Switching back to winter uniform

Hokkaido's getting chilly!

Quick update

The past 3 days has had pretty cold mornings, my hands and ears would even hurt a bit since i'm biking to school. It's not even winter yet...

So i went back to the winter uniform yesterday.

But because it gets fairly warm around noon, i end up regretting not wearing the summer uniform (why you!... sweat...).

But i suppose it's better than ending up catching a cold. And we all have to wear it from October anyway...

Japanese all Girls High School and Kindergarten Sports Festival!!! This weeks diary recap?

女子高校体育祭(Koukou Tai'ikusai)Japanese Girls High School Sports Festival! 

クラスTシャツ(クラティ)Class T-Shirt

Around the beginning of the week our Class T-shirt had arrived!

Sports Festival Practice

Wednesday the 18th of September 2013

Today the second years got to train in the gym hall during lunch break, so some of my classmates ate their lunch during the small break after 3rd period so they could go to train immediately, the lunch break would begin.

I just ate my lunch at usual and went down to the hall when i was done, i was supposed to train for 大縄(oonawa) group rope skipping?

But when i got down there the only student who were practicing skipping was a group of 2-2 student, so after waiting for a while so whether they'd come or not, i went back to my classroom where my friends were still chatting.

So i ended up not doing any practice before the school festival, hoping it'd work out anyway, somehow. (should've probably done at least some practice though) 

Sports Festival Day 1

Day one was held at Kitami Taiku center in the Arena which, i did not know where was, so i looked it up on google maps hoping i would not somehow get lost trying to get there.

But saw quite a few of my schools students on the way so it went smoothly without me looking like a stalker.

Around the entrance

On the upper spectator seats

The Arena

Sports Festival Day 2

クラスTシャツコンテスト T-shirt Contest

My teacher had asked me if he could take a picture of my t-shirt, found out this was what it was for...

boards on the volleyball, Badminton and Tug of War Turnament

Cute Kindergarten Sports Festival!

Saturday the 21st of September

Overdosis of kindergarten cuteness!

Today's Diary entry

Grocery Shopping at Tobu East Mall

Today i went on an early grocery shopping (around 10-11 o'clock) with my host family at Tobu East Mall.

After the grocery shopping was done, we went to the arcade game, gaming machines and gashapon(so many rows!!!) area where i watched my two host sisters play the Aikatsu Arcade Game. 

Not my picture. Seems to be from crunchyroll.com with i can't access fron Japan

It's like a rhythm/music game similar to for ex. Project Diva i think, but it incorporates the Aikatsu Trading card which, seems to be very popular among elementary school students over here, so that you can choose to buy cards before starting the actual game and then you can scan them in (or any other cards that you may have) and that way choose what your character will be wearing during the gaming session. They also have an "IC Card" with your account?/player data, which you place in at the beginning, and i think your gaming data/ranking...etc is calculated and saved onto it or something.

It seemed really cool, made me wanna try it (even at this age LOL).
Arcade games (in Japan) seems really advanced/hi-tech or whatever they call it.
There seems to be quite a few (One piece... and some others that i don't remember) games that incorporate scanning in/using some kind of trading cards, which is pretty clever i think, terms of the producers earnings. 


There was like a girl waiting for us to finish, so she could get to play when we were done.
But because both of my host sisters were going to play it took quite a while.
And i tell'ya she did not seem content having to wait for that long LOL.


Then we went and bought my host sister birthday present, because her birthday is coming forth and the newly released "Jewel Pod" by SEGA toys which she wanted was on sale. 

She wanted to upgrade to the new one

The one she had. It actually has touch screen, apps games, e.mail func. etc. Pic from wikia

This seems to be and old one. pic from cooljapannow.jp(they sell japanese goods)

The new upgrade is even fancier...

Those things are getting close to looking like something like an Ipod Touch. It has like Apps  n all and you can take pictures, send e-mails... etc. What kind of toys kids get to play with nowadays...
Even the new Tamagochi's here now have color screens and look pretty nice.

Slot Game with prices at K's

We actually went to a bakery to buy lunch, but the shop was going to close down the day after tomorrow(they were even selling paper bags, muffin cups n stuff which they'd no longer use), and there weren't much left when we got there, the people who wanted their last bakeries before the close down had been faster than us. So we decided to come back early tomorrow on the last day and see if we could buy some of the last makings then.

So before going somewhere else for lunch we went to K's electronics store. My host family's phone company is au which today had a stand where their customers could try their luck with a slot game. We won the small (miss) and the big price (three matching) and got ourselves some wrapping i think and free tissue boxes(which we had actually stocked up on when we went grocery shopping, well we won't have to do it again for a while).

Donkatsu for Lunch!

We ended up going to a nearby restaurant to eat lunch and we actually met some of my host dads coworkers there too. While at the table one of them actually came to greet me asking me where i was from and when i told him i had come from Denmark he was actually like "Ohh~"... "Copenhagen" and i was like yeah! Someone actually knows about DK LOL.

As for the food it was the best Tonkatsu i've eaten. With the Tonkatsu or other dish you choose you get unlimited refill of plain rice or 5 type rice, tonjiru(nice~) or  miso  shiru and cabbage (maybe also pickles/seasoned vegestables too).

So i got to eat to my hearts content~<3

When we got home i played animal crossing new leaf with my host sister.

Skyped with my sis in DK.

And tried to pull myself together to blog a bit and that was more or less my day.

(have to get some studying done too with the JLPT coming up at the beginning of december!!!) 

Still working on it"

Got my hands on a 3DS LL

Joining the club with the upgrade :D

Animal crossing (New Leaf) seems to be really popular over here.

Harvest trip with Gas Company :D

Today we went out on a trip with my host dads co-worker through a company event!
Had lots of fun today!

Will update later~

Music Station; Nishino Kana

Music Station

Watched Music Station with my family yesterday.

Music Station is a Japanese television music program which airs every Friday, running for around an hour. 

Music Station webpage (unfortunately not in english though):
Music station

This week there was a special performance by Nishino Kana and her new album is being released.

from generasia

from generasia

Don't know if it's official, but her facebook page?
nishinokanaofficial

You can also see it on her facebook page, but around the release of her album she been featured on the cover/specials/interview in various magazines (Popteen included!)
Which kind of made me want to buy a lot of the magazines, though it would be a waste of money to just buy them all because of the few pages that features her.

The song that she performed seems to have been really popular, one of my friends sang it both the first and the second time we went to Karaoke.
I really liked the song from the first time i heard it and it have become my favorite Nishino Kana song ever since, i think it's a ballad (if i'm not wrong) it's really catchy and has a nice melody~

Check it out!
西野カナ　『会いたくて 会いたくて(short ver.)』

On a preview Music Station show (Last week maybe?) she performed her new song "namida iro" (tear color?)

You can check it out here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic15-0lSigQ

The show features new hits, but there are sometimes old hits featured too.
There something on the show called, i think it was "Birth year songs" where they for example show past shows/performances and music rankings from the fx. year 1990 or so.

They also have random people kids, students, passerby's on the street, old ladies...etc. react to songs before they are shown n you'll be like wondering "eh... what song are they talking about?" and then they'd be like BANG it was this song and we be like "ohhh~ i remember that song from my childhood!".
Well, i didn't know much about Japanese music before coming here other than what was about: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (the PONPONPON graze), i think i had heard about one ARASHI song or so, a friend showed me an AKB48 song(didn't have the best first impression of them since the song was something with a lot of girls doing pillow fight or so in their underwear?), then i remember that i had heard some from NEWS and Yamapi (Tomohisa Yamashita) and that was about it(oh, and whatever Opening or Endning of whatever Japanese cartoons i had seem, or from movie soundtracks).

But coming here talking with friends and sometimes watching i discovered that there's some really nice music over here, or rather, that i really like quite a lot of the music that's being produced over here. and i somehow now feel that I've been missing out on a lot, since i mostly grew up with V-Pop and K-Pop through my family and occasionally listened to the western music around me.    

But i have and will still watch Music Station from time to time! :D
I'll try to post some of the songs that had caught my attention. 
If i can remember it's name or artist, that is :P.

Lizlisa and Shopping in Sapporo

Liz Lisa

So here's some pictures of the catalog/magazine pages.

I don't know if putting things like this on my blog is illegal or not, but hopefully they won't sue me or anything.

I don't know maybe you can find it on their website (then the picture quality will be better too)

I visited a Liz Lisa Shop when i was in Sapporo (there was an Ank Rouge Shop too!)
But all the shop assistants were like SUPER cute and pretty! XD
The shop itself too was all flowery, pink and girly too!
I was almost too embarrassed to walk around the shop in my casual everyday clothes (>.<")

I chatted with some of the shop assistants. She was really nice and gave me a lot of advise on how to combine different clothing pieces and what kinds of styles would fit different occasions and stuff. At some point i told her (probably because there was some "fashionable girl" - vocabulary that i didn't get) that i was a foreigner/on exchange and she was so kind as to say that she wouldn't have realised if she hadn't told me and that my Japanese was nice (I do think i have a distinct, maybe even bizarre accent XD). 

But yeah just so you can see some of the new clothings :D

 The new Liz Lisa trench coat is so pretty!!!

But i really like the new one from Ank Rouge too~

Not that i really have the money to buy any of them...

 I really like the foral sweater/jumper it's so cute!

 I think it's really cool that it's based on classic french fashion 

 Some Liz Lisa Hair style tutorials?

Kimatsu-test? And got to try out Koto and Sanshin!

TEST!

Summer vacation ended two weeks ago and this week we had kimatsu test (similar to chuukan/midterm? test) from Tuesday to Friday(today).

Today

1st period was the Suu A/Math A test

Got to play Koto and Sanshin :D Yay

2nd period was actually shuukyou (Religion?)
But i had the chance to try to play Koto and Sanshin with my Music Teacher so i went for that. Had to sacrifice the shuukyou test for it though, so, don't know how interesting it might've been...

3rd period we had the English test
My teacher was so kind as to write furigana for me, since i can't read all the kanji's yet and even wrote some explanations in english for me, for example as to what the problems ask me to do, since i might not understand what it says in Japanese.
Pretty ironic that i only got this kind of extra help with the English test :D
But our teachers so nice~

The cheap yen is not bad at all :D (at least for travellers)

Paying for school trip

So Tuesday i went out to the main post office in my city to try to withdraw the money i have to pay for my school trip, since i saw that the Yen had dropped a bit the day before.

Had checked the national bank website one in a while.

It kinda falls a bit, then rises a teeny bit, then falls a tweeny bit, but then fall a teeny bit ALRIGHT might as well get this done :D!

You can choose to have the display(touch)screen in English, which is very convenient since i can't read all them kanji's yet.

I checked before, when you have to type the amount of money that you want, it tells you that you can withdraw a maximum of 200.000 Yen, coincidentally the exact cost of my school trip, very convenient i thought.

But when i tried to withdrew the 200.000 Yen (pr. time/day?) which i needed it just spat out my card (Mastercard Debet) with a receipt, confused i asked a really kind guy at the post counter and he told me that it said something about my balance not being sufficient.

Have i been robbed without knowing?

So i tried again with 150.000 Yen, then 100.000, then 75.000 Yen, then 50.000... yes. i got the 50.000 Yen.

So i was like ok, for some reason i can only get 50.000 Yen. Which means i'll have to withdraw 4 times to get the amount that i need. So i tried to withdraw 50.000 Yen again, but this time it did the same thing as before about my balance not being sufficient.

(O_O)Z

I was like don't tell me there ain't more on my than 50.000 Yen, there were supposed to be more then enough for me to pay for my school trip since i also won AFS stipendium.

And then the unimaginable thing came to mind, someone (bastard) hacked my account... Nooooooo!!!!

Of course acting all composed i went home as usually, and when finally there i popped up my computer...

Time out, sorry i'll have to study for the test tomorrow to might continue this later.

See ya~  

In the end

2013 September 29th

Back with the update for this post, i must admit i kinda forgot about it (completely).

Anyways, yes my account my alright and my balance as it should be.

So at least i knew that my balance wasn't insufficient as the ATM claimed.

It seems that for some reason i can only withdraw a maximum of 50.000 yen pr. day, so i ended up having to visit the post office four days to get the amount that i needed.

But i guess it's alright, it might have something to do with the fact that i have a teens Mastercard Debet.

Transferring the money and paying

So later we got instructions as to how we should transfer the money through the post office. So yeah, i had to go there again...
My host mother offered to do it for me since it was a bit complicated, but they have already done so much for me, and since i can just stop by on my way home from school i thought it would be best to try and get it done by myself, since it was me who wanted to  go to begin with. 

Hayao Miyazaki is Retiring?!

Announcing his retirement 

My Host family told me that it was in the morning news yesterday.
Kaze Tachinu might well be his last work they said D:
Being a Ghibli fan this is kinda shocking, but the would would've eventually have come of course, and he's getting up in the years as every other mortal human being is even though he is HAYAO MIYAZAKI.

Watching the news Monday morning I wondered what would happen to Studio Ghibli? Will he still occasionally get involved in their productions? Is his son taking over?
What about Hisaishi Joe he's probably getting up there too.

But i believe he does have a long and successful carrier to look back and be proud of, that's always something :)

Even the schools Talking about it

When i went to school Monday, our first lesson was Religion.
Just before the lesson began, my seat neighbor was talking about how she would cry when Hayao Miyazaki isn't of this world anymore, being a huge fan.
Yeah, even the Japanese themselves seems to be very fond of the Ghibli movies, i don't think i've ever heard anyone say they didn't like Totoro.
I think our teacher heard our conversation and at some point the started talking about the morning news regarding Hayao Miyazaki's retirement and how he too was very fond of Ghibli's movies. I think he said that he liked "Whispers of the heart" and "kokurikozakakara  " and those types.
When he then moved on to Kaze Tachinu and how "Suteki" it was (I was going on about it too with my friends about how "suteki" it was! But it really is!) I think he almost, or did he actually shed a few tears after that, saying something about that we should definitely watch it if we get the chance.
And the i-wanna-watch-it-again-feeling i got after i watched it for the first time returned XD