Demystifying Trash

Monday was the first day of classes for me at Waseda. I headed to school on my bike in the rain to register for the term. My schedule is close to finalized and I've packed 11 periods worth of class on to three days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Four day weekends!!! So I didn't actually have class on Monday, but I definitely wanted to try out the bike route before my real first day of class.

Waseda looks something like this when it's not raining, but so far this week it's rained every day. In fact it rained Friday and Saturday, stopped for a bit on Saturday when Jon arrived, and then started raining again late Sunday after he left. Jon clearly needs to come back; he's like the reverse rain god.

Biking in the rain is zero fun. I tried to do it Asian style (holding an umbrella in one hand), but biking up and down hills with one hand on a single speed bike with 14-in wheels is terrible! On my way back home, I just took the rain on sans umbrella because it was just too much of a hassle.


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It's probably a good thing I did a test-run because I got lost in that park.

I'm a bit conflicted about my class schedule. There are a bunch of classes I find interesting and I want to take a lot of language classes to work on my Japanese; however, the classes don't matter at all and I only need to take five rather than 11 classes and simply pass them as well. Part of me wants to take it really easy and another part of me tells me school is a piece of cake anyway.

Regardless, I felt the necessity to get a poncho and so we again headed to our favorite store, Daiso. While in the area, we checked out the crepe alley again to find that Angel Heart was still open. A custard + whipped cream + strawberries - whipped cream crepe (try saying that in broken Japanese) later, our verdict was the custard or ice cream just tastes better in crepes than whipped cream, but Marion Crepes tastes better than Angel Heart.

I've seen this chain called Momi & Toy's everywhere, and after we check that one out, I think we can settle on an official winner and then never eat crepes again.

Every time we hit up Daiso, we buy all sorts of crap. Went for a poncho and left with no poncho (they were sold out cuz it was raining, duh), a vegetable peeler, a laundry basket, a money book, and I forget what else. The whole way there V had been looking forward to stocking up on this 49 calorie peach jelly that she had previously had. Of course, they were sold out of that as well. As fate would have it, a drugstore on the way home had it on sale for 88 Yen! That's less than 100 Yen!

I really wish that stuff at Daiso only cost 95 Yen, so it would end up to be 100 Yen after tax instead of 105.

Today was my first class and I have this one class which is half Japanese students and half English-speaking students, the class is supposed to be a discourse on cultural differences and I found one on the first day, spelling. There is no "l" sound in Korean either, but the Japanese take it to a whole other level. Today, my professor was writing "Venezuela" and spelled it "Venezuera." Forgivable. A Japanese student was discussing toilets in China and wrote "No Rocks" on the board. When he meant was "No Locks." This is mind boggling.

The reason that this kind of stuff happens is that lots of Japanese words are Japanizations of Foreign words into katakana. So they call locks, "rokusu." They use this word all their life without realizing that it comes from the word "locks." Nobody had the guts to point out his mistake. Let's just hope that he never has to discuss rocks...er I mean locks with anyone ever again.

Afterward, I was talking to some of my classmates and they were having difficulty with the concept of burnable trash. Japan basically has no room for landfills, so almost all trash that isn't recyclable is burned. I had gotten fairly accustomed to separating trash in Taiwan, but I'm not even sure if it's incinerated or not. One big difference is that Taiwan separates out compostable trash.

The real question is, "What is burnable trash?" Trash gets separated into three categories: burnable, unburnable, and recyclable. Recyclable trash obviously gets broken down into more categories, but everything that can possible be recycled (and there's a lot of it) will be properly marked. This includes stuff like plastic wrappers, styrofoam trays, and basically anything foamy. Unburnable trash is only large items like TV's or bicycles or potentially hazardous items like batteries.

Everything else is burnable. This includes plastic bags, gum wrappers, scrap paper, receipts, floss, and food. It's a little weird to think of stuff like plastic wrap and aluminum foil as burnable, but I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong...soon.

One last random Japanese idiosyncrasy to discuss. I've been using the computer lab in the Graduate School of Commerce Building (also known as Building 11) and been trying in vain to get used to a Japanese keyboard.

It has about ten extra keys and the @ button isn't shift-2. ?!!! @ has its own goddamn button and a lot of the punctuation is mixed up. An apostrophe is shift-7. ?!!! If ever I'm chatting with you and fail to use punctuation, please forgive me...its the keyboard.

I think I forgot to mention we succeeded in time service: 400 Yen off this for 958 Yen. Yayyy.