mokudekiru

Two weeks into my internship in Pittsburgh, I have learned many things. Most notably, Pittsburgh is not a city. Not really even a town. I prefer to refer to it as a village. On multiple occasions, I have met someone randomly at a cafe or on a bus, and then seen them < 24 hours later, in a completely different part of Pittsburgh. I swear this is not normal.

So why the Pittsburgh stuff anyway... this summer, I'm doing research at the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, which means I'll be an expert on Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh by the end of July, as well as learning a thing or two about learning science, misconceptions about decimal arithmetic, and specifically how examples with errors in them might help you learn.

Carnegie Mellon

Kinda looks like this:

The campus is really nice, pretty small, and you can see the Learning Cathedral from, well, everywhere (the tall thing in the background):

The best part of the engineering buildings is that they’re all connected by bridges. The downside is that you never know what floor is ground level – it can be anywhere from floor 1 to 4 depending on what building you’re in, and the bridges aren’t on the same floors either. After 3 weeks though, I’m confident that I could survive without actually going outside in the winter.

The Gates building is the wackiest looking, but it does have a bunch of nice couches and a balcony that I work on sometimes, when my lab’s lack of sunlight is getting to me (get it, there’s a lot of windows in the gates building… ha…)

The bridge to the Gates building is cool…

…especially at night.

(we had a mini photo shoot there last night):

But the CMU campus is not all fun and games. In fact, there is one horrible, horrible thing going on here… a giant, slanted pole in the middle of the main quad area, with people walking up it:

This thing actually creeps me out significantly. Why are these people walking up into the sky?

Any why must these creepy fake people watch them from the ground? Sometimes there’s real people staring up at the pole too, but I assume they’re fake… as was happening when I took this picture… spot the real boy!

ITS2010

So I started work on June 7. My second week of work, however, was effectively lost, because I ended up volunteering for ITS2010, a conference going on at CMU this year about Intelligent Tutoring Systems, which is pretty relevant to the research I’m doing. Also I was interested in participating in a non-reflections|projections conference and seeing how they do things. There’s a bunch of pics from the conference here. The conference basically involved:
- lots of cool talks about intelligent tutors (computerized educational software that is ‘intelligent’ in some way, usually adjusting to the student somehow)
- lots of free cheese & wine, and a constant supply of coffee
- meeting lots of new people from all over the world who research the interesting stuff mentioned above (yeah, my Japanese knowledge DID come in handy!)
- A kickass banquet, with more of the above-mentioned free foods, plus, pretty plants with little aliens in them! (Banquet was at the Phipps Conservatory)

And Jack Mostow singing…

…and us singing with Jack Mostow:

Pittsburgh Wisdom

Here’s what I’ve figured out and noticed so far…

- Public Transportation: The bus system leaves a lot to be desired. There’s not really enough buses to begin with, but the service makes the experience even more unpleasant. Buses don’t stop for you unless you practically jump into the middle of the street and wave at them (and even then, they stop like 30 feet in front of the bus stop), they love to yell at you about you paying at the wrong time (going one direction you pay before the ride, going the other direction, it’s after, god forbid you don’t know which to do). While the occasional bus driver will be extra friendly and help you find your way, asking simple questions to most drivers incites severe rage, such as when we asked about Highland Ave., and the bus driver snapped back at us, “What about it!?” Come on, lady, we’re on a bus, what do you THINK we want to know about it…? or the other day when we got on a bus that had opened its doors, only to be yelled at because apparently it stops and waits before we can get on the bus… let’s just say, I avoid the bus whenever possible, because it just makes me depressed.

- Taxis: The lovely bus system ceases to function after around midnight, which means you’re stuck trying to find a taxi. Yeah, good luck with that. The first weekend here, I was stranded with my friend in Southside, the main go-to for nightlife. At 2AM when everything was closing down, we tried to flag down a cab, but there were very few, and the ones that did drive by were full. Upon calling a cab company, they claimed they wouldn’t send me a cab, because I was in a busy area where you’re supposed to “just flag them down.” We had to specifically find a more remote location to wait in order to call a cab, and even so it took 45 minutes for said cab to show up. I have a feeling this is not the last time I will be stranded somewhere in Pittsburgh.

- Food: Don’t expect too much. Pittsburgh seems to be really good at bar food, especially half-off late-night food (Fuel & Fuddle is excellent, though getting a table for 14 people at 11 PM does prove to be challenging), but if you’re looking for ethnic food (and I am) you’re pretty much out of luck. There’s a thai restaurant in shadyside that’s good but far too expensive, but that’s kind of the only asian restaurant for almost miles… other than the CMU trucks, which are actually pretty decent. More on them another day.

- Weather: Just carry an umbrella with you, all the time. It will be totally sunny, then start pouring for half an hour (right when you need to walk outside, too)…so be warned.

- Bubble tea: A major issue for any new place I live in… and Pittsburgh has by far the worst bubble tea situation out of any place I have ever lived. I have tried four places now and only one has been good enough that I might go back.
Stay away from:
- The kiosk in front of the learning cathedral… not enough boba, flavor was eh.
- Lulu’s: possibly the worst bubble tea I’ve ever tasted. Threw it out halfway through.
- Oriental Express: Probably the best option in walking distance of CMU, but still pretty eh. I liked the Taro, but have heard bad things about fruit flavors (which I never get).
The only good option so far is the Rose Tea Cafe in Squirrel Hill. It had your standard bubble tea that one might expect from every bubble tea establishment… not enough flavors, but I’ll take what I can get.

- Paper towel dispensers: I have never been to a city that has such a hard time with dispensing paper towels in bathrooms. Across the city (including my own dorm, and places at CMU), the dispensers just don’t work, the paper gets stuck inside, or whoever is restocking the paper just completely gives up and there’s just a roll of paper sitting on a countertop, outside of the dispenser. WHY IS THIS SO HARD, PITTSBURGH!?

- Mt. Washington/The Incline: Is definitely worth going to after dark for an awesome view of the city.

Lots more Pittsburgh insights later, DC next week, and more. Peace out.

So when I’m not traveling to random places I’ve never been before, you might have noticed that I write a lot about Japan and jdramas here. Reviews, complaints, venn diagrams, relationship graphs, the whole deal.

But what if you’ve never seen a jdrama before? What is all this jdrama nonsense, and where do you even begin? Well, my friends, you’re in luck. The Ganbatte Times has given me a column all about jdrama! I’m starting with the very basics: the “what,” “why,” and “how” of jdrama, and then I’ll work my way into reviews of shows and recommendations on what you should and could be watching, for any and all levels of Japanese knowledge.

I started out in April with an Intro to Jdrama, which covered:
• What jdrama is and who watches it
• How jdramas are different from western TV shows
• Why jdrama addiction is for everyone

My second article came out this week, and it covered How to Watch Jdrama which covered all the technical details of how to get your hands on jdramas, even if:
• You don’t live in Japan
• You don’t know Japanese
• You don’t like computers
Or, of course, if you DO any of those things.

The Ganbatte Times is a Kyoto-based webzine aimed at (and mostly by) the JET community, so there’s lots of other cool articles about non-jdrama stuff too, if jdrama isn’t your cup of tea. The reviews here aren’t going anywhere, and I’ll always mention here when I have a new article or review up. I might not be quite ready to quit my day job, but I’m totally thrilled about getting this writing gig, so a big thank you to Laurel and all the people at the Ganbatte Times!

Or ESTA, for short. My friend Noam and I are both interning in different Pennsylvania cities this summer, and decided to take the week before her job started to explore the East Coast. Everything went fabulously smoothly, so here’s a recap of what we did and how to get the most out of a short trip to several fabulous and famous cities.

Our general trajectory was:
Chicago → Philly → NYC → Boston → Philly

Noam’s job is in Philly, so we made that our home base. We departed last Tuesday, stayed with friends at UChicago for a night, before heading to Philly to drop our stuff off, and catching a bus to NYC. We didn’t have a car, so all transportation must be public. Things we booked ahead of time:

• The flight from ORD → PHL, obviously
• All bus rides, which was 5 total, because there’s no direct Boston → Philly bus, you have to get off at Penn Station in NYC and switch buses. We used megabus for the first three buses and BoltBus on the way back from Boston to Philly. BoltBus had nice leather seats, and we took earlier buses than we had reserved because we were scared we wouldn’t make the connecting bus, so we were standbys and they always had a spot for us. Megabus was nice because there were two levels and we got a good view of the cities we drove through. Both bus companies had crappy, horrible, yet existing, internet. Both were much cheaper than the Amtrak option.
• Hotel in New York. We stayed at the Wellington which we of course cross-checked with the Bedbug Registry, as bedbugs weren’t really on our list of things to experience in NYC. This hotel was good, though a bit noisy (thin walls, hear people opening/closing doors, etc.) but had a great location, literally one of its doors opens to a subway entrance. Super convenient.
• Tickets to a comedy show for our first night in NYC, at the UCB Theatre which we had heard was good on the internets. It was.

Alright, now onto the stories and the photos!

Wednesday: The Three-City Whirlwind Tour
We woke up in Chicago, and took a 7:15 cab to O’Hare. It took an hour and a half (it would take about half an hour with no traffic). We were very stressed about missing our 9:35 flight, and without a seriously skilled cab driver who was willing to do things like get off the highway and get back on, we would have missed our flight. An evil lady at security who forced Noam to squeeze her rolling-suitcase into the carry-on size limit box didn’t help either, as we had to spend 15 minutes emptying it enough to fit, while everyone else walked by with much larger suitcases. We made our flight with 10 minutes to spare before takeoff.

A very short flight later, we landed in Philly, got no information out of anyone at the airport about transportation to the UPenn campus (the lady kept saying “call them yourself” and I didn’t really feel like getting her to explain who “them” was when she refused to say anything other than that one sentence). So we took a cab to Noam’s apartment, dumped our stuff, and ogled her 22nd story view of Philly:

We then walked down the street for some delicious Indian food and took one of the best pictures I have ever seen:

Got to sit at the front of the top level of the megabus, and saw lots of Philly as we left.

The bus took an extremely long time as we ran into evening rush hour traffic. Got to NYC around 6 PM, dumped our stuff at the hotel, grabbed a snack, and took the subway to our show which started at 8.

UCB Theatre was a pretty small venue, around 100 people in the audience. We had reserved tickets online for two comedy shows in a row, both of which were 5 bucks and very funny. The host of the first show did an icebreaker based around this incredible ad from ediets.com, shown below. From 0:18-0:35 is really the significant part of the video. Then he had the audience recreate the jingle, with a third of the audience singing each of the three lines of “ediets.com / now you got it going on / now you got it going o-on”

The funniest guy was John Mulaney, who writes for SNL, and told us about many things, including how Justin Bieber terrorized him in the hallway once while being the musical guest for SNL, and how he was both ashamed and touched to have the world’s busiest and richest teenager and his crew laugh at him.

At UCB Theatre Noam and I ran into two different friends from high school. Our high school is 800+ miles away from NYC. It also has 300 total students, so counting above and below our grades for the years we were there, we know roughly 540 people who graduated from our high school. Total. This venue had 100 people there, tops. And four of them were from our high school. Insanely small odds. Unfortunately, we hadn’t worked “running into random friends from high school” into the NYC plan, so we didn’t get a chance to hang out with them later, though we received invitations, they would be for when we were back in Philly. Alas.

Thursday: Epic NYC Exploration

So… one day in NYC to fill, unplanned, what do you do?

Step 1: Bagels and Coffee. We wandered northwest-ish from our hotel and found Bagel Stix for generous amounts of cream cheese and lox on bagels, and iced cappuccinos.

Step 2: Central Park Proposal. Brought the bagels with us to have a bagel picnic. On the way to our picnic spot, we passed by a couple, walking on a little dirt path near the street. Right as Noam and I passed by the guy, the guy was down on his knee, and proposed! I was sort of confused as his choice of proposal spot (random dirt path? Not near the road but not away from it either?) or why he didn’t wait until we were more than 1.5 feet away (there was no one else coming after us), but we just rolled with it and watched them hug and kiss and be happy because they’re getting married. Noam’s camera has paparazzi level zoom, so here’s the happy couple:

Step 3: Finish bagels and wander Central Park until you get to the Met. You know, like Gossip Girl. I don’t really understand how Serena and whatever the friend’s name is have tender BFF moments on the steps of the Met, because there were so many friggin’ people. Oh well.

Step 4: Strawberry Fields. Takes you back south through the park.

Step 5: Buy shoes. We passed by an Aldo, my favorite shoe place in the world (actually, we passed by like 6 that day) and both got new shoes at relatively inexpensive prices (for Aldo). When I was trying on my new gladiator sandals (how ever did I go so long without them?!) a girl sat down next to me trying on some other shoes, and complimented the shoes I was trying on (which is odd, it’s not like they were even mine yet… I guess she’s complimenting my taste in shoes? I also felt slightly bad because they were the last pair of that style). Then she decided to kind of sadly complain about how she lost her job two weeks ago and is getting nicer shoes for all the job interviews she was going to. I think if I’d stayed a few more minutes I would have heard her whole life story. So…that was a depressing conversation.

Step 6: LOVE. You just gotta. It’s all you need.

Step 7: Times Square. It’s famous. There weren’t that many people there though. Not really busy, kinda a letdown.

Step 8: The Village, Soho. Went there for walking around, shopping, etc. Had coffee at Think Coffee near NYU. It was getting chilly out and I hadn’t brought a jacket, so we shopped at a few stores in Soho until I found a shirt at UNIQLO! So glad they’re in NYC, and I also bought clothes to stay warm from UNIQLO in Osaka. Good times at UNIQLO, though I think I actually liked the clothes at the NYC one better than the ones in Japan.

Step 9: Rain and Chinatown. It started pouring, so we went to Chinatown and entered the first restaurant we saw, and consumed fish soup and eggplants and were happy. We purchased bread at a bakery that claimed to have read bean in it. The next day we found, tragically, there was no red bean. We were so ripped off.

Step 10: Empire State Building. We thought we may as well see it on our way home, so we got off the subway at the appropriate place, and realized that since we were standing right under the building we couldn’t actually SEE it (you know, skyscrapers are tall). Instead, we did find K-Town, which was friggin’ awesome. And very nice at night (probably 11 PM ish?)

Step 11: Froyo at Pinkberry, and KARAOKE. You just gotta. Thank you, K-Town, for having karaoke. So much Lady Gaga and Katy Perry were sung. Also the karaoke room was friggin’ enormous.

Step 12: Subway back to hotel! And sleep! Job well done!

Friday: NYC → Boston

First, we got breakfast at Radiance Tea where we experienced matcha lattes and mochi. BEST BREAKFAST EVER, and like a 1 minute walk from the hotel.

Then we got on the bus at Penn Station to Boston and suffered a long bus ride. Batia (who we were visiting in Boston) met us, took us to Boston Chinatown while we waited for the bus to Waltham. Bubble tea. Good times. When we arrived, Batia, MPitt and friends were holding a vegetarian BBQ in their backyard. Delicious!

Saturday: Epic Boston Exploration

Walked 13 miles! Saw 3 colleges!
Here is the map of our route

Here’s what we saw:

Newberry Street for shopping, where they had an Espresso!

Noam’s Gnomies, also on Newberry:

Boston Commons & Gardens:

Took the Freedom Trail through downtown to see some famous old stuff:

Batia’s favorite, graveyards!

Went to the water:

Crossed the river to cambridge, visited MIT’s Stata Center since I am really into seeing cool CS buildings around the world.

Went to Harvard Square, where it started to rain, and we ate at a Vietnamese place. Afterwards we explored Harvard and found where Noam used to go to daycare!

Gotta do something with signs.

And then we waited through several buses to get back to Waltham. Creepy middle aged dude on the bus kept asking us what our ‘party plans’ were there. We didn’t answer him, but agreed that we had party plans, they were just exclusive (mainly, excluding him.)

Then, we experienced the awesome that is Eurovision. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a singing-contest among all the countries in Europe, each who send a representative to sing some ridiculous pop song, and then all the countries vote on each other and a winner is selected. Batia says the insanity of Eurovision makes her proud to be an American (we don’t participate). I gotta say, this was one of the more patriotic moments of my life.

The winner, as we found out after like four hours of pure awesome, was Lena from Germany:

Anyway, that was Boston, and the next day we went back from Boston → NYC → Philly and finished unpacking into Noam’s place, and I snagged an empty room from one of her future roommates who hadn’t moved in.

Philly Adventures

The sightseeing Noam and I did in Philly involved checking out Philly history near Independence Hall, etc. We even got these sweet badges from folding our map correctly at the Independence Center. However, this meant we got a ton of extra attention throughout the day as all the tour guides and such would question why we got junior ranger badges (did we deserve them?) and whether we even counted as “junior” as we are clearly not children. We didn’t see any kids with the badges, which probably means we’re just really good at map-folding (well, Noam is… I watched.)

They’re pretty into the Liberty Bell there. Not as much as Ben Franklin though. Apparently he was the man. Noam is also pro-liberty:

The rest of this week, Noam went to work while I became an expert on cafes in the UPenn area. If you need a cafe, I have some pretty strong opinions on: Capogiro Gelato (good!), Lovers & Madmen, and Green Line Cafe (meh!). I wrote yelp reviews for all of them so you can read about my horrible and good experiences if you care.

The reason I had to become such an expert at cafes was that I needed to be at them ALL day while Noam was at work. The security measures at her apartment were kind of insane, and they wouldn’t give a guest card to me, so we had to spend 5 minutes signing me in every time. Bleh. That meant I couldn’t be there during the day, and her roommates’ (once they showed up) 9 PM bedtime and their demands for library-like silence meant that I shouldn’t really be there at night, either. We stayed away from the apartment and galavanted around Philly with a bunch of new and old friends, including eating with Noam’s new REU buddies and such.

After a week of repeat visits to UPenn cafes, Ben Franklin statues, Chinatown, and Lorenzo’s Pizza, I am off to Pittsburgh for a while. Summer is officially rung in.

Oh, and all the other pictures are here as always.

If you’ve ever tried clicking on the “old japanblog” link at the top, you might have noticed that the photos didn’t work, rendering the blog rather worthless. Well, I have good news! I’ve spent the last two days reconstructing the blog and all its photos. It’s also on a blogspot URL for the purposes of keeping it authentic, just how it looked in 2006-7 when I was originally posting to it.

So knock yourself out. Get inside my teenage mind as I adjusted to life as a Japanese schoolgirl, complete with loads of culture shock.

Visit the blog at: http://mojellyfish.blogspot.com/

Highlights include…

Jumping off cliffs in Kyoto:

Asking Oguri Shun to marry me on my 18th birthday:

Pulling a danjiri through mountains to welcome fall in:

The overly crowded and beautiful Kobe Luminarie:

My complete and total obsession with ikanago, the west Kobe delicacy:

Throwing surprise parties for Noriko, culture festivals, and TONS of purikura:

Sakura, Takashi, Osaka, and my first encounter with an ice dog:

The ever-popular purple-jacket boy:

And of course, rapping about tea ceremony:

Enjoy!