It's been a while...

So it's been a while again I guess! Not good. I have stories to tell, but I'm busy making the stories and so no time to write them down! Good thing is today is a holiday for us! Yes, no class, how exciting. The reason is that all over the country high school students are taking the entrance exams for national universities, of which Choudai (The short version of the university name) is one. And so as it will be complete chaos and mayhem, they decided they didn't want the annoying foreigners around :D So normally a nice sleep in is a good way to start a day off, but noooo. We had to get up early (well, earlier than I would have liked to) because today was fumigate day. What day? Well, these men came to our apartment and fumigated the place. They cleaned out the drains, and sprayed our rooms with anti-bug stuff. Goody.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. ~ Proust

First things first though, what I've been up to since I last updated ;) SOo... yes, Ikebana! Ikebana is the Japanese version of flower arranging. Well, it's translated to flowere arranging but it's a bit more than that. It's a highly revered art form, practiced by a lot of Japanese women, even today. So usually these little culture lessons we get aren't really that impressive, and the same applies to our Ikebana lesson. After a quick explanation of what Ikebana was, we were shown on a piece of paper one style of Ikebana. So we thought we were all supposed to try and do that one, but it turned out that only those with a certain type of vase got to do that, the rest could do freestyle. Well, they forgot to explain to us any of the 'rules' or preferences regarding the arrangement of flowers in Ikebana, so I was a bit at a loss. Basically I was just sticking flowers in this thing at random, making someone I thought looked reasonably nice, but I have no idea if it has any aesthetic value in the Ikebana realm. I've seen various Ikebana pieces so I sort of knew what type of thing they like, different lengths and stuff, but really it was guess work. The result was halfway decent though, I think...

Tuesday a fellow Leiden student who studies in another part of Kyuushuu came to visit with her boyfriend. There were other plans already in the making however, and so Gerrie and I decided in the end to meet up with two other people who wouldn't have been able to come along otherwise. We went back to Za Watami, the izakaya we went to a few times when we first got to Nagasaki, especially when we were still at the hotel. The drinks were a little 'weak' but the food and the atmosphere is really good there, and we were with quite a group in the end, good stuff! The other group planned to go to this place called Cybac afterwards, so we said we'd meet them there, which we did! Cybac is this rather big entertainment centre I guess. For practically no money you can spend up to 12 hours there playing arcade games, playing pool, table tennis, do karaoke, take a shower, take a footbath, relax in a massage chair, watch movies, play playstation, surf the net or just grab a manga and sit yourself down on a couch. Once you're inside all that stuff is free! Including as many softdrinks as you want, it's amazing! You can apparently even rent your own private room with couches and stuff, and as you can stay for up to 12 hours, you can even spend the night there, which is a really cheap way to do that! I mean, they have showers and stuff, you can get toothbrushes for free at the counters, except for a change of clothes there is everything you need there, truly amazing. I spent my night taking a footbath and having massages with Maarten, then played some pool, played table tennis with Lindsey, Sahim and Kendo and practiced my Taiko drumming.

Wednesday was a rather short day as I didn't get up til late, went to class and Gerrie Claudia and I went to Yume Saito after. I have some boots that I needed these things for to make them stand up right (no idea what it's called, see picture?:P) After a slurp of starbucks we went to the supermarket there. It's quite big and they have lots of 'foreign'stuff there. That's where we got the idea to make burritos! Not the easiest thing in the world I must say. We ended up managing to find everything but the actual tortillas, which we had to go to the station for, and there were only 2 packets left! Seriously lucky. So went home and made burritos with Clau and Gerrie, and then ate them too! (how exciting!). After that I did a little gilmore girls catch up watching with Mariko and Gerrie, we're almost up to date now ;)

This brings us to thursday! Thursday we had a dinner planned with some Japanese people, amongst whom Ken (the ketchup guy ;)). The plan was to go eat yakiniku to start off with, but the plans changed to Italian. After that we were going to go to Karaoke and do a 'nomi-houdai'. The nomi-houdai was for 2 hours, which means that for about 14 euros you can drink as much as you want of whatever you want for a full 2 hours, something you really need when going to do karaoke if you ask me ;). Anyway, so we end up being with around 12 people, 6 foreigners and 6 japanese people. We go to this place called Bagdad Cafe ( I kid you not) which was supposed to be this Italian place, but it really wasn't. I don't know what it was supposed to be, all I know is the food was meager and not all that tasty. I was glad to be getting to karaoke place now, called "Voice Shower". Aww....

Karaoke was seriously fun, I actually did some singing (I'm not a big fan of karaoke and singing, but tonight was just fun, then you get in to it). Ken is a big big Ellegarden fan, and I"m starting to get there, I really like their music (Ellegarden is a Japanese pop/punk band) and Gerrie, though he won't admit it but you can tell by how enthusiastically he sings along, likes them too, so Ken Gerrie and I screamed (*ahem* I mean sang) along to some of their songs too. After 2 hours of making my throat hurt we decided the night was still young (it was only 10 o'clock or so) and some of us went to this place called Jinya, a "standing" bar. It's called that because in general there are no seats, but there are some. Those aren't really seats though, more like bars you can lean against, as you might see at some Dutch busstops. There we saw two people from Gaidai, one whom I hadn't met yet. Brett (the guy I didn't know yet) is a self proclaimed emo-kid (haha) though he doesn't look the part. He just likes emo music, for the rest he's reasonably normal I think. He totally ruined my night however by telling me System of a Down was 'temporarily' broken up. ARE THEY INSANE!?! They can't do that to me!!! Arrghh... Anyway, yeah, so, THANKS Brett (though maybe as fan I should have known...but don't go there! I check their site and they mention nothing about this, so...). I ended the night by getting the bar tender's phone number, how cheesy is that!? Haha, I have to explain myself here though. He looked so familiar (yes, cheesy, okay, get it) and so I asked him! It turns out he goes to Choudai as well, he's 21, and super nice!! He said if ever I needed anything, or got stuck with something, had a problem, I could always ask him (this is regarding uni stuff and general Japan life btw) so I thought well hey, my tutor sucks, I'll just find my own! hahaha (sorry Kenji).

That brings me to the present (well not quite, I started writing this post yesterday so I'll just pretend it's still yesterday?) where I got up to have the place fumigated. It turned out to be really not such a big deal. They cleaned out the drains, and did a little squirt here and a squirt there in my room. They were gone within 10 minutes or so.

So... do I still pretend it's yesterday morning or not... well this post is really long already, a bit more won't hurt haha. So, it is no longer friday, it's saturday, but I did fun stuff yesterday, which I will tell you about now!

After taking a nap after the fumigators had been (the night before had been a long one) and then Gerrie came to drag me out of bed (probably a good thing) and we decided to go off to Kankou Douri, and big shopping area. We were curious about what the uni looked like today however. In the trams we could see tons of high school kids, going towards the uni. SO we walked over there and it was quite amazing! There were highschool kids and choaches (busses) everywhere!!! The whole campus was full of students, there were a ton of busses, and the stream of kids going in and out was continuous! THe trams were full of them going in both directions, this was no joke! Gerrie and I really were quite impressed! But also hungry so we went to kankou douri where we first had lunch and then walked around a bit before meeting Masa (the Japanese high school kid who speaks English). He is in his last year so he's almost done (school year here is from april to april, and he is only going to class until the end of january). After sort of aimlessly wondering around and not really doing anything we went to Starbucks to relax. We met this British guy called Ben there (we saw him earlier that day but didn't really talk to him then) and had a chat with him. He is one of Masa's English teachers as well. Masa goes to an independent English school after his regular school hours, he is going to study English at APU in Beppu.

The plan of the rest of the night was rent a movie, have dinner, watch a movie! So the 3 of us set off to the dvd rental place where we found the perfect movie. The Japanese name is "Jerry" which is what Gerrie is called here (the Dutch 'G' sound is too hard for them to pronounce ;) ). We didn't actually rent the movie though, we got Hitchhikers Guide and Crash. After a quick dinner at Gusto we went to Sahim's place and watched Hitchhikers Guide. Sachi interrupted when he wanted to test his new camera. He recently bought a laptop and is now testing everything he does with us, so using Skype he called us (took a while for him to figure that out) and he turned the webcam on, so we could see him and Nono and all these other people at Biado's. It was really funny!! But we had a movie to watch, and Sachi refused to let us go haha. Anyway, Sachi is now and internet man, should be interesting!!

Now we really are back in the present. I've had a nice long sleep, am going to take a shower now, and then tonight is a Latin party at this place called BodyIISoul (I've been there once before xmas) and I can't wait, so off I go!!

x Jennifer

ps: Taiko and Mochi movies are up! Check the link!

Pictures
Ikebana
Cybac
ESSparty/karaoke
chaos at the uni

new movies coming soon!