Day 3

6-15-08

The view from my dorm room window.

Today followed in much the same vein as the one before it. Up at 7:00 sharp, run around the campus for 13 hours, and then in bed by 10:00. Thankfully less classes today, again supplemented with meals, and games that were “educational” in one way or another. The games were mundane, and the meals were barely edible at worst, and pretty tasty at best. Today’s game was called Barnga, (a name obviously designed to conceal any aspect of the game itself). It was a card game, with essentially the same rules as hearts, except you wanted to take tricks. The catch was that each table had a different trump suit and high/low cards, so when you moved tables, the rules were completely different and--bonus!--you weren’t allowed to talk.

Barnga time.

The amount of frustration, anger and general pandemonium that said catch caused was absolutely ridiculous. You’d always get a person at your table insisting that diamonds were trump and refusing to believe everyone else at the table--who had been there when the instructions were handed out--that spades were in fact trump. For myself, the second someone at my table got confused, I guessed the “different rules” catch and was ready to quickly assimilate when I managed to win a round and change tables. The truly surprising thing--and the reason why I am recounting all this uselessness--was the amount of people who could not be budged from the idea that their old rules were the way we were supposed to play the game. That people got offended, even furious over something as minute and stupid as a card game. It makes me wonder how these people are going to react to all the difference in Japan, and what they are going to insist upon there.

On an entirely unrelated note, I have remembered why I detest counting in Japanese. I rediscovered this fact while taking my Intermediate Japanese course today, which ultimately involved spending half an hour in utter confusion and frustration because I couldn’t remember is -mai was the counter for small animals or flat things.

The other confused people.

Let me explain. In Japanese, it is apparently far too simple to count everything the same was we do here--two cats, two piece of paper, two cups of water and son on. Oh no. Instead, they have different ways of counting for everything. And I do mean everything. The way you end a number--or even the way you say a number--changes depending on whether you are counting people or days or flat things or cylindrical things or electronic things or books or small animals or large animals or birds (for some reason not grouped with small animals) or liquids… the list goes on. If counting pizzas, two would be ni mai, but if counting people, two would instead by futatsu. And if that weren’t confusing enough, somethings it changes depending on the number as well, whether the ending bit starts with a p or a b or an h.

My teachers explaining that counting is “chotto muzukashi.”

So counting is a “little difficult.” Understatement of the century. When you think you at least sort of know a language, there’s really nothing like admitting that you can even count.

Lastly, food. Food is never far from my thoughts these days, and as I eat my last Cheez-It for the next six weeks, it is more prevalent than ever. I can’t really figure out if I agree with the cafeteria food they’ve been feeding us. On the one hand, they have oatmeal at breakfast, complete with nuts and brown sugar and cranberries and it is absolutely delicious. Plus, there’s tea, complete with cream and sugar, at every meal. On the other hand, we’ve had such food as “BBQ beef” the color of my favorite Argyle T-shirt, and the one time they had delicious corn muffins, they ran out before I could get one.

In line for the questionable food.

In such a way am I divided over Japanese food. For dinner tonight we had an Obento-style meal, complete with chopsticks. (It was probably to get us used to Japanese food. That or just for fun. Could be that too). Because I’m going to be stuck in a country with such food for six weeks, I went all out and tried (mostly) everything, from the neon yellow pickled radish to the weird eggy thing, right down to the pink and white processed fishcake. (What the hell is a fishcake anyway? No one could tell me. “Really processed” was about the best description I got, mostly I was just told it was “fishcake” and the explanation ended there. It didn’t even taste like anything, so I’m not really sure what the point of it was. I really should have taken a picture. I promise that if I ever have another meal with a fishcake I will take a picture). I can still taste the barley tea I had with dinner, which was unsweetened and very… earthy. So far, I’m just unsure about whether I like Japanese food or not: some of it is delicious, and some of it is, well, fishcake.