Wednesday, April 7, 2010

4月7日 Day 14: WELCOME TO THE WORLD



I FINALLY GOT A CELL PHONE. (Sorry I look gross in this pic-- but I LOVE this phone)

What a process though. Pain in the motha-flippin' A.

It's basically common knowledge that if you're in Japan-- you NEED a cell phone. There's no way you could successfully hope to meet up with people without one. Everyone at our school was told to buy their phone in Shibuya because they spoke English. Unfortunately, that meant that all the pre-paid plans and phones sold out like hotcakes.

In an effort to avoid the wait, my friends and I went to this place called Donkey Hote (no relation to Don Quixote) which is basically a SUPER STORE. My friend Nick calls it Mecca because it literally has EVERYTHING you could ever need. Tampons, TVs, fake eyelashes, and phones galore.

Unfortunately, the phone guy didn't speak ANY English which meant that I was the de-facto translator for our group of 5 girls who needed phones. O_O I understood things like this:

"It's very important to ___________ if you want to _____, then you need to ______ and then use the _______ to ________ the ________."

MISSING ALL THE IMPORTANT PARTS.

Somehow, we were able to communicate the most basic pre-paid plan making sure that it had all the specifications my friends' phones had: unlimited texting (known here simply as me-ru)
for ¥300 a month and ¥99/minute phone calls. Needless to say, I won't be calling anyone unless it's an absolute emergency.

It was so funny how eager the guy was to talk to me though. What I DID understand made him so relieved that he didn't have to stumble through English and he sort of talked WAY to fast in anticipation of my 100% comprehension.

Other than that, we went to our school's freshman week and looked into joining some clubs. I looked all over the place for the ikebana club, but couldn't find it. The clubs were basically just roaming the main path of the campus holding big signs and passing out flyers. ZERO organization. I got a flyer for the Tea Ceremony Club and I'm hopefully going to join the Art Appreciation Club and maybe the Ikebana Club (I heard it kinda sucks the fun out of enjoying ikebana, but we'll see...).

Then we got our test results back. I'm placed in Japanese 2: 200, which is basically what it sounds like, the next major step above Beginner's Japanese. I'm not upset though because I definitely feel like it's an adequate measure of what I've learned after 4 semesters. Not enough. HA. I'm glad I placed above most of my friends though! (A simultaneously small and vain accomplishment :P)

Then we went to the greatest place on campus: the bookstore. I got some seriously hot Sophia swag.


*Note: I will never wear both of these sweats at the same time. I'm not THAT tacky. Sheesh!

1 comment:

  1. Where's the "I went to class" part of this sojurn? Dad

    ReplyDelete