What with one thing and another, at the start of October I was finally able to book holiday again. I had quite a glut too - in a fit of enthusiasm-slash-pessimism, I took the option to buy some extra days.
And then I hit my never-ending problem: what to actually do with them.
So I've been wanting to eat okonomiyaki again for about eighteen months, in fact, and KM-san kindly offered to go with me.
My schedule this year is much more consistent; I start at 9.30am and have classes until either 3pm or 4pm, with an hour for lunch and brief breaks between classes. There's more hours because this year (not being a long-term student) I'm on the conversation course track, not the generic track.
We met fairly early, so we had time for a coffee and a walk before we went for food. I needed them too, as I'd inadvertantly eaten too much lunch and was very full!
I'm staying in Hakata, so we wandered north a bit in search of Higashi Park (東公園).
Oh hi there.
Since I've now been out of Japan for nearly six months, you might be forgiven for assuming there's nothing left to write. Wrong. I'm still catching up on half-drafted posts.
One of the things I did in Japan was bookshopping. I'm, um, a fairly voracious reader - I normally have over a hundred books waiting to be read, and get through a hundred or so in a year. Reading more manga recently (for insight into Japan and its culture, initially, and then just because it's fun) skew things towards bigger numbers, but reading a lot in Japanese pushes things very much the other way!
Anyway, surrounded as I was by Book Off and other cheapo bookshops, I dug in. It may be hard to work out the appeal, considering the hassle it'll be to get them home. Well, here, let me explain.
As you can see, I started this post months ago in Japan. Still working through that backlog...
So it seems silly to spend six months in Japan without learning to make at least one national dish, right? Let's pick an easy one.
Having already tried this out in cooking class, I knew basically what to do, but wanted to try making makizushi from scratch. It has a lot of advantages. It's healthy, relatively straightforward, you can make it in advance (or at least, some of the prep can be done ahead of time) and it makes a decent lunch that doesn't require reheating.
Bowl of rice! For my first attempt, I didn't have any sushi rice. This caused some problems.
So, the Rakuten thing was, in the end, a... partial success at most.
I still have very little idea of what was going on technically bar my own guesses, but then I didn't actually ask for the specifics of their technology.
As a reminder, I began with an English Kobo account linked to a Yahoo email address. I then ended up with a Japanese Rakuten-Kobo account linked to a Gmail account. My Kobo device could only be registered with one of these accounts at a time, so it wasn't possible to view both sets of books on the same device.
The customer service people explained that they thought they could find a way to unify my 'libraries' (the books I've bought from Kobo and Rakuten-Kobo respectively) into a single account. I could then read books from both Kobo and Rakuten-Kobo on the same However, that account would be assigned to one country. For complicated and annoying legal reasons, most booksellers can only sell their books (including electronic ones) within a single country. For this reason, I'd only be able to access the account while I was in that country, and any books from the wrong country would be unavailable anywhere else. This was, as you might imagine, Not Okay.
I eventually worked out that although I can't load Japanese books onto my English Kobo device, I can set the Kobo desktop software to link to my Japanese account. This allows me to read the books on my computer. It's a very poor solution on a broad scale, but it does solve the immediate problem. I have closed my correspondence with Kobo.
However, I'm basically going to have to advise anyone visiting Japan that:
All that being said, it is technically possible to buy books while you're in Japan. People of a certain bolshie inclination will be aware that methods exist to remove DRM and other protections from ebooks, allowing you (rather than the publisher) to control what happens with them - such as where you can read them, using what devices. It's even technically possible to use a proxy server to pretend to be in Japan, in order to buy books. However, these methods are not necessarily strictly legal in a lot of places, and (perhaps more importantly to many readers?) involve an awful lot of hassle. So these aren't exactly a good alternative solution.
At present, the advantages of e-books are not sufficiently exploited to make them worthwhile. Paper books may take up space and cost money to transport (the great advantages of e-books), but a paper book doesn't care where you want to read it. You can buy a paper book from another country and have it sent to you, but cannot buy a digital copy of the same book from that other country (despite the obvious environmental advantages) even though both seem to be functionally identical in that you're buying a book outside the country where the company is licensed to sell it. Why? I dunno.
Sadly, British retailers sell a terrifyingly small amount of non-English literature, mostly the sort of things that appear on exam syllabi and win awards for being thoroughly miserable (thus marking them out as Proper Literature). Linguists, polyglots and expats are still left with the problem that books really need to be imported, as paper items, at a premium, via specialist bookshops or expensive international shipping. Have fun.
I should probably have mentioned this earlier, but for anyone interested in studying Japanese or just knowing a bit more about some of the cultural differences, I must recommend some books. Even better, they're free!
The Japanese in Depth booklets by International Communication Institute are one Japanese man's insights into some of the differences, based on many years of international working and previously published as a newspaper column. I found them both fascinating and educational, with a mixture of cultural points, pop philosophy, pop psychology and discussion of actual linguistic differences. Of course, a few of the columns weren't to my taste particularly, but I found them very worthwhile; indeed, I've read them all repeatedly. They're not that long, and the e-books are available free from Smashwords.
From the first volume: This is vol. 1 of the collection of monthly columns contributed to The Daily Yomiuri, Japan's nationwide English newspaper. It amusingly illustrates how mindsets are different between English and Japanese. It's an eye opener for English as well as Japanese.
This is mostly for GenkiJACS students, so feel free to pass along if that isn't you. I should also mention that this will not include any specifics of the exam, since I'm pretty sure they will need to reuse some questions. Not like I could remember them now anyway. In case anyone's confused, I wrote most of this on the day of the exam, but didn't finish it up until a week or so later.
So having finished the Genki II textbook, I'm due to take an exam (in about an hour) before I can move on to the next class. I thought I was done with exams ten years ago. For what it's worth, I'm writing this in a brief revision break, not purely for procrastination.
I was under the impression the exam would be once my lessons resumed next week, as I'm currently on a 3-week half-term break. However, while I was in Korea I had an email asking me to take the exam today. If I'd arranged another trip or something I'd have politely declined, but since I wasn't actually doing anything I didn't see any particular excuse. It also meant, although I'd have to cram my revision in, I'd have a few days post-exam when I wasn't thinking about it. And in the fairly likely event that I don't pass, it gives me more time to prepare for another go...
The exam covers the whole textbook, covers vocabulary, grammar and listening, and has a pass mark of 80%. I haven't actually studied the whole book in class, due to joining an ongoing class on the basement of my placement, which means that although I'd covered the essential bits, there was quite a lot of vocabulary and a certain amount of grammar that I hadn't covered. So I've been trying to catch up on that in my free time during the past couple of months, while staying on top of my classwork and homework. I just about got there.
Unfortunately there's no past paper for the exam. As someone whose revision style is based almost exclusively on doing past papers, this is a pretty substantial drawback.
I now realise that one thing I should have done ages ago is make use of the accompanying CD. Because we'd been using it in class sometimes, and covered the other sections with the teacher, I didn't particularly see the point. So I only started using it yesterday, and realised I'd been missing a trick.
The advantage here is that the CD is both a resource for listening (which you really can't get too much practice for, especially for the odder verb forms that get less use in conversation) and a way to drill things. So I started working through the textbook exercises based on the CD. I just wish I'd had longer to do this. I heartily recommend any future students to do exactly this. On a weekend or something, just pick a chapter and go through it. It's great revision and pretty quick when you're not doing anything else. Doing it in small doses over time will be way more effective than trying to cram it in like I am.
Right, back to revision.
...time passes...
Okay, I just finished. Maybe. We'll get back to that in a minute...
The exam was, on the whole, okay, although I'm not hugely confident.
My exam (they presumably differ) came in more that one paper. As nobody else was taking it at the time, I was set in a room to get on with it. GenkiJACS clearly trusted me not to do something as self-sabotaging as cheating on a progression test, so I just dumped my bag in the room and started - none of the regulatory stuff you have to worry about in school most exams, no teacher sat impatiently waiting for me to finish à la GCSEs. This was an unexpected and very welcome feature. I began with a grammar paper, which covered everything from verb inflections to particle use, including some contextual use. Opening the paper, I look at a table of verb forms and promptly transformed into a shaking, sweating mass of nerves.
This was pretty unexpected, because historically I haven't really been that worried about exams that didn't involve oral tests (those are always deeply traumatic). However, in the last few years I've had some stress/anxiety issues, and they decided to manifest here. This may be partly because I didn't get as much preparation done as I'd have liked, as I mentioned, so I wasn't feeling entirely ready for it. The immediate reason was that this was actually one of the trickiest parts of the whole test for me. You know where I mentioned earlier that I'd missed some of the textbook by joining an ongoing class? Well, that included a couple of verb forms in their entirety - the potential (can do) and volitional (let's do) forms.
I did say I wouldn't mention specifics, but I feel like "you need to know all the inflections of common verbs" is obvious enough that it doesn't really undermine the test in any way.
Naturally I'd looked over these forms in my revision, and we did use them a very small amount in class. However, they aren't used that often in a classroom context. When they are used, we tend to be use the -masu polite form of the verb, whereas the test covered the plain forms used between friends. I use the volitional occasionally in conversation with friends, but of course in that context it's much easier to get away with mistakes, particularly small ones like slight mistakes in vowel use. The test was written, of course, and so accuracy was crucial. My revision had been hasty, with a lot of vocabulary to focus on, and I was filled with agonising doubt about the details of these forms.
I spent around fifteen minutes of the fifty available filling in the first question on the test, and then moved on. Most of the rest seemed okay, with a few uncertain points. I left a couple of blanks, because in a test like this I saw no point in guessing when I didn't have a preferred answer. If my Japanese wasn't strong enough and I needed to redo some material, then I'd be better off failing than passing by chance. What with my worries about the first question and having wasted a lot of time, I was fairly stressed throughout this paper, which naturally slowed me down further, so I just scraped a finish before the time was up. Quite worried about this paper, I had no time to review answers or anything. As a person who normally spends the last third of all exams rereading the paper twice and then doodling in the margins, this is a pretty big deal.
Thankfully, the rest of the paper was nothing like as anxiety-inducing as the first part, and between that and a brief break while I got a fresh cuppa (yes, I could drink and eat during the exam! marvellous!) and the next paper, and my brief conversation with the lovely Nabe-sensei, I'd calmed down a fair bit.
The second paper was vocabulary. This included kanji recognition, marking pronunciation, and knowledge of how to use words in a sentence. It was tricky in places, not least because some kanji are annoyingly similar to others. This is a particular problem for me because I know a ton of kanji that haven't yet appeared in the books, including loads that I only know in Chinese and may have a wildly different meaning or pronunciation in Japanese. While it's usually a big advantage for me, in some types of questions this can trip you up. On the whole though, I found this paper fairly straightforward, although again there were a few spots I wasn't that sure of. Not entirely sure how well I did, as I was a bit doubtful of some points (especially pronunciation) but probably better than the grammar.
When I finished paper two, I came out and there was some brief confusion. It wasn't quite clear whether I needed to do a third paper, and as it was getting late, nobody left in the office knew the answer. There was a paper lying around, but it wasn't clear whether it was intended for me - from a quick look at it I rather thought not. So I agreed to come in the next morning and check.
...the night passes uneventfully...
So I went into the school again and discovered I had in fact finished the exam. In fact, Nabe-sensei had already marked it and congratulated me on passing! I was so happy. Exact marks and transcript aren't ready yet but knowing I can progress (and don't have to resit!) is good enough for me right now. This afternoon is my conversation date, so I can also enjoy that without having exam worries in the back of my mind.
...the next day...
So I came into school for no particular reason. It's technically still holiday for me, but I had nothing particular to do and I get bored sitting around my apartment or just walking on my own. I've done plenty of that. So just like on my free afternoons, I decided to spend a few hours in the lounge reading and studying. Being at school generally makes it easier to motivate myself to work, plus I like having people around even if I'm not chatting to them.
Anyway, Nabe-sensei tracked me down and provided me with my transcript. The boy done good!
Okay, this will be a bit bewildering to the non-Japanese-readers amongst you. The broken part on the far left is just my name. From left to right, we go Vocabulary, Grammar, Listening Comprehension, Interview, Total. Each lists a number of marks (点) available. Each section has two boxes, for mark and percentage respectively. The Listening and Interview sections are blank because they're for higher-level students, I think. As you can see, I actually did better on the gramamr than on the vocabulary! I'm not quite sure how that happened, but then it was a much bigger paper.
I appreciate reading the picture may be difficult. The crucial point to note is that with a pass mark of 80%, I scored a respectable 91% overall (89% vocabulary, 93% grammar). I'm fairly happy with that.
I was allowed to see my papers and check the mistakes I made, but not to keep them. Seems fair enough, presumably it will help avoid answers getting passed around - with the best will in the world, for many people it would be hard to say no if someone asked for a look at your paper, and people won't necessarily realise that answers may be the same.
Unfortunately I didn't think to actually write down the points I need to review. I might ask in the office if they can let me have another look so I can do that.
Disclaimer: advice based on personal experience in September 2014.
Maybe you're a fellow GenkiJACS student getting your visa renewed, maybe you're a tourist, maybe some kind of hilarious bureaucratic mix-up has ensued and you thought you were going to a wedding in France.
So somehow, you've ended up in Busan. Clearly, you want to get out again as soon as possible.* But how?
If you're genuinely trying to get out of Busan, feel free to skip ahead to the actual answer.
Common wisdom directs you to the limousine bus back to the airport. If your case is anything like mine, a travel agent provided helpfully-detailed instructions on reaching your hotel, down to the gate numbers and a description of the bus journey with your stop highlighted and the travel times given. And they won't have mentioned anything about getting back.
It's fairly likely you'll have ended up near Busan Station, either because you stayed in the area or went off somewhere on the underground or train, or a local bus. The main city station is a natural place to choose to get a bus, because those sorts of places have nice prominent stops and information offices to advice you. This is certainly what guided me.
The limousine bus stop at Busan Station is not part of a big multi-ranked bus point, or a nice prominent stop. When the kind lady at Information showed me a map, I eventually tracked it down to a simple metal pole with a slightly uninspiring red sign reading Limousine Bus Gimhae Airport. For reference, this is slightly to the south of the station on the same side of the road, just before the pedestrian crossing. If you come out of the station, it's to the left.
The area in front of the stop is right next to a pedestrian crossing and carries double yellow lines, so naturally the lane is entirely full of parked taxis as far as the eye can see. The street is fairly crowded with signs and trees, and another bus stop is nearby, which means it's very difficult to tell when your bus is coming. The limousine bus doesn't seem to have a number, but announces its destination on the front as usual. However, unless your Korean is excellent, you'll only be able to use this during the brief moment when the sign flickers to English. The bus also moves fairly quickly, so you'll need sharp reflexes (and luck) to identify it.
But don't worry about any of that, because the bus won't actually stop here. It's physically impossible because of all the taxis, and so the bus will sail cheerfully past. It may be that, by stepping between the taxis out into the middle of the road and waving furiously, you could persuade it to stop; I didn't have the nerve, and I'd also assumed that a bus timetabled to stop at a major destination would at least pause for a moment if someone was standing right by the sign. Admittedly, I didn't wave at it or anything, because its rapid approach and my shaky confidence meant I wasn't feeling that bold. I did check with tourist information (again) that I'd been in the right place, though, and she confirmed that it was probably because of the taxis. I didn't notice any particular outrage about this, so possibly there's something about taxis in Korea that I don't get. In any case, don't assume you'll be able to get this bus conveniently. There's only one every half an hour, so when you don't manage to get it, you'll be stuck for a while. Personally, I became sceptical that the next one would stop and was running out of time, so I decided I had more confidence in the underground.
So having failed to get the bus, how to you get to Busan on the underground?
There's a certain amount of noise about it being difficult to get to Gimhae on the underground, suggesting that it's slow and complicated. The subway certainly takes an hour and two changes. On the other hand, the bus takes 50 minutes, I waited 40 minutes to get away from the airport and was unable to get the bus back at all, so I think the underground is still looking good.
The problem you may run into is buying a ticket, because this isn't properly explained anywhere. The machines don't seem to offer the option of picking a destination; instead you have to select your destination line. You want to take the orange line to Seomyeon, the green line to Sasang, and the purple line to the airport. But the purple line, though prominently depicted on the map, isn't one of the available options. You may begin to wonder whether the blue option, which covers the distant blue line, also covers the airport line in some kind of radial zone scheme. It does not.
Information services in the underground consisted of a stray desk in the middle of the passage, looking like something that might be popped down to collect entrance fees at a school fair, where a lady was eating her lunch. She spoke no English and appeared to have no resources that I could point at. Asking about Gimhae got me directed upstairs with the word "bus". So I gave up and went back to the railway information desk and my helpful English-speaking lady.
The secret here, it turns out, is that the purple line that appears prominently on the underground map, is physically connected to the underground, and is talked about as being part of the underground system nevertheless isn't. It's a light rail line that's handled entirely separately. We might legitimately (and with a great deal of heavy-handed sarcasm) question why this is so, but since implementation of public transport is hardly cutting-edge comedy material, let us move on.
You need to buy a ticket to the green line (line 2).
Incidentally, much to my surprise, throughout my journey I found that passengers would force their way into the train as soon as the doors opened, making is very hard for anyone to get off. I was surprised because politeness seemed to be a pretty big deal otherwise. Be prepared for this and disembark boldly.
It's also worth bearing in mind that just because someone is standing with their face two millimetres from the door, that doesn't mean they plan to get off. I'm not sure what it does mean, but again, be prepared to push past or step around them to make sure you escape when necessary.
So this is sort of aimed at other GenkiJACS Fukuoka students who want to stay longer than 3 months. It's difficult getting a visa, so the visa waiver scheme is great for those who can use it. The problem is that you need to renew it around the 3-month mark, and doing this means leaving the country for a bit. The classic scheme is to nip over to Korea for the night.
I spent ten hours since leaving my flat to arriving here. Only 35 minutes of that was spent flying between the two countries. I spent about an hour travelling within Japan, another hour on the bus from Busan airport, and seven hours waiting around. If things had gone to plan, this would have been a mere three hours - slightly more than I spent actually moving anywhere. I can expect the same on the way back. I left early in the morning and will return in mid-evening.
As far as I can make out, this means that the best case is wasting two full days mostly hanging around in airports of surpassing tedium or on transport to and from them, plus additional time making arrangements and checking paperwork, and spending in the neighbourhood of £250, in order to get one piece of paper replaced with an identical piece of paper that you are more or less automatically entitled to anyway. This is an absolutely fantastic use of everyone's time and money. I try to be understanding, but I can't help caring about things like processes and efficiency, and when I think how much better the world would be if you could simply go to an office (a local office, not out at an airport where it's convenient for nobody) and answer the questions and get your permit extended, without the one simple yet vast hoop of "must leave the country" to jump through... at least the notoriously awful-with-visas USA lets you walk across a bridge and back.
I feel slightly mean disliking Busan, but so far 100% of my experience with Busan, and indeed Korea as a whole, has been entirely negative. This is in no way Busan's fault, or anyone's really. I was obliged to come here for no good reason, which never helps, and I have no personal desire to be here. My flight was delayed three hours. The first airport bus refused to let anyone one for reasons nobody understood and left us waiting for another 40 minutes, followed by a tedius 50-minute drive in through a grotty, concrete-ridden industrial suburb of the kind that always infest airports. Because of the typhoon, it's grey and miserable and chucking it down with rain, so even if I had any desire to explore the streets of a city where I don't speak a single word of the language, I wouldn't. I'm going to get soaked as soon as I step out for some food, and have no idea where to find any, because in Korea Google Street View doesn't work in about 90% of streets, so you can't scan the local area for promising eateries.* And I just discovered that a very reasonable law here prevents hotels from offering disposable toothbrushes, but I deliberately didn't bring a toothbrush and toothpaste because the Kumamoto branch of the exact same hotel provided these, and getting toothpaste through airport security is a pain, which means I now need to locate and buy toothpaste and a toothbrush so I can throw it away tomorrow, thereby undermining the whole aim of the law anyway.
*From what I've read, this seems to be for military security. Nobody else explicitly mentions Street View not working, but rather limitations on maps. But there are very clearly massive restrictions on Street view because you simply can't go to most places at all, on multiple attempts over several days.
For anyone else making the trip, I would honestly advise going one of two ways. The first is to plan an actual holiday of a few days in Korea and go somewhere more immediately preposessing, or indeed to a different country altogether, rather than taking the shortest possible trip out of Japan over to Busan. You're going to be travelling for a long time, you might as well get something out of it that you might enjoy.
The alternative I'll suggest would be to make it as short as physically possible. Aim to get a mid-morning flight and to fly back in late afternoon. Don't bother leaving the airport. Bring a packed meal so you aren't reliant on the dismal food selection in airports, and something to do for the ten hours or so you'll likely spend hanging around. This will be a rubbish day, but at least it should only be one day. You'll also save on the time and energy of taking the bus into Busan just in order to sleep and eat there, as well as the money you'd otherwise spend on the hotel and travel.
