176 to 232 to 275

Do I pwn or what?

FYI, the passing mark for JLPT 2 is 240, 60% of the full mark of 400.

Judgement day has arrived. 1,000 poor souls. I might be one of them. And so might many of my good friends.

Warning: More ranting in the rest of the post than anything constructive or logical.

I’ve been practising the bass quite a lot recently, partly due to the holidays from school, partly due to boredom and my avoiding getting any work done, and partly due to the fact that it’s really fun. I think I’ve reached a point where the most efficient means of gaining more experience in playing the bass would be to learn from another player.

I certainly hope everyone has been spending their National Day holiday constructively, unlike myself, who finished My Boss My Hero over the course of today.

Essentially a comedy, My Boss My Hero tells the story of a 27 year old Yakuza member, Sakaki Makio, who is next in line to leading the Yakuza group. However, he dropped out of formal education at a young age, and basically can’t even add numbers. Not wanting to let a total dumbass run a Yakuza group, his father poses the task of graduating from high school within a year, as a criteria before he can assume leadership.

How funny is it, really?, you might ask. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves…

Just read this newspaper article: Court forces ISP to reveal culprits.

So, to combat declining sales, ODEX thinks that nabbing the anime downloaders, hence instilling fear amongst all of us and generally bringing hate for ODEX to a unprecendented level, is a good solution. And I thought global warming unbelievers were deluded.

And this is done instead of raising the quality and speed of ODEX releases. Maybe if you gave people a good reason to buy your stuff (and no, yours being the only legal means of obtaining anime in Singapore just doesn’t cut it), people might actually buy them?

1 week has flown by, and the home-stay for the Japanese students from Kobe High School ended yesterday. Actually, to be more accurate, Thursday was the last day they attended lessons at my school, but last night we saw them off at the airport.

Essentially, there was a student exchange between my school and Kobe High School, where 10 students would be paired with students taking Japanese from my school. It turned out that only girls responded, hence 10 girls. No pics, sorry, but just imagine 10 cute and pretty girls. =D I hosted a Year 2 named Sumire. The others who joined my homeroom class are Kyoko, Shiori, and Ayako.

Here’s a short summary of the events for the week. Skip this LONG part if you’re not interested in what we did.
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I think home-stay is one of the more true and meaningful ways to experience a foreign country. You really immerse yourself into the culture, living in the homes of the locals (and not hotels), eating home-cooked local cuisine (instead of high class restaurant food), and in this case attending the school and seeing how Singaporean high school life is like.

That said, I believe the girls really enjoyed the home-stay. We were pretty good hosts, I’d say. I myself, as a host, learnt a lot from the experience as well, and my confidence in speaking Japanese has really risen. I would go for the home-stay at the end of this year if not for the fact that it costs 3500 SGD.

I do think that the girls are too quiet, not only with us, the hosts, but even among themselves. There was only one girl who was really hyper about everything, but when she wasn’t around the rest were all reserved. Perhaps they were just being polite, or it was their natural disposition to be quiet. I think they might have experienced a bit more of Singaporean culture if they tried more stuff, like the food at Little India, or asked more questions.