Home Sweet Home

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Hey everyone!

So this is a little overdue, but I am officially home! Yay! After being away from home for so long, I will be spending the next month here, just relaxing and hanging out. (I also see a lot of cooking in my future, as all of my friends are either still abroad or have already gone back to school, so I will need something to keep me entertained while everyone is off doing their thing.) Anyways, since I don't foresee anything out of the ordinary occurring while I am home, I will be taking a break from the blogging until it is time to go back. Speaking of which, next semester I will be blogging for IES (the program I will be participating in), and one of their rules states that I cannot post the same thing on my blog as I do on theirs, which is what I did last semester. Therefore, I suspect I will likely end up linking to my weekly posts on this blog, so anyone who is subscribed will get that link each week. Sorry about any inconvenience, but definitely keep an eye on this blog, as I will also post any vignettes that I think would be censored by IES (or anything extra, as I will have a word limit over there) on this blog.

Anyways, to follow up on the end of the Japan episode:

One of the first things you learn when living in a host family is that you are not supposed to invite guests over, as it tends to be pretty rude, especially in Japan where even asking can be problematic, due to the cultural inability for the host family to refuse. This, compounded with the fact that my hotel said I was not allowed to bring visitors up to my room (and we are all rule-followers), meant that there were few places that my friends and I were able to hang out. Thus, we commonly found ourselves either at an arcade or at カラオケ (karaoke). The arcades, while expensive, were a lot of fun, and had lots of music-based games that we played (including a taiko drumming one). They also always had claw games, the staple of arcades everywhere. I am semi-ashamed to admit that one of the days we ended up getting sucked into one of them, and considering each turn cost ‎¥100 (about $1), I'm sure you can imagine how we cumulatively spent way too much money on the game. And it took us about an hour, and the guy who worked there ended up coming over, opening the game and lifting the prize to make sure it wasn't actually stuck, and explaining what strategy we should be using (multiple times) for us to finally get the prize. But we are all super stubborn, so we did win, in the end. The best part was that at one of the games behind us, a guy started playing after we had started, won before us, and when he won, he just nonchalantly looked around for one of the workers to give him a bag, whereas when we finally got the prize we were jumping up and down and shouting in excitement. Such 外人 (gaijin - foreigners).

カラオケ was also a lot of fun, because while we did sing lots and lots of English songs, we also sang some Japanese songs. I have linked a playlist that I created of some Japanese songs below. The first two are by a group called Sekai no Owari (meaning "the end of the world), which is a Jpop group that creates music that is A) much less weird than most of the Jpop out there, and B) really catchy. The first song by them is in English, because while there is a Japanese version, it is not on YouTube. It is currently very well liked amongst my friends in Japan, and because it can be found on those musical arcade games mentioned above, it was constantly stuck in my head. Following the Jpop are a few rock songs by One OK Rock (which is technically read as one oak rock; a play off the Japanese pronunciation of one o'clock), which I really like. We sang all of them in カラオケ, which definitely tested my Japanese reading skills, but was a lot of fun, and this is definitely my favorite Japanese group. I've also added a cover of Vanessa Carleton's A Thousand Miles, because it is both a throwback and because it showcases Taka's (One OK Rock's singer) amazing English. If you have any interest at all, definitely check out the playlist linked below!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPIodjam71sieMPSgFOvv-V-mLlixTDjj

Aside from that, we ate lots of good food, and did a lot of shopping, which is kind of what traveling seems to have evolved into, especially amongst my generation. And I'm definitely not complaining, because I really really like looking at Asian popup stores, because it is so easy to find the coolest stuff. On that note, since being back I have definitely noticed that I am much more comfortable shopping in East Asian stores. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but I will say that it is easier for me to find things I like over there. I constantly found myself finding things that I liked and whatnot, whereas here I feel like I have to actively search for things that fit my style and personality.

And to completely switch topics, one of the things that I found the most strange about Tokyo was that for the most part, the housing was usually no more than three floors tall. Considering Tokyo is normally considered to be the city with the highest population in the world, and Beijing doesn't even make the top ten, I was really surprised that while Beijing is skyscraper after skyscraper, aside from shopping areas, Tokyo isn't a very tall city. What I didn't realize until recently is that most definitions of Tokyo include its vast suburbs. When just considering the urban areas of the two cities, Beijing has a MUCH higher population density; 13,589 people/km² compared to Tokyo's 8,790 people/km2 (using Wikipedia's numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area). Like I mentioned, the difference is definitely noticeable. I would say that the housing in Tokyo (from the outside, at least) reminded me more of Boulder, because while all of the buildings are much closer together, the sky is still visible in the horizon, whereas in Beijing the sky is more contained to what is directly above you, or what you can see between the buildings. On the same note, the subways also surprised me, as they were also not nearly as crowded as the Beijing subways tend to be. I think we managed to miss rush hour in Tokyo, for the most part, but I still think that Beijing's subways tend to be more crowded. Pro tip that my friends taught me, though: if you are going to be on the subway/train for a while, and there are no open seats, if you stand in the middle of the isles, in front of the seats, people in Japan will not push you. Note that this is not the case in China, where people will cram themselves into any available (or not) nook they can find.

That's all for now, and I will talk to you all again in about a month. (I will be 21 by then; isn't that insane??)

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Photos

Claw game prize - we were VERY excited
photo cred. Sabrina

Harajuku
I don't know if you can see, but we are also on the far right of the screen in the background piture

Takeshita Street, Harajuku
This is the place to be for both college students and foreigners

Purikura!
The photo booths in Japan are fun because they add makeup and make your skin white and your eyes huge. Afterwards, you can also add stickers and other fun stuff to the pictures!

Comments

[Terry May]

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Hi Katie, Welcome home! Did Mexican food taste weird after being away for so long? We'll have to do Rio again before you go to Shanghai. How can you possibly be turning 21? Lianne won't be that old for a looonnnggg time. (How'd ya' like the èr shì yī from the English keyboard?) Adults?? OMG! We all look forward to keeping track of what you're up to in Shanghai - until then, I guess we'll just have to get by with talking face to face. Hope to see you again soon, Terry