My Kansai Gaidai Student Exchange

Well well well, this was truly an amazingly fun day! the Universal Studios Japan trip was organised for and by the denizens of Seminar House 3 (however largely the CIE et al.) but we managed to get those who don’t (or did) live in SH3 to come along too … so basically just Jamie. (whose photos I’ve stolen for this blog post)

Group photo!! hai chi--------zuuu!!

Anywho! so much happened that awesome day so I’ll break it down and tackle each segment and demonstrate my mad organizational abilities.

• The Jaws Ride
• Spiderman Ride
• Rollercoaster!!
• Night Parade
• Other random bits

The Jaws Ride –

The Jaws Ride, it gets a ‘The’ preceding Jaws not because that’s the actual title of the ride but because it was that fucking awesome!

So here is basically what happens, we lined up our crew in the queue for a good 40 minutes.. we jump onto our boat for what we assumed was some tour / ride with Jaws involved. What we got was something much much more cooler. We had, this tiny little Japanese woman as our guide.. showing us the area, she had her little mic and told us little things about stuff.. UNTIL!!

Jaws attacked! (who would have thought?!) and then this tiny little Japanese woman became what I can only describe as a Jean-Claude Van Damme with boobs and slanty eyes (ohh I went there) … anywho, she rocked out with a massive gun and shot into the water which responded with massive explosions and water flying everywhere.. followed by a Japanese ahhhh!! *insert random frantic Japanese speech here* eventually, after Jaws had a go at the boat a few times she decided to shoot a barrel of oil which also exploded and fire engulfed the boat and we all recieved 3rd degree burns.

But yeah, no.. the fire went all across the water as if some level 8 mage casted wall of fire and it just sat there for a while.. while it was still there, everyone could feel the heat and literally retreated that inch or two that they could whilst fasten in their seats because it was that hot on your face.. but right after that, some mist came on top of us before our Japanese Jean Claude decided enough was enough and blew the crap outta Jaws.

Amazing ride, made 100 times better because it was a midget of a Japanese woman wielding the gun and going head to head with Jaws.. ahhh, loved it. Right after the Jaws ride, under pressure and with the “Who are you?” song playing by the Who.. it was this destined moment, this point in time, where our theme park group formed, myself, Andrew and Christa. Our day would be ruled by fate and we would be rewarded for going with the flow.

Spidersman Ride –

Spiderman! woooo, okay of course the Spider man ride was awesome, in fact I’m going to say Spidey was in fact, one of the best rides there.. which clearly it is. For a few reasons!

1. The queue! it was here we bought these ‘express’ tickets that basically catapulted us to the front of the queue
2. 3D awesomeness in a awesome ride type simulator thing
3. The ride accommodates 16 people but we got it to ourselves.. so the picture at the end was hilariously funny. (13 empty seats? lol)

So I don’t want to ruin the ride, but I guess I’ve pretty much done that with the Jaws ride so I’ll just jump into it. Spiderman.. wow, 3D glasses, spidey verus a bunch of bad guys (SPOILER: spidey wins!) and it was amazing amazing amazing. Words can’t describe it. The simulation was quite amazing, at one point we were falling (according to the 3D screen) but the thing we were in made it feel like we were actually falling and then rescued by Spidey’s web of love.. (not that sort of web of love but the other web that comes out from his hands, wouldn’t mind either tho!) long story short.. I think the Spiderman ride was the best ride there.

Rollercoaster –

Ahh the rollercoaster, what theme park is complete without a theme park? I’ll tell you, a half assed theme park with cheap bastards that couldn’t afford to put in even the dodgiest of rollercoasters! but yes, as you can imagine USJ has an awesome rollercoaster, it goes around half the bloody park which is quite the area to cover.. our theme park team tackled this thing twice, the second being the better of the two. The first time round we waited in the line like normal people for about 40 to 50 minutes, and we sat at the end of the rollercoaster and thought we had a good time. The SECOND time round, we used an express ticket.. we were on the ride, on the front-most seat in a matter of minutes, literally 3 minutes. We would have walked past at least 300 people.. 300 ordinary non VIP peoples. We managed to request that we wait for the next rollercoaster and get the ichiban row! (not sure which translation to use, the best or first row – number 1) anyhow.. it was amazing. When we jumped on the second time round, it was nearing darkness so the theme park was alit with lights of all colours! completely sweeeet. We got off the ride knowing full well that we’ve signed off on our rides for today in the best way imaginable.

Night Parade –

This night parade was completely unforeseen but loved entirely.. so much effort was put into these floats it was amazing. Only pictures can be used to communicate their level of awesomeness and even then these don’t do the intricate level of detail put into these things justice.

Yay for Elmo, Snoopy and Hello Kitty!

Arabian Nights! followed by a bunch of dancers.

Yeah so as the pictures would indicate, this parade was very much so on the epic side of the scale of life.

Other random tidbits of stuff that we did? ahh I dunno.. we had awesome fooods at some New York style pizzeria (I liked the bolognese), we went to the Terminator 3D thingymaboby, Back to the Future ride, Jurassic Park ride, saw a parade during the day and generally had loads of fun together. Ohh and our dream team theme park fellowship group thingy!! we all got our faces painted.

The day was long and very enjoyable, we finally left the park late at night and headed home. <3

So in Japan, family is important. I’ve got a family here in Japan! not a host family but a family of friends! wooo.

Left to right; Jace, Jesse, Angie, Jamie, Mitch, Charlie

Left to right; Annie, Jamie, Ashley, Charlie, Jesse, Chris, Jace, Angie

Left to right; Charlie, Jamie, Ashley, Mitch, Joe, Angie

My family includes the following! with NOTES.

Joe – my theme park buddy, bromance partner and shares Angie’s bed with me.

Angie – girlfriend / annoying poohead and a non-cheesy person but is trying to change!

Jace –  Jace is Jace.

Charlie – approves of me! pterodactyl and her nan goes everywhere with her.

Chris – hiking buddy, chicken whisperer and talker.

Jesse – can just go fuck off or go to hell..

Annie – are you okay? annie, are you okay?

Jamie – nampa king and guy with the BEST host family.

Ashley – another AUSSIE! but from Sydney.. no no I like Sydney.

Andrew – broken arm, Tigger, knows where to be and when.

Sunny – can cook, can Japanese but most of all CAN DANCE!

Alex – Canadian but not as much as Canada, better basketballer than Joe.

Canada – CANADA!!

And those are my family peeps.

Okok, soo I’m waaaaay behind. I haven’t been blogging for almost two weeks. Why? because soooo much has been happening. Let’s start with Orientation Week!

I had a bunch of stuff to do during orientation week, those of which included:

• Banking Session for my JASSO scholarship and awesome money ease.
• Bike registration and actually buying a bike.
• Payment of fees
• Japanese language placement test
• General Meetings
• Opening Ceremony

So I got all of it done, the banking session was easily the worst though. You had to write everything perfectly and if you made even one little mistake you had to start all over again, you know how the Japanese people are.. fooking ridiculously anal about being exact.

Annnywhooo, there was a business side of orientation week, and an awesome party alcohol side to it all. Alot of orientation week is a blur for me, but I do remember a many a good things, some of which include karaoke, karaoke and KARAOKE! and why karaoke? because of the nomihodai (all you  can drink) for 1000yen or 12 bucks Australian. Now to be fair, this was all you could drink.. in an hour, but maaan.. everyone can drink easily 50 bucks worth in an hour. We did shots, so many shots, beers, rum and cokes and!! a spesh plum wine that was absolutely awesome. You could drink half a litre of this stuff in a matter of seconds if you really wanted to, it was that goood.

Oh and cameras, everyone seems to have one! but not I, I’m the cool cat in all of this, I don’t need a camera because everytime someone goes to take a shot.. out appear another 6 or 7 cameras. Facebook is now littered with 5 copies of every single shot.. I do not kid.

Picture of my family, taken by moi.

But yes, Orientation week was very fun. I can’t wait to get into the entire weekly life that is being a ryuugakusei in Japan.

So I’m listening to Apologize by OneRepublic and feeling as if the physco babble is about to start. 

Well here goes, ummm. So this post in essence is about nothing in particular but has a certain theme to it, the quintessence nature of a friendship that starts out as nothing more than a common interest. For those curious, Japan.

I really have to give it to Facebook, they really live up to their bold claim. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Facebook, helping people from all around the world connect – or something to that effect. =\

For those that read and do not know, there is a Facebook group called Kansai Gaidai Fall 09 — and somehow, it has brought a group of people together in a way that I thought was impossible for Facebook, naive on my part considering Facebook is Facebook.. but enough about Facebook, it sucks in general right? yep.

Puzzling stuff.

But onwards, I’ve gotta honestly say, that I’ve made alot of friends out of this group and I’m sure that a few of them I will continue to talk to even beyond the scope of Japan, which is really ridiculous to start talking about as I haven’t even started my legen… wait for it, I hope your not lactose intolerant… DAIRY! adventures in Japan yet. But yeah, I just can’t believe how innocuous these friendships can be, starting from a simple ‘heyy’ or ‘hihi’ and extending into the realms far past your personal fort knox / boundaries. I can’t begin to grasp the silly concept of what this will spell out for me in the end but I think it has to do with something I like to call the mother-fucking Internet.

The Internet is great, but it can be a bitch some times. For the purpose of this post the Internet has become a rampant internetworked evil demon! it allows you to establish ties with other people, allowing the creation of friendships and whatnot whilst doing it’s evil deed of preventing you from actually doing what real friends do. Now, I don’t want to get into a discussion about the semantics of the phrase ‘real friends’, again for the purpose of this post, it’s a friend that you get to see and get to do stuff with and particularly enjoy the company of. The Internet while great and all, stops you from doing much of the things you would normally do with a friend and for this I’ll go to gripes with it.

Being said, would I have it any other way? would I rather say no, fuck you Internet, I’ll wait and meet these people for the first time in Japan?

The answer is no. =P

I count down almost everyday until I get to meet these wonderful people.