Merry Christmas!

I wish you all Merry Christmas and a Colorful Happy New Year!

New year postcard sent to Isayama sensei
Vercy|ÜD, pencil, original design by .Farbrausch

The first semester has ended meaning that some of my friends are leaving Yamasa. Departures are always sad, though we tried to make them as cheerful as we could. The left picture is of the G class. The right picture is the gang I used to hang out with most of the time. I already miss you all!

 

Thanks to Yui (right picture, first row, first girl on the right) I was introduced to the Takada family that she visited during her Japanese home visit. I am really grateful for this. I think they are what we call good people.

Lately I was busy with installing the components that I bought myself as a Christmas present. I set my network wireless once again. If there was a statistics for "How many network routers do you buy a year?" I think I would finish at a fairly good position. The only difference for now is that it I am running on 302.11n (300MBps WIFI) because that was the cheapest! Yeah I know ... this is Japan.

I hacked a reading lamp for my top bunk so that I do not annoy my roommate if I happen to read till late. Not like it is a realistic situation that I go to bed later than him. He usually goes to bed well after 2 AM ;) The thing is that my territory begins to resemble the typical Vercy-ish look: lots of wires everywhere.

I received a lot of complaints about my voice and video quality in Skype. This was the courtesy of the built-in camera and mic of my new laptop. I am happy to inform you that I moved to the next level with a 3MP camera and a decent mic. So now it is really up to your bandwidth :P

At the moment I am spending the winter break which is 3 weeks at Yamasa. The dormitory is very quite providing a perfect chance for improving my skills undisturbed. Having the WIFI and the bunk lamp installed I can really focus on learning. Let's hope my enthusiasm won't fade before the end of the break...

... and again. Merry Christmas to you all!

Long time no see! - Updated picasa album

It has been a while since my last post. Lots of things were happening lately and I simply did not have the time to put them into words. My life is getting complicated as usually. This should be familiar to people who actually know me ;)

I apologize for not been available the week before. The theory of lower quality technological goods being sold in Europe seems to have reached me. My Dell XPS 1330 had been malfunctioning ever since coming to Japan so it was not as surprising as inconvenient that it eventually stopped working for good (the video chip is fried). I bought a new machine to able to continue my life. Acer Aspire 1410 Asian model - same price double speed. Thanks Santa!

Last weekend I finally took my exam. I usually only remember the parts that I screwed up so there is no telling of the results until they actually arrive which is going to be next February. This does not mean that I will decrease the learning time but quite the contrary. I feel like I have to get through the learning period as quickly as possible so that I can actually get advantage of the knowledge.

I am also nearing the end of my first term here in Okazaki. It has been fun! I have a class full of interesting and funny people to hang out with. Although it is somewhat sad I really do plan to keep in touch with the people I have met. I am also proud to present the article that I wrote in the school's newspaper.

As a final accord I present the pictures taken last week at the Eastern park of Okazaki.

Experiment #1

Today, I decided to make some food on my own. I call this an experiment as I was afraid of the outcome myself. Now, I know for sure that there is nothing to fear. I could almost buy every single ingredient except for one. Guess what? No, it was not paprika: it was caraway. I was hard pressed to leave paprika out of my recipe but I am pleased to tell you that paprika potato is not out of the scope at all. See the documentation of the result below. Codename: 'Pörkölt and Dumplings'

The miso factory

After waking up at half past nine without any special reason I decided I need to take a rest so I joined the group going to the 八丁味噌 miso factory. It was great decision I have to tell. I took some pictures so that you can see how the miso is made here on Okazaki.

My chair at the dormitory was not very comfy, I really wanted to get a new one. After yesterday's meeting I headed straight to the shop but as the meeting took longer than expected, the furniture shop was already closed by the time I got there. I had more luck today so now I have a new chair.

Apart from watching the latest Stargate Universe episode the only thing planned for today is drinking the sake I bought. I am not familiar with the different kinds of sake so I asked one of my teachers to help me out. I was suggested to by 大吟醸 sake which is supposedly drinkable without heating. I can't wait to open the bottle. The label on the box says: 'A bit above the high', thanks for the translation Sho!

One busy week

This weekend did not have any adventures for me. It seems that I am starting to settle down in my life in Japan. I already have most of the things I need to get by: bank account, mobile phone, work permit and some local knowledge so when I need something I know where to go. The only thing left, is to learn as much Japanese as I possibly can. From now on I will concentrate my efforts to the  preparation for exam of my choice.

The exam is going to take place on December 6. Having slightly more than a moth of time I thought it was necessary to rearrange my timetable. I bought two nice handbooks that will hopefully guide my me through the most problematic parts. The first one contains assessments to measure progress while the second one was picked according to the preliminary results of first. At least now I know that the probability of success is not zero after all. The avatar of the paragraph says: 'to read' which is my weakest skill as of now. I have fairly good listening and speaking skills, but as only listening is present in the test I can only use that one to bias the final outcome.

Do you remember Reiko, who had birthday the week before? After seeing that others were taking pictures as well, I decided to take part in the action instead of the commentary. Luckily, I got hold of the pictures. Many thanks to Pekki! After some struggle with the upload service, it is finally available in Picasa. See for yourself:

Happy birthday Reiko!

This weekend was not less fun than the previous one. I was invited to lunch by my classmates to a running sushi restaurant. This was my first encounter with the traditional Japanese cuisine and I have to say it was delicious. It was proven once again that there are really few foods that I cannot consider edible. The one mistake I made was eating the wasabi the way I eat it back at home. The stuff you can by at home has a sweet spicy taste which, compared to original thing, is largely misleading. After tasting the stuff it took a few moments to regain my consciousness. It might have been slightly longer than that, as my classmates started ask questions like 'Are you all right?'. Anyway the food was great and considerably cheap compared to most places around.

After the lunch we went to the AEON Mall to do some shopping. The boys and girls split up and headed towards different directions. After buying the books we came for we had to wait for the girls. What do you do in Japan when you have an indeterminate amount of free time? Let's go and play! It turned out that my classmate is also into such places, which was immediately demonstrated by spending approx 4000円. After meeting with the girls again we went to nice tea shop to have some macha. This is a kind of tea that is served in many ways: sweat, sour, hot, cold and everything you can image. This was also the place where we greeted Reiko, for this Saturday was her birthday.

To improve my reading skills, which I assume to be the weakest point for the upcoming exam, I bought a manga. Although I tried reading manga before it was not long before I realized it was way too difficult for my skills at the time. Although things have changed, it may very well turn out, that I simply do not like reading manga. My decision fell upon ~Holic, for it's anime seemed fairly interesting - thanks for the preview Ranger. I started reading right after getting back to the dormitory and it still looks a great idea.

This week, I spent most of my spare time with looking for a phone. In the end, my efforts were honored with success. After checking all major providers in Japan, I finally found one that had some decent offers, at least with the foreigner's eye. AU was actually selling out last year's models for free if you sign a two year contract. The phones themselves are no match for this year's new shiny phones. I mention some oldie-but-goldie feature just so know if you happen not to be able to read the official specs:  800x484 TFT, build in terrestrial TV tuner, 7.2MBps data transfer, 8MPixel CCD camera with flash light,  GPS, Bluetooth, Infrared, full internet browser, built in dictionary, 750MB RAM and many more. Taking a look at these specs renders the Andriod phones or the iPhone to nothing but expensive toys in my eyes.

Last but not least, I had a nice walk to the Okazaki park which resulted in some photos that you can check out in Picasa.

Surprise!

The extra classes started finally, and they are beyond expectations. I could pick two of them, which I decided to be Japanese reading and Kanji practice. The first one is about reading whatever text you bring and discuss it with the rest of the class, while the other is about playing with the kanjis. Given my taste with books, it is always challenging to find something that I consider worth reading. I thought, I would do a head start and find a decent book in a local book store. I was just wondering if any of my classmates knew one, when it happened! Imagine the following conversation:

• Hey dude, isn't that far?
• It is about 30 minutes from the dorm.
• Hmm, it is going to be a long walk ...
• Don't you have a bicycle?
• I did not feel the urge to buy one just yet.
• I can give you one!
• What, don't you need it?
• No, I actually have three of them ...

This how I gained the owner ship of one fine bike.

There is one more thing I wanted to share with you. The trip to Gamagori also resulted motion pictures that I uploaded yesterday to YouTube for you to watch. Please see the life threatening fireworks of Takeshima (the name of the island).

Gamagori (蒲郡)

I spent today by exploring one of the neighboring cities, Gamagori. Thanks to my camera, I was able to do some visual documentation of the places I have seen. I took part in a tour that took me around the surrounding area thus I could experience many new things in a single shot like eating mandarin from mandarin trees. Please proceed to the image library:

The land of PS3

Almost a week passed since my last post. My life is getting busy, as you may have guessed already. I have regular classes and I returned to duty on the other side of the world thanks to the so brilliant capabilities of the internet. Luckily, extra classes only begin the next week, so I can have a deep breath this weekend before engaging full throttle.

Many people suggested that I change classes because class G seems somewhat low level for my skills. They are certainly right, even I realize that. However, I prefer to have a little spare time for my coming exam and I am not sure how I can handle the pressure, so I decided not to rush just yet. I also found out, that many of my classmates have already succeeded or are going to try the same exam as me, thus I do not have second thoughts. My enthusiasm may fade by time, but luckily I am staying here for more than one term.

One morning, eating my breakfast half awake, I was invited to a trip for the weekend. Coming to Japan I promised myself that I would not visit any places before having bought a camera so the time was nigh. Even though this is supposed to be the countryside it is very difficult not to find what you are looking for in 10 minutes walk. I already knew at least 3 places that popped into my way while exploring the food stores, but actually looking for something is way different. I found a decent camera shop right on my way to the school. After checking the prices on the internet I had to realize that it is not simply cheap, but offers almost invaluable goods for sale. This is how I became the owner of a Pentax Optio E80 for 12300 JPY. For an additional 2300 JPY I also got a 2GB memory card and a case. The price also included 20 photos prints a photo album and a portrait photo print for free. I never experienced similar service anywhere on the globe. Really! The guy standing at the counter even slipped a set of batteries to may bag. Most unexpected, if you ask me. Nevertheless, we are talking about the land of the used Slim PS3, which debuted only a few weeks ago, and is not available anywhere else but here you can buy it second hand already. For the finale here is a picture of my camera's case and my futon as promised:

School is about to begin

Today was the first day officially spent with Japanese classes. Although they started from 9 AM I got up at 7 AM just to make sure that I am not late even by a second as we were strongly suggested not to be late or skip classes without any good, verifiable reason. The Immigration Bureau has direct access to the school's attendance register of all language schools in Japan. They probably want to make sure that people actually do what they claimed they would be doing in the visa application form.

After having breakfast I headed to the school to check out my new class. I was assigned to class 'G'. In The Yamasa Institute classes are labeled with the letters of the Latin alphabet being 'A' the highest possible level. The last letter for this quarter was probably letter 'L'. This is what I anticipated, not too difficult, but still has its challenges. It also turned out that my room mate is in class 'F' so we really are at about the same level in Japanese studies.

Starting from today I have 11-15 new classmates and who knows how many teachers. We also had to pick 4 extra classes by the end of the lessons. 2 of them were preselected to be communication but we could pick 2 freely to match our interests. Although the cooking lesson was very tempting I picked reading practice and the level 2 kanji practice as I am willing to take the JLPT Level 2 this December. For those of you who don't know: the levels are ranging from 1 being the most advanced to 4 being the most basic - and I already passed level 3 last year. Even though there is high a chance of failure for level 2, the exam is held only once a year in Hungary and twice a year in Japan, thus it just did not feel right to ignore this possibility. That said, applying actually costs more in Japan than in Hungary which is somewhat obnoxious if you ask me.

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Typhoon

One of my friends just wrote me a mail about the only thing he managed to miss in Japan, namely the typhoon. If you consider him lucky than I was not lucky enough. Yesterday dawn, a class 2 typhoon just passed over our heads. School was canceled and we were warned to buy some extra snacks in case there is some serious trouble and the shops can't open the following day.

Storm come and gone. Although it was supposed to be frightening I woke up only once during the whole night for about a few minutes and fell asleep right away. Some students said it was like the dormitory was about to roll onto its side. Maybe I had woken up more than once, if that had happened :) What I realized from the whole fact is that there was no electricity for a half day including internet and that people around the dormitory seemed more busy than usually cleaning up the mess the storm had caused.

Assessment day

The last part of my journey was rather interesting. I found out that the person sitting next to me was a physicist and we had a great conversation on his field work which is plasma research. After a decent breakfast and a successful landing the only thing that was left is to get to the school and grab some cash from an ATM. I always prefer to use may debit cards, but my friends made quite uneasy with the lot of warnings about not being able to use their cards. My doubts are largely gone now. If you have a major embossed debit/credit card you are good to go.

I am most happy to announce that you do not have to worry any more. Both the wine and the palinka survived the trip. Which made me more than happy: not only do I have stuff to show off with but I do not have to wash my clothes straight ahead.

Luckily I had a good night's sleep before having my skills assessed. That said I had to buy a futon to sleep on first, so I headed to a major super market and bought one with top covers. May seem straightforward but believe me, it is not. I was shocked by the variety of goods for sale.

I had my assessment today but it will take some time before I get the results. I do not have a good feeling about it, but that is the way it usually is with me. I do not have good feelings and I get excellent results. Let us hope it is not any different this time.

Afterwards, I decided that I will familiarize myself with the Japanese foods and beverages, so I headed to a supermarket. The results are amazing by all means. I think I will have to take multiple turns since there is so much difference compared to European food. It turns out that you can get by from about the same amount of money as in Hungary at about the same level. That said, I always preferred the somewhat more expensive but higher quality stuff, so this statement may not hold as a general truth e.g.: it surely does not hold if you only buy Tesco economical products. But if you do not wish to pay attention to your health, you can get by at extremely low costs even in Japan. I suggest instant noodles. The amount, quality, variety and pricing of the beverages - yes alcoholic - are a bit above my taste, but still very well in my target range. Today's winner was a tie between the rice oil and Asahi beer. The rice oil stands right next to the olive oil. I do not have the slightest idea of what that is good for, but it sounds interesting, doesn't it? Whereas the Asahi beer stands on my desk and I think it's worth the effort of bringing it home.

Some information on timezone offsets. I was quite confused by misinforming people on the topic, but now I have a more complete picture. The confusion was caused by the daylight saving time. Hungary is GMT+2 in summer and GMT+1 in winter,  but Okazaki is GMT+9 at all times. At the moment it is +7 hours but that will change to +8 hours on 25th October if my interpretation is correct.

First entry

4 October 2009, 6:22 PM Hungarian time. I decided at Function 2009 that I would write a blog on my Japanese stay, so here you go: I started writing this little memoir while sitting on the flight to Nagoya.

First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to all the people who kept me busy for the last two weeks. It was only now that I realized I have so many caring people around me. This is also a big apology from the ones who where left out by the lack of time - sorry Attila we will definitely have a meal when I got back.

My flight took off from Hungary at 11:15 AM so I had to get up way too early for my taste. Living in the country side has some side-effects apart from funny odours in the morning :) I made it safe to Frankfurt where I had to change flights. The most pathetic part is that it takes less time to get from Budapest to Frankfurt than to Debrecen. I only know this because I called my relatives from the international airport as a final notice before going out of call range since I already knew that my phone won't operate in Japan.

The biggest surprise so far is that Lufthansa serves food that is actually worth eating. Maybe I was too hungry, but it felt really good, and they gave me enough beer to have good (and quick) night's sleep before waking up at my destination. I can only say that I am looking forward to the breakfast.

I found it surprising but my German seems to have improved so as the Custom's Officer did not bother to switch back to English as a default for unknown and unspeakable languages like Hungarian. Maybe I am delusional, but it felt good, and it also seemed consistent with the rest of the German people I tried :)