Cell phone and other adventures.

I don't have a whole lot to say in this post yet, but I'll try to cover some neat stuff. I've been busy with classes and life.

So here's a buncha random things!

FIRST: Food! I know that Dad loves food pictures, so I thought I should post some.

This is "okonomiyaki" -- sometimes called "Japanese Pizza" for no real reason. It's a round, flat .. cooked stack of dough with cabbage and other seasonings inside, and usually some type of meat or seafood. I got shrimp! It's then smothered in some mayo and a brown sauce. It's cooked in front of you and and you serve it to your own plate, bit-by-bit to keep the rest warm. Very tasty, an Osaka special!

This is something that I'm not sure the name of. The main dish is a rice porridge with vegetables and an egg cooked on top. That cup on the right is full of Ume-shu (plum alcohol). It was really sweet, I think it's my new favorite drink.

This is a meal I got at a 'college student chow' sort of restaurant. The portions are huge for a super cheap amount. It was pretty tasty. (That's teriyaki chicken and some fried fish on the left, and miso soup on the right.)

I got a cellphone! It was kind of a hassle-- I had to get a 'permission form' from the store, then go to the City Hall to register. I had to go and register as an Alien anyway, so I just did both at once. Then I went and bought the phone. The company is called "softbank" and they offered a discount for foreign students. It's a lot of money up-front (you have to buy the phone, approx 160 dollars), but the monthly plan is super cheap-- about $2.50 dollars. Softbank to Softbank is free (calling and email, both). Outside of network, it costs 41 yen per minute (a bit less than 40 cents), and 3 yen to send an email (less than 3 cents.)
I checked out all the other options available to students, did the math-- this was the best deal.
There's a 6 month contract, so my plan will be canceled in August. The cancellation fee is higher than the monthly fee so there's no point, haha!

Here's a close-up of my little cellphone charm buddies. The left is a cute pig for no reason, the golden cat is the popular "Maneki Neko"-- a good luck charm. Since he's gold, he'll bring me good fortune and wealth.


Of course, I went to the city today to get my registration stuff done. Here's the area near the city hall-- a park. Very nice and peaceful!

Here's a slice of Japanese bread. ITS HUUUGE! You can see that it's huge in the right picture, compared to my hand. I didn't have a ruler, but I wanted to properly show the thickness. The left picture is the bread compared to my gameboy. My gameboy is about .85 inches thick-- the bread is thicker. Bread is sold in bags of 5 slices, or so. Very strange.

I met my Homestay Visit Partner (the daughter who is about my age, of my family) earlier this week. She was really nice. We had lunch together and talked. I'm going to meet her again soon. So far she hasn't invited me to go to her house yet.. I hope that I can visit soon. I feel like I'm not getting enough exposure to Japanese.

Tomorrow I'm going to go into Osaka proper (the real city), so hopefully I can get some adventuring in, and lots more exposure to Japanese

WORD OF THE DAY (not really) IN JAPANESE!

Again, Dad requested that I give a little bit of Japanese information with my posts, so here's a starter. Let's see, what's a good word to learn?

Let's start with a word I hear a lot: TAIHEN. (Similar to spanish phonetics. Basically you'd say it as to rhyme with "my pen")
"Taihen" is hard to explain, but the dictionary lists the meaning(s) as: "difficult, terrible, tough, enormous." Basically, you use it to describe something that's quite bad. I mostly hear it used in the past tense-- that something "Was terrible." This would be, in Japanese, "taihen deshita" in a formal way, or "taihen datta" informally. I use this phrase a lot. If something was bad, but you want to de-emphasize it a bit, you can say "chotto" before either of the above phrases. It means "a little..".