In This Town, Don't We Love it Now! :D

Oh hi.

My name is Talia and I'm the worst blogger ever.

Sorry about the disappearance of forever. I have pictures to sort of make up for my absence:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020615&id=1230390045&l=0b59e150e5
This is from my friend's performance at a bar and the night onward. This is what happens when you have a curfew at 11, but you miss it, and the trains end at 12, and you miss that too...

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Anyway, so far my life has consisted of the following:

1) Purchasing the Leaf Green edition of Pokemon for the Gameboy Advance, but it works on my Nintendo DS Lite because Japan was smart enough to figure that people with DS Lites would like to play old games on their system. It's like I'm reliving my past, before my mom staged an intervention due to my obsession with Pocket Monsters (quick lesson: The original name is Pocket Monsters, or in the Japanese, Poketto Monsutaa but Japan LOVES shortening words so the word Pokemon was created. Geniuses.)

I'm fortunate to have friends who are just as nerdy as I am who can appreciate when I complain to them how my Vulpix got dominated by a Rattata. Also, it's all in Japanese. Yeah, that was a challenge I didn't have 10 years ago.

2) I had a presentation to do with my two American friends, Mike and Cat, for our cellphone culture class (talking about cellphone technology in Japan and how we use cellphones in our daily lives...for much more than just talking and texting). Now, this class is all taught in Japanese. We ended up not having any Japanese people in our group for the presentation. We managed to come up with an idea, make a power point and come up with a script of things to say. During class, after one guy finished his presentation, the teacher pointed to us to go next. Cat wasn't really too thrilled but we got up there anyway because we figured we'd just get it over with the sooner the better.

A Japanese girl referred to us as the "gaijin chiimu" which essentially means the "foreigner team". I feel like I would have been more okay with that statement if she said it the less rude way, by saying "gaikokujin" at least. Oh well. I still laughed.

Now, when the first guy did his presentation, nobody was paying attention except the teacher. So, we figured we'd have the same luck. Nope. No such thing. We were walking up there and every single person was looking. They clapped when we got up there. Mike introduced us...they clapped again. I couldn't stop grinning. It's like we were heroes in an absurd way. During our whole presentation, as far as I could tell, everyone listened to us. In our presentation, I included a special barcode which is only done in Japan called a QR Code and it lead to a website. I actually saw one of my Japanese classmates scan it with his phone while Cat was presenting her portion. Class interaction GET! (by the way, the GET! statement is a sort of joke between my friends because on soooo many advertising things, they use the word "get" and it's hilarious).

When we finished, everyone clapped again. It went much better than I had anticipated. We got back to our seats and the same girl who called us the foreigner team said we did well. Thank goodness.

3) Halloween is coming up and Japan is excited. I'm not even sure if kids trick-or-treat or something. But there are costumes and Halloween paraphernalia EVERYWHERE. I plan on going to the nerdiest place in Tokyo (Akihabara) to find my costume. I plan on being a Pikachu because I can't think of anything better and people have suggested it....and I'm shamelessly in love with Pokemon again. And everybody loves Pikachu, right?

4) There are just little things that I do here that just make my day. For example:

So in Japan, there are people on the sidewalks everywhere trying to hand you things. Little packs of tissues with advertisements on the outside, cards with promotional info, posters, etc. trying to get business. As you can imagine, they are all requesting you take their things in Japanese. Sometimes, I'm offered things just because I'm walking past them and other times, I don't get handed anything because they figure it would be a waste as I am not Japanese and they don't think I understand it (which is true for the most part...). However, two times walking down from AGU back to Shibuya Station, we walked past one of those people and he said,

"Hey guys, how are you doing?"

In English. Needless to say, we weren't expecting it. We still kept walking and as we laughed in surprise, we said, "Fine thanks, how are you?"

"I'm good, thank you!" He responded.

"Yay!" I said as we continued to walk by.

Next time I see him, I'm taking whatever he has to offer. And next time, we plan on responding in Japanese to shake things up a bit. The goals we have in life are fantastic.