Complain and ye shall receive

My favorite anecdote from the day so far: the keynote speaker this morning began his speech by asking if everyone could hear him if he was standing at his full height. "I should really slump down like this," he said. "They just don't make microphone stands tall enough in this country." Everyone laughed.

Ten minutes into his speech, a Japanese man, one of the sort of ushers of the event I guess, went up on stage, took the microphone out of its stand, handed it to the speaker, replaced the stand with a taller one, took the microphone back and put it in the new stand, and left the stage.

Maybe it's not a very exciting story (4/10, maybe 5?), but trust me, it was pretty hilarious at the time. I was imagining the hotel officials whispering to each other after he said that: "えっ、何?日本のマイクロフォン・スタンドはすべて短すぎるって?あのやろう。。。見せてやるぜ!"　Or something to that effect but, you know, in real Japanese instead of my attempted approximation. ("What?! He said all Japanese microphone stands are too small?? That bastard, we'll show him!")

(Don't you think the normal question marks look odd in between sentences of Japanese? Wouldn't "。。。なに？日本の。。。" look more even? But last time I used the bigger question mark I felt my moral fiber was called into question...)

The other exciting part of the day was role-playing as a Japanese elementary schooler. You see I met this guy, and he was really cute, so we ditched the afternoon workshops and just hung out in his hotel room and it turned out he sort of had a thing for -- no, no, wait a sec, that's not quite what I meant. (But as I read the sentence I just typed, I couldn't resist. Dirty mind points for me; I think that brings me to about 65.) Let's try again: I went to a session on making elementary school visits, and they had us be the class and did sample activities with us, aimed at different age groups. It's not often in recent years I've been called upon to sing a song whose lyrics are "1 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7," or sing Five Little Monkeys while making bed-jumping motions with my palm and fingers, or compete to be the first to grab the card with the right animal on it (Mia beat me! She got three cards and I only got one. It was quite disgraceful. If I were a real Japanese school child, I'd have brought terrible shame upon my family. In fact, I've brought terrible shame upon my family as is. Sorry, family.). 本当に楽しかったよね。

(For anyone who doesn't know Japanese and wants to understand the little snippets of Japanese I throw in...tough! 日本語を習ってみれ. ;-P)

I found another couple of people who'll come with me to 秋葉原 tomorrow night, so that was good. I also bought two huge thick books on being vegetarian in Japan. (Which is part of why I feel perfectly fine skipping out on the vegetarianism workshop thingy that's going on right now...heh.) Other than that, the day's been pretty boring so far...lots of listening to people talk.

Okay gotta go, one of my roommates wants the internet. じゃあね!

Oh, lyrics, uh...well, it was raining yesterday and I didn't have an umbrella, so...

雨の日傘ささなきゃズブ濡れになるだろ。
その程度さ、笑うだけさ。

P.S. Oh yeah and I forgot the other funny moment I meant to include here: during the elementary school session, we had to climb with our fingers up and down like in the Itsy-Bitsy Spider (going down, by the way, is really hard!) The workshop was being run by a Japanese woman who is in charge of elementary schools in Kyoto or something and by a former ALT (JET teacher person). The dialogue went as follows:

Woman: Okay, now this is the mommy finger [wiggles index finger], and this is the daddy finger [wiggles thumb]. Mommy finger [wiggles], daddy finger [wiggles]. Now Mommy and Daddy touch like this [touches left thumb to right index finger], and Mommy and Daddy touch like this [touches right thumb to left index finger]. And we make a rectangle!

ALT guy: Right, that's right; when Mommy and Daddy touch, they make -- a rectangle...

Woman: [looking shocked] Aah, these are children! Pure, pure little children!

It was cute. ^_^ Okay bedtime now. おやすみ、みんな。

日本へようこそ!

今は東京のホテルにいるよ。 But I'm sure as hell not going to continue trying to write this post in Japanese...

So I woke up almost exactly 24 hours ago, meaning this isn't going to be the most coherent post ever. Of course as the day progressed I noticed dozens of things I intended to write about and I've forgotten all of them. But everyone I've met has been just lovely; I know four people who will be in my prefecture (albeit not very close to me) who are all excellent. The girl sitting next to me on the plane went to Yale and we played the "oh do you know...?" game and each won -- a guy she knew in high school went to Swarthmore (Matt Conan, for anyone who cares), and she knew of Sudipta ("oh, oh, is he the completely crazy right-wing guy who's just completely offensive and ridiculous?" "Why yes, yes he is..."). And oddly, I was sitting near several vegetarians on the plane, which surprised me. The guy on my other side was really into organic farming and was telling us his plan to travel the entire world while volunteering on organic farms. Next to him was Lindsey, whom I'd met at the June orientation and who will be in Kobe. So I felt very connected to the people around me, and we didn't have any problem making good small talk when we wanted to. Oh, and I also met a guy, Kevin, who went to Seton Hall.

Of course, mostly I'm never going to see these people again after Wednesday...although I collected email addresses, just in case.

Of the plane ride I have not much to say; for some reason, I felt less freaked out than I typically have on shorter, domestic flights. Maybe just something about the magnitude of the plane and the distance made it seem more...solid. Oh, and the food! The first meal was some sort of acceptable spaghetti with vegetables and some bread and salad, then there was a snack of a small sandwich with cucumbers and lettuce, but then.....I must have been damn hungry. Because the last meal was cheese ravioli...in tomato sauce...industrial, airplane tomato sauce...much of it sort of congealed and clumpy...and I ate every bit of ravioli. It was some sort of minor miracle. (For anyone who doesn't know...this just doesn't happen. I cringe and run away at the first mention of congealed or clumpy tomato sauce; in fact writing this is making me a bit sick.) And it wasn't that bad, after I had scraped most of the sauce off. I was proud of myself. ^_^

Here's an anecdote that one guy sitting near me told, when we were exchanging random anecdotes. One of his friends doesn't know how to swim very well. One day he (the friend) was at some beach with a bunch of friends, and saw a little island not very far out into the water. So, for some odd reason, he decided to swim to it. After all, it really did look close. So he sets out swimming, and he's not doing so well, he starts to get really tired, but he keeps going, flapping his arms faster and faster, until he realizes he just doesn't have the energy to make it -- but at that point, he was exactly halfway there, so there was nothing he could do, he had no energy left to make it back to shore or to get to the island. So he's flailing and failing, and running out of breath, and he realized it was just impossible, that was it, he was going to drown...and he finally gave up, and accepted his death, and stopped struggling to stay afloat...and he started to sink down...and...hit the bottom. The water was only five feet deep.

-__-;;

Still, a near death experience is a near death experience, even if you were in five-foot water the whole time, ね?

So the flight was spent with some chatting, some listening to music, some watching anime, some reading about the height of points on elliptic curves, and a lot of just sitting and spacing out and half-trying to sleep. But it really wasn't bad; it didn't feel as long as I expected.

Then at Narita...sweat. Humidity. Yeesh.

Did you know that a lot of the signs around here are written in Japanese? It's pretty sweet. I spent the drive to the hotel attempting to read signs and buildings. But I think it felt sort of like a Japanese lesson with a very good virtual reality system, or something...as I said to Lindsey who was sitting next to me, I'm used to staring at kanji I don't know, and trying to sound out katakana, so even all the Japanese surrounding us didn't make it sink in that the reason these signs are in Japanese isn't just because I'm interested in Japanese and have sought them out as kanji practice -- they're in Japanese because they're in Japan.

The hotel is, uh, fancy. And the toilet squirts water at you. It's awesome. I went out to dinner with Lindsey and her roommate Sarah and another girl who's two doors down from me, Maria. And now maybe it started to feel like being in Japan. We found a restaurant and shop district, where there were narrow streets filled with people and infinitely many sushi and noodle restaurants and arcades and electronics stores and people talking in Japanese. It was.....absolutely amazing. We ate at a little noodle place that's sort of a glorified vending machine: you put money in a vending machine, push the button of the dish you want, get a little ticket, and then give it to a woman who very quickly makes your food for you. I had きつね, kitsune, which means fox but was in fact soba noodles with broth and a bit of seaweed and scallions and two huge flat triangles of the most amazingly flavorful tofu that has ever existed. It was, at the time, the most satisfying thing I've ever eaten, or so it felt. And I successfully used chop sticks! And it was completely filling and it cost ￥320. すごかったよ。

Then we wandered a bit and just soaked up the atmosphere. We poked into a video game and DVD store, but they had a pretty small selection. But Lindsey and I are planning an excursion to 秋葉原 Tuesday evening, so for the three people so far who have commissioned video game purchases, have no fear. (That is, as Elizabeth so helpfully informed me, the electronics and gaming district, known to users of our alphabet as Akihabara.) Then we went into this monstrously huge electronics store -- floors and floors and floors, in fact they had several separate stores adjacent to one another. In one of the smaller ones, which was mainly filled with watches, I couldn't resist buying a watch with Japanese numbers (it even has old-fashioned characters for the first few numbers) for ￥1920. I mean hell, dinner was three dollars, so why not? I even managed to mumble "kore o kudasai" to the salesperson.

Oh, and in an arcade we passed there was a game which I picture as being sort of like DDR, only with two taiko drums you have to hit in the right rhythms. Now, I don't actually know how the game is played...I just know it was an arcade game with two large taiko drums sticking out of it. Which is awesome.

My roommates have both just gotten back and gone to sleep, so I shall do the same. (Uh, the sleeping part...I am already here.) Tomorrow is packed with orientation stuff, but there's a chance I'll find myself online in the evening, since writing emails and posts in an important way for me to decompress. Comments or emails would make me disproportionately happy.

おやすみなさい。

Oh, but first, some song lyrics. This isn't particularly relevant to this post or my mood, but I've been deeply into Honey Blade for the last couple days, so I feel obligated to go with that:

目覚めると君はどこにもいない。
残されたカトレアと手紙。
あの日、あの時、あの場所で、あのまま君を、君を、
君を、君を、君を、君を、壊し尽くせばよかった。。。