Mix-Up

Look! A timely update (might have been pressured into it).

My cold got the better of me last week, very unpleasant. It was weird, whenever I said I had a cold or someone asked if I did, they would immediately ask if I had a fever. I generally separate the two. One day I went home early because I was tired of being sick and just wanted to sleep, and of course had my temperature taken (as I thought, I didn't have a fever). This was done by putting the thermometer under my shirt in my armpit, which is how it's done here. Huh.

On the plus side, I seem to be growing accustomed to my cold room, and it doesn't really bother me anymore. Or maybe my heated rug is just amazingly effective, which it could be. Japanese houses are generally very cold in the winter, someone said because they can't make them very solid because of earthquakes. I don't know. But anyway, this means there's a big industry around staying warm. I was in a department store a few days ago, and there was fuzzy EVERYTHING. In addition to a huge selection of fuzzy socks/booties, there were fuzzy arm warmers, leg warmers, belly warmers, underwear shorts things, onesies, and onesie/sleeping bag things, as well as all the outdoor gloves, mittens, scarves, and hats.

I also went to an outlet mall, and it was scarily identical to ones in America. All the store names were even in English, but going inside all the clothes were definitely Japanese. There were SO MANY SWEATERS it was ridiculous! ALL the stores had big selections. I was looking for something to wear for Christmas parties, but there were literally no nice dresses or skirts in the entire mall. We even asked someone which stores had dresses, and she could only come up with four, each of which only had a few and completely wrong styles. So that was strange and annoying. I'll try somewhere else later.

Random- the cucumbers are really small but the carrots are really big. Somewhat related, I am constantly afraid I'm going to mix up the words "ningen" and "ninjin." "-jin" often means some type of people, like I am an "Amerikajin," Japanese people are "Nihonjin," French people are "Furansujin," etc. So of the two words, you'd think that "ninjin" means human, but it actually means carrot and "ningen" is human. So I always have to check myself to make sure I don't refer to people as carrots or talk about eating people.

So this Sunday it was really sad. All the inbounds (like me) of my district and the Rotex (people who have gone on exchange and come back) had planned to go to Nara on Sunday, and I was really excited to spend the day with them and see Nara. My Rotary club counselor had emailed me, asking if I was going with the Rotary club to Nara on Sunday, and I said yes. I thought it was a little strange that he said "with the club," but I was told it was the same thing and assumed a number of clubs were going or something. The district trip planned to meet at a main train station, but I was told to meet people on the train at my station, where I thought we'd just go to the main station together. When we didn't go there, and gathered with all the club members at a different place, I thought maybe we were just going separately as a club. On the train, however, I found we weren't even going to Nara; we were going to Kyoto. I was soo disappointed, first having just been there two weeks ago, and second not really wanting to spend the day with senior citizens, as nice as they are, instead of my fellow exchange students. But it turned out to be a pleasant day anyway, if not as fun as Nara would have been. Luckily there was a nice Korean grad student, and we became friends as the two youngest people. It felt really good to be able to mostly converse in Japanese, but she had pretty good English too, being in linguistics. We went to a totally different part of Kyoto than I went to last time, too, so there were no repeats. We visited the house of Joseph Hardy Neesima, a famous guy who studied in America in the 1860s and returned in the 1870s to teach about Christianity and English, founding a university. It was really cool because there's a TV drama about him right now that my family watches, so I knew about him. The house is built in a Western style, a very new thing, and even has a waffle maker! We visited some very nice temples and walked through pretty parks, and the weather was perfect. A bonus of being with the Rotarians was that they are all rich so we had a very expensive lunch at a fancy French restaurant and an expensive dinner at a famous eel place that was SO GOOD. I'm still sad about not going to Nara, but hopefully I'll get there at some point.

Happy Thanksgiving!