Kurisumasu supeshialu!

So I could not stay away from the updating anyway. But I have good reasons, for how can I enjoy my christmas without telling everyone about the things that belong to christmas in Japan. First off, there’s the semester-is-at-end celebration. After receiving our grades (I got straight A’s all through. Reading, writing, listening, talking, attendence and the overall grade \(^-^)/ ) we head for the bar called Zig-Zag. It is owned and run by the school’s Declan and it’s located inside the school campus… No I’m not kidding, really! Declan was even behind the bar yesterday night serving his students drinks. Just imagine this happening in Sweden. The ministry of education would probably die of a heart attack, which would probably be a good thing… What raised the weirdness-factor during the night is that my kanji teacher came to drink with us. My homeroom teacher didn’t come, she went out with some own friends to drink until she dropped. I just have to ask her for a duel next semester or somethings. She’s a pretty heavy drinker according to her colleagues, and she can hold her own pretty long.

But besides the drinking in a bar which isn’t very special for Japan, two other things happened to me that makes this christmas pretty special compared to my Swedish ones. Major earthquakes that I could (finally?) feel, and karaoke! First one was when I was going to sleep. Two powerful shocks make the paper walls in my room shake like crazy. I thought they would break. The second one came the morning after during breakfast. It was even more powerful. The news reported the earthquakes about 30 minutes later and it had measured about 3 I think on the scale. I don’t know if anything serious happened to anyone, but the trains were delayed by 6 minutes, and in Japan after an earthquake that is concidered really long.

Then we have the nice thing called karaoke. I’ve tried some crappy Russian machine back during high school and recently also the Singstar on Ps2, but nothing can beat real Japanese karaoke. Sound isolated room, sing all you want during the whole night, we started at 12.15, got out at 4.15, free drinks as much as you like, I took it easy with lots of water, but some of the other guys sure did not… And of course; the price. 200 SEK ca for the whole thing per head, and then you’ve got literally tens of thousands of songs from the 40s to the very latest j-pop single released last week. It was crazy. I tried to get some X-Japan songs to come true, but alas, the only one that I could sing to was Stab me in the back as it has English lyrics. The other two I tried had kanji so I could sing the hiragana and then sit quiet for about 30 seconds… But to compare the Singstar that you must first pay 2000 for a Ps2 for and then the game for what 400, and then you get like 15 songs… I’m not too fond of singing, but in a group in a karaoke bar, it sure beat the hell out of that Sony.

Concerning christmas I’m not going to celebrate it in the ordinary way this time. My host family does not celebrate christmas, only New Year, and so I will enjoy myself with some movies I’ve rented instead. It’s amazing how cheap the rental in Japan is. I got 4 movies for 80 SEK. Now in Sweden, I’d probably have to pay about 120 for the same amount of movies, and 40 here and there might not sound much, however, concidering in Sweden that’s for 1 day and in Japan I get it for 7 days, it does make a hell of a difference. I don’t know how, but in Japan everything is so cheap! Perhaps I’m gonna have to eat those words once I take my trip to Tokyo, but for now here in Okazaki, I’m saving myself a fortune. Had I bought everything I have in Sweden, I’d prolly be broke and homeless by now.

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Today’s word is Oshougatsu – New Year’s Eve