Sunday, 22 April 2012

So how rare would you like your fish?

       Good news everyone! I survived being sick! But this damn cough is persistent and still wakes me up at ungodly hours, like a pesky child. But before we get into my crippling disease, the rest of the week should come first. So on Sunday my host mother, brother and I went to a shinto temple. It was damn awesome, and I bought a fortune piece of paper for the year :D I'm not quite sure what it says, but my host mother assured me it was good, and that it said I will be safe in any travels I have. Which is good really.
         After we went to the main section of the temple, we ventured forth into the Sakura park that was near by, and the petals were falling like rain. Very beautiful, and many people sitting on tarpaulins and drinking sake, which seems to be the way to enjoy Sakura. Also I learned that Japanese turtles live for 100 years! Who knew? Supposedly they are magic and lucky, so of course I stole one. And by that I mean took photos.
           So then the first week of actual school started, you know, with a schedule and stuff. So that was a lot of fun, and of course I had to do a self introduction to my home room. So everything was going normally "Nice to meet you all, I'm Jesse, I'm 16 and I come from Australia. I play hockey and cycle a bit, though I'm not fantastic. Oh, and I play guitar and saxophone" " SUGOI!" which here translates to "Oh my dear lord, you are sexiness incarnate, with your big caucasian eyes and musical adeptness." So now that half the class was swooning, I took my seat up the back and stopped a whole lot of work being done.
           Seriously though, class isn't as challenging as I thought it would be. Sure I don't actually understand what is really going on, but hey, writing kanji! For those who do not know, Japan has 3 alphabets. There are to phonetic alphabets "Hiragana" and "Katakana" and a third alphabet, "Kanji". I know the phonetic ones, because together there is only 90 characters or so. Kanji however, has several THOUSAND characters, and I only know about 100, and even then I couldn't write a whole bunch of them. So pretty much the goal of my classes that are in Japanese is to figure out what all the kanji mean and to remember it. After that, then I might actually do whatever we are talking about.
           So my days mostly go like this: Starting with homeroom, we read the newspaper in English, then off to various classes. My classes are English (In Japanese), English (In English), Japanese history (English), Japanese geography (English), Social studies (Japanese), English grammar (Japanese), Art (Japanese, but it's art, the language doesn't REALLY matter), Shodo (Japanese Caligraphy, in Japanese) and PE (Japanese). So we usually have a couple of classes in English about Japan or Japanese language, and also have a few classes of Japanese lessons (see above). And then afterschool, commute and walk home, all up taking about 40 minutes or so, which isn't too bad considering how damn big Tokyo is, and then homework, dinner and chatting with my host family then bed. Bed at like 10 because I need to wake up early, and I certainly need my beauty sleep.
           So one final thing! On the weekend, everything was pretty cruisy, didn't do anything to energetic. On Sunday we went to a sashimi (raw fish) restaurant. And by raw, they don't just mean not cooked. They mean that you catch the fish, they prepare it for you in front of you, and then you eat it. It doesn't get much fresher than 5 minutes dead fish. Oh wait, yes it does, because the Japanese sashimi master have perfected the art of not actually killing the fish, so its heart keeps beating while you eat the raw fish flesh from the platter around it. It's both impressive and kind of scary. So, no one can say they have had fresher fish than I have, unless they actually bite it straight out of the water.
          That's all for now team, and remember, when you say you want a steak rare in Japan, make sure you specify that it's dead.

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