Metamorphosis

A few firsts experienced in the past month.

Went to my first dance club in Japan. The clubs are as proportionally small as everything else in this country.

Got in "trouble" for the first time. I kind of let the 海外実習者専用厨房 (Kitchen for foreign exchange student use) of my dormitory get a little dirty. As a result, I got my first real taste of the Japanese tendency to mix personal and work issues. Upon noticing the disaster in the kitchen, the dormitory superintendent contacted my office's 課長 (=head honcho) who took 10 minutes out of his schedule to scold Andrew and I.

First date. It was a blind date although no one here seems to know what that is.

First shinkansen ride. Almost feels like an airplane. And nearly as expensive too.

First tea ceremony. The ritual was filled with all sorts of rules like making sure you have the picture on the cup facing you when drinking from it and away when putting it down. I could deal with those. What I couldn't deal with was sitting in the 正座 position for longer than 5 minutes at a time. I'm inflexible enough as it is, but sitting on my ankles introduced me to a whole new level of pain.

I want to introduce a few of the other current Epson co-ops from Waterloo who are also keeping blogs.

• Andrew. Works on the same floor as me and lives two doors down the hall at the dormitory. I seem too much of this guy and as a result we've become good friends. He idiotically (cleverly?) didn't study a single word of Japanese before coming here, but in three months he's studied hard and I think he's probably learned as much as I did in a year studying at Waterloo.
• Jason. Works way over in Hino, Tokyo. We've never actually met, but we've been in contact through e-mail since we started working. Definitely has the best Japanese out of all of us.
• Jeff. Knew him from Konja and Japan 102. Hired by Epson-Avasys, a subsidiary of Epson whose purpose nobody quite knows. He came here about two months after the rest of us did and got a sweet bachelor-style apartment in the heart of Matsumoto, if Matsumoto has such a thing.
• Alex. No blog but I'll give a shout out to him anyway. He's my next-door neighbour at the dorm but works in a separate office. He's the most over-worked out all of us, putting in crazy amounts of overtime which puts him on the same level as your average Japanese worker. He could care less about preparing for the JLPT but when it comes to speaking Kansai-ben or 200 year-old samurai lingo, he's our go-to guy.