大きい『Big』 Update! [UPDATED PICTURE]

Alrighty, let's see. I know it's been pretty much forever since this blog has received any update at all, so let's give it a go now. I have a couple hours before work this time, which coincidentally is my last night before I return in July, so this one has the potential to be a monster of an update. Basically I think I'm just going to ramble on about how things are going and some Japan updates, including where I'll be residing, class schedule, etc. If all goes well there will be pictures of the building I am staying in, but we'll see!

First of all, I can't seem to make the "World Clock" gadget work on my blog, so I took that off, so you're just going to have to go to a site to display it. Being the kind person that I am I have taken the liberty of finding a site to display everything you'd probably want to know about where I am. So, click THIS LINK to find some info such as the time, weather, and moon conditions of more-or-less where I'll be the next 4 months.

Alright, so what have I been up to you ask? Or even if you didn't ask, I'm going to tell you! I have continued working 4 - 5 nights a week at a local McDonald's, which, judge as you will, is not all that bad of a job. Surely not something I'd want to make a life career out of, but it's fun enough to do for breaks and summers. A lot of the people there are real nice to work with, and being friends with the managers is always a good thing as well. I work shifts like 7:00 PM to Closing, which gets out anywhere from 12:30 AM to 2:00 AM. Not like I go to bed before 4:30 AM anyway. Which, I might want to stop, haha. But yeah, I work here most nights.

On days I don't work I visit my girlfriend or do random things such as read, play videogames, watch anime, or as of late, study Japanese. My favorite thing out of all these is of course visit Marissa, it's been so nice not going to University of Rochester this semester and being able to visit her more often. It's going to be hard being apart from her for so long, but we're not going to let it separate us. We've been together for nearly 3 years and we are very dedicated to eachother, so this won't split us. I love her to death and more than anything in the entire world.

Yesterday concluded, for the most part, my shopping for necessities for Japan. I ordered luggage from Cabela's and that came and is real nice. I also ordered a pocket electronic English <--> Japanese dictionary, which is real nice. It was a bit pricy, but I think the use of it will pay off for it. And also, I'm a gadget nut, so I don't regret spending a few hundred on something that I think is neat and practical.

So let's see. May as well go into where I'll be staying as this is breaking news even for me. I'm going to take a stab at explaining this the easiest way possible, as I'm sure that most of you are not familiar with the formalities of Japanese addresses. I'm not going to list the building in this blog because I don't know if it's a good idea to or not to be honest, haha, but the city and prefecture and whatnot are surely fine. First of all, my address to the common American would be this: Baraki, Ichikawa-shi, Chiba. If you want to know the Postal Code and the building number you're going to have to email me, because I think that web-crawlers or bots that scan and send junk mail may target things that have numbers, and well, I don't need that happening. But for those of you who are interested, my Japanese location is: 千葉県市川市原木.

To break it down, if anyone is interested, is as follows. The prefecture is Chiba, which is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. If you're not familiar with what a prefecture is, think of it as a boundary, almost like a State in the USA, but not quite. Anyway, here's a map of all of them :
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As you can see, I live right next to Tokyo, and to be honest, a lot of the stuff is actually in Chiba and not Tokyo. The program name is IES Tokyo but I imagine it's like that because more people would be attracted to how close it is to Tokyo than Chiba because clearly more people have heard of Tokyo before. Anyway, there you have it.

Ah yes, continuing breaking it down. Ichikawa-shi means Ichikawa City, as "shi" means city. Ichikawa literally breaks down to mean "One River", although it is my understanding that there isn't a significant river that it gets it's name from. If you want to learn more about the city, info can be found at the City of Ichikawa website, feel free to read up on it. It looks like a very nice city with some Shrines and other various things to see. I'm excited at least! The last part, Baraki, is the most specific location, like a "ward" of sorts.

Alrighty, what else can I get in. Oh yeah, the place I'm living is a men's dormitory. At this point I was given only the address, so I don't know what kind of room I'll be staying in, whether it's a single or a double or something like that. I would also imagine that it will be full of people of all races as the building is absolutely huge. I found it on Google Maps - Street View, I'll post a picture of it below. Courtesy of Google Maps.




You can walk around Google Maps by clicking street view with the info I've told you, and you can use the info in the email I will send to you to find this exact building and walk around it and stuff. Technology is pretty neat these days with things like that.

Well, once again I seem to have found myself out of time, although admittedly an good h our of the time I thought I'd have to write this was used talking to a friend in Rochester who is also going to Japan in a month or so, and also to my girlfriend. There were a couple other things that I was going to look up, like Beaches and attractions that will be near me, but due to lack of time at this moment I may have to put it off. I'm going to be kinda busy packing and whatnot the next few days, but I'll try to look into it.

And like I said before, should you be interested, email me at damian.larue@rochester.edu and I'll send you more info on where I am and a phone number, although I don't think it's to my room, just the building. I'm going to be using Skype for talking to people in the USA, so if you make a Skype account I can keep in contact, either video calls, voice calls, or instant messaging.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

~ Damian ~