours and having them express ship me a new card, only to not be able to activate it because I couldn’t reach the automated activation service by phone for some reason. I swear, I tried like every possible combination of country codes and the number I was trying to reach (with/without leading 0s or 1s, respectively) and it still wouldn’t connect. I ended up having to get some money from my parents’ account.

And so, last Friday my stay at the Genki Japanese and Culture School ended. After classes end on Fridays there’s a graduation ceremony where all the people leaving that week get a certificate saying how many hours they studied and at what level, and then have to give a brief speech. After that, I went to the game center with some friends and played the Gundam game again, the one where you get in a pod and it’s like you’re actually piloting it! Kinda. It’s such a moneysink, but it’s so fun. I recorded a couple videos at the game center, but Youtube won’t let me upload them for some reason. I’ll try again later. After that, there was a party at a cafe owned by one of the teacher’s family. The food was pretty good. They had fried chicken, sushi, bream, some sort of pasta, and some other dishes I don’t remember. For dessert they had some really good sorbet. Flavors included grapefruit, banana, apple, and green tea. And yes, the green tea flavored sorbet tasted exactly like green tea. It was kinda gross. Also, as I just found out, sherbet and sorbet are the same thing. Furthermore, it’s not spelled “sherbert” as I previously thought. Also, for some reason, the family has a couple of horses for pets. Here’s a group shot of everyone that went to the party.

Not gonna say much about this, but yesterday I saw the new Evangelion movie. Neon Genesis Evangelion is an anime series that came out around 1997 and happens to be my favorite anime. Recently, a series of movies has been coming out that’s remaking the original series and adding new stuff. Being the huge Evangelion fan that I am seeing it in a theater was amazing. It was epic by itself, but seeing it on a movie screen was way too good. They were selling movie-related goods at the theater, which was pretty cool. I picked up this pamphlet that has a bunch of stuff about the movie that I can’t read yet. Someday I’ll break the Da Vinci Code and read the delicious contents those devious kanji are hiding. Oh right. Japanese movie theaters are unreasonably expensive. Going to see the movie set me back $18. I was also gonna go see the Fukuoka Tower and I heard it was best to go at night, but by the time I got there it was closed. All I have to show for myself is a grainy picture.

Earlier today I got on the Shinkansen, left Fukuoka, and am now in Hiroshima. Tomorrow I’ll be checking out the Peace Memorial Park and later on be heading to Kyoto. After I do stuff in Kyoto, I’ll be in Tokyo for three days and then come back to the US.

Random observations:
More people use parasols here than I’ve seen anywhere else.
It’s not uncommon for stores to, instead of taking your orders in person, have you buy a ticket from a vending machine that has your order on it.
It’s damn near impossible to find notecards here.

One of the students at the school showed us these videos on “how to speak Japanese without saying a word”, which are hilarious imo. The first one I linked is part 2, but it covers everything that’s in part 1. As a small warning, the second one has a bit of foul language.