The Apartment, Yakiniku, and Being Called "Saiko"

I moved into my new apartment two days ago and I love it!!!! It is sooo teeny--notice the random pictures through out this post. My kitchen is like the size of an airplane bathroom stall…probably smaller! But the bathroom is pretty sweet. And I have stairs steps up to my bed! I have to hang my clothes outside to dry, which is like China. In my mind I keep comparing Japan to China, and they have many similarities but several big differences. Like Japan definitely smells better and is cleaner than China. But China was so much cheaper than it is here. The prices here are about the same as in the USA, except that here my money isn’t worth as much. Luckily I am getting paid in yen!

My Japanese pretty much sucks at this point. I’m really good and using short phrases, but whole sentences are a little beyond me in most cases. I am pretty literate though! Since Chinese and Japanese share a lot of the same characters, I can guess the meaning of most things written in Kanji (Japanese characters). However, Japanese also uses two 50 letter alphabets, Katakana and Hiragana. I learned how to read both when I was younger and that has luckily stuck with me. However, I am not able to understand the meaning of what I read. I can understand basic sentences pretty good as well. It is just the replying thing that I really suck at. Also I kind of speak my Japanese with a Chinese accent…weird eh?

I met this Chinese girl at a Yakiniku shop (yummy sizzling meat on a hot plate) and it was soo much fun! She was working there and the girl I was with (who is Japanese) could tell that the server was Chinese. So I busted out the Zhongwen (Chinese) and it was sooooooooo awesome!!!!! She liked it too cause she told me to come back to visit. Luckily the Yakiniku shop is like two minutes away from where I work.

Tama is about an hour or so away from Iidabashi (where I sometimes work). There are large plots of farm land scattered throughout Tama and the people are nice (the ones I’ve met so far). The guy at the vegetable stand called me cute and awesome today! Hehe, it was pretty funny. See, the funny thing is that in Japan the word “Saiko” (which sounds like psycho), means “awesome/cool/ect”. So technically he was calling me “Kawaii” and “Saiko”….lol.

More later!