Ballon festivals, dick shrines catherine and MvC3

    Finally I get to do some recent talk, first of all I finished the japanese course I had assigned, according to the teacher I am pretty damn good when talking, but my writing skills are subpar if you compare them to how much I can speak, second to that comes my trip to the Sapporo snow festival in Hokkaido. I wasn't too impressed by the snow sculptures, but I liked the city overall, cold as hell, but still an enjoyable place in my opinion, getting to the Northern island was a real challenge, 18 hours on a ferry... most people puked, I have some experience sailing so I managed to be ok for most of it, watched some lame Hugh Grant movie in japanese(the one with horse jessica parker), felt bad because I was focusing on it to practice japanese. After returning from sapporo there was a small break from the laboratory... meanwhile a low stakes poker tournament happened in the dorms(really low with, 1yen, 5 yen and 10 yen coins as chips) I did pretty well since it was like the 4th time I played Texas Hold 'Em.


     Also it is the time this blog was born to keep things up to date with more detail, the upcoming months ought to be better in most aspects, writings, details, entertainment, for example now I can say things like this.

    It was totally worth it to buy MvC3 near release date just to play with Lace & Taco, the fact that it also ended up being lag-less is one of the most gratifying surprises ever.

    Today at the seminar since we didn't see each other for a couple of weeks, we all ended up travelling to different spots in japan, we all had omiyage, funny scene though, in one of the instances, I was the only one to receive omiyage from a certain person. This weekend the plan is to head to a balloon festival and next week is the ski trip for international students.

     Catherine is the most interesting game I have played on the PS3 so far....

Hot communication is the top of cool.

Hi everybody!

     For starters, I think introductions are in order, I am an exchange student that hails from Venezuela and is currently in Japan for a thesis. This blog will basically just keep track of everything that happens in Nagaoka (where I reside) and the rest of the places I end up visiting during my stay. I have been here for a couple of months so this first entry will be mostly catching up and the eventually this blog will become more episodic, so I expect this first post to be longer than the ones after.

    September: 

        My first month in Japan, overall it was pretty bland all I did was hop from train to train to reach Nagaoka in my first day and after that it was just endless introductions day after day, I moved in to the dorms and well also picked my research topic, only thing memorable I would say is when my tutor introduced me to one of the girls that is also in my lab just say 「リーさん男が大好き」she did seem pretty surprised about that "introductory" comment out of nowhere, my tutor also seemed like a pretty nice guy and he isn't so "japanese" considering he also did exchange in the united states for a bit so he always managed to break the ice between me and most japanese he introduced... by making comments like that one.

The one good memory of that month was playing softball with my lab at Hard-Off-Eco-Stadium in Niigata

   I think that closes September pretty well.


October:

　This month I guess was an improvement over the one before, I settled down, met lots of people from the lab, but since this is mostly a summary I will wrap things up saying the things that happened: our Halloween/birthday party mash up.

     At the dorms for international students during this time, we used to have a lot of barbecue parties at the lobby, it all ended up mostly in drunken antics, like people getting so drunk you'd slap them and nothing happened, Mexicans passing around death jalapeños, during that time, even though there are two other Venezuelans in town I am the only Venezuelan at the dorms and I arrived alone for the whole year I am basically on my own, no one I can really rely on, sure you make friends, but it isn't just the same I would say, where am I going by mentioning this now, the parties made me realize this situation a lot faster than I would have normally I guess, for instance, the Germans always had another German to take them back to their room, things like that.

   The Halloween party mash up was interesting, around 4 of us at the dorms, coincidentally two Venezuelans including me had their birthdays pretty near Halloween, so it was decided to throw a big Halloween costume party to save expenses and manage to get more guests to the thing, I mean a party with just us international students is just boring and maybe the whole Halloween excuse can draw more guests to it, along a Colombian and two of the Germans we formed a Ghostbusters squad, that was pretty good during the party, but at the end we ended up being the dustbusters... doing all the cleaning, etc.

  November:

 November was mostly about the student trip to tokyo, it was a lot of fun since we mostly ditched the group to be by ourselves, this tour was very japanese with a guide that had a time table and stuff so that is basically the reason we kept ditching and met the group at later points. We visited the usual spots so I didn't find this so interesting.

     

     
December

      This month I can summarize quickly I think, only things worth mentioning is that it started snowing and that at the end of the year we headed to Tokyo for the countdown at Tokyo tower I will add pictures to this eventually, if you want any picture in better quality just ask, for these small ones get the point through. Only regret here is I was talking to a girl in a club and she was dragged away from me by the hair(pretty caveman style)and I thought it was going pretty alright personally.

January
     January was mostly about me jumping out of buildings and playing magic  the gathering, specifically a pre-release, I was the best foreigner in the tournament, since I managed 4 wins and 1 loss in the event, but a bunch of people never lost so I ended up not winning a big prize.