This is a general HEY MELISSA HOW'S LIFE IN JAPAN post, because I thought about it the other day and if I just keep writing about all the important stuff I'll never remember to write about my day-to-day routines and little culture shock explosions (that happen every day, mind you). And I know you don't care about me and all you want are pictures of food, but you have to deal with this first. So there.
Life so far? Is cold. We've come to the conclusion that we can't do anything of much interest right now besides shopping and indoor day trips because it's just really cold...and by that I mean in the 40s. With wind chill, so it's pretty bad, guys. (Not anything remotely close to that ridiculous snow falling all over America, though, and for that I am glad.) The other day we went to Inuyama, a little spot in the almost-country about half an hour away. Inuyama literally means Dog Mountain, and we went to see the castle and the surrounding temples. The light was beautiful and I fell in love with the Japanese countryside for the 85th time. I can't wait until we get to Gifu, which is a two-hour train ride from Nagoya and all country (and an outlet mall, I think) and dotted with old farmhouses and mountains that stretch on for years and green, green, all that green in the rice fields. But like I said, as of right now it's FREEZING. And Gifu is all outdoors, so that will have to wait.
Inuyama was really wonderful, though. We got to ride on the trains that let you swivel the two-seaters around so that you can have a four-seat group, and it was a nice half-hour of traveling through country (even though we were all REALLY HUNGRY so it wasn't so much "nice" as it was "cool but WHERE IS THE FOOD WHERE IS IT WHEN ARE WE GETTING THERE").
And then we got to Inuyama and had to walk through a long street of shops to get to the castle. On the way there we passed the sweetest lady on earth, who worked at a panya (bakery) and actually offered to make reservations for us at a restaurant nearby when we asked if she knew of any place we could eat. Eventually she told us of Ikeda-ya, a Chinese place down the road, wherein a nosy Japanese man tried to translate everything for us even though we didn't need his help. At all. He was but a fly in the ointment, though, because the old ladies who worked there helped us out with the ordering and then let us have 200 yen off the check. :) They also put ham in a meal we asked to be vegetables-only because Gray is vegetarian, because apparently ham doesn't count as meat? Neither does octopi, apparently. But they remade it for her.
Then we went to the castle--though honestly the shrines around it were much more interesting; not to say the castle wasn't but it took us all of 10 minutes to get through it (and then a extra 20 minutes for landscape pictures....I like my landscape pictures, okay). As for the shrines, we did our thing with the water basin (I really wish I could remember the name! Sorry, Japanese major fail. I can tell you that the ones in tea gardens are called tsukubai, though...) where you pour water over your hands and wash out your mouth in order to purify yourself. We also did ema, which is a block of wood where shrine visitors write their wishes. The shrine priests then bless the wood and hang it up so that it can come true. Since we're broke exchange students (more on that to come), we 'split' an ema four ways and wrote each of our wishes on one block. Picture:
There were a lot of ema already up, and we spent a few minutes reading the ones we could understand. Quite a few were in different languages--English, Spanish, French, Vietnamese. One of them simply said ai, or 愛, or love. :)
Inuyama pictures:
Other than Inuyama, we haven't been traveling outside of Nagoya much. When we're in Nagoya we do three things: 1) attend school, 2) shop and 3) go to Daikoku (you could also add in 4) messing around the city, though that usually mixes in with shopping). Upon discussing our not-so-exciting lives we came to the conclusion that we can't do anything because of--you guessed it--the cold. We want to go to parks and the zoo and Gifu and so many other places, but alas. The temperatures are going up, though--into the 50s! SO HAPPY.
And now I'm going to talk about shopping.
Actually, I'm going to talk about money.
Cash in Japan is no joke. When people say that Japan is a cash culture, they really mean that if you're not carrying cash around, you're screwed. No one cares that you have a credit card. Oh, you can use it--but not everywhere. Maybe a department store here and there, but not when you're buying groceries or trying to buy a train pass or anything actually relatively important. You might have money in plastic but that doesn't matter.
So you decide to withdraw money. Unfortunately, because you are a gaijin with a gaijin debit card, you can only withdraw money at post offices. And because this is Japan, the ATMs at post offices--in fact, the ATMs everywhere--close at around 5:30 PM. If you want to exchange money, like traveler's checks or those pesky US dollars still hanging out in your wallet, that's great...just make sure you get to the bank before 3 PM: WHEN THEY CLOSE.
The story of Japan goes like this: everything is open when you don't need it and closed when you do.
But back to money. Say you've finally gotten to the ATM and have finished crying about how ridiculous the exchange rate is (about 80 yen to a dollar--raise your hand if you remember when it was 110 to a dollar. Yes, my hand is raised. Yes, I am sobbing). For the purpose of this anecdote, you've withdrawn ichiman yen, which is 10,000 yen, which should be $100 but is more like $80 in value and an actual $120 out of your account. (Sob, sob.) You've got money in your wallet and you're ready to go!
Fast forward to midnight. You've got 2000 yen in your wallet. You've spent about $80 going through your normal routine. You haven't splurged on anything big. You haven't bought yourself anything fancy. Then why oh why have you spent what seems, to us little Americans, SO MUCH MONEY?
I'll walk you through it.
Train (if you don't have a train pass) - about 520 yen round trip if you only have one destination; two or more is ~700 yen
Lunch - 2000 yen
Shopping at the cheapest places possible - ~3000 to ~4000 yen
Snacks at the convenience store - ~300 to ~500 yen
Dinner - ~2000 to ~3000
That comes out to ~8000, give or take change.
The moral of this story is that being an exchange student in Japan is REALLY DIFFICULT, money-wise. This is probably a trend no matter where you study abroad, but the fact that this is Japan--a country notorious for having ridiculously high costs of living--just hurts your wallet. If you want to know a few useful Japanese phrases that will actually convey your feelings in an accurate manner, consider the following:
- 私のサイフは泣いている。(Watashino saifu wa naiteiru.) My wallet is crying.
- 私はｘ円がしかない。(Watashiwa x en ga shika nai.) I only have [x amount of] yen.
- お金がないから、コンビニで昼ごはんを買う。毎日。(Okane ga nai kara, conbini de hirugohan wo kau. Mainichi.) Because I have no money, I buy my lunch at the convenience store. Every day.
- 今日お金貸してくれない？(Kyou okane kashite kurenai?) Will you lend me money today?
- お金がないから、できない。(Okane ga nai kara, deinai.) I can't do it because I don't have any money.
- 私のサイフは泣いている。私も泣いている。(Watashino saifu wa naiteiru. Watashimo naiteiru.) My wallet is crying. I am also crying.
- お金の木はどこ？(Okane no ki wa doko?) Where are the money trees?
- 名古屋銀行のアカウントに、一円しかない。(Nagoya ginkou no akaunto ni, ichi en shika nai.) I only have 1 yen in my Bank of Nagoya account.
- やりたいけど、お金がない。(Yaritai kedo, okane ga nai.) I want to, but I have no money.
I'm supposed to get a big deposit from Nanzan in my account, though, so I'm happy about that--but it doesn't come in until next week. I'll already be on vacation. What awful timing, really. It would have been nice to have that money beforehand. But I'm not complaining. As we know all too well, money does not grow on trees.
And that was my sad story of the day. To those of you coming to Japan for study abroad in the future, I hope you feel my pain.
Until next time! We are going to Tokyo for 5 days next week. Hopefully we will make it out of that city alive.
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