Lovely title right? I made it with the visual people in mind :D
You must think I'm dead right now since I haven't posted in so long. And you'd BE RIGHT!! Click now to receive your free BS prize!!
The truth is much more simple, blog posts take time. Something of which I don't have a lot of - specifically my internet time is way way 少ない.
Gotta love that I now have 5 months worth of blog content and 35 minutes to post something.
My current life set up:
Living at 2nd host family's place. The dad is really awesome! He loves to try and repeat any English words I use or teach him. Example: *Dinner time* "Do-nt ureeabe uwauwanyshing"
Translation: Don't leave anything.
He repeats what I say because he knows he sounds funny.
It's a really funny contrast because I've got my host dad, my host mom, and a younger host sister (11 I think...) and my host dad's daily antics are barely even recognized by my host mom and sister. My host mom is a really 冷たい人...She only talks to me when she wants to point out something I did "wrong" or something that she wants me to do, always ending it with the most soul piercing "Wakatta?" I've ever heard. I won't use this blog to complain a lot since that's no fun to read (although some topics I could probably make interesting) - it also wouldn't give you a full picture on the awesome times I have here too.
I will say that I think my host dad is an incredibly awesome person for still being able to be so zany. My host sister...is 11 so just think of an 11 year old girl who likes to read books and does ballet. I'm not really sure how to describe her other than that.
I get up every morning around 6:20, take a shower (being the crazy gaijin I am I bathe myself in the morning), eat some breakfast (sometimes cereal, sometimes miso soup and onigiri) and then head off to the bus stop to wait for the bus that will take me to school. I could make an entire blog post about the FUN of riding busses to and from school with all the other students on the bus but for now I'll leave it be. Next is school, I've gone through that before so I won't repeat myself.
Now here's the new stuff, Tuesdays and Thursdays after school I have Japanese class at a local building called Rifare. It's me and a bunch of ALTs (Foreign English Assistants) learning intermediate Japanese grammar. We've gotten into stuff that's new to me now and I find that...exciting? I don't know, I guess I find it cool to go to class and then hear "Today we're learning THIS GRAMMAR" and then you realize you've heard that everywhere but never knew the meaning so it's kinda like I'm hearing "Remember those government fat cats who were talking in that secret code? WELL HERE'S EXACTLY WHAT THEY MEANT!!!"
Yes I just vaguely compared learning Japanese to being a spy of some sort.
Alright Agent Stryker, you've infiltrated their base...
Copy that Command
Now all you need to do is take down their top grammar particle agents ONE BY ONE
Agent Wo and Wa should be easy but don't take Agent Ni or Ga to lightly ok? You still need to be focused enough to take on Commander Keigo and those two guys are hiding all sorts of grammatical weapons
わかりました！
(If it were my host mom then it would be わかった）
On other days, I go to Track and Field Club. See, my interests are things like playing guitar and writing comedy or making small movies and such. So...I though the BEST club to fit my strengths would be TRACK AND FIELD!!!!
It was more of a decision that I though I would try and branch out to something else (plus, Japanese conbini bread doesn't exactly make you more fit and muscular).
Club goes from 4:05 until.....7ish I'd say. It's the off season so everyone does things like weight training or running exercises. I recently got some weird injury with my left foot while running so I'm left with weight training, stretching, and situps and situp like exercises basically.
The weekends are left for me to relax. Sort of. Track and Field is usually on Saturday too. So...make that Sunday to relax (although my host mom tells me I have to wake up by a certain time for....what reason? I'm not sure exactly actually) <- I thought I wasn't going to complain
In other news, any and all hospital tests I've gotten here have shown that I'm all fine and dandy. Although the fact that I used "dandy" might be cause for concern...
I have tons more to post but I don't like massive posts. Till next time! (Also, new Australian exchange students are coming on Sunday :D )
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Thursday, September 17, 2009
School
I've decided that I can't recap everything that's happened sequentially so I'm just going to write about different topics until everyone is brought up to speed. Today I'll do school since that's taking up most of my time right now (plus I'm typing this in school right now, IT class).
My school
I started school a few weeks ago and it's been interesting to say the least. I have to take the bus to school and back every day and on the first day, my host dad put me on the wrong bus. I was told the bus I was on would go straight to my stop with no changes so I stayed on the bus until the last stop. Luckily the bus driver I had that day was the nicest one I've come across so far so she was very helpful in making sure I got to where I needed to go. After a few small problems (no bus going to my stop), I finally made it to school (only an hour or two late). Thank goodness it wasn't an actual day with classes. I walked around the school and got lots of stares and pointing. I found my room and as I walked to it, two girls were standing outside the door and saw me. Smiling and with excitement they boldly and eloquently asked...."Jared?" and I answered with a triumphant "Yes!" Queue excitement and stares as I walk into the class. All the girls wanted a picture with me and asked me questions like "Do you have girlfriend?" Then the guys came up to me and asked things like "How tall are you?"
That day (and the day that followed) turned out to be days in preparation for the school festival that weekend! The days were basically me helping out my class with their room theme and watching the many dance groups practice. They really take it to the next level here. School festivas are all out with coordinated hip hop dancing, Japanese food stalls, bands playing on a stage, and rooms with themes like a haunted house or a quiz of some sort. Keep in mind that most of the dances were comprised of homeroom classes (not dance clubs or anything like that) and they were doing things like jump rope stunts and breakdancing and everything.
My class turned the room into a giant board game. I got to help as a person who sat outside the class inviting people to come to it. Most of the time I was going around to different rooms with some people from my class. There was a group of girls that weren't students that asked to take a picture with me and then would all giggle if they saw me around the school. I just found it kinda crazy because I would just stand there or say "Hi" or wave and they would go "Kakkoiiiiiiiiii" (So cool!). So, if you're planning on going on exchange and you have:
Non brown eyes
Non black hair
and/or you are:
Tall
Foreign
People will think you're cool. (If you're a girl, everyone will think you're cute)
Since then I've been having regular school days. Everyone stays as a class and we stay in the same room for most classes. Class goes from 8:40 until 4:05 on every day except Friday (which gets out around 3:05). It's definitely been an interesting experience so far! I don't understand a lot of the classes so I just practice kanji or doodle for the time being. Except English classes. In those classes I help with pronunciation or grammar or things like that. My English reading teacher kind of annoyed me the other day because he pronounces everything himself and his accent isn't that great. He insisted to the class that wolf was pronounced as "oorf."
I'll write more about school in later posts. My next post will probably be about my recent trip to Kyoto and Osaka during Silver Week :D
My school
I started school a few weeks ago and it's been interesting to say the least. I have to take the bus to school and back every day and on the first day, my host dad put me on the wrong bus. I was told the bus I was on would go straight to my stop with no changes so I stayed on the bus until the last stop. Luckily the bus driver I had that day was the nicest one I've come across so far so she was very helpful in making sure I got to where I needed to go. After a few small problems (no bus going to my stop), I finally made it to school (only an hour or two late). Thank goodness it wasn't an actual day with classes. I walked around the school and got lots of stares and pointing. I found my room and as I walked to it, two girls were standing outside the door and saw me. Smiling and with excitement they boldly and eloquently asked...."Jared?" and I answered with a triumphant "Yes!" Queue excitement and stares as I walk into the class. All the girls wanted a picture with me and asked me questions like "Do you have girlfriend?" Then the guys came up to me and asked things like "How tall are you?"
That day (and the day that followed) turned out to be days in preparation for the school festival that weekend! The days were basically me helping out my class with their room theme and watching the many dance groups practice. They really take it to the next level here. School festivas are all out with coordinated hip hop dancing, Japanese food stalls, bands playing on a stage, and rooms with themes like a haunted house or a quiz of some sort. Keep in mind that most of the dances were comprised of homeroom classes (not dance clubs or anything like that) and they were doing things like jump rope stunts and breakdancing and everything.
My class turned the room into a giant board game. I got to help as a person who sat outside the class inviting people to come to it. Most of the time I was going around to different rooms with some people from my class. There was a group of girls that weren't students that asked to take a picture with me and then would all giggle if they saw me around the school. I just found it kinda crazy because I would just stand there or say "Hi" or wave and they would go "Kakkoiiiiiiiiii" (So cool!). So, if you're planning on going on exchange and you have:
Non brown eyes
Non black hair
and/or you are:
Tall
Foreign
People will think you're cool. (If you're a girl, everyone will think you're cute)
Since then I've been having regular school days. Everyone stays as a class and we stay in the same room for most classes. Class goes from 8:40 until 4:05 on every day except Friday (which gets out around 3:05). It's definitely been an interesting experience so far! I don't understand a lot of the classes so I just practice kanji or doodle for the time being. Except English classes. In those classes I help with pronunciation or grammar or things like that. My English reading teacher kind of annoyed me the other day because he pronounces everything himself and his accent isn't that great. He insisted to the class that wolf was pronounced as "oorf."
I'll write more about school in later posts. My next post will probably be about my recent trip to Kyoto and Osaka during Silver Week :D
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Previously on Jared Stryker's Life
So it's been over a month....yeah....
There's just been a lot going on and I didn't really want to sit down and write a huge post. I probably will make this a more summarized version of the past month.
First Big Thing: BOLTON WEEKEND
I had the "first" outbound weekend back in January and everyone seemed really cool. I still had interviews and stuff, I think more so just to see how things are with me and if my views have changed at all. I stayed the night at a local Rotarian family's place. I was sent to a place by myself (as opposed to pairs like everyone else). They were all incredibly nice and we played Scrabble and watched part of a movie. Some of the inbounds were at the weekend as well so it was nice to see them again. I found myself trying to predict where all the outbounds would be sent. This year they're sending only one person to Thailand, and now TWO to Japan. The only other change is that they're also sending people to Australia, New Zealand, and (I think) South Africa.
Second Big Thing: WANAKITA
The four day winter camp from February 1st to 4th that all the exchange students go to. This was a fantastic time! Not a whole lot changed from last year in terms of activities. This time we had another sesssion of actual cross country skiing and our campfire was indoors (bah, not really a campfire then...). Wanakita is the time where you can get a better snapshot of everyone and it was much easier to predict where everyone will be going. In fact, that's what some of us did. We wrote down a list of where we thought people might be going and we're gonna see how close to the mark we'll end up being. Last year, the outbounds seemed to have a big group that socialized with each other and then a small group that more or less socialized with themselves. This year it's much more half and half in terms of "groups" if you can truly call them that. I had to sleep in a quinzee again. I hadn't ever planned on being in a quinzee twice in my life but they needed another guy to have enough body heat in the quinzee so I was that guy. The "dance" this year was a lot more dance-like compared to last year's. There was a constant strobe light going and people were dancing, not just standing and taking pictures. One other interesting thing to note is that when we did the "solo sit" (which is going out at night with lanterns and being sent off a few paces into the forest along a path so that you seem alone for 45 minutes) one inbound ended up staying out there a bit....longer than expected. We all had come back to a cabin for our indoor campfire and we all looked at each other and asked "Where's Juan Pablo?" Turns out he was still out there, he had gone a bit more than a few paces and was just sitting there waiting to be picked up by the Rotarians again. Crazy!
Third Big Thing: SCHOOL
I'm back in school now as of February 2nd (yeah I missed the first few days because of Wanakita). I needed something to keep me occupied so I might as well keep in the school mindset (for my exchange) and for extra credits. I'm not taking anything too strenuous and i'm only a part time student (only 2 courses in my case). I'm taking Film Studies and World Issues. Film Studies is really fun and I'm thouroughly enjoying it. World Issues is a "U" course so that's where all my homework and challenge comes from. I considered taking Travel and Tourism but that'd be too easy. I need something that stimulates my brain or at least keeps it moving.
Fourth Big Thing: IMPROV NIGHT
We finally had our improv night last Friday. It went fantastic. It was a night of improv, original skits (of which I wrote a lot of and helped write the others), and music (I got to perform one of my original songs which was cool). We finally saw it all come together (only about 5 or 6 people truly worked on this night from start to finish). A lot of people showed up - we ended up selling 70 or so tickets in advance! On the day of, we rehearsed from 10:45 all the way until 7:10ish when we had to start letting people in. I loved it when I heard compliments specifically mentioning the skit that I wrote entirely solo. It was also fantastic to hear the laughs when I performed my song (with help from my friend Kieron as the second singer). I couldn't help but smile hearing people laughing after delivering a verse's punchline and it was especially awesome when we got a HUGE cheer at the end of the song. We filmed the night so hopefully some footage pops up online soon. Although, apparently the cameras might have run out of film before my song (which majorly sucks). Meh, great night nonetheless.
Thanks for waiting over a MONTH for this post and be sure to look for my next post sometime after Rotary's Announcement Day on February 22nd.
There's just been a lot going on and I didn't really want to sit down and write a huge post. I probably will make this a more summarized version of the past month.
First Big Thing: BOLTON WEEKEND
I had the "first" outbound weekend back in January and everyone seemed really cool. I still had interviews and stuff, I think more so just to see how things are with me and if my views have changed at all. I stayed the night at a local Rotarian family's place. I was sent to a place by myself (as opposed to pairs like everyone else). They were all incredibly nice and we played Scrabble and watched part of a movie. Some of the inbounds were at the weekend as well so it was nice to see them again. I found myself trying to predict where all the outbounds would be sent. This year they're sending only one person to Thailand, and now TWO to Japan. The only other change is that they're also sending people to Australia, New Zealand, and (I think) South Africa.
Second Big Thing: WANAKITA
The four day winter camp from February 1st to 4th that all the exchange students go to. This was a fantastic time! Not a whole lot changed from last year in terms of activities. This time we had another sesssion of actual cross country skiing and our campfire was indoors (bah, not really a campfire then...). Wanakita is the time where you can get a better snapshot of everyone and it was much easier to predict where everyone will be going. In fact, that's what some of us did. We wrote down a list of where we thought people might be going and we're gonna see how close to the mark we'll end up being. Last year, the outbounds seemed to have a big group that socialized with each other and then a small group that more or less socialized with themselves. This year it's much more half and half in terms of "groups" if you can truly call them that. I had to sleep in a quinzee again. I hadn't ever planned on being in a quinzee twice in my life but they needed another guy to have enough body heat in the quinzee so I was that guy. The "dance" this year was a lot more dance-like compared to last year's. There was a constant strobe light going and people were dancing, not just standing and taking pictures. One other interesting thing to note is that when we did the "solo sit" (which is going out at night with lanterns and being sent off a few paces into the forest along a path so that you seem alone for 45 minutes) one inbound ended up staying out there a bit....longer than expected. We all had come back to a cabin for our indoor campfire and we all looked at each other and asked "Where's Juan Pablo?" Turns out he was still out there, he had gone a bit more than a few paces and was just sitting there waiting to be picked up by the Rotarians again. Crazy!
Third Big Thing: SCHOOL
I'm back in school now as of February 2nd (yeah I missed the first few days because of Wanakita). I needed something to keep me occupied so I might as well keep in the school mindset (for my exchange) and for extra credits. I'm not taking anything too strenuous and i'm only a part time student (only 2 courses in my case). I'm taking Film Studies and World Issues. Film Studies is really fun and I'm thouroughly enjoying it. World Issues is a "U" course so that's where all my homework and challenge comes from. I considered taking Travel and Tourism but that'd be too easy. I need something that stimulates my brain or at least keeps it moving.
Fourth Big Thing: IMPROV NIGHT
We finally had our improv night last Friday. It went fantastic. It was a night of improv, original skits (of which I wrote a lot of and helped write the others), and music (I got to perform one of my original songs which was cool). We finally saw it all come together (only about 5 or 6 people truly worked on this night from start to finish). A lot of people showed up - we ended up selling 70 or so tickets in advance! On the day of, we rehearsed from 10:45 all the way until 7:10ish when we had to start letting people in. I loved it when I heard compliments specifically mentioning the skit that I wrote entirely solo. It was also fantastic to hear the laughs when I performed my song (with help from my friend Kieron as the second singer). I couldn't help but smile hearing people laughing after delivering a verse's punchline and it was especially awesome when we got a HUGE cheer at the end of the song. We filmed the night so hopefully some footage pops up online soon. Although, apparently the cameras might have run out of film before my song (which majorly sucks). Meh, great night nonetheless.
Thanks for waiting over a MONTH for this post and be sure to look for my next post sometime after Rotary's Announcement Day on February 22nd.
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