Day 9: A Bike for Andrew

Our placement exam results won't be ready until the afternoon, so I try shopping in the neighborhood. Shopping and cooking are probably the hardest day-to-day tasks for me. Packaged foods have pictures on the front which may or may not represent what is inside. Labels are often written in a sloppy brush stroke or highly-stylized kana that takes a long time to read. Instructions are written almost entirely in kanji. Sometimes there are English lables and/or pictures with the instructions; I tend to gravitate toward those products. I understand why there is so much bilingual packaging in the US now.

There are several nice produce shops in my neighborhood, but most of the vegetables are presently unidentifiable by me, and I don't know how to prepare them. There are probably six or eight common varieties of white rice at any grocery store. The stuff contains a lot of glucose, which makes it almost impossible to cook in a pot like American long grain rice. My roommate explained the kanji on our rice maker which is capable of making rice seven different ways, so I at least have rice to eat.

NOTE: In the US junk food is cheap and health food expensive. In Japan it is cheap to eat healthy and expensive to eat junk - usually American-style - food.

My ride to school usually lets me cross paths with interesting people. I would have to say that the most popular color in Japan is black. Second place isn't even close. If there is a second place, I think it is pink. Pink is sakura and girls. This little girl has a new bike. The picture loses a bit of the context. It's a very busy street lined with gray buildings. People dressed in black and charcoal bustle hither and thither. There is just one small mote of color in the midst of all this drab confusion...

The placement results were in, and I did worse than I had hoped. I'm now Nihongo leberu 1 (Japanese level 1). One of my classmates from USC is also level 1. Someone remarked that we placed relative to prior experience in Japan. The longer one had lived in the country, the higher they placed. At first I was discouraged, but it will give me the opportunity to build a broader foundation for my Japanese.

NOTE: In Japan everything is synchronized. All schools start at the semester and take vacations at the same time. Graduation happens at the same time across the country, so new employees start work at the same too.

Japan is famous for school entrance examinations and the competetive process of attending a preferred school. An eskareeda sukuuru, or "escalator" school is private school where one automatically is accepted to the next grade level. They are very expensive. Waseda has a high school a middle school, and prep school in addition to the university and the several campuses. Here are what I think are middle school students involved in some start of the new year event. The banner backward, but the "W" is for "Waseda" followed by the kanji for "school," "entrance" and I think "new." Some schools allow western dress but many have uniforms. The boys are organized by class and probably year.

Peter had discovered a used bike shop near the campus, and most all of the USC people ended up buying one there. I bought mine at the shop earlier, but this day a group of us went to help Andrew buy his. The husband and wife made a cute team. They are very friendly, the kind of people you could visit with all day. I would recommend their shop to anyone. Anyone nice, that is.