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!
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.
It’s been three years, I think this story deserves to be told by now.
It was April 2007. I had been studying abroad in Japan for 8 months now. I had lived with several host families, but unfortunately, this fourth and final family was a little bit full of crazy. Host mom had her own physical and mental issues, and in general just had a stick up her ass about, well, everything. She was hyper-obsessed with a fear of me doing something wrong and getting her (or worse, her daughter, who wasn’t even in the country at the time) in trouble. So I would get reprimanded for many horrible things I did, such as using Kansai-ben (the dialect of the area I had lived in for the past 8 months) instead of standard Japanese (not offensive language, mind you, just the dialect, typical conversation, the same way she and everyone else in a 50 mile radius spoke).
Adding onto whatever fundamental issues my host mom and I had with each other, the house did not have internet that I could reliably use, which became a point of contention. For quick things I would borrow their computer, but as my laptop would not connect, I would often go to downtown Kobe (Sannomiya) and sit in a cafe with wifi to blog, contact my family, etc.
I always sensed my host mom had issues with this activity, mostly because a) she would say strange things when I left the house, such as “it’s springtime, so all the perverts are coming out this time of year!” (I guess they hibernate like bears?) and b) I found out she was notifying my school administration I was doing this horrible thing. (It wasn’t even an internet cafe… it was a cafe with wireless!) Springtime, the season for perverts in Japan
If you’re wondering why the high school would even care… let’s just say it was a pretty ritzy private all girls’ school with its own extensive set of rules including:
• No going out in your uniform to any store after school (to prevent you from misbehaving and giving the school a bad rap)
• No going to karaoke EVER (one of the most common pastimes for middle schoolers and high schoolers in Japan, and clearly the cause of a lot of social disruption in Japan)
• No net-cafes either, apparently
• A slew of things that have to do with hair accessories (No wearing hair accessories that were not black hairties) that aren’t really relevant here
• No printing things at school (never really figured this one out. Not a single page, ever.)
Some of these rules are typical for Japan, some of these rules are excessive, even for Japan. I knew something was up when I confronted host mom about reporting my wifi-related-activities to the school and she got defensive and accused me of engaging in enjo kousai (often translated as “compensated dating” or “schoolgirl prostitution”) since that’s the main thing that apparently goes on at net-cafes. The infamous cafe where most of my illicit behavior occurred
So things were a little fishy, but generally going fine.
Until April 17th, when I awoke to find an email from my Japanese teacher in America stating that there were apparently some issues with my host family and they were very angry at me for breaking the rules AND for what I had written on my blog.
What?? Angry? No one ever told me… and what about my blog now?
It turns out that a couple of posts I had written doing some mild complaining about things like the lack of internet had gotten around, particularly back to America, where host family’s older daughter was studying. Some of her friends decided to tell my host family about it, and intentionally skew it to sound worse than it actually was.
So now I was left with no choice but to confront the issue, or risk being thrown out of Japan a month early.
What ensued was a lengthy crying-session by my host mom about how much I had hurt her with my activities and my blog, and the allegation that all this stress I had put them under forced her not to eat for a week (she never ate–how was I supposed to know this time was my fault?) I really had to ask, what words were exactly that hurtful?
Completely seriously, she says, “You use some really bad language on there. I heard it says the word ‘pissed’… now, I don’t speak English, so I don’t know what that word means, but I hear it’s a vulgar term for PEE!!”
This was the moment when I realized all was lost. This miscommunication was never ever to be solved, no matter how many times I told her that pissed=annoyed/angry. Instead, I apologized profusely, and put a password on my blog.
Things simmer down for a couple of awkward weeks with the host fam. Until one day at school, where I get pulled out of class, taken to the library, and the teachers in charge of exchange students sit me down at a computer and tell me to delete my blog. Now.
??!?!
Apparently, having a password on it makes it LOOK like I have something to hide, and people will be curious about it, because that’s human nature. Thus, the blog must be deleted. The school also made up a new rule about blogs and how students can’t make any that talk about people or have pictures that are “too big” or “too clear”.
After that blew over (moving my blog to a slightly different address seemed to do the trick), my host family decided to notify me they wouldn’t be hosting me after the next week. I had 3 weeks left in Japan. Host mom seemed to get a kick out of telling me I would probably be homeless for the last two weeks of my exchange. To her dismay, I emailed a previous host mom, and in under 5 minutes, I had a futon waiting for me. So much for me being the scum exchange student of the universe.
Sometimes I felt rebellious enough to take my indoor school shoes out on the town
So I’m not sure what the take-home message is here… probably the following:
1) Living with host families sucks sometimes.
2) It’s better to have either your host family or your school on your side. When they both gang up on you, you’d better comply or your days are numbered. Also, pay attention to the subtlest clues that something strange is afoot, since neither party may mention that you’re in trouble.
3) Perverts come out in the spring, cafes are for prostitution, and pissed always means pee.
Or not so easily – we spent the first day of our trip dealing with car trouble, and returned back to where we started (see Dave’s blog for details). On day two, our new plan worked and we made it all the way across the border and to Niagra Falls.
Lesson 1: Niagra Falls in March is a GOOD IDEA
$115 gets you a 42nd story suite overlooking the falls. We did not have to actually go visit the falls, which is nice, because it was cold.
On day 3 of trying to get to Toronto, we got up and left Niagra Falls, drove another 1.5 hours away or so and finally reached our destination!
After navigating the numerous one-way streets of downtown, we finally found our hotel, the Strathcona which had a great location (right in the middle of downtown) and sadly no parking. We did manage to scam our way into free parking though, by finding a parking lot where they had a flat overnight rate but no ticket or any marking on the car, and then leaving it there for 3 days without leaving the parking lot. 1 day’s parking cost for 3 days (and it was like 20 bucks, so it’s pretty significant savings here!)
One other essential item the hotel did not provide was free internet. We looked for a coffee shop, and got extremely annoyed at the sketchy internet connection at Second Cup, so we paid for one day of internet and laid out a game plan, using the map. Having this map was really helpful, and it highlights kinda the “important” neighborhoods in the different colors and explains them. Yes, Gaybourhood is the one in pink.
Tuesday Adventures
1) Headed for Yonge, the downtown shopping district (in yellow on the map). Checked out some record stores and such.
2) Went to the World’s Biggest Bookstore which was sorta big, but really not all THAT big. There was a smaller bookstore right next to it.
3) Took the subway west to Koreatown which might be my favorite place in Toronto. We went to a restaurant called “Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu” and YOU ALL SHOULD GO THERE TOO. Look at our glorious feast. SO DELICIOUS!!!
Wednesday Adventures
This is the day we walked way too much.
We started by walking east to the St. Lawrence Market, where we found wonderful baked goods and tea to eat and drink for breakfast (my first scone consumed in the country of Canada).
Then we started walking farther east to explore the less city-like parts of the city and eventually arrive at Pizza Pide, a Turkish pizza (and some lahmacun) place.
Area near the hotel
The CN tower is visible pretty much anywhere
My delicious feta/spinach noms.
We took a streetcar west, passed through little Italy but did not stop, and walked south until we were in the Queen Street West neighborhood. It was artsy and we stopped by the very small Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.
Afterwards, we needed to regroup a bit and get some internetting done. Due to our horrible experience at Second Cup, we realized a bit more research needed to happen before choosing a cafe to visit. Luckily, blogTO had an article about the best cafes with free wifi. We went to the White Squirrel, which was just about the size of a living room, but somehow reminded me of the Dolores Park Cafe in San Francisco (there was also a park near this one, and something about the layout of the cafe… I dunno.)
Queen West as a neighborhood was pretty interesting. It had a lot of clothing stores and kind of a wilder bunch than most of the other parts of Toronto we’d walked through. The street itself sort of reminded me of being in downtown Santa Cruz. CRAZY.
On the way home, we hit up The Beer Store to get Dave’s precious Labatt 50. The important thing to know about The Beer Store is that when you walk in, there is NO BEER. There is an empty room, and a menu on the wall of beers, quantities, and prices. You walk up to a guy behind the counter and tell him what you want, and he brings it to you. Based on the signs around the store, they have a pretty serious recycle policy too, when you bring back empty beers. Oh yeah, and The Beer Store is a chain. We saw like 50 of them in the week we were there.
The fruits of Dave’s Beer Store adventure
Later that evening, we hit up Chinatown for some noms, and went to Bread and Circus, a bar with a stage, and a stand-up comedy group was performing that night. Small place, pretty cozy, hilarious show. blogTO strikes again at giving us a good suggestion (downside: now I want a blogTO website for every city in the entire world).
Thursday Adventures
Today was the day to visit the University of Toronto. First we went to The Dark Horse Espresso Bar in Chinatown, where you needed a cell phone to get texted a password (and we didn’t have our phones with us) so that didn’t work out so well. Next the Kensington Market, and then walking up to the University.
Lots of little Hogwarts-like areas too. But the best part was the Computer Science building, which blows Siebel Center out of the water:
Very magical.
Next was the Shoe Museum (this is like the equivalent of the beer store for me), walking through Gaybourhood, and chilling out in the hotel again in the evening, stealing internets from our paying neighbors.
And that, my friends, was Toronto.
On Friday we packed up, headed out, and stopped at a bagel place in Mississauga on the 10-hour drive home. Ahhh bagels.
Overall Impressions
- The weather: was no worse than the midwest. Toronto is a perfectly acceptable spring break destination
- The Europe: You definitely felt the French influence. Most cafes and bakeries were run by French people. This could help explain why there was so much good pastry in Toronto.
- The City: Toronto is kind of like one of those cities you see in movies: skyscrapers, parks, businessmen walking around, lots of people from different ethnic groups who all appear to be socioeconomically similar, and the appearance that nothing bad EVER HAPPENS. It was clean, there were very few homeless people, and even the worst parts of the city were not at all frightening.
- The transportation: Toronto had excellent (albeit slightly expensive) public transportation. We wanted to see a lot of things by foot so we rarely used it, but by using the subway and the streetcars, we could get across the city pretty quickly. The subway was clean and nice and reminded me of a less high-tech (PHYSICAL TOKENS! PHYSICAL TURNSTILES! WHAT IS THIS!?), less crowded version of subways in Japan. One of the best subway pictures I have ever taken
- The coffee lids: This is my main complaint about Canada. Every lid I encountered was flat and the tab wouldn’t stay down. Here is some other guy’s rant on the same issue. Come on people!!
- The fashion: NO ONE IN TORONTO WAS WEARING PANTS. They all had those stupid leggings. I sent these pics to UIUCNoPants. The no-pants epidemic definitely crosses international borders:
In short, I would totally live there, and just hope they figure out that whole fashion and coffee-lid thing beforehand.
Also, I too, like Canadians, love to eat the Internet for breakfast:
