Thoughts from Kyoto - January 12

My host Mom's cell phone

Haruns's cell phone. Now THAT'S pimp.

Amazing. If my phone were like that my shorts would probably fall down.

Now that I’ve realized exactly how different Kansai-ben is from “standard” Japanese, I feel slightly better about not understanding people’s conversations – it’s not just vocabulary and grammar I’ve never learned before, but different ways of saying things that I actually learned. I guess when I return to the States Japanese people will know where I studied abroad because of my mixed dialect. It’ll probably be some bastard hybrid of Tokyo-ben and Kansai-ben, interspersed with grammar mistakes and random English words substituting for Japanese vocabulary that I don’t know.

There’s another significant difference I’ve noticed between Taiwan and Japan, which is that while it’s hard to drive in both countries, Japanese roads are actually really narrow whereas Taiwanese ones are made artificially narrower by people double-parking and what not. I actually haven’t see any cars parked on the side of the road yet in Kyoto – there are apparently tons of parking lots, which is a good thing because for some roads if there was a single car parked there, it would be unusable.

Something I like about this Japan is that there always seems to be a trash/recycling bin next to the vending machines – making it actually easy to toss away your garbage, which probably helps with keeping streets clean.

So like in Taiwan, kids get money on New Year’s, though apparently it’s the Western (1/1) one rather than the Lunar New Year. As such, in the evening we went out to eat at an Italian Restaurant (which was surprisingly affordable), and the kids treated us to a meal with their newly received money. How awesome is that? I mean, everything I’ve seen so far just indicates that they’re just… so amazing. Maybe there’s something in the water they drink, I dunno.

Cell phones are a big deal in Japan – what’s cute though is that (for girls, at least) they’re all ridiculously pimped out. I mean, maybe it’s because I haven’t seen real schoolgirl cell phones in Taiwan or something, but dang, this blows away everything I’ve seen yet in terms of the accessories and stickers on them. Even Mom has a pimped out cell phone.

School (as far as classes are concerned) officially starts tomorrow… this’ll be interesting ^_^

On a completely unrelated note, playing iCCup in the Taiwan/Korea/Japan time zone is significantly harder than it was back in the States, if only because proportionally, there are so many more Koreans. I think in this season I’ve already played more Koreans than in all of the other seasons combined. Points aren’t going to be easy… so far I’m 5-4, and all 4 losses have been to Koreans. Dang.