Thoughts from Kyoto - January 20

That box? It's a bar code. I'll explain below.

Since not all that much has happened in the past few days, let me comment a bit about food. Um… it’s pretty good. What can I say? Oh yeah, I went to an Indian Restaurant today with friends – called “Raja”, and it was mad delicious. There were real Indian people there, which was sweet. Also, on one of the walls they had one of those strange-looking black-and-white dot-pixel-art-ish things, which seemed really out of place until one of the KCJS vets explained that it was a bar code. For what? Well, you use a bar code reader built into your cell phone (the hell?), scan it, and information pops up regarding the scanned item. AMAZING.

Lunch with other KCJS students at Raja. Delicious.

I didn't really get any good shots of the place. Suffice to say, it was sweet.

Yakisoba for dinner, apparently Osaka-style.

Typically, breakfast will consist of coffee, and some form of toast. In today's case, French.

Random snack on Saturday. Delicious. Amazing what you can do with a pancake, oranges, cream, and a banana.

Japanese dollar stores (100 yen here) are AMAZING. The whole deal with supposedly higher cost-of-living in Japan is interesting to see – while some goods such as electronics or clothing are indeed quite expensive, when it comes to other things such as food or school materials, it is possible to places that sell them cheaply yet reliably.

I *really* love the ofuro (bath) here. It’s nice that you finish your shower outside of the tub so the water stays clean, thus allowing multiple people to use it one after another, saving water. It’s especially a blessing in the winter, because you feel warm for hours afterwards, which is… just really nice in a place that generally lacks central heating.

On a completely random note, I’ve noticed that Japanese kids refer to themselves in 3^rd person relatively often. I wonder if this is sort of a culture thing, or more of a language thing.

I’ve noticed something quite paradoxical. As my Japanese level gets better, my ability to study goes down. This is because while I am able to concentrate even when it’s somewhat noisy around me, I am unable to whenever there’s some sort of language that I understand going on, as I somehow find myself inexplicably drawn to the conversation. For a while, I was able to use headphones playing classical music to block it out, but after awhile the effect started to fade away as well, partly due to the fact that I do have some classical music training, thus making it… too easy to follow the music. Now, up until now Japanese has still felt like a completely foreign language to me, so even when the TV’s on and there’s some intense drama going on, I can continue studying since at a certain level it has been gibberish… but as my grasp of the language increases quickly each day… I CAN’T STUDY.

Oh yeah, so a cool thing about going outside of the States is seeing what people think of American politics. Suffice to say, Bush isn't particularly popular. They're gonna have inauguration parties tomorrow IN JAPAN. Badass. Pity it's going to occur at 2AM Japan time, at which time I will be asleep. Sorry Obama, I love you and everything, but not enough to flunk school.