Tales from drunken parties!

Mina-san, Konban wa!

Look, my Japanese is already freaking amazing. I know how to say "everyone, hello!" in Japanese. Impressed ain'tcha. Oh I know you are. You know what else will impress you even more? Pictures of my dorm room! you will finally get to see how nasty a place I am living in. Oh wait, that’s right I haven’t had time to complain about the dorms here! well lemme get started. First off, showers cost 100 yen. I get 10 minutes of wonderful warm water, and then BOOM frozen solid. The cold water is like a ninja that sneaks up behind me in the shower and stabs me with an ice sickle. I'm surprised it even flows when it is that cold!! ok, I have ranted enough about the showers, I guess... now on to nasty point two of the hell hole called Minesawa Dorms. The walls. The walls in my room are fairly good compaired to some of my friends, but they are still amazingly bad. The paint is kinda cracking in places and the walls could use a good scrub down, too. Them all dirty, eww! Because the paint is cracking in some places I am scared to actually wash the walls in case part of them fall off, which HAS happened in some of my friends rooms. Its amazing. It’s like half the wall just fell off… so for now, my room is going to stay looking all crappyish.

Anyway we haven’t even gotten to the really scary part of my living quarters. The spiders! Ahh they are everywhere! THEY ARE ALL OUT TO GET ME! I SWEAR! IT’S A CONSPERICY! Ok… so they are really after the preying manti, crickets and mosquitoes, but it is still scary. They are ALL over the place. And by all over the place I mean literally inside our dorms. On the first floor there are about 4-5 spiders living in each shower stall and on each light. I must admit though, I haven’t gotten a spider bite while living here… and there really aren’t many mosquitoes because of them… so I guess its an OK trade off. It feels so weird though, in America there would NEVER be with spiders anywhere. We squish spiders when we find them. SQUISH SQUISH SQUISH! Never cohabitate with them! It is hard, but if I can get a good picture of them with my 1.2 mega pixel camera… I will. It is hard though, because they always spin their webs around a light. Using a cameras and taking pictures straight into lights that are on isn’t a good combination. Oh well. Oh and I think I forgot to mention, these spiders are HUGE. At least 5 inches with legs. They are big enough to eat birds… and maybe small children! Poor poor children!

Anyway enough about the freaky arachnoids. Lets move on to something a wee bit more fun. The classes! They are akin to 90 minutes of hell. Ok maybe not THAT bad, but they can get extremely boring. Ever listen to someone who can’t talk English well… talk for 90 minutes? It ain’t a fun thing. Fortunately for me, Japanese classes are taught all in Japanese. That’s right… 90 minutes of Japanese… and then a 10 minute break… and then another 90 minutes of Japanese 2 times a week. ALL IN JAPANESE! AHHHHH. The teacher might say 9-10 words in English, but all the rest are in Japanese. It is amazing. Completely different from class in the states. But the truly amazing part is for the most part I actually understand what is going on!

This brings me to how my Japanese is progressing. Right now, I can understand the topics of conversation so-so. And in fact, if it is the teacher talking to someone else I almost always know what to say as an answer. The weird part is that when the teacher talks to me I always get so nervous that I completely lose all my Japanese skills. This also happens out in the real world when trying to talk to native Japanese speakers. It’s really frustrating. I think I need more practice speaking, but this is hard to do because I can’t really speak well enough to talk to anyone! It is the same problem as trying to make Japanese friends. How do you make friends with someone who can’t talk English when you can’t talk their language?! Totemo tanoshikunai…. (not very fun.) Anyway, I HAVE made a few Japanese friends. Basically the people who hang around the international student center and can speak so-so English.

Soo… there have been two memorable nights that I’ve had (minutes the typical going out to eat with the other foreign students) since the last post. One was the night we went to Shibuya. Tokyo baby. I went clubbing in Tokyo with some friends. Woot woot! Lemme just say it wasn’t very much fun. I tried dancing alittle… that wasn’t fun. But apparently all the girls think I’m hot because a lot wanted to grind with me. Grinding is just awkward. The slutty club like girls are all like “Oh touch me all over” basically and I’m all like “err your good looking but I don’t really want to fondle you right now.” “oh that’s cute… now fondle me, bitch.” (I added that profanity because it so fit’s the typical clubbing girls atitude!) so that’s my impression of grinding. Btw, Dancing isn’t fun. Its official. Oh did I mention I don’t like dancing at clubs? Anyway I’ve decided that I am NOT a club guy. If I had to categorize my “drinking” (granted I don’t really drink) type it wouldn’t be get-drunk-then-go-dance-at-clubs, it would be sit-around-and-do-karaoke-while-wasted. So I guess that makes me more like a Korean and typical Japanese than American. Oh well…

Another fun night involved the same buncha friends. It was an impromptu all nighter with drinking games. Basically, we went out to eat at a place at Yokohama-eki (which means Yokohama station, so… downtown Yokohama) After eating we decided to go to karaoke. Karaoke was fun. A buncha somewhat not sober people singing songs… what isn’t fun about that!? After about an hour of karaoke we decided to get a bottle of whisky and some coke and go back to the girls dorm (it was closer… and its co-ed so don’t get all “WHAT HE WENT TO THE GIRLS DORM” mom and dad! ;D ;D) and played “never have I ever.” It was pretty fun. I didn’t get drunk, but the other two guys passed out at about 3:30... The girls and I all stayed up though because they didn’t drink nearly as much as the two other guys. The funny part is one of the guys got so wasted at 5:30 when we went home he was still quite drunk (we ran outa alchohol at around 1:30) Amazing, eh?

Soooo that’s basically my life so far. Study for some, party for some… kinda the same as the states only everyone is Asian and I can’t talk with strangers. I hope my Japanese gets better soon. (sounds like its sick or something doesn’t it! ;D)

Anyways I’ll cya all next update! ^_^

-David