生活

So now I'm finally starting to getting used to living here. I don't get surprised by everything in the same way anymore, and just living som kind of everyday life, which is to say quite nice! At the same time it kind of shocks me when I look into a calendar and see that I've been here almost a whole 3 weeks! It honestly doesn't feel like even near that much, but much more like maybe one week.

At least it seems that being here actually does improve my japanese a lot, and especially when it comes to listening I'm really starting to get better, and can even hold simple conversations without too much trouble. Also I have noticed that you get much more motivated learning when living here, since when you learn a new kanji, or a new word, you immediatly see that this is something that i can really use in everyday life, and make my life simpler. It can help me read various signs and so on and so on. Although I still don't understand most signs completly, at least I mostly understand them enough to be able to guess what it tries to say.

So what have I been up to? Not much, to be honest. Of course I have been doing stuff, but not much considering I've been here for almost 3 weeks, it would be to expencive to go about doing things all the time, and also tiring, considering I have to get up at 7 to go to school every day. So a general day looks something like this:

• Try to get up at 7:00
• Get up at 7:20
• Eat some breakfast
• Take a shower
• Think it's probably a little to late to walk all the way to school (or be too tired), and take the train instead
• The train is really crowded, but get in anyway, and enjoy at the beautiful view over Tokyo from the elevated railway. At the second stop get out, and walk the rest of the way to the school. Sometimes I of course do have enough time in the morning, and then I simply walk the 30-40 minutes to school.
• Get to school and take the elevator to the 6th floor where our classroom is, unless the elevator is to crowded, in which case I take the stairs.
•  Have classes for 3 and a half hours until 12:30 
• Go buy some lunch at the nearby supermarket, and sit down and eat it in the school lobby on the first floor.
• Do the homework for tomorrow, and then use the rest of the time until 16:30 to learn new kanjis and words.
• Now the school day ends! Either go home and cook some dinner and play games/watch anime/do something else at home, or join some friends and do something fun elsewhere in Tokyo!
• Sleep

Of course there are slight variations to this schematic, but at least it quite closely resembles what i do during the days. So now I can use the rest of this entry to discuss the things I've done that deviates from this.

Something very nice is to just now and then join some friends and go to some other part of Tokyo, like Harajuku, Shibuya, Akihabara or Roppongi and walk around a little and have some dinner. This is really cool, because you actually get to experience living in such a big and densely populated area, and it's something that I still havn't really get used to fully. There are so many cool buildings, smart traffic solutions, cool railways etc. etc. that I still get really excited when I see them!

Other stuff I've been doing is going to a picnic in yoyogi park, which was really nice, and also last sunday I went to a consert in Ikebukuro, which was a really interesting experience. It was called metalympic, and there were 5 different metal bands. The first ones (nard) were really weird and hard to define, but they had really cool outfits, and I kind of liked them. Somewhere during there performance I noticed that a large portion of the crowd were middle aged women, and I guess the avarege age in there was something like 40 at this point. This was explained by the next band (ware wolf babys), which consisted of something like 40 year old women, playing more old school heavy metal. After their performance the avarage age in the crowd quite quickly dropped somewhat.

The third band (VELL'z FIRE) was quite intresting, and played really well. After this they had some kind of air guitarr competition, after which the most important part of the evening came, Gotsu totsu kotsu, or 兀突骨 (see 3:15 here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj-aOoN7gwI)! Really cool samurai death metal. In the end there was a band called breed of darkness, this time with middle aged men. In total, this was a really nice event!

Also, I have now lived for 3 weeks without a cell phone, and turns out it actually works quite ok! Will try to get some pictures up sooner or later too!