Plan B Review

Thought it might be a good idea to let you know how things have changed since the "Half Time" post and see if I can check off a few of the goals I set myself at that time.

Now that the project is done and my timetable isn't being disrupted with intermittent quarantining, the past two weeks have actually been fairly normal, or as close as things can possibly get to that. The timetabling is much much better this time around - only one late afternoon lesson Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays, and a large wodge on Mondays and Thursdays. The timetable is now entirely taught in Japanese, which while being horrendously difficult I'm sure is healthy somehow, the language equivalent of eating broccoli or something. That said the classes are actually interesting - one about comparing Korean culture to Japan's, one about the place of kanji in Japan and why you only really need to know around 1,500, and one about globalisation and the "McWorld" phenomenon. So basically lots more free time, lots more interesting and useful lessons and much more language. Timetable gets a tick.

Let's see if the rest of the list has come to fruition...

1) Escape university.
Well, um, not really. One or two other students have managed to join the Nagoya Frisbee team I think, but I still don't have much hopes for much proper engagement with the city. I spend as little time as I have to at university now anyway, and that's about it.
2) Get a job.
Big success. I teach English to one student for ¥3000/hour (about £19/hour) twice a week, and could probably find another student if I felt like it. I've also secured a translation postition with the university online course department - they wanted someone to go through their syllabi and course descriptions and things to put them in English. That one goes at 60 words to an hour paid (an hour roughly ¥1000). It's good for me both for my Japanese and by wallet. So yes, earning lots, feeling more like I'm actually working towards something rather than just wasting time around Nagoya.
3) More self-study.
This too a success. I've started studying at least half an hour every day, and also the translation job pushes more Japanese my way. Having a completely Japanese timetable also works wonders too, so happy with this one.
4) Write a Japanese sakubun at least once every two weeks.
Kind of. I've signed up to an online writing course that has one small piece to write every week, but only about 400 characters. If I ever meet my tutor I'll ask her to check through them before I put them online, but there's really not a lot you can say in 400 characters. Will have to expand them or something.
5) Move to the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Level 1 kanji.
Aha, no. This is oddly conflicting with the next goal, in that I'm not going to change kanji lists while I'm studying for a different test. I'm going to make JLPT2 as good as it can be before July 5th.
6) Take the JLPT Level 2 test this year in July.
All signed up and rearing to go. Studying specifically for this one now in my own time. Haven't received any confirmation for it yet though, hope that's not a bad sign.
7) Try and join a theatre club.
Hmm, not really. Would have liked to, but I think I've just resigned myself to the fact that I might as well just spend all my free time either wasting time on the computer, earning money for translating or studying for the JLPT. Variety was fantastic in Sheffield last year, and I do very much miss it now, but I think that I have two months or so left in this country and the more work I can do now the less I have to do in 4th year.


Overall then things have improved around here. It's still not great or anything half as good as the fun I was having this time last year, but it's better. Having my head down and working towards things is maybe not exciting or riveting but it's better than wandering around with nothing really to latch on to to call your purpose. On top of that more travelling planned - I'd like to finish Japan off with a visit to Kobe and a visit to Okinawa, and then back to the dormitory for some frantic packing and boxing of things before leaving Nagoya for the last time.

I'm both looking and not looking forward to it though. It's something that's difficult to describe - Japan is quite a marvellous place in a number of ways, and it's great to wander around it and just be in its bizarreness and difference of everything. I can easily see how people could make a life out here, however hard that would be to begin with. However, I miss the "extra-ordinarity" of what I had in the UK. I once thought that what I had encountered here in Nagoya was "the Normal". There are people, there are jobs, there are restaurants etc but nothing really special leaps out at you apart from what you yourself find special. Back in England with my friends and family there something extraordinary was always happening, no matter how insignificant, it was extraordinary and outside "the Normal". Perhaps this is therefore a good thing, that I get to both experience the blandness of normality in a country which is by nature intriguing, and that I get to understand what it is that I left behind in the UK and how special it actually is.


PS. Having got bored one day I decided to get a bag of compost and some strawberry plants from the garden-centre and see if I could create anything. The original plan was tomato plants because they're effectively foolproof but they weren't selling any, so I figured strawberries were still red and a fruit and worth having a go at.

They're well developed now, even spilling over into another small container of earth I had lying around and they even managed to produce four strawberries! Although one was bad and I ate the other three to see if they were bad as well. Since the plants seem determined to grow in all directions I'm nudging them towards the balcony wall bit to see if I can get some vine-action in them growing in and out of the holes.

Also, there're loads of little white spidery things all over some of the leaves - they're not making holes or anything and they wash off very easily, but I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be there. Any suggestions on a postcard to the usual address.

April and May

Hello blog followers. You may have been it's been a bit of a while since I haven't been posting anything, and nothing at all in April or May. That's because things here have been busy. That's my excuse anyway. You'd have thought 5 days in quarantine would have made me write something at least...

April - Project project project
Having come back from Singapore, I had two weeks working on my Year Abroad Research Project (tm), which was fairly pointless because I needed term to start on the 13th April before I could really do any of the research side of things. The family came over on the 4th for 16 days, and I spent the time I had before term travelling around Japan with them, seeing some new places and revisiting others. Since I'm feeling lazy, I was going to invite one of them to write something about the occasion, especially since I wasn't with them for half of their time, but I might end up doing it myself after all ;)

April was incredibly busy trying to get enough research done to warrant a pass. Students on the year abroad aren't required to actually pass anything at their host university, and so long as they turn up to lessons then everything is fine - the only caveat is that we have to write a 6000-word research project on a subject of our choosing. Not really wanting to write anything serious, and not being too keen on handing out opinion polls about women's working rights or economic conditions or something else doable but dull, I chose (back in Sheffield this time last year) to base my research project on the topic of Japanese Humour.

Ah, blissful ignorance. What have I learnt from doing this research? Humour is the absolutely worst thing you could ever write about academically. Reading the available literature, which already is incredibly difficult to find (especially about such a specific topic as Japanese humour) is simply boredom grating at your eyeballs, jokes have no meaning when written down, and I even found a chapter where the hilarious Yes Minister was pared down to an incredibly dreary explicative text. Taking such material and then trying to write something meaningful from it was not easy at all, especially when the vast majority of it was completely irrelevant. On top of that, the majority of Japanese humour comes from the discourse of a comedy duo, the clever tsukkomi berating the hapless boke for his errant thoughts. You can't even record that sort of thing in words. The Japanese idea of a funny television show is to gather a random handful of celebrities, maybe bring in an expert of something for educational purposes, and then get them all to do something bizarre or impossible like eating scorpions or playing Human Tetris. This is equally difficult to really write about or describe, so I eventually had to write about the place of humour within society rather than about the humour itself. Ah well.

May - Quarantined
The big plan was to finish it off before going to Korea for Golden Week (a group of holidays in the first week of May) but I didn't quite manage that. This was ok though, because something fairly big happened while I was busy scribbling away. Swine Flu came to the Far East.

It was only a tiny amount of cases, but Nagoya University insisted that, since I wasn't going to cancel the £200 odd flight to Korea with only three days' notice, I would have to be quarantined on my return to the country for 10 days. I wasn't exactly explained the rules, just that I would have to stay in my room as much as possible, avoid places people gather etc. The idea of it was completely without meaning - if I wanted to cook I'd have to visit a shop to get ingredients, and then use the communal kitchen down the corridor. I'd have to get back home from the airport using the underground. If I was infected they'd find out very quickly when I took the whole dormitory out. But of course, the death rate for swine flu outside Mexico is less than 0.1%, so of course the Japanese government has gone absolutely nuts in suggesting such quarantines.

When I got back I found that the number of cases in Japan was roughly 200 more than Korea's anyway. It had managed to infect a school or two in the Osaka area.

So, I spent (a fortunately shortened) 5 days in my room with just the research project and the bi-daily temperature measuring to do. This was where I discovered the disadvantage to my do-everything laptop - I ended up doing everything on it. If I wanted to work, laptop. If I wanted to play games, laptop. If I wanted a film or music, laptop. I even use a couple of Japanese study programs on the thing. If I wanted any variety from sitting at my desk I could read a book for a bit or read through a textbook but aside from that there was remarkably little to stop me going incredibly stir-fever. Never mind swine flu, cabin fever would end up killing me.

On the last day (Thursday) I emailed in my health/temperature sheet and looked forward to freedom. Turning up at university, I was quickly surrounded by teachers on all sides wondering why I had come in. Apparently they as in the department had no problems with me being there, but they hadn't cleared it with Nagoya University's Beurocracy Central. I was allowed to go to the one lesson that day, and then asked to carry on taking my temperature over the weekend too.

I'm sorry to say that Boots' Feverscan(tm) was either inaccurate or Nagoya Uni had its paranoia hat on again, but having emailed in the weekend's results I got a phone call early on Monday saying that a temperature of mostly 37 with occasional 38s classifies as a fever, and would I be so kind as to go to hospital to be checked. Hm.

Hospital was a way away, and a fairly small drab kind of building in which I waited for a fair bit, was talked to, waited for another bit, had some long stick thing wodged up my nose, waited some more and then eventually charged about £25 for the bit of paper on which the doctor had scribbled "no problems".

With my health now financially secured on paper I could get back into the swing of things at uni, and with no more project to worry about I could actually try and get back into some sort of normal schedule. Hooray!

Travelling: Korea II

Seoul
This was my second time in Korea, for about the same duration (10 days-ish), a trip mostly just to get to see Lianne again, but this time we also decided we would try travelling around to see more of the country. Lianne didn't have a great deal of time off work so the travel would be slightly rushed, but it ended up being very worthwhile and we got to see a lot of the country that I didn't see much of the first time.

Firstly was off to the captial of South Korea, Seoul. Having talked a lot with the Korean students in Nagoya, asking them for their ideas of what to see/where to go etc, one of the students (who had ambitions to work for the Seoul tourist industry) supplied me with a very comprehensive list of things to see and do in Seoul, including her favourite chicken soup restaurant. Which is where we went first.

It was very tasty - a whole chicken floating in soup stuffed with rice and ginger. Perfect for the slightly chilly and rainy day we were exploring the streets.

Nearby was the National Museum, and a palace. The museum was no-photos, but contained a lot of ancient Korean relics, mostly from its various royal families, along with various traditional possessions and robes still used during various festivals and ceremonies.

The palace was only one part of a large complex, but one which apparently had been destroyed and rebuilt more times than was really fair. It was still able to accept tourists though, so we went in for a look.

The thing that struck me was the colours of it - a lot of work had gone into keeping the colours vibrant in the wood. Just a shame that the weather was a bit grey.

After the castle we wondered up the road to a nearby shopping street, full of clothes and trinkets. Here we discovered the only Starbucks in the world that is forced to write its horrible trademark name in the local alphabet. On the way we also passed by the remains of the Namdaemun, or the usually enormous Great South Gate, which had burnt down about a year and a half ago. Rebuilding work was underway though.

It was on this street that I managed to get myself a hanko (personal stamp) made. My new translation job required one to stamp off the time that I had worked so they could calculate my pay, and most Japanese people use a hanko in place of a signature, so I figured that it would be a good purchase. The trouble would be finding out how to represent my name in Japanese characters - the vast majority are impossible to convert ("Johnson" would have to be "Jon-son", and the characters don't exist in Japanese). I settled eventually for 砦門 (sai-mon), meaning "fort gate". People I've showed it to say that it's a good choice, with a slightly Chinese/old fashioned feel.

Moving from the shopping street, we began exploring the immediate city. In Seoul there's a very well decorated but small river running through some of the busier areas. It makes for good walks and almost separates you from the metropolis that towers above you, and which was a good place to explore. Further up the river there were some fantastic paper lanterns. The bridges were lined with a fair few police though.

It was around this time that we began to actually recognise the fact that there really were a lot of policemen around. I'd heard from the Korean students in Nagoya that all South Korean youths of 18 or over have to partake in some form of military service, and seeing as most don't want to join the army they instead serve in the police or fire service. Still I'd never seen so many concentrated in one place before, and the light and unworried atmosphere in the city didn't seem to warrant their presence. At any rate, there were plenty around, either lining the streets, marching out of subway entrances or forming ranks on bridges. Small worry that some form of martial law was silently being introduced. But no worry, back to touristing. The worst we were getting from the police was the odd blank stare.

From the end of the river (blocked by more rows of police - now noticably sporting riot gear) I spotted a spotlight, and thinking there might be some sort of festival I tried to get to the source to find out what was going on. All the direct streets were blocked by more rows of riot police, so going around the long way we were faced with this.

It's alright when they're just lining up to block passage, but not so much when they start marching in the streets shouting and banging their shields. I wondered if some sort of war had broken out, but at any rate it would probably be better to head back to a hotel than hang around. We later found out that earlier that day there was a parade, and that the police were expecting demonstrations due to the upcoming Labour day, but the show of force was well above what would have been required. I suppose it shocked people enough not to even try.

The next day we left the motel and in the street immediately adjacent to ours was a full blown parade.

Parade over, we set off to try and find one of Seoul's famous temples, close to the business district. There were some musical fountains around which Lianne managed to get a video of.

The temple was famous for having the largest statue of a Boddhisatva called Kannon, and when we found it it was also full of red lanterns.

That evening we thought we'd try for the Seoul tower, to see what we might see. There was terrible queuing though - about 45 mins just to get into the cable car to take us to the base of the thing, and even when we got up to that point, we had to buy a separate ticket just to enter the tower itself. It seemed some clever lock-maker had made up something about couples locking themselves together on the tower dias and made a mint.

When we eventually got into the tower, we then had about an hour and a half wait to even get into the queue for the elevator up. At the top, the windows were pretty thick with dust/grimy-ness and we didn't wait long to find out why - three small Korean girls burst out of the tower and immediately threw themselves at the glass. Wonder if they caught anything.

The view of Seoul was not particularly worth the wait - it was nice, but not two hours worth nice. Especially when there was another three quarters of an hour to get back out of the viewing gallery. Eesh.

By that point it was getting late, and we decided it would be easier travel-wise if we simply caught the night bus to our next destination rather than looked for a hotel for the night.

Busan
Busan is the "other" Korean city - in the same way that most foreigners to Britain have only really heard of London and Manchester. It's less touristy than Seoul, but contains (at least from what I saw) a lot more foreigners.

Arriving at 6am was not so great, but sitting on a beach in early morning having not slept so well was a new experience. It was more a question of finding some way of passing the time before we could even try and get a seat somewhere for breakfast to try and wake up a bit. We eventually managed to find a cafe called "Paris Baguette" (bonus points for originality) to grab some hot chocolate and bread, and as if by some sort of cultural magnet within half an hour there was a french couple chatting merrily behind us. Sort of makes me wonder why my pub or fish and chip shop detector wasn't working.

When we'd managed that, we made off for a large temple on the coast. This too was full of colourful lanterns, and was just a beautiful location to sit in the sun, slightly sleepy, but still taking in a foreign country.

Still sleepy, we decided to find a hotel and hit the sack for a few hours, before heading out that evening for the sea front for dinner and a couple of drinks. The beach itself had a strange laser show and a wonderfully lit bridge, all of which my camera refused to take pictures of. You'll have to put up with one I took the next day.

After those two days, we headed back to Ulsan. Lianne's short holiday was over, and I spend the rest of the time doing odd chores around the apartment and trying to be helpful where I could while she was working.

When I got back to Nagoya I was quarantined... (see next post)