September 04. 2004 00:17

Umm... Not shopping

I went to bed at 10 last night. This morning I woke up at 7 because I had to go to the toilet. I was quite happy I was able to wake up that early on my own (today Heidi lent me her alarm clock, because I don't have my own), but since it was that early, I thought I could sleep a few more hours and went back to bed. The next time I woke up it was 4 in the afternoon. -_- Well, I hope that erased my jetlag.

Because I woke up so late, I couldn't go wander in the city centre. I had to hurry because I wanted to meet Ken-san at the International Office and it closes at 16.30. I dressed up fast and went off to find my way to the school, but right at the door of the dorm I took the wrong turn because I was too confident to look at the map. I wandered aroung for a while trying to find the way, then I decided it was hopeless and tried to return to the dorm, but I couldn't find it either. After a while I managed to find my way back, looked at the map and continued the right way. When I got to the International Office, it was already five. Thankfully Ken-san was still there.

Ken-san is a bit different than what I imagined him. He's not Japanese (Ken is also a Japanese man's name so I wondered if he was or not), he's somewhere around 30 I think, and he has a greyish beard. But he seems very nice. He asked if I wanted to go along with the short-time exchange group to Tango at the coast (Yes!), and he showed me a nice route around the interesting places in the city centre, and the closest 100 yen store and Book-Off at the Qanat shopping centre. He also showed the nearest Koonan, which sells household items, and I decided to visit it and Qanat today. The all close at 21, so I had nicely time to go home, eat and get to the stores by bike (and get lost if I had to). By the way, the kitchenware that was in my locker has disappeared.

It gets dark really fast here... At 6 when I left the International Center it was already getting dark and by the time I was ready to leave it was fully dark. It felt a little dangerous to go out "that late" since I'm used to it getting dark around 23 in Finland at this time of the year. But there were lots of people around, even at 21 when the stores closed, so it was okay. And besides, Kyoto is not a dangerous place and I'm out late all the time at home, too.

So, after talking to Heidi for a while I left. Yesterday I was using the bike of an American exhange student called Angelica or something. Today I got a person called Rhiannon's bike from Ken and I might be able to buy it for about 5000 yen. Both Angelica and Rhiannon have gone back, so their bikes are probably for sale. But anyway, so I went along the fairly simple route along a busy road. I'm not sure where I turned wrong, but somehow my way was blocked by this big bridge meant only for cars. Kyoto sure is difficult to get around in. But I was able to find my way to the road I was supposed to be on by taking some silly detour around a few tiny roads. When I came back to the dorm, the way was really easy and there was no bridge on the way, so I really don't know how I got there.

I first went to Qanat, because I probably could get almost all from there. I bought a mug, a plate and a couple of pairs of chopsticks to eat with, a small frying pan, two of those "washing pillows" (lost the word, no dictionary) and a wooden spatula. Then I took a couple of plastic containers, a mirror, a washed clothes hanger and a soap box. Of course, I forgot to buy an alarm clock, curtains, trash can and an adapter so I could get some electricity out of the wall. I couldn't find soap and there were no kettles, but the clock was already 20.30 so I took off with what I had. The total for all of this was 1260 yen, which is about 10 euros. Then I went to the Book-Off store to find some music and maybe a couple of art books. I said this already before, but Book-Offs sell used books, CDs, games and manga. I had so little time that I decided to look for the art books only if I had extra time, because they were a bit difficult to find among all the other Japanese books. I went to the CD wall and tried to find Maaya Sakamoto's CDs. That was very difficult, too, because I can only remember one kanji from Maaya's name. While I was searching I found Every Little Thing CDs and took Many Pieces while I was at it. I also saw Do As Infinity and a couple of anime soundtracks, and good souvenir CDs like Gackt and X Japan, but since I forgot to bring my list, I didn't buy any of those.

In the end I had to ask the guys who were at the next shelf if they could show me Maaya's CDs. I was proud that I could ask it all in Japanese, even though there was one guy among them who actually spoke English. They went about it for a while, like the Japanese seem to do, and then said there weren't any. They told me to go to the new CDs shop at Qanat and seemed like they were ready to show it to me, but I thanked them and slided away. I'll rather see if I can find used first, because they're a lot cheaper, and I have a lot to buy. When I went to buy the CD, the guys came back to me and the one who spoke English asked if I could tutor him in English. Um... Yeah, sure, if I knew he only wanted tutoring. I have no idea how trustworthy these people are, and what I should do in these kind of situations... I told him I just came to Kyoto Seika and that my Japanese wasn't good enough for me to teach anyone. With that I was able to shake them off... I don't know, tutoring could be a very nice way to get some extra money, but I have no idea if it's just a common pick-up line or if they really mean it. (I just know foreign people can easily get these suggestions.) Maybe, after I've been here for a while, I might find someone I can tutor.

The way home was a lot easier than the way there, as I said. I was home at half past nine, so I had just the time to go to shower and put my shoppings to their places before I retired to my room to write this and sleep. Tomorrow I'm going to go through that route Ken-san showed me and then Heidi asked me to join her and her friend so we could go dancing in the evening. There's a nice club called Metro near the city centre and were going there. There's some latino night, but Heidi said there're all sort of different nights, usually accompanied by live bands, and it's usually reasonable cheap. Tomorrow it's either 3500 yen or 2000 yen (we weren't really sure if the other was door price and the other in-advance price or what), but usually it's about 1000 to 2000 yen. It's really nice to see Japanese club life ^_^