My parttime job for the moment

Drifting

Anybody wants a 250USD Steak?

Being sick has it´s benefits. It gives you a lot of time that you can use for searching the web for job positions. After a few minutes surfin around I found an American steakhouse restaurant that was about to open and they were looking for bartenders and waiters. A couple of days after I sent them my CV they called me and wanted me to come over for an interview. I can´t say that they were thrilled to hear about my inexperience in the restaurant business and that I was a student. But later the same week they called me up again and asked me to work the very next day. すごい! Sugoi! And after two days of working what can I say? A restaurant is not the easiest and most uncomplicated place to work in. Everything is done in a very specific way and it feels like it´s gonna take quite a while before I´m gonna feel comfortable.
Check out the restaurant.

So I guess I´m not a なまけもの (namakemono = lazy person) anymore.

Karuchi

Surfin Russia

Sick like a japanese dog

At the moment I´m stuck in Matsudo Guesthouse with a cold and fever. It all started last week. People began to act weird, complaining about feeling sick. From then the virus just kept spreading. At night I could hear people scream in agony. I locked myself in and haven´t slept since last weekend. When i tried to explain to my school why I wasn´t there they just called my crazy. CRAZY? Am I crazy just because I don´t wanna be eaten alive by zombies? I think they can hear me now, have to go...

By the way. Check out the not so new, but still new TV series Californication. But don´t download! It´s illegal!

Viva America

Mendokusē

Updating this blog has been really mendokusē (how troublesome) lately but I´m gonna give it a try.
One of the few things I can remember doing the last weeks is visiting Disney Sea with a couple of Swedish people from my class. In the outskirts of Chiba (same prefecture as I live in) you can find Disney Land and Disney Sea located next to each other. The last one is supposed to be more of a place for older kids with fewer Disney characters running around trying to hump your leg. Going there on a weekday when we were off school, of course, (yea kids, stay in school and don´t do drugs) was the perfect thing to do. This way we didn´t have to spend hours waiting in lines for the mediocre rides offered at Disney Sea. Even though the rides were completely worthless the whole place were really beautiful so I spent time taking photos until my forefinger bled.

During our week-long holiday we also managed to get ourselves to Ageha, which is supposed to be the biggest club in Asia. And yea, it was pretty big. The main dance floor looked more like a football field. Maybe the people at Ageha heard the rumors about Swedish people where on their way so they decided to get a Swedish DJ to the club that exact date. Or maybe it was just a coincidence that Steve Angelo played there that night. We will never know...

Tokyo Gamu Showu

After a quite wet karaoke night we were on our way to Tokyo Game Show. As usual, it’s hard to get around in the complex train system, especially when you have a hangover. The good part is that you can practise your Japanese asking around for directions.
The Game Show was, like everything else in Japan, gigantic. You could walk around for hours watching the presentations of the newest videogames. My favourite part of the happening was to run around taking pictures of the many cos-players scattered around the enormous building. Seeing people dressed as Sid, Yuna and Sepheriot was like walking into a Final Fantasy game.

School is still quite hard but a nice one week holiday is coming up. Before that our school ordered us out in the deep Japanese jungle and made us climb up Takao Mountain. Not very interesting and it didn’t compensate the five hours we had to spend on trains getting there and home.

The weather in Tokyo is still quite warm. Looks like I’m going to run around in shorts until November. Yatta! やった!

Moving to Matsudo

After realising that staying in Warabi wasn´t an option (I don´t have enough space to write everything I didn´t like about that place) I decided to move to a guesthouse in Matsudo instead. Trying to carry all my crap from one place to another, having to switch trains once, wasn´t the easiest, but it sure was worth it. Unfortunately it´s the same distance to the school.

The teachers at school has gone berserk. At least two chapters in the book, about 120 new words and 30 kanji´s a week. Kanji is the chinese characters which are used in Japan aswell. Kanjis can be quite complex, you have to write in the right strokeorder, know all the pronunciations which can be different if the charachter is combined with another kanji etc.
Just two more weeks and then there will be a short break which I´m looking forward to.

I bought a new camera (Nikon D80) wich was quite たかい (takai = expensive) so there will be more photos uploaded soon.


If anybody feels like sending me some swedish coffee, Extra tuggumi or heaps of money this is my new adress:

J&F House DK Matsudo Room 242
Hinokuchi 771
Matsudo-Shi
Chiba-Pref 271-0067
Japan

Okinawa, hell yeah..

After nearly two hours by flight me, Johan and Björn landed on Okinawa, home of Miyagi-san and Hatori Hanzo. With a clear sky and heat that makes Tokyo feel like Alaska the one thing we had in our minds was to find a beach. After a brief walk in the maincity, Naha, we realised the beach sucked hästballe and took a cab to Manza Beach (it´s easy to travel in Okinawa, just need a map and then close your eyes and point out the destination). The beach was really nice but the best part with Manza we found out later in the evening. Close to the beach you can find a place called Mixed Peace Bar, owned by really nice, laidback Okinawan people. After spending an hour drinking and trying to communicate in english and with the few words of japanes we know western people started to fill up the bar. Apperently not very far from Manza there is a big hotel where people from all over the world is working. One night the bar consisted of 13 different nationalities.
Being in Japan for more then a month without visiting a hospital was of course too much to ask for. So, one day, at the Manza Beach a stone decided to penetrate my foot and use it as home. It took the doctors 20 minutes to remove it. The best part is that they didn´t remove it. Two weeks after the accident I still had pain when walking so I went to the hospital here in Saitama with Moki-san, the guesthouse manager, who accted as my translator. It turned out that the fuck-up-Okinawa-doctors sent me home with a stone big as a small raisin still inside my foot. It´s gonna be exciting to see if my insurance will cover this, going to a hospital in Japan is far beyond cheap.
Back to Okinawa: After alot of beer and a with a few Yen left in our pockets we decided to leave for Naha. We found out that 75% of all american soldiers in Japan are based on Okinawa. Very unfair if you consider that the people here had to suffer the most during World War II. And of course all Okinawans assumed that we were americans and you could feel that hate. Most used sentence in Okinawa: Amerika-jin ja arimasen, sweden-jin desu. (Not americans, swedish). Naha was a bit boring so we went to Mibaru Beach instead and had our white skin transformed to a deep redish colour. Enjoyed alot of good japanese food and had our first earthquake experience. Wooha.

Other experinces in Okinawa was watching a mongoose beat a seasnake in a swimming contest. Japanese people know how to amuse themselves. We also went to one of the biggest aquariums in the world, Ocean Expo Park. Amazing to watch whalesharks (6 meters long) swimming around next to mantarays, hundreds of stingrays and huge fish.

Sadly there will be no pictures from Okinawa. My camera broke just before leaving from Tokyo and Björns disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

And please don´t forget, never shake your baby! (Learned from the AFN channel, American military channel for the soldiers based on Okinawa)

The heat is killing me

Long time since i last updated the blog. The weather in Tokyo is unbelievable, around 35-39 C, wich makes you really lazy. According to the japanese people I´ve spoken with the heat is gonna last for one more month. Omfg.
Most days have been spent sleeping untill noon, go to school for a couple of hours and then try to find something to eat. Weekends consits of even more eating and drinking. Thank you CSN!
One saturday a couple of weeks ago Gousha, a polish girl who lived in the guesthouse, had her birthday. We decided to go to a restaurant in Shibuya, The Lock Up, sort of horror-theme-eat-and-drink-place. The dining rooms were decorated to look like a prision cell and one time during our stay they turned of the lights and a couple of crazy japanese in ghost outfits started to run around and scream. The food was kind of crappy but with a free bar who cares? After that we found a really nice restaurant and had a couple of drinks before some of us left for The Womb, a nightclub also located in Shibuya with mostly house and trance music. The trains in Tokyo doesn´t go at night so you have to wait for the first one in the morning if you desided to spend the night out, that means you gonna be home at 7.30 am. By then you are shotto tired.
Becuase of a nice, wellearned (?) three-week-summerholiday we made up plans to go to Okinawa.

Gakkou. Taihen desu ne

After spending nearly three weeks in Warabi I´m starting to settle in. Luckily we don´t start school untill 1pm, sovmorgon hela dan, varje dag. Going to school, which is in Shin-Okubo, takes about 1 hour with train. The teachers speaks only japanese and it´s quite hard trying to understand or even just hear what they are saying when they spitting out 10 words every second. Taihen desu ne (It´s tough). Our class consits of mostly koreans, who seems to speak japanese fluently, and a few swedes who has to entertain the koreans with badly spoken japanese. After four hours in school you are quite confused so after going home we mostly spend the evenings drinking beer instead of studing. Japanese beer is by the way really good.

The weather here isn´t the best. Rains alot and it´s very humid. 20 degrees here feels more like 30 but there isn´t one room in whole Tokyo which doesn´t have an AC, niice.
It feels like my stomach is starting to get used to the japanese food. Of course are all menus in japanese and the people there doesn´t speak any english so ordering can be quite a challange. Been served deepfried herring, liver and heart of pig and alot that i don´t know what it was and probably don´t wanna know either.

Most of the time is spent being in school, drinking beer or eating at japanese restaurants together with the other people from my hostel in Warabi. We have also tried a japanese style spa (onsen), got lost in Shibuya, karoke where you can drink as much as you want for 60 SEK/hour, cheked coz-play in Harjuku and much more. So desu.

Pictures are on it´s way. Hopefully in a few days. I´m not in photo-mood, maybee it feels to japanese.

Jetlag and the studentroom God forgot

After 20 hours of constant travelling I finally arrived at Narita airport, Tokyo. Even though I had alot of space in businessclass I couldn´t sleep more than about 15 minutes, total. Fortunately they had a wide range of exciting movies as "Music and Lyrics" with my favourite actor Hugh Grant and a german film about old women opening a lingiriestore.
Half alseep I managed to get on a train and get to Warabi where my future home were supposed to be. After taking a shortcut through Warabi which gave me 20 minutes more of walking than necessary I finally found W&F House. I had to sign a whole bunch of papers (hopefuly none which I promise to give away my kidne for free) and then I was showed my beautiful six squaremeter room.
Dealing with jetlag isn´t that easy as I thought. After a quick walk around Warabi I fell asleep, in the afternoon. Woke up in the middle of the night having no clue where I was and of course no chance going back to sleep. Slept through the morning and up again at 5pm. Brilliant.
Today I managed to get up at 1 pm and decided to take the subway in to Shinjuku which is the place you see in the beginning of Lost in Translation. Just walking around in Shinjuku is amazing, after a while it feels like your head is gonna fall off from looking up, down, up, down. It´s nearly to much to take in, not like in quite Warabi. A few hours walking around and I started to get tired and decided to get back. Not the smartest thing to do during rushhour if you only been in Tokyo for a day. The traincars are completely full and if you´re unlucky there is no sign that tells you wich station you are going to so you have to try listen to the japanese voice babbling in the speaker. I dont know how, but just by chance I managed to get of at Akabane station, switch train and get home. Now I´m going to try study some hiragana and katakana.

Thanks everyone back home in Helsingborg for turning up at japanese (arabic) restaurant Ichiban.


Want to know what your name looks like in japanese? http://japanesetranslator.co.uk/your-name-in-japanese/

20 days to go...

20 more days to go then I head for Tokyo, Japan.