The building is huge, and I need to spend a lot more time documenting it's interior. There's a movie theater, 2 food courts, a four level department store, tons of clothing stores, a dollar store (college students' salvation), and an arcade ( omg omg omg omg omg).
I will have to spend a day at that arcade, and after that day I will be able to better describe the glory that is Japanese video games. We explored for about four hours, shopped a bunch for the essentials and got food at a little udon shop.
I actually had a pleasant exchange with the people who worked there. I asked a couple questions in Japanese and the woman there happily answered them. I also asked a girl there what they call chives in Japanese (she was putting chives on my udon). I she said neji (which I pronounced correctly only after several tries), and she asked me what we call them in English. She had as hard a time saying chives as I did of neji. A good time was had by all.
The Goods
Now to describe our shoppscapade.
The majority of the stuff we got was from the dollar store. Chop sticks, I got a nice pair of cooking chopsticks, wastepaper basket, dish towel, clothes hangers, and I got myself a pretty nice looking knife. I picked a midrange priced one, because I wanted a nice knife, but I was still shopping at the dollar store, so their nicest knife would probably still be pretty dull.
We also stopped by a "novelty shop" which is a terrible way to describe it. It was more of a tiny one room version of Bed, Bath, and Beyond, it was called "Three Minute Happiness". I got pan here, it's a nice one with a wooden handle. The metal on it isn't terribly thick, but it's still a nice pan. I also got a couple wooden spoons, they're very smooth and well shaped. Jessi got a little steel teapot here, it's really cute.
Our next big area of shopping was the grocery store. I forgot to mention the grocery store. There's a grocery store, it's attached to the mall, it's pretty cool. We got a lot of the basic food stuffs here, noodles, soy sauce, sesame oil, orange juice, soap, and laundry detergent.
We also decided to buy a bottle of wine to celebrate. Since you know, we can, because the drinking age in Japan is 20. They had a very pleasant little alchohol selection. Actually a pretty decent selection, I had thought that liquor beyond sake would be a little harder to find, yet I stood before a pretty solid selection of wine from the Napa Valley. They also had vodka and rum in . . .20 liter bottles? From the floor they reached up higher than the knees and were wider around than Jessi. There were at least 100 of these sort of bottles. In anycase we'd already decided on a red wine, for cooking as well as drinking, so we went with a Sutter Hill Merlot from California. (No bottle opener as of yet though)
Finally we decided to get the rest of our stuff at the department store. I needed a wash cloth, and some bowls. What I found though really made me happy though, a "My Neighbor Totoro Bentou box. It's so cool, it's got two compartments and little dividers for a variety of foods. I also got a blue mug, cause I needed something to drink from. So far I had used cash for everyting, so when we went to the counter I wanted to give my debit card a shot.
I figured there'd be trouble, but it wasn't busy so I wanted to try my best to make this interaction work. He rang me up, I gave him my card, he slid it through the machine and asked me, "ikkai? nikai? sankai?" which translates to "one time, two times, three times?" This provided me with quite a quandry.
Is he asking me if I want it all together, or if I want each thing rung up seperately? That didn't make a whole lot of sense. He'd given me back my card, did he need to slide it through another time? I offered him the card again, but that didn't seem to be the right response. He got an associate to come over, who had a little book with english notes in it. I apologized for my bad japanese, but they remained gregarious. "Do you want to pay, one time? two times? three times?" He told me in english.
Something was off about that. Obviously that was what they were saying in Japanese, I knew that much, but why would I want to pay for something more than once? If you paid for something twice you would be out twice as much money.
A Japanese woman nearby offered her abilties in English, and asked the manager what was going on in Japanese. he explained to her in japanese, and I got, "how many times do you want to pay?"
At first this made about as much sense, and then it clicked. They were asking about payments! How many payments would I like to make. It's a department store, and Japanese department stores still offer customers the ability to pay in multiple instalments. "Do you want to pay multiple times" is a lot like "Do you want to make multiple payments?"
I'm suprised I didn't get it sooner, but I wasn't expecting a multiple payment plan. But now I am, and if I ever get into the circumstance again, I'll know how to react.
Just goes to show that sometimes you just gotta be patient and try you best to work things out without getting flustered.
Careful Mack:
ReplyDeleteneji (ねじ) = screws [tools and hardware]
negi (ねぎ) = Welsh/green onion or leeks
I think it's more likely that she was putting the latter in your food. As an aside,
nira (にら) = chives
Hurray for a small working vocab of cooking ingredients gleaned from Japanese cooking shows.
Don't think I've ever run across that installment payment plan before, but I would guess that's because you payed with a bank/debit card? I've never run across it before, but then again, I've never had to stay in Japan for longer than two weeks...
Perhaps you can ask your advisers about how best to procure a Japanese <-> English electronic dictionary that you can just carry around. They run pretty steep $150ish to something like $500 for the most blinged out models, so it's not a cheap investment by any means, but it might solve a few language issues sometimes.
Also! A handy trick I learned (and since you're a decent artist): keep a small notepad on your person, and if you ever need directions to something like a bus stop or train station, DRAW it! A picture is worth a thousand words, and when you when you can't say them in another language, all the easier. Or at the very least you get Telephone Pictionary as seen through the eyes of a Japanese person trying to help you.