Hehehe... the petals are already falling off the cherry trees!
Is it wrong of me to chuckle at this? Cherry blossoms have been hyped so much lately - nearly every day for the last six weeks I've had someone talk to me about them... and they've been flowering for less than a week and already they start to drop petals, which get run over by cars and disappear, swallowed up by the omnipresent black hole that absorbs all nature in Japan. Now all we need is a good strong wind, and the trees will be back to looking as black as they were last week, until the green leaves start to sprout. I hope its nearly summer. The other day (I think it was Tuesday) we actually had 26 degrees during the day! Then of course as soon as the sun went down it plummeted to ten, and since then its back to overnight lows of 5 or so, daily maximums of around 10 or 15. Though NHK promised me 17 degrees tomorrow, so I shall be looking for this excitedly. My kenkyushitsu (lab, perhaps, is a good English word) is having their Cherry Blossom Party tomorrow at 1pm... they better hurry, or there'll be no more blossoms. (It remains to be seen whether any of these millions of cherry trees in Japan actually grow any cherries... one would think so, but I have learned never to apply logic in this place.)

Met Eugene the other day, too. The ANU student who was out here on exchange last year, and has actually transferred his degree to Tohoku, he liked it so much. So he's back as a normal student. Gave me a chance to ask about the rest of the ANU stuff that he promised me ages ago, and I thought he had forgotten about... turns out that he still has it, and is delivering it to me one piece at a time. (Any more than that and I can't carry it on the bike... like when I first got here I took the CD player back here one speaker at a time.) This made me very very happy, because I now have a rice cooker (it will cook a whole cup of rice at a time, but that's OK, I probably won't need much more than that. One cup is enough for two people), I have a COFFEE MAKER! (Once again, small, it claims four cups but I reckon three - hey, at least its coffee and I can buy good stuff from the supermarket instead of resorting to cans out of a vending machine). There are more kitchen utensils on the way, it seems. Yay! Happy wombat!

When I was in Japan last time, I used to think the cans of coffee were excellent. Mind you, I couldn't drink coffee at all until I came to Japan and tried the stuff in the cans. Since then (probably mainly a result of Cafe Essen in Canberra and Sarah's coffee maker) I have developed a taste for the good stuff, and really, there is no going back! Yay for my coffee maker... saved me 2000 yen, too, plus another 6000 or so for the rice cooker! All this has meant that this week I am actually UNDER budget! If I can keep going at this rate I might actually be able to save some money here.
The scholarship is precisely calculated, it seems, to allow me to live comfortably each day, but not saving anything. So, since my entire purpose of being in Japan is to save some money, I'm not able to go out for smorgasboard buffets every day, nor take taxis around the city, or expensive stuff like that. I do still eat out, because as long as you stay away from the expensive places, its often cheaper to eat out than to cook back here in my nest - plus, someone else puts in all the hard work and cleans up!
I really need to be working though - still no responses from my ads on the internet for english teaching, so Im going to have to hunt around for some private students. Maybe the residents of Sendai arent as keen as those in Saitama to spend 3000 yen an hour to talk with a native English speaker... oh well, wish me luck.

Classes were supposed to start this week... I checked the timetable and discovered that the first Japanese class I was suggested to go to (nothing is required, of course) was Tuesday afternoon. So, like a good wombat, I thought I would at least try them for the first couple of weeks - though the level seems to be aimed at Level Two of the Japanese Proficiency Test, even the highest level classes. I already have the Level Two certificate, and Level One is quite a jump above that.
Realistically, to anyone who knows anything about Japanese levels, Level Two is more than sufficient to get anywhere in the relevant world, except entry to some of Japan's top universities. Well, seeing as I am going nowhere near any more of them(!), and in the aviation world and for the most part in the public service job market, Japanese ability is seen along similar lines as being able to tie sugar snakes into knots inside your mouth: definitely an interesting ability, but not having any practical value. I'll settle for Level Two.
Theres also the matter of the Kanji test I'm going to have to take at the start of next year back at ANU. For that they want me to be able to write, from memory, two thousand of those little kanji squiggles.
Tohoku's top class for the 'best' foreign barbarians teaches up to one thousand... the same one thousand that I learned how to read for the Level Two test four years ago, and learned how to write in first year at ANU. Yeah, I have probably forgotten how to read a few hundred, and forgotten how to write a few more hundred, but I can live with this. Outside of this exam back at ANU I'm never going to need to have memorised two thousand kanji ever again ... I know it is considered minimum literacy standards in Japan, but I have no intention of ever living in Japan after the end of my sentence this year. Any time I ever need to write a kanji I have forgotten, I will do exactly the same thing the Japanese people do: Look it up. I have a pretty good kanji dictionary back home (hehe... no, I didnt bring it to Japan.. it was too heavy). I have no intentions of deliberately failing this test - don't panic - but I do question the need for me to reach that level in the first place. Some , like the people who want to come BACK, by all means, because they will really benefit. Me? Nope. Kanji study will happen, for sure, but I am not going to let it take over my life, because quite frankly, I dont like studying kanji anymore. I would much rather curl up and sleep, or read a book, or write more stuff on this diary. Sigh...

My big decision for the next few weeks is whether or not to go to either of the concerts I've noticed coming up in Tokyo. The 12th and 13th of May, The Living End are playing, and I am very keen to go to this show, because I missed it when they played at ANU last year. It's going to cost about four times as much as it did in Canberra, though, not including the train ticket to get there - but they are one of the few Triple-J style bands that actually produce good music. They're from Melbourne, in case you didn't know. Might even be able to use that to my advantage and squeeze a backstage trip out of this if I go.
The other dilemma is, later in May, the 27th, 28th, and 29th, there will be a KISS concert. Dad still hasn't stopped talking about the one he and Sharon went to in Melbourne (was it last year or the year before?)... and by all accounts they put on a fantastic show... that one will set me back a hundred dollars or so too, once again not including the train ticket. Does anyone in Tokyo want to go to either of these shows with me (and let me sleep on your floor that night)?
Might be a good time to conveniently arrange an ANU exchange student get-together in Tokyo...

84

Heading up to the Family Mart (convenience store) up the road on Friday afternoon, I noticed that the cherry blossoms had begun to show. They werent there the day before, yet suddenly the tree by the cemetery had blossoms on it. I figured it was only a matter of time before someone invited me to a cherry blossom viewing party.
Walked back into the foyer, ran into Zen, one of the other Australians.
He invited me to a cherry blossom viewing party.

sigh..

Supposed to be today, in the park across the road from my study nest at uni. I declined to go, but on my way in this afternoon to get to the internet, I saw the group of them across the road... there was one cherry tree in the park....
I hope they had fun.

88