lists

Hello

Okay, so maybe this was originally an activity one of our teachers had Sarah and I doing in our Japanese lesson, but whatever.

1. Vending machines. I want to pack up a couple and take them home, but I:m not sure they:d fit in my suitcase. I can:t get over how many of them and how many different flavours and stuff there are.

2. Purikura. (The little pictures you take and then draw on.) See comment for vending machines. Love them, love them, love them!!! They:re so cute and they have the added bonus that I can actually take the pictures home, just not, you know, the entire machine.

3. The totally adorable clothes people over here wear with the Japanese – English that doesn:t make any sense. I saw a T-shirt yesterday that had mushrooms on it and said ‘Let:s grow up together and become delicious.’ I laughed so hard.

4. Everyone over here is really nice. This impresses me.

5. Also it:s busy. Like, really busy. Elanora doesn:t DO busy. At least not like Japan.

6. I am quite convinced that Yokosuka Sogo High School was built for the sole purpose of making Elanora High look bad. Mission completed. Three storeys for crying out loud. Three! And it:s just all so beautiful. Everyone who knows me who:s reading this, when I get back, you will be seeing photos. Just a warning.

7. The uniform and the fact that everyone wears it over here. It:s so cool. I know I;ve described it on here before, but whatever, I:m doing it again. Long white shirt, navy blazer, tie, high checkered grey skirt (with the shirt tucked in, no less), long navy socks, black shoes. I love it so much. Our uniform back home is just…blergh compared to this.

8. The trains. They are the best, I love them so much. Probably because of the Gold Coast:s train system, or complete lack thereof. I like the fact that if I wanted to I could walk five minutes to the station and go to Yokohama or Tokyo. Well, I could if I was Japanese and therefore born with a instinctive knowledge of the public transport system, but seeing as an Australian exchange student I don:t possess this handy quality, it would probably be better if I were to limit my Yokohama – Tokyo excursions to when I have Misato or some other equally instinctive Japanese person with me.

9. Natural disasters. They rock! In the space of the two short months I have been in the country, Japan has experienced a typhoon, god knows how many earthquakes, a tornado and a tsunami. And so what if the tsunami turned out to be about ten centimeters. There was still full on warnings on TV all night. This was for my area too. Very exciting.

10. Hot cocoa. I know this probably should be under the ‘vending machine’ heading, since that is where it comes from, but it is so good it deserves section all to itself. Oishii is all I have to say here. Oishii, oishii, oishii.

11. I am still incredibly impressed by the fact that I am in Japan. I have been here for 2 months and 1 day and I still cannot get over the fact that I am not in Australia . Sad, huh? Whenever I think about it I can feel all this insane laughter welling up in my thoat.

12. The TV over here is classic. Even the ads. I love it all. So many of the TV shows have subtitles popping up all the time and everything, it:s so cute. And in large quantities of the ads, at the end they have heaps of people standing in a clump dong the same action, like flopping their heads from side to side or doing freaky things with their hands. I also love the anime they have on here. There are certain ones Misato watches every week. My favourites are ‘One Piece’ and the weird one were there:s a girl and a guy who have this special power where they can make these cbe things around the baddies and blow them up. It sounds sad, but it:s actually really, really cool.

13. Japanese music is so cute. It:s about three or four years behind Australia and America and stuff, which is funny. I have to say though, SMAP is the single most hilarious band on the face of the earth. I know quite a lot of Japanese people love them (Case in point: Okaasan. She does all the dances along with them whenever they come onto TV) but I just laugh and laugh. I am planning on buying their album, purely for it:s unintentional entertainment value.

14. My host family is so freakishly nice I am starting to get paranoid they:re secretly plotting against me. Maybe that was why I got sick. They fed something to my voodoo doll.

15. Everything.

Sarah told me we have about 18 days left. I am afraid. I am very afraid.

Laura Sinclair Survives Massive Earthquake!

OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh my God!! I am SO excited.

Saturday morning, 7:30am.

EARTHQUAKE!!!!!!!!!!

So, I was asleep. You know, as all mentally stable (questionable, I know, but bear with me here) are at the crack of dawn on a Saturday. And then I woke up. My bed was shaking.

EVERYTHING was shaking.

And I was freaking out excited.

Although I wasn’t entirely sure at this point if it was actually an earthquake or if it was just my freakish, early morning factor coming into play or if it was actually an earthquake. Cause I couldn’t see very much, cause it was dark and I didn’t have my contacts in, so thanks to my deformed gene pool I couldn’t see anything.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t hear and feel anything!!

I only got confirmation when I went down to breakfast an hour and a half later and Okaasan’s comes over and she pointed to ‘earthquake’ in Misato’s dictionary. Yay!!!

I’ve just finished an Oral class which involved translating the lyrics of a James Blunt song into Japanese. Which, by the way, is really weird. But anyway.

We got to listen to the song over and over which was fun, but kind of annoying after a while.

Completely random fact’ in the ‘Learning Space’, Sarah, Kara and I are currently in, there are 40 different types of English – Japanese dictionary. More if you count the double ups.

How do I know this you may ask? Well, Sarah (clearly at the height of boredom) has just counted them.

I feel like making a list.

Random List Stuff

1. Rice, rice, rice, rice, rice. ALWAYS rice. Last night we had noodles for dinner and there was a bowl of rice as well. Really, the Japanese should hate rice because they eat it all the time. Okaasan even has it for breakfast. BREAKFAST!!

2. Every Wednesday afternoon, everyone cleans. I am serious. Last week we swept the floor. Although I’m not sure about how much actually gets done, cause most of the time seems to be spent PRETENDING to clean, but not actually doing anything.

3. SMAP is a really popular band here, despite popular opinion in the Music In My Life unit we did for Japanese in Australia. My host mum loves them, they were performing on TV last week and she was fully doing the dance along with them.

Also, one of the guys seems to be in a lot of soup ads.

4. I can’t think of anything else. I’m not really very good at remembering stuff am I???

I’ll try and add some pictures next post, but at the moment I’m on the wrong computer to do it.

Sayonara

Laura

I haven’t posted anything for a bit, so I’ve decided to make random lists about nothing in particular. Here goes:

Things that bug me

1. When old people call me Lauren. Or young people too for that matter.

2. When people call me Blondie. Hello, I have a NAME.

3. When the great storm the news people have been predicting turns out to be wussy.

4. When I’m at the end of a really good mystery (Go Nancy Drew) and JUST BEFORE we find out who dunnit the book ENDS, because the last chapter had fallen out.

Things I suck at

1. Diving. I’ve been trying to learn, but it hurts!!!

2. Catching stuff. This is only really a problem in PE, because other than that, my friends know I’ll just drop it, so they don’t throw things to me. But PE you sort of have to catch it.

3. Anything Manual Art-sy. I swear the sander thingy is out to get me.

4. Drawing. Scratch that, anything artistic. In all my almost 15 years on this earth, I have only produced one piece of art work I am not in the least ashamed of. I’m the girl, who, when she’s in art class trying to make a teapot out of clay, the teacher (admittedly very nicely, but still) suggests I might like to make an abstract, half collapsed looking teapot on purpose, because the whole nicely modeled thing wasn’t really working out for me.

I’ve seen loads of movies lately, so I figured I may as well talk about them

Movies I’ve seen lately and whether I thought they were good or bad:

1. Pride and Prejudice The recent one that is, with Kiera Knightly. Really good. Now I want to see that five hour BBC one. 7/10

2. A Cinderella Story I’ve seen it before but I just got the DVD. Love it. The ultimate fairy tale. What more can you say. 9/10

3. Chicken Little Surprisingly funny. Worth the movie ticket, though it’d be better on DVD, so you don’t get running commentary from the little kids surrounding you. It’s kinda sad though, at the start with the whole ‘My dad is totally embarrassed to have a kid like me because of the whole the sky is falling incident.’ But still totally cute. 7 ¾ /10

4. Ice Princess I only saw this yesterday, but it was pretty good. It’s worth seeing if only for the skating. 7/10
5. Pirates of the Caribbean Okay, granted, I’ve only seen a little bit, but it looks really cool. 4/10 (to be revised after I’ve seen more than just the first ten minutes)

6. Fun with Dick and Jane Pretty average. It reminded me a bit of The Italian Job with the whole your supposed to go for the baddies except there was no awesome car chase. Just to reinforce something to someone, the seating was entirely coincidental. So get over it. 6/10

7. The Lion King In an attempt to stop my friends going on about my deprived upbringing, because I hadn’t seen this film, I rented it and it was SO GOOD. I love the opening bit. So amazing. Also it helped me to understand a friends play I saw while in Japan. Like I know that it was Mofassa or something that got killed with a light saber. In the play, not the film. 9 ¾ /10

8. The Perfect Man I got this out because it looked good, but it wasn’t really all that great. It reminded me of New York Minute with the Olsen twins because it was just so totally unrealistic. Still it had it’s moments. 6/10
9. Harry Potter 4 Cool. Really cool. But it sucked that they had to cut so much out. They should do a long version, with all the good bits from the book in there, like P&P. 9 ½ /10

Books I’ve read lately and whether I thought they were good or bad

1. Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews. Really sick. That’s one woman with a twisted mind. The basis for this book (and it’s sequels) is incest (brother and sister for the most part) and locking children in an attic for four years to get an inheritance. Add some rat poison, freakishly religious grandparents, betrayal, revenge, a few fatal house fires and a restored mansion, and you have some traumatized kids and a scarily fixating book.

2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. Really good. I loved it. As far as chick flicks go, well sorry A Cinderella Story.

3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I’ve only read a few chapters, but it’s not really that exciting. Shame I’ve gotta read it for school next term. Here’s to hoping it picks up.

4. Legally Blonde by Amanda Brown. Why anyone even bothered to make this into a movie I’ll never know. I loved the movie and Elle and even Bruiser, but honestly, in this book, Elle is a major cow who seems to think she’s superior to every one else. The only reason she does well is because of class notes her secret admirer (why does he like her? She once went out of her way to totally mortify him) leaves her. Crap book, fantabulous movie. Go figure.

5. Blue by Sue Mayfield. It’s a really sad book about a girl (Anna) who tries to kill herself because of the popular girl (Hayley) bullying her. It’s interesting though, because you jump between Anna’s mum at the hospital reading her journal and Mel, Anna’s friend who’s torn between Hayley and Anna, telling the story from her perspective. So Anna’s getting her stomach pumped at the hospital and next chapter she’s playing tennis with Hayley. Anyway, it’s really good.

I can’t think of any other books I’ve read lately, so I might go now.

Bye bye.