Sorry about the in focus/out of focus problem. My camera and I don’t really agree on where to focus.
Anyhow, this video is basically just for myself. I want to look back at this 11 months from now and see how much better I’ve gotten.
I also went to Hanabi today. I will show you what is in the next post, maybe tomorrow. I have some video too! Here is a preview:
I have now been here one month! And yesterday was the first day of our two and a half week long summer holiday! The school “planned” a trip to Disneyland for the first day of the holiday. Or in other words, they gave us a student discount. Of course we had to go along to celebrate the holiday and the fact that we’ve been here a month. The time has gone really, really fast! There are more pictures from Disneyland on my flickr, for some reason there aren’t a lot of pictures though, I really don’t know why.
On our way into "It's a tiny world"
The rain made it colder which was nice!
But the summer holiday isn’t all about fun and games (although there will be games)! I have a couple of goals that I have set for myself during the holiday.
On the topic of games I have started playing Starcraft 2 a little bit. It’s actually very fun and I had a long discussion with myself wether or not it was morally justifiable to play games when I should be studying Japanese, but I came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t always be studying Japanese so to sort of just live a normal life and feel that I am just like anyone else here I bought the game!
It’s a pretty cool real-time strategy game, and when I get a little better I’m going to start to play multiplayer online, which is what is fun about it, playing against other real humans.
Starcraft 2
That’s the short update. I’m living life, everything is going good. I’m having fun and I’m learning lots. If you have any suggestions for what to do during summer vacation I’m very open for them!
I’m planning on making a video soon with me speaking Japanese, mostly just to be able to look back at where I was now when I’m going home in 11 months. Keep an eye out for that. Until then; またね。
Yesterday Marcus, a classmate, hade made some onigiris (rice-balls with stuff in it) at home and it looked pretty good so I tried to make some myself!
I fried up some chicken with some pepper and some extra salt to counter the rice (according to Marcus instructions), then I put some cellophane wrap in a cup and put the rice in there, made a sort of cup out of the rice and then put the chicken in the middle.
I pulled up the plastic wrap and pressed everything into a ball and then put it in the fridge.
Today during one of the breaks in school I ate it, and it tasted really good, so I’m going to make more! After about 3 hours in school I usually get really hungry so this is a really cheap way (it cost maybe like 30 yen to make one of these balls and you actually get pretty full from one or two) to not be hungry for the last lesson!
This is the school that I go to and in this video are some excerpts from one 50 minute lesson. This is basically how most lessons go, we practice dialogue, repeat after the teacher and read from the textbook.
We got ourselves a rice-cooker today. It’s sort of a must-have thing in Japan. I already love it and am probably going to eat even more rice from now on. It’s awesome. Today we made this:
For those of you who questioned the reason to get 8GB of memory in my new computer I give you: “Using all the memory”
Memory usage
This little feat was accomplished by simultaneously running Safari with YouTube, rendering HD video in iMovie and processing images with Lightroom, under no time did the computer seem slow or stall or anything like that. So yes, it is worth getting 8GB of memory in a computer.
I was out walking in Nakano today and came across a cat on a wall. We took some pictures of it and it wasn’t scared at all so I put my tripod on the wall and the cat started nicely posing for the camera so I got this awesome shot. Probably the best picture I’ve ever taken.
Check out more pics on my flickr.
I was going to talk about the cellphone, the camera and school. But I didn’t really have anything useful to say about the camera so I skipped it. I find it a lot harder to make vlogs right now than writing regular blog-posts. When I write I can get in exactly how much information I want and the reader can choose to read as much of it as he wants, it’s easy to school to see where interesting parts are and such. In the video though I have to be fast and concise or it becomes super-boring very, very fast. The end result is that the video contains a lot less information than a blog-post would have. It’s a good exercise to learn to be concise, but at what cost does that happen, and is it worth that cost? Anyhow, here is a video. Showing off the school-material is the most interesting and worth-while part.
Today we just chilled out. I recorded a bunch of stuff for a vlog to explain the phone thing, showed my new camera and talked a bit about school. However, it turns out I am extraordinarily boring when I talk, so I need to learn how to talk more concise and a lot faster. I’m going to make another attempt tomorrow, if that doesn’t work I’ll just write what I want to say instead of making a video. I did however make a video from some random shots throughout the day. We just spent the day walking around and found some pretty neat stuff.
I’ve managed to find some sort of Yoghurt now. It comes in half-litle plastic/paper containers and you can see one in the image below. This was my breakfast today. I think it’s pretty expensive though.
This is one of my absolute favorite things to eat in Japan, Mister Donut:
I just got a new camera! Yay! It’s a Lumix GF1 and I’ll talk more about it later. Here’s some random test-stuff for now!
Pictures:
