Saturday, June 13, 2009

For Realz this time, Part 2

Ok, I know its been a while, but here is part two!

So, I believe I explained this before, but our "beds" consist of a futon mat, which we lay out on the floor, we then place the sheet on top of that and then the blanket, complete with pillows. There are two rooms that could be used for sleeping, the tatami mat, which I have pictures of on my flickr account (which I WILL update soon). It is a tightly woven straw mat that is actually quite comfortable. The other room is just a room with a hard wood floor. We decided (since it was recommended) to all sleep in the tatami room and leave the other room as a hang out area (which has quickly degenerated into the "throw all your crap into" room. Admittedly, the tatami room is much more fun to hang out in) We then fold up all our bedding each morning (most mornings) and place it into the cabenet for the day.

Ok, now HERE'S the problem. Despite the tatami mat being much more comfortable than hard wood floors, its STILL the floor. And I roll around a lot in my sleep. In addition to that, I have a bad shoulder.

For those of you who don't know (which I imagine to be not too many of you, but I think I should explain for the few who do not), but I have a bad shoulder. It was a wrestling injury I recieved in high school, but did not get fixed until much later. Due to the injury, I had very limited mobility in my left arm where even basic movements, like shrugging, became quite painful. To this day, I usually only shrug with my right shoulder, out of habit.

About a year after the injury, I injured it further. At this point, what limited mobility I had enjoyed up until that point had been lost. I could not move my arm without my shoulder in a decent amount of pain....and I STILL waited until the wrestling season was over to get my surgery. Imagine this in your mind. Me wrestling, with my left arm hanging completely limp at my side...and I still place 3rd in state.

Out of 3

ANY WHOoooo. So, take my bad shoulder, add sleeping on the floor, plus my tendancy of rolling around while I sleep and you get a recipe that makes my left shoulder in pretty much constant (however slight) pain. So, theres that.

So, my first morning. I awoke to find blood on my pillow. I was confused. Did I suffer a random concussion while I slept. Nope, its not coming from the ears. Did my nose start to bleed? Nope, doesn't seem to be coming from my nose? WHERE THE CRAP DID THIS BLOOD COME FROM?

Well, some mysteries are best solved after breakfast. I began to meet when Kylan told me that I had a HUGE gash across my forehead. I rushed to the bathroom to notice there was a fairly big line of dried blood on my forehead, about two inches in lenght. I was lucky enough to notice that it was NOT a huge gash, but a line of blood that ran down my forehead and onto my pillow. The actual cut was very, very small. Which is suprising, due to the amount of blood. So, from now on we know which bedding is mine.

Mines the one with the blood on it.

Typing this has led me to a question that is probably on all your minds, but has not crossed mine until this very second. WHY THE CRAP HAVE I NOT WASHED THE PILLOWCASE YET! I have NO idea, I think I will do that later today.

Anyway, the first couple of days consisted of little activity so that we had time to get over jet lag. We were constantly told that the next few days would look NOTHING like the rest of the trip (boy, they were RIGHT). We had a couple of meetings in the girls room (the rooms consist of 4 guys in 204, three guys in 201, me and my 3 roommates in 305 and all 6 girls in 408, needless to say, their room is the biggest) talking about how the rest of the trip would look like.

But that was probably boring and I do not rememeber it, so lets move onto the fun stuff.

At some point, we all went to MOS burger. The only Non-American based hamburger place in (I could have said Non-McDonalds place, but that would have been easier and consisting of less words) Koenji. (Or in Japan, I think) We all went there because the hamburgers ARE distinctly Japanese (they are small, and they are donut shaped and the condiments are place in the whole, its kinda cool) and because it was one of the few places in Japan that is large enough to seat a party of 17. I felt so bad for the people taking the order. Most of us speak no Japanese, and many of us are particular when it comes to food (no onions, no, no, NO onions.....NO ONIONS! FINE! I guess I'l just scrape them off!...No pickles please)

It also did not help that Sammy and I decided that we would just point at the menu behind them and say "I want THAT!" and let THEM figure out what we wanted. We thought we were adventurous, they probably thought we were jerks.

Also, I had melon soda, it was good.

Some time later (I have little to no recollection with what days this stuff happened, so please bare with me.) We went to Student Impact. Student Impact is Campus Crusade, but they call it something different in Japan, something about it "Campus Crusade" being difficult to say in Japanese. It was great, we got to meet with the Japanese christians as well as the staff that we would be helping out. We introduced ourselves and got fed. It was yummy. We also discovered many awesome Japanese resources, such as the New Testament in english and japanese, as well as manga versions of the New Testament. Many people got a kick out of that. I also got to meet Nosuke, who has been since become one of my good friends.

After the meeting, we went on a scavenger hunt. We were told to go to Shibuya (a prefecture known for shopping, slightly less crowded than Shinjuku), we were in Mitaka at the time, so none of us had ANY idea on how to get to Shibuya, I personally had no idea where I was (we had never been to Mitaka before) so it seemed pretty freaky at first. So, we were put into teams and basically given a crash course of the train system.

My team consisted of Matt, Tracy and my roommate Tim. We went to the trainstation and attempted to figure out how much we had to pay in order to get to Shibuya (we were given some money for the hunt). We found an older lady that speaks english, but did not know Tokyo very well. She told us a way that meant we had to get onto one train and transfer to another train.

Meanwhile, I had found a student from Michigan, that had been living in Shibuya for 2 years and gave me COMPLETELY different directions. He told me of a train that went directly to Shibuya, unfortunately, none of my team saw me talking to him, so we went with the directions that he woman told us, which was wrong and we spent more money than we needed to to fix the problem. I am not bitter, its just that I WAS RIGHT. BOOYA! (Shi-BOOYA! chuckle [if you do not get that joke, I will explain, that is how you pronounce Shibuya])

So we got to Shibuya, where we began to go over the list of items we were meant to find. We were supposed to find Hachiko and we got bonus points for finding out the story behind it. As a side note, this hunt pretty much required us to ask people for help, which was a great into the interacting with Japanese people. (No, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm being serious, I thought it was great) We found Hachiko was a statue of a dog, and we got a picture with it, which then convinced every Japanese person in the facinity that it meant that WE could take pictures of them for them. I don't necessarily mind this, but we were on a tight schedule.

"Ok, heres your camera back, can you tell me what...oh, I see, you are walking away. Thanks for the help...yeah"

Well, we found out later (after the contest was over, sadly), that Hachiko was the name of a dog that lived in Shibuya. His master was an old man that would go to work every day, and Hachiko would wait at the trainstation for them to return home together. Well, one day, the master died on his way back from work. So Hachiko waited for his master every day at the trainstation at the same time for his master to return, until Hachiko himself eventually died. Its a sad story, but the statue was put up to honor the dog, the most loyal dog in Shibuya.

After getting a picture at the Hachiko statue, we went looking for a store called The Loft, since we were supposed to find a pen there. We eventually found it, and The Loft was SO COOL. The place was HUGE! And there were Gundam and Dragonball Z stuff! YaY!

Then we had to find out what a "puricura" booth was, and we had to "bring back a suvenier" We had NO idea what that was or what it meant. So we started asking around, I asked a man working in a clothing store (most of the stores have no real front wall and you basically can walk in and out freely, its shaped like this l_l...kinda). and asked him what one was. He got so excited he walked us out of the store, down the street and in front of an arcade. All the while, I'm thinking "this dude totally just ditched his work to show us this thing".

It turns out that a "Puricura" booth is one of those photo booths that are so popular here in Japan. Friends and couples will go in there and get several pictures of them taken and they can customize the background and the stuff in the picture. Luckily, the man in charge of the puricura booths was very nice and helped us through the whole process, despite him not knowing too much english. After that, we went to the apple store, not too much excitement.

We then had to find a store called Shibuya 109 and go up all the floors on the escalator. We asked around until we found the largest building in the area with the words "Shibuya 109" in large letters on it ("How the crap did we miss that?" was my responce) Luckily, the place was only 8 floors and 1 basement. But it had so many clothing stores, there were SO many clothing stores for women it was rediculous. The ONLY guys there were ones with women. I don't think I even saw any male employees. There was ONE store for guys, on the top floor, and it was "coming soon". We were also tasked to eat as much new food as possible. So we went to a french bakery on one of the floors. (they said NEW not NEW JAPANESE, yay loopholes! [hey, we weren;t the only ones to take advantage of that, one group went to McDonalds]) and got some cool pastries.

After that, we got to together and swapped stories. We then returned to Mitaka and discovered that there would be no actual winner (awww, but I wanted to win) and that your team members would also be on your campus teams.

You see, the primary goal of this trip is to go to Japanese college campuses, meet college students and become friends with them. Once you become friends, use that friendship as an oprotunity to share the gospel with them and introduce them to christians that are fellow Japanese students. But, we are too large of a group to all go on one campus at a time, also, there are too many campuses to have us go to all of them each day and be effective. So, the whole team was devided in half and each campus team had two college campuses that they would focus on during the week. My team has GaiDai (the Tokyo Univeristy of Foriegn Studies) on Monday and Wednesday and ICU (International Christian University) on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

So, with that being known, we prepared to begin going to campus, since we started the day after the scavenger hunt.

We began going to campus on Tuesday, so my team had ICU that day. We had to take a train to Mitaka and then a bus to the school. Despite being known as International Christian University, most of the students are not Christian. Its only called that becasue the university was founded by a Christian. There are Christian classes and a church on campus, but the classes sound more like bible history and the church does not seem to perform services, but is merely a classroom for said Christianily classes. In addition, from what we have heard about what is taught at the classes, it is not entirely correct.

We spent most of that day prayer-walking and getting to know the campus. Matt and I talked to two people, one of them lived in America for a while, and the other was a foriegn exchange student. We quickly discovered that the campus was BEAUTIFUL! There were so many trees on campus, and the whole thing is surrounded in forrest. At some point, Matt and I found a traditional tea house in the forrest near campus. It was the summer home for some big-wig samurai that was torn down, transported to campus, and rebuilt some time in the 60s, but the structure was originally built in the 1600s, i believe. I so wanted to go in, but I know that tea ceremonies are very strict, so I did not want to go in and do something that would anger someone, so I merely admired from a distance. We met some of the SI (student impact, I will probably call it SI from now on) staff that work at ICU, and it was cool meeting them.

The next day, we went to GaiDai. I just felt SO confident there. I did not feel uneasy or anything, which is odd, because we were warned to be very careful on this campus because SI teams have been kicked off before. We had to go into the campus in groups of two and never all at once, since we might be considered suspicision and banned from the campus.

Well, Tracy and I spent some time prayer walking, we were trying to find the club house. Japanese clubs are after school clubs that students join based on their interests (anime club, archery club, tennis club, etc) We eventually asked someone named Kazuki where the club house was, only to find that we were standing beside it. We eventually got into a long conversation with him and he wanted to meet and talk again, so we swapped emails and planned on meeting the following week.

Thursday and Friday rolled around with not too much that I can remember happening at ICU, except Tim and I talked with a group of three students that wanted to meet again the following Thursday. I DID find out that my group would be further split into two sub-teams. One team would go to ICU on tuesdays and the other would go to the nearby ICU high school. This team would talk in front of 1 freshman class on the following thursday and 2 classes the next day. They would share about their life as a Christian and then break the class into discussion groups where they would lead a Q/A session for the remainder of the class. Then, they would host an english lunch (where students could meet with native english speakers and practice their english, apparently its very common) that friday, as well as every tuesday for the next 3 weeks.

I was assigned a part of the ICU high school team.

First of all, that meant I had to cancel the meeting with the 3 students that I mentioned earlier, and second, I was totally freaking out. Each class had 4o students, thats a lot. But, I will speak more on this later.

That Saturday, I was told that some people would go to Asasksa (a place with a large Japanese temple) and that it was optional. I wanted to go to Akihabara, a place well known for anime and electronics (RIGHT up my ally), so i figured I would wait around until they left and find someone who wanted to go with me among the straglers. Well, that morning I found out that pretty much EVERYONE went there. The only people left behind were myself, and my two roomates, Kylan and Josh, who had planned on spending the day at a soccer game that a friend they had met on campus was playing in. So my choices were, go with them to the soccer game, or be stuck in Koenji by myself.

Despite what most of you are probably assuming, I went to the soccer game.

It was a lot of fun. We took the long way there (AKA, got to the town where the game was taking place and then walked for over an hour on foot after deciding we didn't want to take the bus....for some reason) but it was so fun when we got there. Not necessarily for the soccer game, as most of you know, I really don't like soccer. It was fun to hang out with my roommates, and it was fun for reasons I promised not to tell. But it was really funny. I might share it later if Josh gives me permission.

The next day, we went to church and I had to dress up, I hate dressing up, I always feel so awkward.

On that note, that finished the first full week. I would like to type more, but this is long enough as it is and I'm hungry. I will talk about the next week later. Until next time

2 comments:

  1. There is a group of seven guys in New York City who have created the Burger of the Month Club, giving recommendations on which is the best hamburger in and around the New York City. In fact their last meeting was at the Trailer Park ...
    Exclusive video-here:Burger of the Month Club-Video

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  2. Hi. I'm Joe, and I was on Gen and Heather's project team in '07. As for the burgers, I also recommend two other places: Freshness Burger and Zat's Burger Cafe, also known as Sasebo Burger. I know there's a Freshness in Koenji. You head for the train station, but follow the street past the entrance - the street, not the covered mall walkway. About a block or two down, it will be on your left. The Zat's I went to was in Nakano, but there may be others; if you go, be sure to tell them to hold the mayonnaise.

    It's exciting to hear what ministry is like on some campuses I don't know anything about. Tell everyone I'm praying for y'all and feeling really encouraged by all the stories I'm hearing.

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