Two Month Anniversary!!!

      Being that it has been two months since the Sannin landed in Japan, I thought it would be an appropriate time to update with actual words this time. Seems that the written blogs are ten times more popular than the podcasts, so I decided to do a post first and then possibly convince the other two to pull through a podcast as we go to dinner tonight. I guess we'll see.
      I don't want to give too much of a detailed account of my feelings about Japan right now, but I will tell you this: yes, I'm stilling having a lot of fun; my feelings on class here overall isn't too much different from my feelings on class at UVA; I'm glad to be making Japanese friends; I believe my Japanese has improved, especially in the sense that I'm more confident in using it, which was a major goal of mine (but, how much has it improved overall? maybe me taking the necessary placement test when I get back home will tell us); and, my goals outside of Japanese are not being met (in-depth jazz research, wife, cooking, etc.). Let's not take note of the eggs before looking under the chicken, though... I've still got two months left : )

      Today's post is going to begin with more food-related pictures. I don't know how much enjoyment you guys get out of seeing the differences in foods as compared to the US, but I REALLY like it. Especially McDonald's food. While my pictures are uploading onto webshots, I'll start with a food that we don't have in America that is simple, but proved troublesome for me the other night. That, my friends, is the SHAKA SHAKA Chicken (here's a link to the Japanese McDonald's Shaka Shaka website... go there now because I'm going to guide you through the Shaka Shaka). You'll notice the 100-yen graphic on the site. Yes, you get THIS instead of a double cheeseburger for a $1 here, folks (the only burger you can get for that much is a regular ol' hamburger, by the way). Go ahead and click the button in the bottom-right hand corner of the page, which roughly translates to "how to eat the Shaka Shaka Chicken". You can see the step by step process of how to work the magic of the Shaka Shaka (don't you love saying that!?). First, you sprinkle one of three powders into the bag with the chicken (choose from "Hot Chili", "Lemon Pepper", and "Cheese"), followed by a closing of the bag. Next is the step where I, and maybe most Americans, had/will have trouble. If you're like me, you'll take the bag and Shaka Shaka THE SHIT out of that chicken (pardon my language). Unfortunately, though, if you're like me, the chicken will BURST from its prison RIGHT on your pants, and so will all that Hot Chili powder. And I'm not talking about me not holding the top (which some of you probably would have guessed from past incidents)... I'm talking about the bottom of the bag ripping open and the chicken flying straight for my crotch. Luckily, the chicken still tasted good.
      Next for the McDonald's experience we have the MEGA MAC, which is part of the promotion that also brought you the MEGA TERA burger pictured earlier. The MEGA MAC is pretty much Japan's answer to the Burger King Quad-Stacker (which is in America), and possibly Wendy's Baconator. I think with these burgers the goal is to stuff as much meat as possible in one sandwich without it getting too ridiculous at the current time. Hopefully, they'll move up to a Quin-Stack in due time. But anyway, the MEGA MAC is a burger that is an anomaly because it's the biggest Makku sandwhich that I've ever seen, yet it is NOT to be seen in the States. The set may have been between 700-800 yen, but I was hungry and HAD to eat one. This sucker is huge. It's basically a Big Mac with an extra two patties stuck in, making the count FOUR patties. To eat it I pretty much had to pull a Dagwood, or maybe even a Peter Fox. Regardless, it was hard to take a bite. Overall, it was good, but was no Quad-Stacker, particularly because I didn't feel like I had turned into a pile of beef afterwards like I did with the aforementioned.
      The final McDonald's item for today is the new Cheese Katsu Burger, which isn't really even a burger at all, I guess. Instead, it's a slab of pork cutlet (katsudon) with cheese inside rounded out with some teriyaki sauce on top. What I really love about the burger is the logo, which I guess is a new breed of pig that has a cheese block for a center. Wicked. Take a gander at this photo, too. While it bad be a bad shot, you can definitely see the cheese innards of the newtype pig oozing out. It was pretty good, but not worth the high price that is on it.
      A couple more food-related pictures, here is a gummy coke bottle that was not worth the 115-yen I paid in terms of taste, and here is the line for a seemingly out-of-the-way Krispy Kreme in Shinjuku. It's absolutely amazing that these people crave the KK so much that the line was SO long a worker came an started handing out free doughnuts to people in the crowd.

Pause. Nap time!

      Hopefully by now you know that "Nap Time" means, "I passed out for hours so I won't be updating again today", but in case you didn't...... it does. And for my helpful hint of the day: don't even TRY the frozen crab stuff. I should have learned my lesson when I got the creamy crab balls... and in ways I did... but I made some frozen Chinese things that are usually filled with meat today, and to my dismay I failed to notice that the meat on the package was PINK, so the meat that I was so looking forward to just... just didn't exist. =(
      Okay, so a lot of this post is going to have to do with the friends that I've made (FINALLY, right?). This first picture is of some of my friends from the baseball circle (left to right, Akira, Momo-chan, Hiroki, Asami, always-forgotten-name-girl, and me). These guys very kindly took me in as one of their own early on and they're some of the people I talk with the most. Mostly I'm referring to Akira and Hiroki, but I have friendly acquaintances with the other three (the least being, you guessed it, always-forgotten-name-girl... particularly because I'm embarrassed to not know her name).
      The two guys are both members of the FLA (Foreign Language... uh... depArtment) and study English. Akira himself has lived in America before and understands everything I say, even my Englishified Japanese, which is pretty awesome, and Hiroki, while not fluent in like Akira, is pretty good at English, and kind of reminds me of myself in learning language in regards to the fact that my listening is more painful than my speaking. Hopefully if he's reading this he doesn't take offense to that, haha... I'm not sure how they think my Japanese is compared to their English (I did in fact give them the link to this site). Hiroki's a busy guy with two jobs (he's both a high school tutor and he works at a cafe as a waiter), and on an unrelated note his Japanese is hard for me to understand because his voice is very low and slurry. It may sound like my English sounds to you guys... you know... manly... unintelligible （笑）*. But on that note, I WAS complimented on being easy to understand by one of my friends who you'll see later, believe it or not. Akira just got a job at Subway, which I think is pretty funny, and is a really good guide for me while I'm here in terms of points like telling me why I wasn't getting much response for the karaoke from the senpai. His Japanese is just fast. And he doesn't correct mine because he understands English. I've already booed him for that one, haha. Oh, and, I'm not sure if I mentioned this in the podcast or not, but he's the one who went out with the senpais on the goukon (group date). They consider him to be a ladies man, and his attitude does come off that way. Maybe America got to him a little bit with being confident around girls, because he definitely doesn't come off as being innately Japanese in those respects. But, he does know how not to be TOO American, as he often tells me not to say certain things in Japanese in public, haha.
      Here's another picture of the girls, same order as before. Momo-chan is pretty good at English and spent some time in South Africa. She has a funny way of saying "castle". Asami doesn't know hardly any English, but is very friendly. We frequently exchange casual words and greetings at practice (it's not usual that I get to do this, by the way, since everyone's always running around). She's often the one that throws me balls to hit into a batting net (I hope that means something to someone), and thus is the victim of worrying about being hit by my wild balls. Yes, even my batting practicing is wild. Occasionally I hit the ball either a) on the top of the bat so it flies over this building to where the golf team practices, or b) at some strange part of the net so that it bounces off somewhere. Not TOO often. But sometimes. Anyway, here's a story: One of the guys on the team, Narita (who taught me how to hold a baseball after gripping like it a softball for about a month), has (had?) a crush on her and the feeling wasn't reciprocated, so the senpai, thinking this was funny, gave Hiroki some money to sit between Narita and Asami at lunch one day and give her an ice cream sandwich. This is what the senpai do at Sophia instead of all that other crap they do in high school. Poor N-san! Poor Asami-chan!
      Here's a random picture of a police squad car pulling someone over. I thought it was really funny because of how the light is boosted up. Looks like something out of Looney Tunes or something... I can imagine it shooting out of the hood about twenty feet in the air, waving around while the police are chasing down some criminal.

      On that note, I'm going to stop my break and study more for my kanji midterm next week. I'll be here studying all night, which means frequent additions to this post, so check again around one your time and it may be complete!

*（笑） is the Japanese emoitcon for laughing, basing itself on the "wara" of the kanji "warau", meaning to laugh. Many use it when texting on their keitai. I may use it more often here.

      Before I continue, I'm going to write a little about a baseball dinner that we had. The reason that we were dressed up in the above pictures was because, previous to going to the place where the picture was taken (a diner called Johnathan's, which seems like a pretty popular meeting place for students), we had returned to the place where I first had dinner with the baseball team to have a sort of "welcome party". At the place we had another nomihoudai/tabehoudai (remember, that's all-you-can-drink and all-you-can-eat), but this time we all had to give jikoshoukai (self introductions). The way this worked was, every time that someone answered a question or said something that related to you, you had to drink. To indicate what you were drinking for, everyone would chant a common word. Here's an example in English: "My name is Greg Weaver and right now I live in Warabi". Cue all people who live in Saitama Prefecture to stand up, kanpai ("cheers"), drink, and sit down.
      There were some set questions, and then sometimes questions were asked. Common ones things mentioned were: where you lived, "seifukuban" (uniform number, and if the standees were designated by being either single-digit or double-digit), position (at the time I said "zenbu"/all since I didn't have one, but usually if someone said 1st base all of the infielders would stand up), "sukina senpai" (favorite senpai), "gakubu" (the school that you're in, and since my school was "Japanese" they chanted "gaijin!"/foreigners), favorite baseball team (one of the Japanese guys said an American team, so there was the gaijin chant again), and OF COURSE, the NUMBER ONE question that is asked by ALL circles: "sukina taipu", or, the type of girl you like. I think it's so hilarious when that question comes up. I even suggest to people to ask that question to others when trying to make friends because they just eat it up. I'm going to write a book:

"Making Japanese Friends: A Three Step Process" by Gregory Weaver
Step 1: Say hello first, because usually they don't. Be sure to state your name and them theirs in this step, too, in case you've never met a real person before.
Step 2: Ask them if they have a girlfriend/boyfriend.
Step 3: Ask them their sukina taipu.

BAM! You're in for life, baby. There may be a special footnote for guys that says: "say a sexually explicit word often", because if you do that they really think you're really funny. I like saying "mura mura" or "maguro gaaru". I suggest just using them before you know what they mean... not that I did.

      Some other things that are worth noting from the dinner: The senpai asked Narita his sukina manger. In regards to fellow newcomer Dobashi (who, sadly, nobody likes because they think he's really boring and he's probably the only one who's worse than me on the team... when he's up to bat, the senpai in the outfield chant stuff like "you need to go do the bench press!". I feel really bad for him sometimes, and even invited him to the karaoke event regardless of advice against it... he told me he didn't sing karaoke, though), after EVERYTHING he said, the senpai just chanted "Dobashi!", so he had to drink after everything he said. The senpai often shouted this at random times throughout others' jikoshoukais as well. Lastly, someone reported that his sukina airport was "Narita". Muwahaha.


      Now, onward and such.One weekend, Akira invited me to his place to eat "nabe". When I inquired about what nabe was, he said it translated to "steamboat" and that it was "Sumo's favorite food". Uhhhh, what? Whatever, told him it didn't make any sense and went along with it. When I got to the station that was near his house he greeted me with his friend Shou, who I had hung out with before when them and I went to a coffee shop after baseball practice one day. Shou is Hiroki and Akira's classmate who has an exceptional way of dressing. For example, he wears a cap with a lot of pins on it sometimes, and also, instead of having a chain hanging from his belt to his pocket on a wallet, he has some awesome rubber band (I think it was made of rubber bands) thing.
      Akira cooked for us while we helped a bit, chatted, and watched TV. Akira lives by himself in a really, really small apartment. What you see in that picture is all of the kitchen he has, behind him is the bathroom, and I think you can see what the living/bedroom looks like in another picture. Here's the nabe, though. Pre-being cooked, of course... I don't eat meat that raw unless it's Manly March. Basically it was a huge stew of vegetables (including cabbage and mmmmm! kimchi! I had never had it before the nabe, and it was reallllly good) with some meat thrown in. We also had this stuff on the side, and, while the name escapes me, the pickle-y flavor of what I think was raw fish stuff does not. After devouring the food, Akira went to go get another of his friends while I did some dishes (yes, yes, that IS Akira's hair in the picture, but I was still doing dishes when he got back). That friend is Asato, who you can see added to the picture here (that's Hiroki passed out under the covers, in case you were concerned about what happened to him).
      Asato is yet another one of the other guys' friends from the FLA. With them added in the equation, that makes four pretty dern good English speakers that I hang out with a lot. Asato's best characteristics is that he's hilarious and very eager to learn English. Just as an example, he texted me today: "'tell us how is the person like' <-- Are there any mistakes?" That may not seem very good, but when you take into account that he's been reading texts about Prohibition and the Dust Bowl with vocabulary words like "ruinous" (hey Dad, ask Mom to say that one), those mix-ups aren't too bad. Speaking of ruinous, I don't think I've ever used that word. It said that the farmers had "used ruinous farming techniques and overgrazing cattle", if I recall correctly. Ruinous? Really? You're going to say the farming techniques are... ruinous? COME ON. (- Job)

      Due to the facts that I have to study more, I don't have much time to study tomorrow, and that it's 10:43pm, I'm going to call this post completed and will hopefully work on another one tomorrow between flashcard sets. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE don't look at the next pictures on the account of they're better with narrative (I'm looking at you, parents!).


... man, I didn't think I'd EVER here the word "Brewsky" in Japan, but someone in the hallway was just saying it. Shoot me.



Until next time...!