九州

■航空券
Skymark Airline
2007/07/10 7:50発　
羽田(東京)〜福岡　SKY003　￥20800
2007/07/18 21:10発　
福岡〜羽田(東京)　SKY026　￥0

my new jobs

So, I've been going to those $8.25 jobs for 2 weeks now. For now, it makes enough play money for me.
I here that some of you guys are wondering how long I'm going to do this. Well it's not going to be too long before I get a real job. I am in the process of making business cards and flyers to increase students as my side job. (I cannot imagine doing $8.25 job forever. It sucks.)
After I come back from the US, I am going to do some serious job hunting. I am also gonna go visit Akiki and my parents after I come back.

going back to US for a while

Thanks to Yo-chan, we bought our tickets back to the US.
Here are the flight info.

04 JUL 07 - WEDNESDAY
JAPAN AIRL 2 COACH CLASS EQP-744
LV: TOKYO/NARITA 530P NONSTOP CONFIRMED
AR: SAN FRANCISCO 1045A JOURNEY TIME- 9:15

08 JUL 07 - SUNDAY
JAPAN AIRL 1 COACH CLASS EQP-744
LV: SAN FRANCISCO 1245P NONSTOP CONFIRMED
AR: TOKYO/NARITA 335P JOURNEY TIME-10:50 ARRIVAL DATE-09 JUL

I miss my cats

One thing I miss the most is my cats. They are all in good hands but I just miss them. I miss having them around and playing with them. I keep bothering Gavin to play with me or pay attention to me because I feel that no one cares for me. I know that I'm supposed to care for myself...but honestly it's kind of lonely in a foreign country. I wanted people to know that living in another country without ur friends really really sucks. It's beyond words how much u miss your friends.

Good read

One more thing

They also gave me a small Q-tips applicator. They said I'm supposed to stick this into my poop and send them the sample. Everyone who works at that factory must do it. It's the law.
So someday today, I will be sending in my poop sample.
lovely job.

Part 2

to the noodle section. Our first job was to take section where we package foods into containers. This was a lot of fun (* at first). My job was to put this plastic sheet over the food that has 350g, After we come into the factory, we clocked in and the work started. The newbies were assigned Yakisoba (Japanese style Chinese noodles) and spray them with alcohol. We put clean gloves on and also used the alcohol to spray our hands. There were about 20 tubs of Yakisoba so we all took turns and separate the noodles since it's been suck to each other from being the fridge after it was cooked. We then moved to a line work. My jobs was to pull out the plastic sheet and place it over the sauced food. The machine spits out a new cut sheet every time I pulled one out. I did that job for Yakisoba 250g, Big size Yakisoba 350g, Yakibi-fun, and some Korean noodle that I can't remember. This is a good job for people who likes to eat convenient store lunch (because you won't eat them any more) and also people who are on a diet(because you won't get hungry). At first Yakisoba looked good, but after 250 packages later, I was tired of looking at them. There about 10~13 people work in a line. Start of the line puts the noodles on the plate. Then around 8 people decorate the noodles with meat, vegetable, sauce, and pickles. After that, food arrives on the belt in front of me and i place the plastic sheet over the sauce. (this is used so that sauce doesn't get all lover the lid during transportation) After that it moves to the lid person and finally reaches the machine where it gets tagged with the date and stickers for the food.
At the very end of the belt, an experienced person sorts the food and randomly lifts the package so she can tell the weight of the item. They are soooo experienced that they don't need a scale to tell if the item is exactly 320g or 430g. After that, it goes through a metal detector. Then it's all done ready to be store into th fridge till shipping.

Like I said, this was a lot of fun till hour 2. For the first 2 hours everything was new and exciting. I was even singing since it was so boring. ( for akiki: i was singing Nightmare before Christmas songs) The job start at 12pm and was supposed to go till 9pm. The newbies were thinking we will get a break around 2pm and a lunch around 4pm ish. People who are used to working at a warehouse would know that is the norm. We normally get a 15 min break and an 45min lunch for an 8 hour work. This job was nothing like that. We had NO breaks. No breaks for 6 hours straight.
time here and it is a hard job. You guys are still lucky because the people you worked with are mainly I don't think anyone can understand this pain. Stuck in one place, in one position, doing the same job for 6 hours. By hour 4, I was done. My body started to ache and my foot was killing me. When we were told we can go on the break, I was like " it's FUCKING 6pm and NOW we are gonna go on break???" No it was not a break. It was a lunch, but we had to finish lunch early since it took good 15 min to get back into the factory. At this point, I was cussing inside. I told the other newbies that this was the last day I would work for them and they agreed. One of the older lady came up to us and said "You know, all the young people say that. This is my 5th time here. Just work with the foreigners, they will be nice to you. If you get stuck with Japanese older workers they will yell at you and tell you that you are doing things wrong." I looked at her and wondered "why did you come back to this place????" Anyhow, one thing i forgot to mention.
There are about 90% foreigners with Japanese names. They clearly don't speak Japanese but do speak Spanish and they all have Japanese name written on their uniform. I came home and asked Gavin who speaks Spanish but looks Japanese? He answered "Brazilians."
There were about 10% foreigners that looked foreigners which included Hispanics and Indians.

Only good part about lunch was that we were able to sit. I brought convenience store lunch for my lunch. After working, I didn't even want to eat it. So i had 2 energy drinks and chatted with the rest of the newbies. We all decided this was one of the worst jobs and that we were not coming back here EVER again. We were also told that one of the girls who came with us went home early because she couldn't hack it.... i feel for her.
After lunch, it was back to the line work. But the second part was lot more stressful. The second line had about 20 people lined up on one side of the belt. Across from us was the same belt with the same amount of people doing the same job. We made Chyu-ka Soba. I was in charge of stuffing the soup package. ( i won't bore you with details any more). Once that was done, i had to pee so i left the line. When i came back i was told to go on a different line. I was told to put stickers (labels) on the food for BiBimba and Hayashi Rice.
When the clock hit 9pm, I stopped my hand and said to the next person, "I'm done. " She said
"wait till ur replacement comes" and this big man comes over and says "You! out" and hands the stickers i had in my hands and passes to the person next to me. He didn't care who got the job, as long as it wasn't me. So we clocked out and the work was done.

I don't think words can describe this shitty job but I kept thinking this will be a good blog post.
Thanks for reading!

One of the worst jobs ever

In Japan there is really cool system called "spot work." You sign up with a company and they find you a day job on the days you want to work. It's like what the Mexicans do in the morning on one of the streets in Concord. The difference is that it's legit and also you can find the jobs using a cell phone.
So, since I arrived here in Japan, I've been snacking on Gavin's income and now we have no money to play around on weekends. Last weekend we stayed indoors and played Diablo 2 till act 3 (which took all day of Sat) and on Sunday we made dinner together and went out for A drink.
Anyways, so i signed up for this company called GoodWill. I've worked for that company before and knew what kind of job I would get from them. In the past I've worked at a warehouse where we tag clothes with price tags and sort items within the warehouse. It's a pretty decent job and pay is OK ( around 7000 Yen for 8 hrs work= $58).
BUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
this time... one of the worst job rolled in.
It was working at a food factory which makes lunch boxes for a convenient store called Lawson.
I have to say, I was really excited about the job up until hour 2. I took the train and the company (Japan Cookery) came to pick 23 other people including myself from the station. We got to the facility and were told to put this cap on so that our hair doesn't fall. The company rule was to wear head attire at all times. So we wore this green ugly thing on our head. Next we go to a break room and meet the advisor of the day. She told us what rules we need to follow and also where we are gonna take our break (singular). We got our keys to the lockers and went upstairs to change into the uniform. This clothing is very very interesting. You hear this fish net (white) thing over our head (after taking the ugly green thing off) and another blue head cap on over the net. You then put a pink head cloth where the area which touches the face is a towel cloth so it sucks all the sweat and you can't drop any sweat on the food. Then you wear all white clothes、a mask and arm band. By now you should have an image like this.
After you wear everything you go to a special room where you use the roller and try to roll out all the little fuzz balls or dust that might have attracted when you wore the uniform. The funny part was using the roller on my head. It felt funny and it looked stupid when i did it.
So we now move into this closed room which fits about 4~6 people and it has doors on both sides. You use one side to come in and the door closes. Once it closes, it makes this really loud noise and didn't seem to do much, but what I'm thinking is that it's sucking some air ?? not sure, but that's what it sounded like. Once that is done, the other door opens to the actual factory. We wear shoes that is given to us. We wear the apron and wash our hands with soap and dry it with alcohol. We are now ready to work.
continue to Part 2.

female needs

Interesting....

Solution to militarization in Japan

Lets bring back Samurai!!!! I swear this would work.

My peeps

ideas, it doesn't mean that one idea that is presented is the best one." I remember having the same reaction as my sister when Bush writing this blog....i sound like a I'm angry at least once a day thanks to all the TV watching I do. Recently it's all about government stuff. Some of you may know, Japan is in a big crisis over social security. We are easily 10 or 20 years behind compared with other countries who has SS system in place. I am most angry at my people because they truly lack how to think logically and look at the situation critically. Of course there are always two sides to the problems we are trying to solve. I sure see a lot of disagreeing and pointing fingers but those people never have any alternative plans. I can hear my sister in the back of my head saying "just because we don't have a good alternativeannounced going to war in 2003. But now I'm curious, how are we able to solve any problem without taking the first step. (now I'm kind of regrettinghypocrite since i was really against the War on Terror even thought i didn't have any resolution to the problem we had back then....)
At this time I think it's better that we have some kind of a plan to solve the problem rather then having all the solution to every problem.
I could be completely wrong. ...

Wild 94.9

THANK YOU to Gavin for checking Wild 94.9 to see if they can stream internationally. Last time i tried it, it wouldn't allow foreign ip address to access their streaming. I am so excited that I don't think my sentences make sense. I don't miss home any more!!!