The weekend (October 13th & 14th)

Drink hugging

Finally, Friday! We had one class this morning, which was actually a fun class, it’s the only class where it’s just the Leiden people I think. In this class we are going to have to give lots of short little presentations, so this is what I was looking for. I’m not the biggest fan of ‘happyou’s’, presentations/speeches, but at least we get to do some real talking, the class isn’t too big, we get to pick our own topics in general, at least, we are relatively free to talk about what we want. It all has to be Japan related of course, but that’s not too hard :).

After class a few of us went to the library to get a log-in name and password so we can use the computers in the library (open on Saturdays you see, and more computers than at the International student exchange centre). We also got a list of all the clubs and ‘circle’s’ at the uni so we might pick something from that. We don’t know what yet though. After all this useful information gathering we went shopping, yayy. We took the tram to ‘Youme Saito’, the shopping centre by Dejima, because we all needed this or that. We bought some little cushions to cheer up our living room and I also bought a body warmer at the UNIQLO (it was slightly less disappointing this time – less crowded, new stuff). You’ll get to see it someday :P

After our major shopping spree (and of course a stop at the Starbucks) we rushed home because we were going to meet up with a group of Japanese people for dinner and drinks. They were supposed to be the ‘english club’ but it’s more like the ‘wannabe English speakers club’. Maybe one of them actually spoke English, but we don’t mind, we want to practice our Japanese anyway.
Not that I got much chance for that, because I was sitting next to Nessa, a Filipino girl from our building, who was way more interested in hearing about Dutch culture, as she doesn’t speak Japanese, so I had a good chat with her! As we had paid upfront for our food and drinks, and you could thus drink as much as you wanted, including alcohol, there were a few people who were getting drunk really quickly (this does NOT include me) and knocking things over the whole time. This is when the weird things happened like interesting drink mixes, ketchup drinks (some drink being knocked over onto a plate with ketchup on it and having the liquid then poured back into the glass) and drink hugging. Ken’s drink was ‘hugging’ him he said. Right on.

All in all a very fun evening, I must say. The three of us here left at 12:30 because we were getting tired and nothing seemed to be happening (by this time we had left the place we had the food at and were waiting outside a shady karaoke bar for a room there to become available). I’m glad we did, as it turned out the rest didn’t get home until 4, and all pissed drunk too. Suckers!

Good night!

October 14th
***Freedom in Control vol. 06

All right, rock on! Okay, enough with the cheesy catchphrases. Anyways, a few days ago Ruben had met some Japanese students who were in a band, and they were going to perform today. I had by chance gotten a flyer about this performance as well, and the whole thing was called “Freedom in Control vol. 06”. It was an afternoon filled with beginning punk rock bands, all students, and it was seriously fun! I miss going to concerts a bit, and so this really cheered me up. Especially seeing the Japanese getting all excited like this haha. The whole thing was held in this relatively small room that looked like a gym room, on campus. There wasn’t really a stage to speak of, the front area wasn’t really set off, but you could tell where the line was you shouldn’t cross so as to not interfere with the bands. There was a crowd of maybe 50 people or something and as is tradition in Japan but weird when going to a ‘concert’ we had to all take off our shoes before entering.

The music I must say was not bad at all! I didn’t know any of the music of course, but there were actually people there who did, which was really fun to see. There was a frontline of like 10 to 15 people who were really enthusiastic. I’ve now seen the Japanese pogo (sort of jump up against each other - common at punk / rock concerts) and do all sorts of silly dance manoeuvres. A little anti-climax was the last band. It was all punk rock and then this last band was jazzy. In general I like jazz, but it just didn’t fit in with the rest, and when they did a cover of ‘why do birds, suddenly appear, every time, you are near’ in REALLY BAD ENGLISH, I decided I didn’t like them. But the whole afternoon was really fun, because I really missed the live music, and I hope there will be more opportunities like this. I better make friends with those band members so they can tell me when there are concerts and stuff :P

DAAN DAAN DAAN! Je hebt een dubbelganger! Was de bassist van de laatste band. Zie grotere foto's op mn photobucket site :)

At 6 in the evening we had the so called International House Orientation. I was hoping they would tell us something useful like what to do in the case of an earth quake, a typhoon, fire drills etcetc. But nooooo. They told us how to produce garbage. That’s what it said on the paper, and that’s what they read out to us, how to PRODUCE garbage. Like that’s hard! What they meant was how to properly recycle everything and what to put in which bin, but they didn’t have to go through these big rubbish bins to make that clear to me! Especially since we’ve been told over and over already about the garbage disposal here. We have our 4 bins, the explanations, the diagrams, everything. And so we sort of snored through that (Gerrie literally snored through it, silly boy) and then waited for the interesting part, but that didn’t come. They were done. Now it was time for a surprise ‘welcome party’. Well yayy. NOT. We were hungry because we hadn’t eaten yet, and were really not in the mood for hanging around. It wasn’t even a party party. They had bought some snacks and cans of beer, and that was it. So not worth staying. Instead we made ourselves a delicious meal (I had potatoes! Yes, because they were on offer at the supermarket, so I had boiled potatoes with a little butter and salt and pepper and and and it was DELICIOUS). Way better than stupid welcome party :P

Now (I’m writing this on Sunday morning) I’m off to make Hello Kitty pancakes. Pictures of the result will follow, because I was stupid enough not to put them on my memory stick so now I don't have them with me (second part of the sentence was written monday afternoon ;) )

Hopefully there will be movies up soon, I'm now going to try to upload them to Thijs's server (thank you Thijs!!!) and when its all set to go I'll post a link. For now, please enjoy the pictures!

baai baiii

Jenn