Roller coaster and my struggles with the language.

It’s been a while and a lot of stuff has happened. I always want to share the cool things I’m experiencing but my classes have me working a lot. The intensive Japanese class is more than the equivalent of two classes for sure.

A few days ago I went out with some friends (6 of us 3 guys 3 girls) to Tokyo dome. At Tokyo dome there is a roller coaster. It’s a roller coast but it’s in a shopping area. It wove in through the plaza and went through a part of a building. It was supposedly the 11th fastest rollercoaster in the world. It did have a HUGE hill at the beginning. It was fun but about average for rollercoasters. I wouldn’t pay the 1000 yen again unless I had a date to go with. It seemed like a good date place.

A few days ago I went out with my friends that I’ve known on skype through language exchange. It was a lot of fun. We went to and art exhibition and an art museum. Both of them were on Japanese porcelain art. They were very pretty, but I think I’m still too uncultured/immature to appreciate art to the fullest. It was me, Jiro, Yumi and Emiko. Sakiko didn’t come because she had work that day. Jiro told me that we would go out again the three of us soon. This next time I’ll ask her for her email/phone number. There are beautiful girls everywhere in Japan. Maybe I just like the way Asians look but there really aren’t hardly any people who don't look good.

Tomorrow I’m going out to language exchange in Harajuku. I found this site for language exchange where people meet and set up times to meet and language exchange. I’m going to try it out for a while. It looks like a good place to find people to language exchange with. I’m really trying to make friends here so that I can learn the language as quickly as I can. It really irritates me that I can’t function in simple situations. For example today I went to the store it said 1289 yen so I give 1300 yen over. I’m almost certain it was 1300 yen. She says it wasn’t enough. I can’t remember how much more I needed to pay because I was sure I read the price meter right and I even repeated the number back to them in Japanese. I think she made a mistake somehow because I looked at the receipt afterwards to see if I was missing something and I wasn’t. It was really irritating. I could have explained that it was 1300 yen and why isn’t it enough but at the moment I was flustered that I was missing something so basic. I paid with 10000 yen just to speed the process up. It really irritated me afterwards. Why didn’t my 1300 yen cover the 1289? There wasn’t any hidden fees either because I looked at my return money afterwards. I think she was mistaken. But I wasn’t confident at the time to argue it and try and figure out why. I wasn’t in the greatest mood either and that put me in a really bad mood. It’s hard some days here. I really wish I could learn languages faster like some people. It not about the amount of time either, because I know I’ve put more hours in than some people and they still pick up language very fast. Ah well, even if it takes me twice as long, I should be able to learn quickly here in Japan.

I also had to write a short story for my creative writing class. It was good but I had to pull material from 5 other stories we had read in the class but all of the 5 stories were dark stories. My story turned out okay from a composition perspective but it was a story I didn’t much care for. The teacher for my creative writing class is a character right out of a movie. He has a weird communication style. He gasps after every sentence and uses a lot of umms and aahhs to fill in the short periods of empty space in his sentences and clicks with his lips. He also acts out with incredible energy. It’s really hard to explain but he seems almost a bit crazy, but he isn’t. He really seems like a fictional character.