ダニエルの冒険

This weekend I’m a little bit more prepared than I was last weekend. Here’s the plan:

• As soon as school finishes, get home, get packed, and get to the train station by 2.30pm.
• Get on a train and get to Tokyo by 5.45pm.
• Meet Ayumi at Shinjuku station and hang out for a while until her cousin finishes work.
• Meet up with her cousin and her cousin’s friend and go for Yakiniku all together.
• Retired to my home-away-from-home Sakura Hotel in Jimbocho.
• Meet up with Ayumi again on Saturday at lunch time after her interview and hang out for a few hours.
• Be in Tochigi for 6pm to have dinner with the family at the grandmother’s house. Stay there for the night.
• Sunday afternoon, get the train back to Tokyo and get home.
• Remember all that homework for the weekend that I had been forgetting.
• Wake up on Monday morning and realise that I forgot to buy bread the night before and just buy fast food from the ministop or skip breakfast and try to make up for it at lunchtime.

In other news, I went for a haircut again this weekend. Slightly different before but not different enough that a photograph would show how different it is.

Also, the documentation for my visa arrived at home which means I’m starting into the phase of looking for accommodation in and sorting out flights to Frisco.

I was walking to the shopping mall today and I finally found the cat which has been meowing outside my window for the last couple of days. It was following a mother and daughter down the road, and I walked up behind them and caught its attention. A couple was passing on a bike and the girl freaked out shouting “look at the cat!! aww… it’s so cute!” and so on and they stopped beside me. (more…)

Here’s my attempt at a translation of the song I’m presenting on Thursday. I didn’t realise how adult its theme really is until I actually studied it in detail. It’ll be interesting explaining what all the vocabulary and metaphors mean (in Japanese) on Thursday. A lot of it is pretty open to interpretation and a couple of lines I’m not sure how to interpret which means the translation is especially weak. I’m very poor at translation work as it is so apologies. I can never think of English idioms when I need them. (more…)

Ireland has been chosen to be the fifth country to be graced with the iPhone. How do we compare to other countries? Well we don’t get “Visual Voicemail” to begin with. In fact, you’re charged 15c per minute to check your voicemail. You get stuck into an 18 month contract but that’s to be expected. It’s 2 years in the US so it’s not so bad (still a long time to keep the same phone though, by modern standards). How does this contract break down? Well the price points are actually the same as the UK price points, but we get 4 times less minutes. That’s right, we actually get 25%, one quarter, of the talk-time for the same price. And how about texts on those tariffs? You get 100, 150, or 250, depending on which tariff you go with. 100 euro a month for 250 texts? The UK tariffs are 500 texts for each. Even the cheapest one is 500.

And now the biggest, most ridiculous, most Irish difference: 1GB per month data traffic. Every other country gets “unlimited” data traffic on their iPhone plan (subject to an acceptable usage policy, of course) but Ireland gets 1GB, on any plan. Why does this matter? Well the iPhone is a data-hungry little machine. You can stream YouTube videos in not just that wimpy little embedded flash video format but a full h.264 stream. You can also stream MP3s within Safari (maybe you didn’t know that). It also checks your mail for you all the time. My iPod Touch is set to 15 minute intervals. That adds up over a month.

I don’t know how O2 managed it, but they got the most rotten deal in Europe going. And they’re probably going to make a fortune out of it.

The exchange rate from euro to yen is about 160 yen to the euro right now. At least that’s what the market says but what you don’t know is that compared to Ireland, the true exchange rate is closer to 100 yen to the euro. At McDonald’s everything is advertised at 100 yen, and there’s the “EuroSaver” menu in Ireland where it’s €1-based. Coke from machines here is about 120 yen to 160 yen, depending on whether it’s a can or a bottle. In Ireland it’s €1.20 to €1.80 if I remember correctly.

In this particular machine it’s especially cheap, and only 100 yen for a can of coke (63c) and 130 yen (82c) for a full 500ml bottle. Comparing Yamasa’s campus’s vending machines to UL’s campus’s vending machines, a UL bottle of coke (€1.80) is 220% the price of Yamasa’s. あり得ない。

The equivalent of a euro shop here is a 100-yen shop (hyaku-en-shoppu). You can buy anything for 100 yen, not just rubbish (though there’s plenty of that if you want it too).

update: RTE’s article on the iPhone tariff.

I had no plans at all yesterday morning, but I got a text from Ayumi about 11am saying she was on her way to an interview in Tokyo with Kaori. I asked if she was busy after, she said she wasn’t and told me to come up to Tokyo for the day, so I threw together enough entertainment (that is, Japanese homework, a book, and my Nintendo DS with hardly any battery left) into a bag to get me through the journey, went to the post office to withdraw enough money for the day, and hopped on the first train out of here. (more…)

I’m definitely back on top. New Approach Chapter 10 is much kinder to me. Check out these results from this week’s tests. 13/13, 14/14, 16/16. By the way, circle means “good” in Japan, so they use them instead of ticks on homework. A big swirly circle is really good. A circle with petals coming out of it (花丸, “hana-maru”, “flower-circle”) is really really good. I did not get a hana-maru but I did get 「すばらしい」 (“subarashii”) written, which means “wonderful”. The red stamp at the top right is a “hanko” (判子, also known as an 印鑑 “inkan”) I got made recently. In Japan, when you buy a house or get married or do anything else important that requires contracts to be signed, you use an registered inkan. Mine is not registered though, and is just a simple personal one that I use for homework and anywhere else that needs a signature. (more…)

I got the results from one of my tests this week and it was 13/13. The other tests I did, I feel fairly confident about either full or close to full marks. I did really well with our kanji reading today (we were reading a newspaper article about Microsoft’s recent attempts to buy Yahoo) and though my list of unlearned words has grown from 200 to over 270 in the last two or three days, I feel like I’m making progress again. Maybe it really was the lack of sleep that got me last week, thank you Moonlight Nagara. Or maybe it’s my new high-peanut-butter-content-diet. Either way, I did well, and in the conversation class today I was flying through our work (first finished all the time, even repeating our conversations two or three times). I also did well in our song class, and ended up unconsciously singing out loud a pretty fast “rap” part from this song (Sunrise by Bennie K) during the song class, which surprised some people (hopefully in a good way). (more…)

Recently I’ve noticed a few mistakes I’ve been making in Japanese and I believe I’ve found the cause. I’ll use two examples, related to pets.

The first is how you count pets. In Japanese, there are “counter” words, which you append to numbers. 10字 (ji) means “10 characters”. 5個 (ko) means 5 small things. 7本 (hon) means 7 long things (beer bottles, trains, pencils). 3台 (dai) means 3 machines (TVs, cars). ４人 (nin) means 4 people.

There are lots for animals. 羽 (wa) is for birds (and also rabbits, as monks long ago were only allowed eat birds, so they started counting rabbits like birds so they wouldn’t feel guilty eating them), 頭 (tou) is for large animals (it actually means “head”, as in “head of cattle”), 匹 (hiki) is for smaller animals (cats, dogs, etc). The problem lies within hiki. I have no problem when using it to say how many dogs I see on the street, but when I’m talking about my own cats at home, I keep using “nin” (人), the counter for people. I clearly consider my own cats as people on some level so I keep making that mistake. (more…)

Here are some of the songs sung at karaoke this weekend. My favourite right now is Sakura no Toki by Aiko. (more…)

The next day, Sunday, I woke up and came down stairs and saw that everything outside was covered in an inch of snow. We were planning on leaving at 10am and driving to Takasaki in Gunma to be there for 11am but Ayumi told me that she’d heard from Saharu that the trains were slow and so she’d be a bit late, and with the amount of snow outside we decided not to take the car and to get the train for safety’s sake. (more…)