Will blog after studying

Oh, what the heck.

Fun in Fukuoka [What a cheesy title. :P]

2 am: Sleeps after planning where to go [Oil: parks, nature, that sort of thing; Me: ROLLER COASTER! RAMEN! PURIKURA!], aimlessly chatting and fooling around with Oil and Takashi, and noticing how humonguous my eyebags are.
4 am - 6 am: Wakes up. Takes bath. Spends a good part of an hour drying my hair and trying to figure out why I ended up with a haircut from the early 90s. Gives up on hair and tries to study, but ends up doodling...stuff.
6:30 am: Knocks on Oil's door to wake her up just in case. This is, after all, the girl who ended up having to take our Nihongo exam an hour after the appointed time because she woke up late. [Not that I always come on time myself.]
7:10 am: Heads to bus stop to meet up with Takashi.
7:40 am: A horrified Oil realizes that she forgot to bring money with her. While sympathetic to her predicament, I was pretty sure that there's somewhere in Fukuoka where she could withdraw money.
7:45ish: Boards bus for Fukuoka after being told to wait several times by the driver, because people with reservations get to board first.
7:45ish - 10 am: Sleeps in bus but gets woken up by whiny kid and doting mother somewhere in Omura. Kid does not want to sit beside some other passenger and whines. Passenger moves to another seat so mother can sit beside kid. Kid does not say thank you [ungrateful brat] despite mom's repeated efforts. Kid still whines. The three of us get no sleep from that point on.
10 am: Fukuoka, yesss! I love this city. It could be Ortigas or Greenhills, that sort of place. Feels like home.:) Don't get me wrong, Nagasaki's charming and all, but I would take Fukuoka over it any day. Also am rooting for it for the 2016 Olympics! By then I should be living there or in Hiroshima. Hehehe.

Ohori Park

To quote Kyushu Connection, "Ohori Park - A touch of heaven! With its beautiful lake, Japanese garden, Fukuoka Art Museum and Noh Theatre, you can make a day of it and never get bored. Stop and have lunch at the restaurant or get in your laps around the 2.2 km track. Rent a row or paddle boat and tool around. Weekends and holidays are bustling but it never seems too crowded. A wonderful retreat from the hustle and bustle of Tenjin."

Apparently Takashi's high school is pretty near the park, so he was regaling us with horror stories from his days in the track and field club. There was a light drizzle so we weren't able to rent a rowboat, so we just took some pretty cool pictures around the park. It was absolutely humid though, so we took off for cooler places after a bit. [Pictures next month, maybe? Am up to upload limit at flickr.]

Marinoa City

Headed to Sky Dream Fukuoka, the tallest ferris wheel in Asia. Oil is not into amusement rides, I mean she's scared of heights etc., so Takashi and I were alternately telling her it was OK and bugging her. We were jumping around the car and kept on moving around, trying to make it shake.:D The view was [cliche warning] breathtaking. The nearby islands were shrouded in mist, and you could see Fukuoka Tower from up there. Took lots of "artsy" pictures afterwards as well, Takashi's good at that sort of stuff. We were hungry, so we headed for...

Canal City: Ramen Stadium

Canal City is at par with the malls at home, which is strange for a Japanese mall. The design is reminiscent of Greenbelt, complete with the ponds and fountains, etc. Went to Ramen Stadium, a complex of ramen stores where you can sample ramen from all over Japan. After eating, we headed to the Jump Shop, where I bought omiyage for some people.:) Wandered around a bit and took purikura before going to Takashi's house.


Not too clear though.

The Jikka
Takashi's house is in Fukuoka, but it's a ways off from the city. He told us before coming that he lived in the inaka, or the countryside, and it was true. But it was really nice; it's not somewhere I would choose to live in, but it's a place you can go home to, that sort of feeling.


Me screaming "Bukid! BUUUKID!"

We played with Qoo-chan, Takashi's dog. Qoo chewed on my Cookie Monster cellphone cleaner though, but otherwise it was love and dog drool. Like Buffy, our dog. [Incidentally, Buffy was my sister's first kiss. Wala lang.]


Look at those eyes.*_*

Takashi's parents are really nice and funny. Made me miss MY family.;_; At first we were all kind of stiff and formal but after a while everyone loosened up and we stopped using keigo [honorific expressions]. His mom made us a really good dinner [tonkatsu, karaage, chawanmushi, the worksss]. His dad is a huuuge fan of the Fukuoka Soft Bank Hawks, so while we were watching the game on TV he was cursing and stuff everytime they had a strike or something. [Obviously I am not into baseball.] Kind of like Boss Raul when watching a Pacers game or playing Halo or NBA Live.:P

The Hawks won though, which is a good thing according to his wife. She said that when his team loses, he gets into a bad mood. LOL.



Afterwards they saw us off to the bus stop. Rode the bus, had thought-provoking, comfort zone-removing conversations, and got back to Nagasaki past 11.

Twas seriously one of the best times I've had here.:)

Have French test [Uh self, French in JAPAN. Huh.] tomorrow and I have verbs to conjugate.

caught in the middle

Economics is not for me. [Despite my high school crush on Sir JLeg.]

Just finished not-too-bad-but-kind-of-scary International Economics exam. I mean, no one's gonna care that I'm not too sure about how production transformation curves work, or how to prove that blah blah elasticity of imports affects blah blah. I'm gonna be a chemical engineer, damnit.

I kind of wish I could be in this limbo for a while. Have been seriously thinking about my future and have come to the conclusion that I'm still just a kid, despite being biologically 19. I must grow up. MUST! But first I must finish Chem Engg in the appointed amount of time [ie. 2009. 2009!!!]. There's no way around it.

Pat's Pseudo Post-Graduation Life Plans:

A. Pass board exam, work in evil multinational corporation in a job that allows me to travel and will make me rich. Desk job = NO.

B. Ditto A, except work at Cadbury Quality Control, growing fat off sample chocolate. Hahaha.

C. Take foreign service exam, ditch the degree-related path entirely, and work for [insert country here] Embassy.

D. Pass board exam, apply for Monbukagakusho, get MS and/or Ph. D in Japan, go back home and be...what? A teacher? Researcher? This option possibly just prolonging my agony as a student [also sign of Peter Pan Syndrome].

E. Same as C., except for the going home part. TNT possibility present.

F. Just fly to Japan and hope I find a job as an English teacher somewhere...if not, be a freeter. NOOOO.

G. Fulfill any of the following childhood dreams: anime voice actress [seiyuu], CIA agent, Romnick Sarmienta's ka-loveteam, stewardess, video game tester, doctor [pffft], President of the Philippines, pop star

H. Jet off to Switzerland with Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, where I will spend my time feeding him grapes and taking rose-scented bubble baths.

I. Join the Peace Corps and go to various impoverished African countries, where I will passionately invoke people all over the world to care [like a non-hot, non-married-to-Brad Angelina Jolie]

J. Invent something that will have as much impact on humanity as Post-It or the microwave oven.

I just want to live happily ever after, and build a nice house for my parents.

Schoolwork? What schoolwork?

Not exactly swamped with academic requirements *snort* but they have been piling up and am not really too motivated to do much about it. This week and next week = presentations + reports + homework + summer break plans prep + yosakoi practice [not the uni team, another team] + exams SO WHY AM I BLOGGING ARGGGGH.

People are leaving, they're leaving...Have decided to Photoshop something as a sort of gift for the yosakoi club. Hmm. If not, a collage will do, I guess...

Things to buy before I leave Japan [for future reference]:
yukata
Japan Football League shirt
collapsible mini-table
Nagasaki University shirt
Nagasaki University post-it
Character-laden 2007 planner [eg. Stitch]
Complete Triplus set! Yesss.
not-straight-cut-semi-loose jeans
high schoolers' bag [wala sa Pinas...I think]
duo highlighters [both ends of the highlighter are different colors]


On a totally unrelated note, I wish I could wait forever.

wala lang. :)

Ryu and I.

Ryu is the 9-year old son of Ate Lisette, a Filipina English teacher here. Cute kid.:D According to Ate Lisette, he's quite popular among the girls. I bet he receives a ton of chocolate during Valentine's Day. He's too young to be thinking about all that adolescent crap though, those girls will have to compete with his Game Boy.:p But he's suplado, I had to cajole him for so long to take a picture with me. He's also fluent in Japanese and English, although he supposedly spoke English more before his teacher scolded him or something. Tsk tsk. I think he can speak and understand a bit of Tagalog as well. They'll be going to the Philippines for summer break [at least, summer in Japan :P] this August to September. When they come back I'll still be here! Haha.

Ryu picked this shot himself among many similar stupid-looking shots. This is my phone's wallpaper now.:)

English, Shminglish

It's only being in a foreign country that I somehow get to appreciate all my years of English education back home. Since I went to a private school, you could say we received quality education. [Public schools are a different story, sadly.:(] Even then, English was one of my best subjects. It was subdivided nto Reading and Language. Language was boring, I mean it was just grammar, but Reading rocked.:D We had those SRA thingies, too, and I would always aim to get the highest-ranking color [Gold? Don't really remember.] in the shortest possible time. And even at home, it was normal to talk in English, usually banter with the family. My grandma was an English teacher, so my Dad grew up being grammar nazi-ed [albeit firmly but gently] and in turn grammar nazi-ed his own children. Not that it was a bad thing.:) Truthfully, I am more comfortable with using English for reports or academic papers, but of course daily conversations are in Tagalog or Taglish. Writing compositions in beautiful, striking Filipino is not something I am good at, either.

This really didn't bother me until I came here. Maybe I have too much time in my hands to think about stuff.:P Why this difference between the two? It's not that I regard English as superior to my native language in any way, but it IS the language of business and education. [Although now is apparently also a good time to learn Chinese if you want to get an edge over others.] It's not a question of which language is better than which, these two are just...different. Like when you go to a job interview, you have to wear a suit and a tie, but when you're just with friends, even pambahay is OK. I feel guilty, though, that this is what Tagalog has become to me.

But I digress. What I don't get is why everyone seems so surprised that Filipinos can speak good, grammatically-correct English. There was even this TV show that said something like, Filipino English interchanges the f and p sounds [ie. pamily, fen] so listeners will have a hard a time with that. HELLO, hindi naman kaya lahat ganun. Mayabang na kung mayabang, but I think that anywhere you go in the Philippines, there's someone who can understand English and speak it fluently. In Manila, especially, a lot of people are native-level speakers, or even better than native speakers in some cases. A Filipino here was even a high school English teacher in the US before he moved to Japan. It annoys me when a native speaker commits crimes such as misspelling "restaurant" [restuarant], pero hindi din naman ako magaling sa sarili kong wika kaya wala naman ata akong K maasar.:)

What's annoying is the condescension by some native speakers [well, initially]. One of them [talking to a Japanese about my English ability] said I could speak English almost as well as he could, except for the "really technical terms". Um, no. I am studying to be an engineer, so knowledge of specialized terms [at least related to my major] is a must. [I doubt he knows what a gasket is. Or what agathokakological or aeaeae means.]

Because here usually you have to speak English slooowly to Japanese people, the pace at which I speak English has probably slowed down. Also, I have to use simple words and make concise sentences, thinking before I speak. (Although you wouldn't know it from the way I write in this blog. Ah well.) That isn't bad. Strunk and White would probably approve.]

Now I sort of want to be an English teacher in the Philippines, if only to pass on something to the future generation. Let the "I'm-a-native-speaker-you-are-not" superiority complex end.

something strange

[Cut my International Economics class for this. It's been weighing down on my mind since early morning, so between a rather useless, boring class and therapeutic blogging, it was a no-brainer for me.^_^;]

Today Su Lynn leaves for Malaysia. It's going to be a bit lonely back here, but we're OK.:D It's kind of sad, isn't it, that we're all really just strangers passing each other by. Sometimes I think that if I had all the time in the world, I would love to get to know all the interesting people I encounter, and befriend them [not just a hi-hello sort of thing].

I would say that taking people for granted comes easily for me. Probably because I'm a selfish person.:P Not that I expect people to drop whatever they're doing to cater to my every whim, but when I get used to someone being always there for me, I start expecting them to keep being like that indefinitely. But then, isn't that part of friendship? To be able to gradually take a friend for granted freely, and have them treat you the same way. So friendship is a sort of commodity, like "I'll be your friend if you'll be mine". But, to quote Adam Smith, "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others,and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it".

So the whole point of this is, nothing really. Thank you to the people who let me take them for granted. Just whack me on the head with a stick when I go too far.:)

*

Madali ako magka-crush. Who knows how many hours of my [and my friends'] lives I've wasted stalking, doodling, psychoanalyzing etc. in relation to these crushes. Like Jerome put it, "sa lahat ata ng orgs may crush 'to e".:P The thing is, if I see someone cute or good-looking, my natural reaction is to openly say so [not to the said person's face, obviously] and giggle about it with my friends. But all these supposed crushes don't really mean anything, because usually I don't even really know the person, and days or weeks later cannot fathom having found something appealing about him. No emotional attachment, just plain superficiality, nothing beyond the looks.:) So when something takes root, is not even an issue of how gwapo someone is and doesn't go away after 2[!] years, it's more than raging hormones. That's scary.

So I will lock it up in some corner of my wasted heart and wait. For how long? Who knows. But I would rather it be like this than know I let go of something quite possibly extraordinary.

more tea-drinking

P7021662
Originally uploaded by patricianne.

Had tea ceremony (AKA final exam) last Sunday. Was glad to have gotten it over with relatively painlessly, since I have the grace of a cow in making green tea. Although the point is, I CAN make green tea all properly and ritualized-like. Yay! Bonus: Get to wear yukata, with obi and everything. Finally realized why Japanese-style toilets are built the way they are [ie. you have to squat to pee] when I had to go to the toilet already all dressed up.

Actually, everyone looked great. The guys especially. Reminded me of my Rurouni Kenshin fangirl days, what with the hakama [trousers] and all. And do you know, the hakama is airy and comfy. It reminded me of a very long kilt. For easy access, maybe? Hehehe.

P7021658
Originally uploaded by patricianne.

Here's me, Oil and In Ae-san trying to make a "heart" but failing. There aren't any pictures of me actually making tea, at least not on my camera. [Will bug other people later.]

Oh, and I had my hair cut. Nothing drastic or even remotely Japanese-like, just had it trimmed and had some, um, bangs. Or sort-of bangs. I'm a cheapskate so no color or perm, haha. Maybe just right before I go home.:)

[Aside: flickr's interface is so user-friendly!<3 Now if only they allowed more uploads each month...]