In Sweden (again)

I haven't been posting cause I've been in Sweden since the 18th of July. I have a lil less than 2 weeks left now, which is sad, but I think it will be easier to go back to Japan this time since I only have like 7 months left. Also I'm looking forward to playing Pokemon Go in Japan, lol. In Japan I don't have internet on my phone though, so I gotta fix that problem first...

Anyway, this vacation has not been as eventful as the last nor has the weather been as good, but this one is a lot longer so I really feel like I have gotten to spend a lot of time at home which feels good. I've also gotten the chance to see some old friends that I only got to see for like an hour last year. This year we've been hanging out 4 times already, and there will probably be a 5th.

I caught a cold 2 times which sucked, but the first time I had medicine so it didn't get that bad.

We got to come to hear the band our dad is in play, and watch people dance, and eat good food.

My siblings taught me how to play Magic the gathering, but there are still things I don't get yet.

We went to stockholm 3 days in a row (unplanned) while we were down in the more southern parts of Sweden.

I got to see my little cat Mio again!

We went to the hippie festival called "Urkult" again.

etc etc, pretty normal stuff (but the cold was the only bad thing) compared to last year, but it's been fun. Happy I could be here for a longer time than last year.

I really do hope I wont feel too sad when going back but it's hard to leave it all when you get used to being here. It feels like my life in Japan doesn't even exit, cause here it's so far away that it's easy to forget it all. But if I didn't go back I'd be a criminal, never allowed to enter the country again, lolol.

Man I hope my apartment hasn't been robbed...... o.o

The Japanese Language - My likes and dislikes

(pic from google)

One of the reasons as to why I wanted to learn Japanese is because I thought the language was really beautiful, but as you learn a language more and more you'll realize that there are both really cool and somewhat annoying things about it. I've been thinking about my likes and dislikes about Japanese as a language and decided to write them down.

Like - No need to use pronouns! In other languages (though not all ofc) you have to say he/she his/hers and so on to indicate who owns/does something etc. So sometimes you will call people by the wrong pronouns and stuff like that, which some people care about. But in Japanese that wont be a problem. You will basically never hear yourself saying he or she or have someone say that about you and I like that!

Dislike - Limited ways of expressing yourself. In English for example there are so many ways to say so many things and so many words and expressions that do not have an equivalent in Japanese. This becomes really clear when you watch a movie with Japanese subtitles and they say something really funny that just becomes something bland or boring in Japanese. When I watched the Avengers with Japanese subs in the cinema here this became very clear and it kinda sucks.

Like - Kanji! Yep, it's true, kanji has helped me a lot! Every time I hear a word I don't know I try to think of what kanji that word is made up of, and if I can find out the kanji then I can get an idea of what the word means or in fact remember that I know this word and now thanks to the kanji it has been restored in my memory!

Dislike - Kanji! Oh? Yes, kanji is not all fun and games as we all know. I really hate it when I am reading something and there is no furigana and the text is full of kanji I do not know. I can't read when that happens, I can't understand the story and I can't even pronounce the kanji I don't know! Sucks.

Like - Not just a different accent - different words! People in Osaka (for example) use a lot of words that people from Tokyo don't. Wherever you go in Japan it seems like each new prefecture has their own way of talking, kinda like their own language in a way. In Sweden we don't really have this, accents can vary a lot by tone etc, but the words people use are pretty much the same all over.
Osaka dialect:
 Sehen = shinai (normal dialect)
Donaisho = doushiyo
etcetc
                   
Dislike - This is just a small one but I dislike that there is no way of differentiating between for example your grandma on your mothers side and your grandma on your fathers side. This is not possible in English either, which is annoying too. In Swedish we can differentiate between these two, for example grandma on mum's side = mormor, grandma on dad's side = farmor. I wish more languages had this!

Dislike - Two ways to say everything! Thanks to kanji there are two ways of saying everything (you might have heard of kunyomi and onyomi). So "inside the car" can be said as "kuruma no naka" but it can also be said as "sha nai". "After school" can be said as "Gakkou no ato" but also as "Hou ka go. And this happens for almost everything! Which means that you have to learn two versions of everything, something that for example doesn't happen in english or Swedish. There are no two completely different ways of saying "inside the car", right?

These are just some likes/dislikes that I could think about now. Would like to know other peoples likes and dislikes too!

Talking cars and Teletubbie-land in Japan

There is a car that drives around my neighborhood every time I have a day off and sleep in in the morning, and it wakes me up. Not because of the sound of the engine but because the car is equipped with speakers and over and over it is playing the same message: We want to pick up your stuff, even if it's broken!
(Well it's a bit longer than that and by now I think I can almost fully recite it in Japanese).
It is not just this car, the truck that picks up everyones trash always plays a little song, kinda like the ice cream truck, but smellier.

There is another truck, that plays a song sung by children, and I simply cannot make out what they are singing about but when I once spotted the truck it looked like a small gas truck, which only makes it weirder..

In Sweden we do not have any talking cars, and no cars playing music or singing, or big trucks driving by blastering K-pop to promote a new band. But in Japan this is commonplace,
Doesn't matter wether I am at home or at school, there is always a truck around singing in an old mans voice that it's selling grilled sweet potato, or warabimochi icecream.

There are also lots of cars roaming around promoting local politicians, these also usually come around in the mornings and wake me up, as if annoying me would make me want to vote for that person!

In Sweden I cannot see something like this happening (just like the Japanese way of standing outside their shop screaming about discounts would never happen either), these cars are annoying and would not be tolerated.

When I thought about these weird cars my mind also went to another thing - the public announcements (or w.e I should call them) that happen in various places in Japan.
On Zamami, Okinawa, where we went on vacation there was a message every day at five that you could here from speakers from anywhere on the island, telling kids it was time to go home for the evening.
My mum said that it reminded her of the Teletubbies, I guess because there are things in teletubbieland that tell the teletubbies what to do too. But I'm not sure since I don't remember much of the show.

It's not just Zamami, but other places too that have speakers set up to remind kids of things, or remind you of some law that you shouldn't be breaking, etc etc. It's not as common as the cars, but it still happens a lot and just reminds me of how different some things here are compared to Sweden.
How some things can be so very common here, but could never take place there, because it would be seen as rude and intrusive. I'm glad this doesn't exist in Sweden, but I can't say that it's not pretty entertaining from time to time!

And if not that, then maybe it might atleast be a good alarm clock to some people!

Pic from google of a ishiyaki-imo truck

Egg pizza in Japan

I think it was yesterday that I walked through Tenjinbashisuji shoutengai shopping street on my way home from school and saw a pizza (you know a fake one that looks totally real) on a pedestal outside a random restaurant. From afar I watched it, suddenly craving pizza, but as I got closer I saw that it had a boiled egg on top, and the yellow goo from the inside was pouring out onto the pizza. Appalled I had to look away and I no longer felt like eating pizza. And just as a side note: they love to put eggs on their hamburgers here, I have never seen that in Sweden and I do not feel like eating that either.

This is not the first time I have experienced Japans strange pizza, I have heard J-vloggers on youtube talk about how Japan can not do pizza but apart from this egg instance I have to disagree. I like the pizza here!

So a lot of people have complained about corn on pizzas here, and yes, there is corn on pretty much every pizza ever here but I don't mind that. It tastes good.

There is also pizza with potatoes on them, which I had never seen before, but turns out it wasn't bad.

Once I got invited to an Italian restaurant and got to eat lots of great pizza - but not Italian pizza, because among these pizzas were pizzas with tarako sauce (fish egg sauce) and mayonnaise...

Asparagus, zucchini, eggplant etc are also something I have never seen on a pizza and therefore I don't know if either is a normal topping in other countries, but it is pretty normal in Japan and it tastes nice!

In Sweden there are a lot of pizza places but not any pizza chains like what they have in Japan (PizzaLa, Domino's, etc) which sucks for me because I especially love Domino's pizza. In Sweden I hate pizza, it is just not good at all (I'm probably alone on this tho), it has a very home made feel which I don't like in this case (do I sound like a crazy person already?). So in Sweden I would rather eat frozen pizza that's been shipped in from who knows where. In Japan I don't have to buy frozen pizza because the ones from pizza chains like domino's deliver a pizza that must have come from a machine rather than a flawed human being.

Okey, I realize I am pretty bad at explaining the appeal of pizzas here but just trust me, they are good!

Ever the rainy season, and finally got my ticket!

I always forget when the rain period in Japan takes places when someone asks me, but now I am reminded again that it is in June. It doesn't rain every day, some days are sunny even, but if you compare the weekly forecast during the rainy season to when it's not the rainy season you can definitely see a clear difference.
Right now the whole week promises to be cloudy. I don't mind that at all, since it's already hot enough here without the sun.

I have been busy drawing on my manga every day now because I want to finish it before the summer holidays. We actually don't have to hand it in until the 23 of September, but I do not feel like working on it during the holiday since I will be going back to Sweden, and after the holiday I have to start working on a new manga anyway.

While I've been working I have been watching various TV series and now I'm about to finish watching the first season of Arrow (yeah, I'm late!). So my life lately extends to watching TV series on my laptop while drawing manga. Also tried to cut down my food expenses to afford piano lessons so now I am eating dry chicken with dry potatoes or rice almost every day!
Maybe future me can understand why I haven't been able to come up with any interesting blog posts, lol.

But even though nothing interesting is going on right now I am not feeling down! I feel a lot better than I did before when I was still homesick.

Oh, and I finally bought my ticket home for a big sum of money!! But it did not look like the price was going down so I just got the one that looked the best, but wasn't THAT expensive.
So it seems like unless you buy your ticket around six months before departure, it's going to be more expensive. Atleast if you are going to travel during the summer holidays in Japan.

I am guessing it's because people are off from work/school and Japan is friggin hot so they want to travel somewhere not as hot - like Sweden!

Last year when I went back my mum found a ticket for around 83.000 yen, but this time we just had to be happy for a ticket for 115.000 yen because we were out too late..

But this time I am flying with Turkish Airlines, which is going to be a new experience that I hope wont be all too tiring (cuz I gotta fly for forever and then take the train or something for half forever to get to where my parents live in Sweden!).

Anyway, just remember to get your tickets in time, and let the old Japanese people at the same transit as you give you snacks and praise for your Japanese skills (oh it happened)!

Donkeys in Japan

For some reason there seem to be a lot of different stores in Japan that include the word "donkey" in their name.
A few days ago I walked past "Snack Donkey", where I am guessing they sell snacks, but it was in the red light district so I didn't enter, lol. I've already walked by "Candy Box" in the red light district hoping they were selling candy. Turns out they were not..

Also there is a very strange chain restaurant here called "Bikkuri Donkey" ("Surprised Donkey") which has nothing to do with donkeys! Neither the interior nor the food is donkey related. How the heck did they come up with this name?
And by the way, Bikkuri Donkey's restaurants look friggin scary, inside and out, I have nooo idea who came up with this concept and why.

Not my pic but I know where this Bikkuri Donkey is, I've seen this scary building irl lol

In Japan there is also of course a store called Donkihote which might sound like it has the word donkey in it but  really it's from the word/name/idk anymore Don Quijote. No idea why they picked that name either..
But people usually just call the store Donki, which sounds like donkey..

Anyway, apart from the 2 mentioned above there have been so many more instances where I have seen stores with the word "donkey" in it and it is just plain weird. Why donkey? Why?

Why the sudden lack of interest?

I haven't really been feeling like doing schoolwork lately, though I guess no one really ever does, eh?
But I realized my lack of interest probably lies in a couple of things - first being that I no longer want to work with manga.

gasp!

When I came to Japan I really did not know anything about manga. I have always drawn manga characters ever since reading my first manga, but I never really knew how the acutal comic was made.

I didn't know that you use these pens you dip in ink, and I had no idea what tones were! It was all new to me.
Another thing I didn't know was that people who want to work with manga all move to Tokyo (which seems like common knowledge among Japanese people)! I don't want to move to Tokyo, dude!

Also, I've heard more and more stories from teachers working as manga assistants, how it is the worst job possible and a really low point in their lives. But if you want to eventually work with your own manga you need to first work as an assistant, and if you want to be an assistant you need to be good at things such as: tones, drawing backgrounds (buildings etc), and I suck at those things!

It's not like I am good at drawing characters either, one of my new teachers told me that I should get better at drawing with the fountain pen, but what the heck, I can't get better just like that even if you tell me! It takes time, all I can do is keep trying.

If I suck at all things assistants need to do, I will not be able to have that work. Probably better if I didn't get it though, cause I know how hard it would be. If it were Sweden it would be fine, but in Japan it's just too crazy and demanding for me.

So basically I've given up on my "dreams" of working with manga, and have put it aside as a hobby like it always has been. The internet is where my manga will be seen, at sites like DA etc.

Apart from this I have also finally found a university program (that also happens to be at my favorite uni) I feel really excited about. I never really knew what I wanted to do, but now I feel pretty sure, and I wish I could enter this program as soon as possible.

With a new goal in sight my will to focus on manga is not that strong. But there is nothing I can do, I've got another year left and I would never forgive myself if I gave up just because I don't want to work with it anymore.

It's hard sometimes, and I forget to be thankful for this opportunity. But if I had never gotten here I probably would never find another goal, because I desperately wanted to get here. So finally I have come to the point where I've moved on from "JAPAN JAPAN JAPAN!" to finding other things I want to do and experience, and that too is a great thing! Gotta keep on fighting because I know that these 2 years here have gone by sooo fast, and so will this last year even though it doesn't feel like it right now.

I miss Sweden, and I know there are so many things I will miss about Japan, Osaka, my friends here, my apartment, my school, my old school etc etc etc. I shouldn't complain, should probably go watch Hetalia instead.. lol

One last hetalia pic