Sep
9
Shin Gakki
Filed Under Newspost
Chose promise, chose due. Classes started this week, as planned, with English lecture courses beginning on Monday and Japanese classes on the following day, a.k.a today. All the studying material was easily bought from the on-campus bookstore and having a British lecturer was like a breath of fresh air after having heard two weeks of different American and pseudo-American accents. While interesting, the Japanese Transnational Corporation course also seemed like a lot of work, but that is pure speculation for now.
Something that is already certain, however, is that I will be buried in work for the Japanese courses, although they are only of level 2 out of 7. Somehow I get the feeling it would have done me good to at least open my books since last February. No matter, this is why I wanted to come here so I will just have to prepare myself mentally to a task I haven’t performed since 1997, also sometimes called: studying hard.
ABOKADO-BAAGAA desu
Enough about school, the main mission of Tuesday afternoon was to go buy cell phones for both Henrik and me. My speaking partner had agreed to come help us and she also brought a friend of hers along, so before going to the Softbank store we went to eat lunch at MOS Burger. MOS Burger is like Hesburger except it is called MOS instead of Hes and their hamburgers do not all taste the same. Also Japanese TV is not constantly running ads about “Mosen kastike”. At least I hope so. Not that I watch TV here anyway. After lunch we moved on to the city hall to pick up some documents necessary for opening mobile phone accounts and were soon ready to enter the Softbank office.
A phony afternoon
In theory, my N95 should have worked here because they sell the same phone model (X02NK) with a custom firmware but since the service personnel retorted to my optimistic question with a blunt “no”, twice, I decided to go with the flow and buy a Japanese Keitai. Obviously, the feat of getting a cell phone contract wasn’t a walk in the park as even with two Japanese translators the whole process took close to two hours. The most significant problem seemed to be the amount of names I have. For some reason, three names were one too many to comprehend, and pointing at them repeatedly did not help me decide which one I should drop for the sake of getting a phone. I believe we reached an agreement at some point as all of the names made it onto the final contract. Eventually, the whole ordeal was made worthwhile when I received a talking plush dog to go with my phone. See how happy I am with two phones and a talking dog?
Life is good
-Antti