I miss...

It’s been almost 1 month since I’ve been here and I was surprised that I don’t miss a lot of things here. Or it was just in the beginning….

The fact is that if you can find the things you like on the new place, you can leave almost everywhere! It’s not necessary to be other country. Sometimes even moving to other city is too bad. Actually by now I feel great in Japan. The people I met here are more than friendly and because I met A LOT of during the AIESEC activities, I know a lot of people and with some of them I made I think good friendship.

So I don’t miss friendship.

I told you that I’m living in a small rural town now called Hitachinaka-shi in Ibaraki-ken. Yes, it has something with the company HITACHI, Ltd. almost all Hitachi’s factories and laboratories and other offices are located in Ibaraki. And Hitachinaka is not the only city with ‘Hitachi’ name. There is also Hitachi city, Hitachiomiya, Hitachiota. I also read that Ibaraki-ken’s former name was Hitachi-ken (or something like this, and may be that is why Hitachi company is named Hitachi). So I was talking about some things I miss:

I don’t miss the big city (I refer to Sofia or Tokyo)

At least I don’t miss them all the time. I still haven’t experienced the traffic in Tokyo metro during the rush hour. We all saw these videos showing the employees of the station pulling people in the train so the doors can close. Unbelievable but true! I used to live in small town in Bulgaria too – Haskovo. I also enjoyed the life there. You can go wherever you want by walking. Here you still need a bicycle but it’s again peaceful and not crowded. Sometimes you can hardly meet someone on the street. Only cars are passing.

BUT I MISS SOME THINGS!

I missed my dance classes and my physical activities….
… Piano-bar ‘Yesterday’ and the karaoke there…
… Coming back home late from the usual (salsa) party night…

THINGS, like these.

I miss my room and I always feel nostalgic when I talk with my mom and I see my room. I also miss my family but it feels like when I was in Haskovo, so by now I’m not home sick. Still I think that after couple of months it would be different….

I miss Lily’s English lessons and her warm hugs.
I miss the fan-grilling chatting with Dora about ‘Oguri-sama’ and other similar things.
I miss the girls talks with the cuties from the SISTERhood – Irja and Siana and of course Teddy, our 4th Grace!!!!
I miss the KINKIs – our crazy parties and dances and chatting and cooking.
I miss TOH’s chatting about DDR strategies….
I miss kouhai’s ‘famozno govorene’ (notorious speaking, OK I can’ translate it!!! It doesn’t sound the same in English – famozen?!?!?!?!).
I miss Kira and our psychological chats. And of course I MISS HER!!!
Also Kagome, Rikae, chibi-bakite. Hippy with ‘a whole village in his head’.

I miss Tsvety’s friendship and nice smile.

OK I miss chatting, drooling and fan-girlling about men a lot, but still Irja sends me some e-mail that throw me down on the ground laughing and in the end my stomach aches!!! So much laugh!!! But I think I found someone to talk about such things – again dorama addicted girl who is also a trainee but in Hitachi’s Yokohama office. Her name is Thanh and I just met her few days ago during Hanami. She is really cute and it seems we have similar interests. I also met some party people with whom I hope to go at some clubs and PARTY, PARTY, PARTY and DANCE, DANCE, DANCE! And in the end I realized that little by little there aren’t that much things that I cannot find here. Of course I can’t take people with me, my Bulgarian friends this is why I said THINGS. And if you have them, you can live everywhere. Of course the climate is also essential. By now the climate here is not that different from the Bulgarian. The spring is just the same but as I know the summer is very humid so I think it will be a little bit different.

But in the end on my why home from the Hanami at Tokyo Sta. Tatsuya and me went to eat something. And in this shop was so small and quiet and some nice J-pop was playing and we were eating kare-rice (Japanese invented dish with Indian curry and rice). And in the end we decided to have a dessert and you know what we ate? Ice cream from Hokkaido (where he was born) and the taste was the same as ours sold during the summer everywhere in the cities. The very cheap machine made ice creams. Oh, my GOD! It brought be back in the hot summer days in Bulgaria! In the end I realized that if I can eat such ice creams here it can’t be that bad. Really…

Writing

I think I will change my handwriting here. It’s not that I’m writing bad or ugly but here I already had some problems with the way I’m writing numbers. Like in Japan they don’t write numbers or English alphabet hand-written (manuscript or whatever the word in English is). They just know the print letters so you all know there are several different ways of writing letters and numbers, but here they use the print letters/numbers so I will have to change my hand writing if I want others to understand what I mean. For example 1 is only one strike and 9 is also different. I will try to write them and show you the slight different, which is very essential here.
Ira (my friend in Korea) told me that Europeans there had the same problem and she already changed the way she writes some of the numbers. When you see them you will notice that they aren’t different form our way of writing numbers, but the problem here is that they are using only the printed-like way and they don’t understand well if you are writhing some other way. Like in Bulgaria (and I think everywhere in the world) we have I think at least 4 ways to write ‘four’, couple of ways for ‘one’, ‘eight’, ‘seven’? Actually their way of writing numbers is very close to the one the engineer are using in their engineering drawings. So it’s good that I learned some engineering drawing and school and I know how to write them… Oh, my! Of course my boss new that the ‘Europeans’ are writing different way so he understood but it’s better to learn this way. At least when I’m used to it I won’t have problems when I get back in Bulgaria.

And what about writhing without listing your hand? Unbelievable! They still write the print letters. BUT I WON’T CHANGE THIS! I was surprised when I read Toshi’s first postcards and then Tatsuya and then here. No manuscript English writing. And you know, when I was in elementary school they forced us to write like this – manuscript writing, no print letters. I think most of us still remember their classes of calligraphy (krasnopis) and these notebooks… At least I remember them.


Here are the numbers like one of my colleagues wrote them and almost everyone here are writing them the same way. No difference...

FOOD AND SHOPS

The shops - here everything is in Japanese, you can’t even imagine!!! Coming here without knowing Japanese – you cannot buy anything in the grocery or in other shop. You know the labels in Bulgaria are always written in several languages but here – only in Japanese!!! Not even a single one in English! So actually it is very difficult to buy food in shops or something else. At least it was written shampoo and conditioner in English so I could buy some! I feel lucky I can read the katakana and some Japanese too so I can find what I need. Like ボヂワッシュ(bodiwasshu) is body-wash or shower gel. YEY, I bought one. But it was so funny when I was looking for soap. Of course I didn’t go by myself in the shops here at least the first couple of times. So I just had to say what I needed and they got me to the stand. But it’s always funnier when I’m by myself. In the food shop I spent more than 1 hour choosing what to buy and it the end I didn’t see cornflakes…. anywhere! Of course just before going out I saw some. I told you I have some meals in the dormitory right? But actually after the first 2 weeks I don’t like them so much and decided that I have to save some money and I will buy some food like yogurt and cornflakes and it’s cheaper. The food there isn’t expensive though but when I buy a box of cornflakes it’s 300 yen (3 USD) and I can eat it every morning for at least 4-5 days. For example the breakfast in dormitory is 288 Yen and I’m just TIRED of eating rice, you know? So this week was very refreshing – I had cornflakes in the mornings with some milk, sandwich and salad for dinner/lunch and of course I bought a lot of instant ramen and soba (noodles). So I will survive! When I’m talking about the food I will mention that here they ARE NOT USING THE KNIFE while eating. They use spoon and fork but knife? No!!! And when I told this to my mom she told me that my father wouldn’t survive there because he wants his knife even when he eats soup, you know? And one day I had some stake (bought from the supermarket previous day) and I used knife… in the end someone asked me where did I have this knife, may be brought it from Bulgaria? It was funny because they aren’t using them while eating so I think that they haven’t even noticed that there are some in the shops. Of course they are using some for cooking but not for eating. OMG! Anyways, I’m very good with chopsticks so you don’t have to worry.

Which reminds me to show you this - my obento set (lunch box)! I bought it from 百円(hyaku en) shop. The equivalent of Bulgarian 1 lev shop. So cute things! I will definitely bring them in Bulgaria.

And also this:




I licked my chops (бях му се наточила на това, облизвах си пръстите) to eat this sushi last week and today I bought it for the good work I did during this days. Yummy!!!

OK let’s end with the food topic