The Road Less Traveled

It’s been a while…

Friday, January 23rd, 2009 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

Well, it’s been a while, but I just wanted to let you know that I will be updating the blog in over the weekend. Classes and finals are finally almost over, and I’ll finally have time to update again. Yay! Anyway, more then. Bye~

Christmas!

Thursday, December 25th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

Hey everybody, how’s it going? I just wanted to brag a little bit, because I beat you to Christmas! And even though I won this little competition (that only I knew we were participating in), it was pretty anti-climactic.

I’m not going to lie; I’m actually writing this approximately 6 hours before Christmas…. but the result is going to be the same in any case. We have nothing special planned for the 24th or 25th, other than not having class. Which is awesome, by the way.

I just wanted to wish you all a merry Christmas and give you a brief update on what has been going on in my life. Which is to say, pretty much nothing. Since the JLPT ended, the teachers have given us a little bit of a break from homework, and we have no trips or projects due, so it’s all been pretty easy-going. Plus, Monday the 22nd was our last day of class before Winter Break. Even though we’re only two days into it so far, it feels like it’s been so long… and I actually get sleep at night, yay!

So pretty much my plans for the break are to stay up late, sleep in, and hang out. Then on the 27th, me and Mike start leave on our trip to Tokyo, where we’ll be going to Comic Market, the world’s biggest comic convention. Over 3 days, they have over 500,000 attendees. It’s going to be a really fun and interesting experience, and was one of the only things on my list of “things that I MUST do while in Japan” that I had before I came here. Strike one off that list.

Anyway, that promises to be a good time, though it’s going to end up being pretty expensive. Oh well.

That’s all for now, really. Catch you on the flip side.

JLPT Completed: Our Journey and a Reality Check?

Monday, December 8th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

So I’m done with the JLPT. Yay! It was rather hectic this morning. Just about immediately after I posted my previous entry, I met up with everyone to walk to the station together. But Mike still needed to go the the convenience store (conbini in Japanese), to get breakfast and lunch, so I tagged along with him. This meant we were going separately from everyone else.

Well, after that we got lost walking to the train station, and didn’t catch a train there until about 8:05. We were supposed to catch the one at 7:43 or 7:54, so while we were running a bit late, the test didn’t start until 9:45, so we were still okay. Well, then we were talking and not paying attention, so we missed our stop, by 3 stops, and had to switch trains to go back. This turned out to be just the beginning of our problems.

› Continue reading

Today is the day…

Sunday, December 7th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

Well in 10 minutes, I’ll be on my way to the JLPT. For those not in the know, that stands for Japanese Language Proficiency Test (in Japanese it’s 日本語能力試験 / nihongo nouryoku shiken), and it’s the big Japanese test given every year by the Japanese government.

My trip basically consists of a 30 minute walk to the train station, a long train ride (switching lines twice), and then another 15 minute walk to the test site. It’s 6:50 right now, and I’m leaving at 7am. The doors for the test open at 8:30, and the first section of the test actually begins at 9:45.

Here’s the schedule:

7:00am -> I leave
8:30am -> Doors open
~9:00am -> I arrive
9:45am – 10:45am -> Writing/Vocabulary
11:25am – 12:15pm -> Listening
1:15pm – 2:40pm -> Reading/Grammar

After that, I’m done… but I won’t find out my results until mid-February, which sucks. But wish me luck, because I’m really going to need it. Anyway, time to go. Catch you on the flip side.

Homestay #1: The Maeda Family

Sunday, November 30th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

How’s it going, everyone? With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming on, everybody’s probably getting pretty busy with (not-really-)last-minute shopping, and I hear you even get snow there. I consider myself lucky that Japan is a country that doesn’t get much snow, or at least hasn’t yet. But there are probably the first sightings of Christmas lights (there are here, too), sales on turkeys (we don’t have those), and all kinds of other seasonal things, many of which are mimicked by Japan, but most of which are not.

I wish I could be there. I miss you all, and hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

But that’s neither here nor there. What I’m writing about today is my first homestay experience. I decided to skip over the University Festival, because I can pretty much sum the 3 days up in a couple sentences: I didn’t go Saturday, Sunday I ate a lot of good food, and Monday I saw an awesome comedy performance. All in all, it was pretty fun, but pretty much everything thus far in Japan (except MAYBE that beautiful view from the peak of Mt. Misen on Miyajima island) was overshadowed pretty easily by the homestay this past weekend.

› Continue reading

Kyoto & Toyota

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

Hi again Just to start things off, let me update you all on what’s going on in my life. After we started going on trips, I began failing my kanji quizzes repeatedly because I didn’t have nearly enough time to study. Well, I finally got back on track yesterday, and I believe I got a 9/10! Yay! Keep your fingers crossed that I do as well on the one on Thursday. That’s pretty much it for class… everything else is going pretty steadily.

Aisde from that, this Saturday and Sunday we will be our first homestay experience. We got the information about the families we’ll be staying with today. I’ll be staying with the Maeda family, it seems. Their home has the mother, father, grandmother (they wrote “granma”), and 3 children: Shoichiro (10), Misato (7), and Kenjiro (7). If you can’t tell the gender by their names (I can XD), they’re boy, girl, boy, respectively. I’m a bit confused, to tell the truth, because the homestay thing is being conducted by a local middle school… and none of those children are in middle school. So yeah, I’m a bit confused… anyway, it’ll be interesting. Especially because on the form, they filled in the “Ability of English” item as “Poor”… that’ll be fun. XD

Anyway, I should probably get on to what I’m actually writing about, and what you were probably expecting to read about from the title of this post: Kyoto & Toyota. I’m going to wrap these trips up into one post, because honestly, I didn’t really enjoy either of them very much. But whatever. That’ll happen from time to time, am I right?

› Continue reading

Hiroshima, Day 3: Miyajima

Friday, November 7th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

Woo! I’m finally getting to the last of the Hiroshima story! And only almost 3 weeks later! Sorry for the wait. Homework, projects, and studying kanji have just been piling up, and I haven’t had time for much else. Also, at least in the past week, I’ve been spending more time at the arcade playing an awesome game called Jubeat, which I have pretty much become addicted to. :/

Anyway, that’s completely unrelated. So, Hiroshima! On to Day 3: Miyajima.

› Continue reading

Hiroshima, Day 2: Awkward?

Friday, October 24th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

So it was brought to my attention last night (yeah, it’s morning here) that I still haven’t written anything more about Hiroshima. Sorry about that. So anyway, today I’ll talk about Day 2 of our trip.

› Continue reading

Hiroshima, Day 1: Travelling, travelling…

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

So we’ve been back from Hiroshima for a few days, and I figured it was about time to write a little bit about the trip. To summarize it really quickly, it was totally awesome. This past weekend I saw some of the most beautiful, some of the most sad, and even some of the most encouraging things I’ve ever seen. If you ever come to Japan, I have one piece of advice: visit Hiroshima, definitely.

I’m going to tell this in a series of three posts: one for each day. Days 2 and 3 were significantly longer, since Day 1 was mostly travel, but they’re all interesting. So after this one, stay tuned for more.

› Continue reading

Hiroshima: Prologue

Friday, October 17th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized | No Comments

So it’s about 9am here in Japan, and I have one class today: my tea ceremony class. If you don’t know what tea ceremony is, Wikipedia has a nice article on the subject. This is our last of two classes on this subject, where we will actually learn and get to practice the art of making Japanese tea (it’s nearly as boring as it sounds, too ). Then later today we leave on our trip to Hiroshima. We’ll be gone until pretty late Sunday night.

Dr. Thompson from OU got here about two weeks ago. It’s good to get to see him more often; it’s a lot of fun and it makes us all feel a little more like we’re at home here. He’s been keeping us up to date on what the plan is for Hiroshima and getting everything together for the trip. Anyway, since we’re going to be several hundred miles away for a few days, you’re not going to be able to contact me really… and I, of course, probably won’t be contacting you either.

Here’s a basic outline of the plan for the trip…

Friday: Leave on the 2pm Bus to go to Jinryo station (the closest train station). From there, take the train to Nagoya, where we board the Shinkansen. From there, take the Shinkansen to Shin-Oosaka, switch to another Shinkansen line and go to Hiroshima, where we’ll check into our hotel.

Saturday: Go to Peace Park and meet Koko, Dr. Thompson’s former babysitter and Hiroshima bomb survivor. Do various other things which I either forget or aren’t set in stone yet.

Sunday: Go to Miyajima island, climb the mountain, see monkeys, etc. Then come home the opposite of the way we came.

I’ll post about the trip more in detail when I get back. Bye!