The chronicler and the story teller (Sarah)

Over the past few weeks Daniel and I have been discussing this blog and what we would like to accomplish with it. We decided we have 2 main goals for the blog: we want it to be 1. a place for us to write stories of culture exploration and 2. a chronicle of our time in Japan. Of the two of us, I'm the one who actually remembers things, and so it naturally falls to me to be the chronicler. And as you can all tell from Daniel's previous posts, he is a great writer and a phenomenal story teller. As such, Daniel will be writing posts about really whatever suits his fancy but I imagine it will mostly be amusing stories of culture naivete, Japan's interesting quirks, and the like. And I'll be doing a more general over view of our everyday lives and the places we visit. Daniel's posts will appeal to everyone. Mine are likely to be read only by our parents and future us. But that's absolutely okay--that's why I originally started this blog. I've always considered it to be less for the people (again mostly parents) who were reading it, and more for me to help remember previous events. Since Daniel will be regularly posting on the blog, his posts will no longer be "Daniels....post" but instead will have their own titles. The author of the particular post will be written in parenthesis.

Okay, now on to the chronicle....

Training, training, training. That's mostly what we have been doing. It's been a whole lot of "one more time"s and "please, stand up!"s. The company we will be working for has very particular ways of teaching. Every different book we'll be using has a slightly different way in which it is taught, so it has been a lot of memorizing. Our first actual teaching shifts begin on Saturday. Both Daniel and I have taught in the past, but given that we haven't taught in this way before, we are both a little nervous. I imagine we will flounder at first, but that we will be quick to get it all down. So, yea, lots of training, not very interesting.

So, what have we done that isn't boring? Well, after our first Friday of training all of our fellow trainees and we went out for dinner and then went and sang karaoke. Karaoke in Japan is way different than in the states. Usually in the states a bar will host karaoke on a weeknight as a way to try to get more people to come in. Here there are huge karaoke places. And like a million of them. Walking down the most popular streets in Osaka, you are likely to find one every block. At American bars you watch complete strangers come up to the mic one-by-one and you laugh at the truly terrible singers and give standing ovations for the good ones. If you go with friends, you have to wait an hour between songs for someone you know to sing because you aren't the only people that want the mic. But not in Japan. In Japan, you and your group get a private sound proof (so far the only sound proofing I've heard of existing in all of Japan) room. You rent the room by 30 minute intervals and depending on what package you buy, you can even get unlimited drinks. Afterwards I remember being a little shocked at the bill (everyone had to pay $25), but in retrospect, $25 for 1.5 hours of singing madness and 3 glasses of wine isn't a bad value. So yea, we had a lot of fun that day.

During the past week of training we learned from one of our trainers that we live in the prostitute area of Osaka...so I guess that was pretty interesting as well. Just one street to the east are dozens of love hotels, where you can rent a room by the hour. Our station and main shopping street are also lined with hostess bars. There are host/hostess bars in Japan where people go to talk to members of the opposite sex. The host/hostess builds fake relationships with people-making them believe that they are loved. Of course due to the nature of this pseudo relationship, sex is sometimes involved. People go to these clubs and drop thousands of dollars in a single night just to talk someone (over the course of the night they are pressured into buying lots of drinks for their special someone). An excellent documentary Daniel and I watched about hosts right here in Osaka can be found for free here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL1pA0McgvM

In the past two weeks we have also been to a cafe/bar where you get to hang out with owls, found a cool bar to play pool/darts, I went to a flea market with some buddies from training and visited a beautiful temple, and we visited a pretty shinto shrine by our training location.

For those of you without a facebook account, check out the photos here:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10101153030509478.1073741830.6710589&type=1&l=43364c41ef