I just started playing a game called "Yakuza 2". I've never played the first one, but it wasn't in stock and I've heard a lot of good things about the series. It's all in Japanese with English subtitles so I figured it would be an awesome game for Japanese practice too. After I started playing I realized it might not be the best game to practice my Japanese since every character in the game are Yakuza and they all talk the part haha. I haven't really learned too much useful Japanese yet. Most of it is all Yakuza (gang) style. But it's an awesome game - I'm really enjoying it. My newest (and apparently completely useless) sentence 「結構悪いやつだぜ、俺は」 "I'm a really bad guy". I know it sounds cheesy in English, but in Japanese it does sound pretty cool and... ちょっとださい if you're not Yakuza I guess lol.
I also just bought a different game called My Japanese Coach which is absolutely amazing!! I would suggest this game to anybody who is studying Japanese whether on their own, in class, or by any other means. This game is definitely not to be used by itself though, but as a compliment to some other meathod of study. It doesn't really go very indepth into grammar or sentence structure (though, it does skim along the surface). It mainly focuses on vocabulary building through small 10 word (usually) lessons packed with an assortment of different minigames like word search, multiple choice, memory games, flash cards, sentence descrambling and a bunch of others. 10 words a day is an ideal amount for anybody to remember and if you do a lesson a day your vocabulary should increase quite fast. It has options to play all the minigames with the words you've already "mastered" as well, but you don't have the choice of which words those are. I would suggest using this game with Anki as help for memorizing those more difficult words. I've been using Anki to enter the words I think might be a little bit more difficult to remember (since Anki remembers which words I remember whereas My Japanese Coach does not). All in all, this is a wonderful study aid, and for $30 it is an invaluable tool for your Japanese.
It all started out with a near-finished retirement home going up in flames on the 7th of April. This fire was started around dinner time and wow did it go up fast. The entire construction site was covered in wood and the building was, also, entirely made of wood. As you might have guessed already, it was found to be arson. Three teenagers deemed to be the culprits were arrested at the scene but only one's name was given out in the morning paper (due to the criminals' age). Damn kids nowadays eh.
A week later I expanded the garden in my mom's front yard so it would look nicer and would be easier to mow the grass. My sister and I dug out all the grass around it and dumped it into a big pile. I ended up getting pretty dirty. In the end we ended up with 850kg of sod (grass and dirt) we had to lug up to the dump. 
We were planning on putting down some wood chips the next day when BAM it snowed 10cm overnight. What in the hell? The past few days had been gorgeous! The average temperature was around 16 and it had even got to 22 the weekend before. Now it was -1. Good ol' Penticton - never ceases to amaze me.
My brother arrived home from College and I gave him the some of the souvenirs Hime had bought him in Japan when I was there. Most of it were random different candies and sweets. One of them being a strange honey-looking candy you have to spin up on sticks and then eat after it gets thick and full of bubbles. It's a pretty strange candy but they (my brother and sister) had a lot of fun with it.
On April 27th I went to hang out with a few of my friends I hadn't seen in a long time. We went out for dinner at Anthony's (I think), had some food and a drink then came back to my place to play video games. We played Guitar Hero III, then switched over to the classic SNES and dusted off Mortal Kombat II and Street Fighter II Turbo haha. It was a pretty fun night. It ended a little prematurely but everyone was tired and one of the guys had to work early the next morning so we called it a night.
We decided to give our dogs a bit of a grooming on the 29th because they were getting pretty scruffy haha. Hallie got the nicest job of them all - we thought it would be cool to give her a lion mane and a mohawk down her back haha. It turned out alright. We just didn't shave off anything around her head and we left a strip on her back about half way down. For all those who think this is animal cruelty - I assure you she is completely content with losing as much fur as she can since it's starting to get warm. And we're bringing them to the groomers soon anyway. And she likes her mohawk! ^_^
Yesterday I attended a Japanese Tea ceremony in Penticton at the Japanese Gardens we have here. It was pretty neat. They had one girl from Osaka that flew over here to be here for the ceremony (she doesn't actually live here) I was pretty surprised haha. I believe her name was Mutsuko. She sat there all alone on that mat waiting for water to boil and then meticulously adding and stiring the maccha. 
Very interesting - I don't think I'd be able to sit there that long. Atsuko was the one playing the instrument. I didn't get to hear her play much since I forgot my camera at home and had to go get it but from what I heard it was also really nice. It was a beautiful day to have a Tea Ceremony. I'm so glad I was able to go.
Goodbye Japan! Home of the rising sun and the love of my life. Some day I'll be sure to return ^_^ I still don't feel like I've left. These pictures I took on my way to Narita airport.
Well I've been back since the 6th and though it's nice to be back I really miss Japan and my girlfriend. Today, we've been together for 16 months. Sadly, we're not able to spend it together. It'll be that way until I go back to Japan which will probably be in July or August. It all depends on my money situation and how soon I can find a job in Japan and get a work Visa.
This is the last picture we took together in the airport before I had to go through customs. So sad :( I made a video of what I did in Japan but I'll have to get her permission before I post in on here ^_^ Maybe I'll put it up next blog post if I get the go-ahead.
I'll start off with the weather. It's cold here, as I've mentioned in my last post, but I don't think I put a picture... maybe I did but whatever, here's a picture of near my gf's place. We were walking to the grocery store at the time. There's snow piled everywhere!! It's great. It really makes me want to go jump in the snow like when I was a kid. It's cold but not unbearably cold. Sometimes my nose gets kinda frozen but that's about it. Nothing to complain about =D
Downtown Asahikawa 旭川 is pretty interesting too. I've only been on a couple of the streets but there's a main street meant for walking only. There's walking paths on both sides and the street in the middle is also for walking... does that make sense? Probably not. Actually the picture on the right is a picture of a different street... 
so maybe forget what I said until a little bit later. It's nice though. Inside this small mall there is a giant statue of the castle from Howl's Moving Castle. In Canada I would never have expected to see this kind of display but in Japan I don't see it as out of place - just cool. Actually the place that it's in is just about deserted. There's 2 restaurants, a place where you can buy bus tickets.. and that's all I've seen haha. So I'm not really sure why they chose here to put this piece. Maybe it's cheaper to keep it here or something. In any case, I'm not complaining. It's cool.
The other day my gf and I went to the Asahiyama Zoo (In Asahikawa). Apparently it's pretty famous in Japan - one of the most famous I think. And for good reason... it was really cool!! They had so many interesting animals I had never actually seen before. Like penguins!! and lots of them too. 
Some were swimming, some were running around, some were getting ready for the daily "penguin walk". It was really a pretty interesting thing to see. The walk way through the penguins "area" went underground and under the water that they swim in so I took a few pictures from underwater.
Then there was a tiger!! At least I think it's a tiger... If it's not please leave me a message and let me know what it is haha. Well, whatever it was, it was pretty neat to see in person. To be honest it was one of the most boring animals we saw in the zoo. It walked around in circles the entire time we watched it. Hardly interesting. We tried to take a picture with it behind us but it didn't really work out... you can only see a really small part of its back between our shoulders haha. So I won't put that picture on here.
And polar bears!!! Now that is something I thought I would never see. Penguins.. I thought it possible, but not polar bears. They're a lot bigger than I expected they would be.. and a lot tougher looking. There's two polar bears at this zoo and both of them have a lot of scars - one a lot more than the other though. Sadly neither went swimming while I was taking pictures but I still snapped a few good ones. I'll post up one to see.
We went to visit chimpanzees and orangatangs. Here's a picture of Hime saying hello to one of the chimpanzees who came to visit us and the little kid beside her. Don't worry, we let the kid say hello first before we took pictures ^_^ We didn't have very much time so we had to leave soon after that. We're going to visit again sometime. I want to watch the penguin parade. 
Actually we had planned on watching it but we ended up getting pushed back from the front and we had to wait another 15 minutes for it to start so we gave up since we were on a tight schedule. There's a picture of all the people lined up waiting to watch it. Actually, the reason I took this picture is because the view was nice and there was a giant ferris wheel haha.
After the Zoo we went downtown and found the ice sculptures had been started. There were sooo many sculptures and soo many people working on them. It was on the street I mentioned earlier in this post. All these sculptures are in the middle "walk way" or whatever you might call it on snow pedestals. Some of them are amazingly beautiful. We got downtown at around 4:30 so the sun hadn'
t gone down and I was able to take 1 picture with the sun up. All the other pictures I took are after the sun went down and so are kind of dark. I'm not really sure but it seemed to be a 1 day type of competition. At 4:30pm most of the sculptures were really starting to shape up and all my pictures around 6pm-7pm were almost complete. I really want to go down there again soon during the day to take some pictures of the finished peices of work =D
And today for lunch we made Takoyaki. I think I mentioned it in a post a long long time ago... But at the time only Kenji was reading my blog I believe. I really like Takoyaki and Kenji was the one who introduced me to it when we went for dinner and drinks together at an Izakaya restaurant on Davie street in Vancouver. So thank you Kenji for introducing me to Takoyaki ^_^ I'll explain what Takoyaki is. 
Tako is Octopus and Yaki is "fried" so thus the name. Even though there's a lot more too it and the Octopus itself isn't fried at all haha. First you take the Octopus as seen above and cut it up into small peices that would fit inside a 1 inch ball. Then you heat up your Takoyaki plate (like a hot plate but with half spheres) and mix up your Takoyaki mixture. 
(Now I know these instructions are useless but I want to explain how anyway) Next, pour the mixture into onto the tray, filling all the half sphere things. Add in some green onions, tempura bits and one peice of tako. Wait for the inside of the sphere to heat up and get.. more or less cooked. 
Then, using an extra long toothpick (forgive me for not knowing this word haha) spin it around so the previously exposed upper side can also cook. Spin spin spin until it's done. One package of this stuff makes a lot of Takoyaki balls... Like 50 or something. Man, is it ever filling. Her mom and dad ate some but they didn't want many. The last batch (the one I'm making in the picture) we gave to Hime's grandparents to enjoy. Actually It's kinda fun to make them but after you get full you don't really have that... drive to continue making them hahaha.
After we ate we decided we needed to take a walk to try to walk off some of the weight we most assuredly put on during lunch. We walked to the shrine near her place. The vew is amazing. This picture is overlooking the area where she lives. I have no idea which is her house but it's probably in there somewhere haha. 
I didn't take any pictures of the actual shrine itself because I feel it's kind of rude. But I really like this type of gate they have over everything. The style is absolutely wonderful. It's a little disappointing our culture doesn't have this kind of "style". After we left the shrine we took a different route back to her place that walks over the main road in the above picture. It's also pretty but I wanted 
to the show the snow piles along the side of the road. It's actually quite difficult to walk side by side along this path due to the snow. In some places it's high enough to brush my elbow while I'm walking. I'm not sure when I'll stop enjoying the snow... probably never ^_^ I really like snow, it's so pretty.
This wonderful program I found thanks to Clay on Youtube (profile) has really increased my retention for Japanese. It's called Anki (暗記) which means "Memorization" or "learning from heart" - a very apt name. And the best part about it is it's free! Of course you can donate if you'd like to (which I would suggest if you start using this program regularly) but it is free. As a side note - Watch Clay's FAQ. I've provided a bunch of links but he makes it clear: 'no stalkers' so be forewarned. But back to the subject at hand.
Flash Card Manager - This flashcard program is awesome. It's super easy to put in all the cards you want and then while you're testing yourself you actually click on what rating you give yourself (like Positive, guessed, fail etc) It's great. If you fail something it will keep showing it to you until you get it right and it tracks your stats too so you know how many you still have to memorize and how many you've memorized so far. Amazing!
JquickTrans - It's got pretty much any word you could imagine. I got it for free when I bought Instant Immersion Japanese Deluxe but It's totally worth the $10 it costs online. Sometimes it's almost too much help because it has so much information. It has romaji also (If you're worried you don't see any romaji in the screenshot)
Instant Immersion Japanese Deluxe - If you're going to buy it DO NOT buy it from Amazon though. I just provided a link there to see the details. In Canada (as you may have noticed) things are extremely expensive compared the United States ($85CAD / $49USD which is about $45 Canadian). So you're paying almost double if you buy it on Amazon. If you want it - Find some way to order it from the states or find a place that will sell it for a decent price. (But with all that aside, it's an awesome program.
Kanji Gold - This is a flashcard program for Kanji. Already pre-set with all the kanji in the different "grades". It works with the JWPce databases so check that out too if you want this. I think this program would be really good for starting to study for the Japanese Proficiency Exam as it goes through the grades as an Elementary student would go through them.I haven't written on here for a while and a lot of things have happened so this will sort of be a recap of happenings since my last post. I have a feeling it's going to be sort of.. all over the place but I will try to keep it as chronological as possible so it makes a little bit more sense (even though almost all the topics are completely unrelated).
d start enjoying it a little bit more. At the rate I'm going at, I won't finish the book for another month or something. >_< Mondo Gelato to get some icecream and talk to my friend Jay. I was surprised to see my friend Toune in there too. I graduated with both of these guys but Toune had moved back to Niagara Falls after we graduated and I didn't know he was back in Vancouver. I talked to them both for quite a while but I ended up talking to Jay the most. He started talking about this funny CG cartoon called 金卵(Kintamago) that you can find on youtube. He seemed pretty excited about it so I figured it must be pretty good. After we got back to my place after icecream we went on youtube to check it out. It wasn't very funny. We only watched one episode and yeah... not the most interesting or funny cartoon.
It's still in development. I know a few people working on understanding how this game works and I managed to find a downloadable and working copy of the game online. It looks really nice and I would really like to play it soon. If it's anything like Ragnarok Online, I will probably like it a lot.
The other night we watched The Elephant Man. Hime bought this movie before we went to my family's house for Christmas, we just never had time to watch it before now. It's a really good movie and it's also really well made. It was made in 1980 and was wonderfully done. It's also based on a true story after the life of "The Elephant Man" AKA Joseph Merrick. I watched the special features on my own time and they were also quite interesting. I'd suggest everybody watch this movie whether or not you think you'd enjoy it. It's not the most action packed movie - that's for sure. But it's a really interesting movie to see. Keep in mind its based on a true story after a real person (who looked VERY similar to the actor in the movie).
I applied and then had the phone interview. It went pretty well... I guess. I found out my weak point is definitely sentence creation. I can understand fairly well and my listening skills are also pretty good, but when it comes to responding... I really struggle. She said I placed into the Beginner 2 course but the course MIGHT not have enough people to run this time so she would get back to me. I really hope it works out because I would really like to take some REAL Japanese lessons from a teacher in a classroom lesson. It seems like it would be a really good school for me and from what she told me, most of what I would be learning would be how to communicate in Japanese... which, right now, is where my problem is.
dish called たこ焼き (Takoyaki). It's more or less octopus but go read the wikipedia for more information on what exactly it is. It was sooo good. The first one I ate was incredibly hot but it was tasty. I really like trying new food. Later in the evening Hime ordered me a drink. A green tea drink.. I also don't remember what it was called. Maccha something. It was really really good. She ordered it with soy milk. Its made with Maccha and Vodka and soy milk and I'm not sure what else. Dom showed up just as 1215 was closing so we went across the street to Sugar Daddys.
o we grabbed a table for the 4 of us and ordered a pitcher and started to drink again. After we got the bill for the first pitcher I showed them all this stupid little magic trick which turned into a big talk about magic and us trying to figure out new tricks and whatnot. It was really fun. Kenji made up the neatest trick. I won't explain it because well... it's magic. But it was great. We got him to show the waitress and then she showed us this other really neat trick with a little bit of ash. After that Don got her to explain how she did it and then he tried to do it to us but I figured it out when he tried it. I haven't tried it myself but I think I might be able to pull it off if people were drinking hehe.
When I got home from work I went over to my friends place to play D&D. Right now I'm a sorcerer. I'm level 3 and we're progressing quite quickly. The DM is really good and I'm really enjoying his campaign. We have to do a lot of roleplaying and its really fun. At the moment we have this illusion spell stuck on us that has turned us into these crazy monsters. I'm a mind flayer at the moment (well I'm not really, but other people perceive me as such). We have to drink this potion to keep ourselves in our regular form but it only lasts for so long. At the moment we're looking for ingredients to cure ourselves but its proving to be quite the arduous adventure.
pizza with the morning people and free pizza with the afternoon people. So I ended up eating 7 pieces of pizza throughout the day. Complimented with a bowl of baby carrots and another giant garden salad. So much food. It was nice. The pizza wasn't really the best pizza but what can you do. Tomorrow we have a company-wide meeting. We're speculating that the company is gonna bite it and we're all going to get laid off. I'm happy. I can't wait till the meeting hehehe. Severance pay FTW. But I can't get my hopes up too much until tomorrow though. I will post what happens tomorrow... Hopefully (I might forget.. or have other things to do).
When I got to the arcade lo and behold it was still closed. I looked inside and sure enough it was 'fat guy' who was opening it. He never opens on time. Idiot. So I went over to Sakura Media to check out what they had (even though they almost always have the same stuff, I had to kill some time). I looked through all their DVD's and then moved on to the soundtracks. I want to buy Hime the 耳をすませば (Whisper of the Heart) soundtrack but I couldn't find it. I asked the lady working there and she said I could find it in the Crystal mall Sakura Media. Then I got to thinking that Hime might not even want it and I don't really want to buy her something if she won't like it. But I know where to find it at least if i change my mind.
At around 12:30 we left and headed for Sports Check because I wanted to buy something. My aunt gave me a gift certificate and I wanted to buy something while they still had holiday sales on. Sol8 left after about 20 minutes because he had to go drive his sister somewhere. I ended up staying in there for quite a while. I finally decided on this UnderArmor Fleece Hoodie and a Nike Dri-Fit Pro Shirt. They had a deal for "buy one g
et 2nd item 50% off" so I went a little over budget on those two items but I think it was definitely worth it. I'm really happy with them. The sweater is incredibly comfortable, super warm, and surprisingly light. Its great. After that I went home.
