Rain. Rain rain rain. And more rain. Another shitty day. The weather was perfectly miserable. Because it rained all day, the sun didn't come out. Because the sun didn't come out, it never got warm. It was quite cool all day, bordering on brisk. And it is July. A typhoon in Honshuu [Japan's main island, south of Hokkaido] is responsible for the rain. We had much wind, but nothing approaching dangerous. It was strong enough to get you all wet and turn your umbrella inside out.
When I walked in the door at 5, my host mother came to meet me saying "are you wet?" , "are your feet wet?". As it happened, my pants legs were soaked and so were my shoes, backpack, and jacket. She made me wash my feet in the shower. At least I think that's what I was supposed to do. It's what I did. Don't know why.
I woke up on time. I decided to set 2 alarm clocks. I've been using Travel Alarm on my newt to wake me, which works wonderfully, except that it's really easy to tap snooze all day long. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a cutesy little alarm clock shaped like an egg from Boni-Moriya. After I got home, I decided I didn't want it after all and was going to give it to someone as a souvenir when I got home. Last night, I realised that I had it and set it to go off in the morning. As it happens, I got up slightly before it went off, but I wanted to hear what the alarm sounded like. I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't wake *me* up. It sounded like birds chirping and wasn't even loud. Which reminds me of Hiroshi's alarm clock. It really is loud. I kept hearing harpsichord music at regular intervals in the morning. It would play for a couple of minutes and the stop. About 10 minutes later, I'd hear it again. I finally isolated it to Hiroshi's room and realised that it was his alarm clock.
On our half way to school, host dad drove all around Jakobina's neighborhood (has beard, is the student living nearby that we pick up every morning while she is walking to station). Last night, I'd tried *again* to tell him to forget it. Every morning he wants to stop at her house and pick her up. I'm pretty sure she doesn't want it. Once again, this morning, he started roaming around looking for her house. I was tired of trying, so I didn't waste the effort of protesting. He didn't see her coming out of the house, so I suggested that maybe she'd already left. We were on our way again. Sure enough, she had already left and we stopped and got her a little ways down the road.
Today, I was shown a better way to go to school. Normally, everyone goes down the flat street, then up 2 and a half consecutive ~45 degree slopes to the building. Today, I discovered that that is a waste of effort, because if you take a slightly different route, you can nearly avoid the slopes alltogether.
Bren was about 30 seconds late to class today. I feel bad because he'd have been on time had he not stopped to get my Pocari Sweat on the way. He couldn't give it to me until an hour later, and then bought me another one. He never told me he had the first one, but I think it's safe to assume it was intended for me.
For lunch, I had another cold cheffie in the cafeteria. If only they had plastic spoons, I could perform my embarrassing act in private.
After school, I went to Hiroba. I was supposed to type an article before leaving school, but their 2 computers were being used and the bitches seemed to be planning to use them all day, so I got fed up and left. I thought I could use the computers at Hiroba to type the article, but as soon as I started trying, I decided that trying to figure out the input system was more trouble that it was worth. And it was costing money. I had been assigned to an XP machine which was English-only. I secretly migrated to try out the word processor. Anyway, I began answering emails on the XP machine and was nearly finished with the first one when I noticed that the key mappings didn't match the keyboard. XP was using a standard Roman (US?) key mapping although I was typing on a J-keyboard. It was a relief not to have to type shift-7 every time I needed to type an apostrophe.
I stayed for a couple of hours and went back out into heavier rain than when I'd gone in. I went to the nearby bus stop and discovered that I'd have to wait an hour for a ride. Not wanting to wait, I rode the streetcar back to Hakodate station and rode the train back to my stop. That meant I'd have to walk 2km in rain. On the train, I was talking to one of my roommates from Ohnuma. She was the Yank from Arkansas. We talked about southern cooking. For instance, we talked about our favorite kinds of peas, turnips, cornbread, grits and country fried ham. We live close together, so we tried walking home together. Within minutes, she was leaving me behind. I was pretty fucking tired by this point and had no intention of walking fast so she took off and left me. Suited me. I didn't like her anyway.
When I got home, I put on dry pants. Only they weren't dry. Last night, I'd done laundry and washed 2 of my 3 pairs of pants. You'd think that after nearly 24 hours they'd be dry. But they werent. The waist and pockets were wet enough to be cold and noticably damp. And still are. My backpack is soaked as well. I'm trying to dry it out. And my shoes probably won't be dry by the time I put them on in the morning.
Got my Flintstones today! I ate a vitamin! I guess something good happened today after all. Well, maybe not.
We had okonomiyaki [a dish whose name means something like "as you like it". take whatever ingredients you like, mix them in a batter which cooks into something like a slightly eggier pancake, then top with a thickened, sweetened soy sauce and other goodies. often called "japanese pizza" despite it having no resemblance whatsoever to pizza except its shape] for dindins. I think I can safely say that it won't become one of my favorite foods. It had things like squid and shrimp in the batter and then she put 2 strips of beef on each one while it was cooking. To cook it, she'd put a really big portable frying pan on the table and cooked it in front of us. You pour in the batter, put stuff on top, wait, flip. To flip, you put a spatula under each side and flip really fast. The first one she did came apart. Then she told me to make one. I was watching her to learn how, but she never let me do it. That was ok with me, though. You flip it 3 or 4 times and then it is done. I have to admit, it was filling and it didn't really taste bad, it was just one of those things where you're glad to be done with it as opposed to feeling pleasantly satisfied after eating something really tasty. I put only sauce on mine, but Hiroshi smothered his in sauce, mayonnaise, and ketchup. It looked repulsive after he mixed it all up. Like bloody puss. I was having trouble eating mine because I couldn't cut it with my chopsticks. Normally, I'm fairly dexterous with them, but tonight I had trouble. Hiroshi showed me how to do it, but my fingers were too weak to push the sticks apart to separate the food. Hosts dad cut his with a butter knife and tiny fork. They don't have a single proper table knife or fork in the house. Only big spoons, Chinese soup spoons, weird little forks, and scoopy butter knives. And lots and lots of chopsticks.
After dinner, host mom and dad took some okonomiyaki to friends and I talked to Hiroshi for a very long time. It was pretty pleasant. I learned that he has a younger brother in Sapporo who's 25 so I asked how many there were altogether. The one in Sapporo was the last one. There are 3 Murayama children. Let's see, Hiroshi's 33, sister is 30, and brother is 25. I really want to know why Hiroshi lives with his parents. It's starting to look like he's the one who will take over the family business when host dad retires. Actually, I guess that was pretty obvious. He's the only male child living near it.
Anyway, we talked about our jobs, or jobs we have had, in my case, about airplanes and flying, camping, baseball and other stuff. There was an American All-Star game on tv that caused us to talk about baseball. His job has something to do with fabricating metal building parts from steel. His fingers are always dark because the metal gets deep into his fingerprints.
Because I washed my towel for the first time the night before, I had to dry myself with a crunchy towel after my shower. Every morning I put on crunchy socks. I don't get it because their towels are never crunchy. Obviously, she's putting fabric softener in the washer, but their towels just look like they were tumble dried. The nap isn't going in all directions on theirs.
Ugh, I nearly fell asleep just now and I still have homework to do. Guess this is it for tonight.