Almost there....

Well been a somewhat eventful week this week. The biggest thing that happened was probably that EKU has once again delayed my loan, mainly due to their constant mistakes as well as their own stupidity. Worst of all they say that it's my fault which I will take partial blame for being that I started the process so late in the semester. However, I didn't know I was coming to Japan for sure until August (you're supposed to sign up for aid in the spring) and I didn't really know I could get loans until October by learning it from Pat. Anywho, everything should be worked out in a few weeks so I'll be able to do a little bit of traveling while I'm in the country, as well as have enough money to get a small boost out in California when I come back stateside. I'm sure a lot of people think I'm crazy for going out that way, most movies aren't made there but that's still where all the big wigs are and if I want to get into the production side of things I need to try my best out that way. Of course there are lots of film schools in Cali as compared to the big Zero that are in Kentucky. Who knows though, I'm still in Japan for about 8 full months so I might always find a film school to go to over here!

Anywho, Monday I didn't do much other than class and then come back and sit around. I tried to study for my test the next day but I just didn't have it in me and was constantly distracted by friends talking to me on the internet that day. I ended up with a high listening score, but a mid B on my writing. Of course I made perfect on all my kanji this week. So Tuesday was pretty much just the test and I relaxed by playing some games and watching a movie or two.

Come Wednesday I don't have classes so I woke up late and ate a breakfast/lunch with Pat and Martin at the grill. The lunch-ladies there know me now and know that I always get my chicken and meat without the sweet and sour sauce they put on it. After that I picked up my pay check and paid some bills. Later that night was my last class for teaching English. I had my students write short speeches and give them in front of class and then made them answer questions from the students. One of my students, Yumi (whom I also think is a beautiful girl), did the best seeing as she's spent time out of the country and really practiced her English. I had another student just run his Japanese through an online translator and I had to correct everything he had written (I had the students send their speech texts ahead of time for corrections). After the speeches I paid for pizza for all of us and we ended up getting pepperoni, BBQ chicken, and dried tomato sliced pizza. I ordered three large size pizzas but they ran out of L size crust and they gave us two mediums which equals out to be a lot more pizza. Between the 8 of us we managed to finish it off though. I bid my students farewell and then headed back home to do a little bit of homework.

Thursday, Pat and I woke up earlier than usual and skipped our first period to go to a nursing school to speak English with some of the students there. We were picked up by taxi near campus and drove about 10 minutes over where we met with a few other students from the area. One student that went with us was from Malaysia and he was pretty cool. Another girl we met there was from Iowa. Then there was a guy from China who was pretty much trilingual (if not more). We would sit and take questions from the students while eating snacks and drinking hot tea (yes I burnt the shit out of my tongue once again). It was really fun and the girls kept asking me if I had a girlfriend and when I'd say no they would all be like "GET ONE IN JAPAN!". The last table was the most fun as I met a really cute girl who liked to talk about anime and would just keep saying this one characters name over and over from Gundam 00 "Setsuna F. Seiei!!". Maybe she thought I looked like an older version of him or something, I'm not really sure. Here is a pic of me and the last group I was with, the girl I was referring to is to the right of me with the stripes.




Afterward all that Ed (the man from Canada who invited us there) said his goodbyes and gave us a small amount of money for helping out. The taxi took us back to campus and then Pat and I rode our bikes down to Hinata's for a nice small Japanese lunch. Our teacher delayed class so we weren't actually skipping first period. While I enjoy this teacher's class I knew there was no way she could finish the lesson no matter how hard she tried. So I ended up not going, and I ended up being right about her not being able to finish the lesson. That night was really fun because we decided to go out to eat with Ho-san, Cho-san, Martin, and Pat for a small going away thing since Pat and Martin flew stateside to do some Christmas stuff as well as Martin being able to see America for the first time. We ended up eating at the same Italian restaurant that we held Steve's going away party at. For a massive 1500 yen (about 17 dollars) I ate an entire pizza by myself, shared spaghetti with everyone (with chili sauce no less), three orders of garlic bread by myself, and then we all shared ice cream and cake at the end. Needless to say I was ready to explode.

Afterward, I convinced everyone to go to the puri-kura (photobooth) where I think we had a good time. We didn't get any digital copies of the pictures so we had to scan them in so they may be a little blurry. Here they are:

I think this is one of the funniest.

This one is pretty good too, gotta
love my bunny ears as well as the
weird face Martin is making.

This is the one I designed the most.
Gotta love the cat border I put on,
as well as the awesome afro I gave Martin.

Somehow Martin manged to lean
out of this one. While those bunny ears
might not be placed correctly I gotta say
they almost look real.........

And the last one, I looks the most
ridiculous because I'm the only one
trying to mimic the pose they put
on the screen before taking the pic.

Needless to say I have a lot of fun with these things. And they're very cheap as well only like 400 yen for a lot of pictures.

Friday was lackluster as I went to class all day and ate at the grill for the second time this week. I found the last two volumes of Full Metal Alchemist (鋼の錬金術師) that I needed to complete my collection, so I was very happy. I was also pleased to learn this week that they will be airing another season of it in Japan coming this April! This anime is very popular in America, but the manga is almost entirely different from the anime, and the new season is supposedly going to stick more closely to the manga which makes me excited. A lot of people in America look down on you depending on what your hobby is, here it's not a big deal. You can't base what a person does in the free time on what kind of person they actually are. Some people might think it's a little nerdy to do some of the things I like but in Japan there are people way older than me that are into this kind of stuff. My point in case in America would be that I've always played videogames in America and was ridiculed by my peers and was always told by my mom that I would eventually grow out of it. Well I never did, while I don't buy as many games as I once did, I still love playing games as much as I did when I was a kid. However, now games are becoming more popular than movies and are high grossing forms of entertainment. So now who's the nerd.....

Well it's the weekend now and everyone has gone somewhere for the break. Most the people I hang with are either in America or on the north island of Hokkaido visiting Sapporo (where I hope to go as well one day). Even with my financials the way they are I've got good friends like Ho-san who are going to help me enjoy myself in Tokyo even if I don't have much cash right now. My buddy Bob paid for my bus ticket and hotel to go to Osaka and Kyoto during the new years so that should be pretty awesome as well. I must have a way better personality than I thought to make such awesome friends like these! Expect an update mid next week because I'll be back from Disney Sea, Akihabara, Tokyo Dome City, Ueno Zoo, and Fuji TV so there should be lots of pics and a big update! つずく。。。。。。

頭がいたい － My Head hurts

Howdy from the land of the rising sun as usual. Been a minute since I've updated but there's not been anything extremely exciting to talk about. Not that there will be in this post but there are some upcoming things that should be rather exciting.

First off I hate EKU, it's as if the place is run by people who never even made it through high school. It takes so long to get a response from someone and even then it's not a straight answer and you're left guessing. I am of course referring to my loans I applied for in order to stay over the entire year here in Japan. Everything is supposed to be worked out already and I should be receiving my funds fairly soon via mail. However, I looked over my account and it says I will owe nearly $400 dollars even after my scholarship pays for my school. The only differnce between this semester and last is that I applied for loans. I somehow doubt I'd be charged for loans so there's not telling what this magical charge is. So I'll ge calling them tonight, wasting even more Skype minutes on calling their stupid asses. I've also been informed from my USA chap (Pat) that when he applied for loans that he had to chose either for his loans to be disburst through his bank account or the new debt enhancement card through EKU. I refer to a new scam the school started this past semester in which the school give you your school ID, but guess what...it's a credit card too. How craptastic is that? I think they want kids to owe them for about two lifetimes now, and that's totally helping our economy.

Since I'm on a roll here I'll take a little time to gripe about the economy. Since being in Japan the US dollar has dropped in value almost 20%. I now lose 10 dollars for every 100 dollars I take out. Which in turn there is no tax here so in actuality I guess things could be worse, but to be safe as soon as I get the loan money I'm going to try and take a big chunk out in order to avoid possibly losing more as the US dollar makes a .5% drop nearly every week, or sometimes more than that. But I'm sure Obama will help make everything right! Doesn't matter whose ass got elected they've got a shitstorm to attempt to clean up. I don't however believe feeding stimulus packs into our economy will help anything other than get rid of SSI and any kind of retirement I could possible hope for in the late future. Of course I think one thing that just might help America is if they learn to stay the fuck out of other countries' business. No one treats me with spite or disrespect here but they all say the same reason why they dislike America if at all, because we can't keep out hands out of other peoples shit. If you think the Iraqi war is about freedom you need to wise the fuck up.

Ah, well I think I've griped enough about the world for today. I'm venting after having an extremely crappy day. Having a day long test every 8-10 days is kicking my ass. It's like having someone take a corkscrew to your head, pop your cranium out, and take a funnel and pour in mass amounts of language. Needless to say I've managed to kill a bottle of excedrin in less than two months, getting at least two migraines a week on average now. I ended up making 47/50 on my listening, 10/10 on my kanji, and for my writing I've yet to get back the score but I'm fairly sure that I made lower than I usually do seeing as I didn't study too much the night before. However, having so many A's so far a low B or high C isn't going to hurt me, and if I really wanna be a douche bag I can look at this in such a way that grades don't really matter, because I've already graduated! However, I do want to learn this language, I know that becoming fluent in a year will be difficult but I'm sure to pick up quite a bit of the language. I can easily get around with the vocabulary I have now. I continue to surprise people that I know so many words and kanji after reading so much manga and watching so much anime (I've cut down on it in recent years though).

I'm more than likely going to Disney Sea next week (no it's not like Sea World ppl). It's more for adults unlike Tokyo Disneyland. Other than that I don't really have a lot planned for my Xmas break. I was going to go to Osaka right after New Year's but the round trip ticket is 150 bucks, plus the cost of hotel and such I'd end up spending around 250 at the least. That would only be for one night so I don't think it's really worth it. Of course the other reason being I don't have my loan money yet so I can't really make plans like that. At the very least I'm thinkin about heading over to Tokyo by myself to kind of wander the city and probably hang out in Akihabara (electric central/nerd central).

A few of us are making plans to try and go to Nagano during a short break we will get during mid January. I'm really looking forward to it seeing as I've never tried to snow ski before. I can waterski but I'm quite sure it's very different. Nagano is actually very close to here, but for some reason we don't get much snow. I need to snap a pic of a view I get every morning, I get to see the snowcapped Southern Japanese Alps if I look to the west on a clear day.

Nothing really mindblowing has happened to me of late unfortunately. Hopefully, once I get passed all this shitty buearacracy I can have some cash and relax for a little while anyway. Well hope everyone enjoyed this blog completely void of anykind of pics. Wait....I'll add some, but let's just hope she never sees these or she'll kill me. This is my Taiwanese friend Ho-san whom I'll be going to Disney Sea with, she'd definitely kill me if she knew I threw this up on the internet :|

No rest for the weary

I know you can't believe it. I'm posting two weeks in a row now. Maybe I'm back on a roll, maybe I'm not. Or maybe I just have nothing better to do at the moment.

This past Monday was Labor Thanksgiving day in Japan. I asked a Japanese friend what was the purpose of the holiday and he told me it's exactly like it sounds, they are giving thanks for working. Japanese people really love to work I guess. I then explained to him what Thanksgiving meant in American, that it was the time when Pilgrims and the natives gathered and exchanged foods and skills, like how to grow corn. After telling him this he was in disbelief because most other countries acknowledge the fact that we pretty much committed genocide during that period of our history.

Anywho, I had Monday off and pretty much sat around and Ho-san (my Taiwanese friend) came over to help me order my electronic dictionary. I bought it at roughly half the cost if I had bought it in America. After ordering that we sat around and talked and played a little bit of Wii Sports. After she left I went back to my studies.

Come Wednesday, Ho-san came back so we could check on when I might be getting my dictionary. She called the store up and they said it would be delievered that day! I thought it would be there later and I didn't have enough cash on me to pay for it (Cash on Delivery is the biggest payment option in Japan and that's what I chose). I get paid the last Wednesday of every month but not until 4:30 and the package came at 3!! Ho-san was really nice and leant me the money so I was able to pay for the dcitionary on time.

9 out of 10 times it's really easy to find out a word or kanji from my dicionary. I'm not sure why I didn't buy one of these sooner...I'd suggest buying one of these babies if you plan on going to a country that doesn't really speak English that much.

Not much bigger than my hand, and fairly lightweight.

Nice button layout, but took some getting use to.

The pad on the bottom is for inputting charaters
via a stylus that it came with. Sweet for writing
kanji to which I have no idea what the reading might be.

Not much happened the rest of the week, class went as usual. Made perfect on some kanji quizzes Friday, I somehow one upped the Chinese student again. The teacher even asked me to explain how I practice to everyone because I scored prefects thus far on kanji. I leave it to memory...guess that doesn't work for everyone though.

After class on Friday I stayed on campus for a while and talked to my friend Bob. I think we're trying to organize a trip to Tokyo Disney during the X-mas break because I'd like to see Tokyo all done up for the season. Our city, Kofu, just recently put up their X-mas lights and it has a really nice feeling downtown now. Sorry, I don't have any pics as of yet.

So Friday night we went with Steve to eat out for kind of a going away party. Our Aussie friend Melissa lied to the store people and told them it was his B-day and we all ended up getting a free round and Steve got a free piece of cake as well. Let's not forget to mention that sang his fake B-day in Italian as well. Very interesting....

This is the hat they threw on him while they sang.

Afterward, they wanted to drag me to karaoke but it's just too expensive for me right now. It's generally like 30 dollars for a couple of hours. While karaoke is fun to me, not for a couple of hours (they ended up not coming back from it til 6 AM the next day, so ya..I'm glad I didn't tag along). Before all that though they convinced me to go to a photo booth. Photo booths here are a huge deal, and they are literally huge machines themselves. We chose what as possibly the most feminine booth that was there, it translated "I want to become a beautiful girl". When you go in it's about a 5ft x 5ft space with the camera and scree to the front and a green screen at your back. Needless to say they're interesting inventions. Here are two of the ones we managed to get digitally. There were more than this and believe my they are just as funny if not better than these two.

Top row is Me, Steve, Lydia (UK).
Middle is Aza who is Mongolian (and very cute).
Bottom is Melissa and Emma (AU).

The screen prompts you with every
shot to mimic a pose it displays on screen, I
was in the middle of trying to do something
but I think it ended up even funnier.

After all that I went home and pretty much went straight to bed. I got up early Saturday morning because the principal of an Elementary School (he also teaches English at the University I attend) invited me to tour their school festival. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures. Had I even brought my camera there wouldn't have been enough time to stop and take pics the principal ran us through so fast in order to see everything. It was very interesting all these tiny Japanese children just staring up at me as if they were saying "What the fuck is he doing here?". Perhaps not so vulgar but just this look of awe would come over their faces as they would see me. Some children would say "HELLO" in English and it was really cute. I think the older I get the more I like kids because they're so innocent unlike adults. Some kids asked us some questions in Japanese and we got to answer back.

Unlike American elementary schools the direct comparisons I can make are that in this level of education there are school sanctioned sports. Whereas in America if one's parents (or the child themselves) wants the kid to play sports you have to go to city sanctioned sports like little leagues for various sports. Also, most children seemed to already be playing intrsuments, which isn't unusual so much that the number of children who could play at least one instrument was much more than the stateside number.

Each classroom had a game or event one could participate in. Instead of similar grade levels participating with each other it worked vertically. For instance there were 6 grades in this elementary school; therefore there is 1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, 5A, and 6A. All of these classes would work together and do something. An example we go to experience was a miniature golf setup in one class room made out of AstroTurf and cardboard. Even the parents were able to participate on some level by bringing goods from home to sell at a bazaar in the gym, or submitting their works of art and handicrafts to be viewed.

After the tour we went our separate ways and while talking with my guide on the way back she mentioned another English teacher on campus. I'd seen him before but I always thought he was British for some reason or another, maybe because he never approached me I assumed he didn't htink I was American or vice versa. Anywho, ironically enough as we were getting our bikes at campus I hear a loud voice coming from above "Hey guys, got a minute!!"

I look up and it's the teacher we were just talking about! He came down and we talked for about an hour. He's from New Hampshire and has lived in Japan for quite a few years. Afte talking for a good while we were then invited to come along with him to talk English to a few girls from a nursing school and get paid 3000 yen (about 28 USD) for talking to them in English for an hour.

Pat and I were really hungry by this time (around 1) and we were going to go to Denny's but Steve (the teacher, not my friend Steve pictured way above) recommened a ramen place. Unfortuatnely, we couldn't find the store so we stuck with the original plan and biked through the tunnel just down the road from our dorm. The tunnel is about 780 meters long and didn't take long to get through, but it sucks if there are a lot of cars in there because it's nothing but exhaust that you're inhaling (which happened on the way back). I thought our destination was much closer, but we got to see some cool sites on the way. For instance (no pics, but don't worry I'm going back to this place since it's close by) there was this HUGE temple just on the other side of the tunnel. A huge buddha statue as well as real live monks sweeping the grounds up.

We ended up biking almost 3 or 4 miles (which doesn't sound like much, but when you're going up and down hill all the time it can indeed be strenuous) to our final destination. By this time I didn't really feel like Denny's nor did Pat. So we rode down another 100 yards or so and decided to get a table at Ootoya's. I've mentioned this place before as I ate there with my buddy Bob about a month ago. I'm starting to surprise myself with my meager Japanese language knowledge. I got us a table for two and later Steve called. So I hit the buzzer (most Japanese restauraunts have them to get the waiters attention) and got our waiter to come over. I said to him in Japanese that a friend was coming and that we needed a table for three and apologized to him. He understood exactly what I said and said it was okay and not to worry about it. Steve showed up shortly there after and we ordered our meal and then headed to my favorite place in Japan. That's right....Book Off! This was a special occasion becuase this was no doubt Steve's final visit to bookoff. He got a cheap set of a manga (made anime) of 10 volumes for 500 yen called School Rumble. He even managed to get them to give him a cardboard box to send his manga back in. I of course got a few volumes to haul back home as well.

The journey back was much harder as the majority of the trip was all up hill. It was cool outside but I ended up taking my thick leather jacket off because I was sweating like a hog by the time we got back throug the tunnel. I was going to turn to go up the hill back to the dorm but Pat kept going straight so I followed him till I caught up. He stopped at another store which I had said earlier I wanted to go to, but my body (and mind) was way too tired to still want to go. This store is largest book/dvd rental store that's closest to our dorm. The prices aren't as good as Book Off, but I leanred something fairly awesome about this store. I was searching for one volume of manga I accidently skipped in a certain series and I couldn't find it in the store. So I asked the clerk if they had it and he showed me the section but of course they lacked the volume I was looking for. He then told me in Japanese (of course) that he might be able to order it. So I follow him back over to the counter and he told me that he could order it and all he needed was my name and phone number. He then proceeded to tell me that it would come in about 12/3 or 12/4 and he would contact me when it came in. While my usage of Japanese in this country might not be completely practical, it's getting me around and helping me with what I need or want to do. I'm not at a conversation level as of yet, but as I said, I can get around.

After all that biking around we came back to the dorm and Ho-san dropped by with everything we needed to cook spaghetti so we (Pat, Ho, and I) cooked a huge spaghetti dinner with meatballs and garlic toast on the side. Pat ended up making an apple pie that eneded up being pretty tasty for his first attempt, as well as his lack of shortening. We then gathered a small group of people up and watched the new Bond movie seeing as we found access to a copy of the film. It was kind of a dissapointment but still entertaining on some level. After all that I hit the bed.

Now it's Sunday and I'm taking it easy. All I've done today is blog, do some laundry and finish my homework for tomorrow's classes. X-mas break is a mere three weeks away and I'm really looking forward to kicking back. As usual, hope everyone enjoys reading what's up in the land of the rising sun.

Insanely Long Blog Post

Well, I know I said a while ago I'd be updating the blog very soon. That didn't work out to well as most can see. We didn't go to Shousenkyo because it ended up raining and it's kind of hard to hike and "peep" at leaves when there's rain in your face.

However, we (Pat, Steve, and I) weren't really that disappointed seeing as we had a long week and could use the time to rest. Good news came later that day when Martin (one of the Germans students) ended up bringing his car back from Tokyo and we actually ended up going to Shousenkyo on Wednesday without the school.

I'm going to rewind a little bit before this past Wednesday though. Last weekend, as I do about every weekend, I went to another hot spring with my buddy Bob. This hot spring was a lot more modern, however much smaller than the one I went to a few weeks before. Both hot springs over look the city at night and it's an amazing view. The water at this hot spring was not only an ass load hotter, but color of it was red! I was told by Bob that the water comes out naturally from the spring like that. I'm guessing there are a bunch of dead bodies buried under that mountain or something....

After the hot spring we decided to go eat somewhere. We were going to hit up a restaurant by the name of Otoya's, but Bob left it up to me because there were a few choices in the area and we had already eaten at Otoya's. So I did the thing any typical American would do in Japan...I decided to eat at Denny's. However, to my dismay the menus, for the most part, only had Japanese style dishes. I found they had some spaghetti on the menu so I ordered that and some bread to go with it. It ended up being the most delicious spaghetti I've ever had, but that's not hard to beat considering I've only eaten it a few times. The only downfall to the meal is that they only give you a thimble's worth of parmesan cheese.

Afterward we walked across from Denny's and visited one of my favorite stores in Japan. That's right everyone, I can't help getting off...at Book Off! I'd been searching for a couple of books that I managed to find finally at this distant Book Off, I always love asking the people in Japanese if they have something or not. Makes me feel like I'm learning something useful in my classes...aka how to spend my money. I have a fairly modest manga collection now, and I'm going to have to bring most of it in a suitcase when I come back during March, so I can start my collection all over again when I get back.

Here's most of my manga, and yes it's all in Japanese...

Meron Pan( melon bread), the best snack...in the world.
Doesn't taste like melon though, and maybe that's a good thing.

Oh and for those who didn't know previous to this post, I've been accepted for Financial Aid through my school so I'll be coming back to Japan to study for another 5 months after my short stay in March. I was getting really stressed out over it, but everything seemed to work out in the end.

Back on track for this week. We started kanji this week, mainly this will be the best refresh for me thus far whilst being here. I learned around 400 kanji stateside, but as we all know if you don't use it...you unfortunately lose it. And rather quickly I might add. So it's come time to finally buy an Japanese/English electronic dictionary. They can run all the way up to $400 or $500 dollars, but I found an awesome deal on the internet for a decent model that will run me around $160 total. I really need one of these especially since I'll be here for another 9-10 months.

So during my mid week break Wednesday, Pat, Martin, Ho-san (a girl from Pat's adviser's lab), and I piled in to Martin's big van and took a short drive to do some leaf peeping. I dressed a little to lite as later on the wind picked up and got very cold. We took about a 4km hike up a mountain side and got to see all kinds of sites. This isn't so much something I can describe so I've tried to narrow this down to a good few pics out of the hundred and forty pictures I took.

Here's a pic of the guys: Martin, Pat, Me

Interesting rock formation. The sign said
it's supposed to look like a set of ears.

I've got too many of these river pics...

Left 2 Right: Ho-san, Me, Martin, Pat

The colors in the fall leaves here are just
down right stunning I think.

This mountain looks so colorful I could just eat it.

The red leaves are my favorite.

Gotta rub that belly for good luck.

A horse carriage that would go up and down the
mountain. This horse is so huge it puts Clydesdale
horses to shame. On all fours it still had about 6 inches on me.

Another great pic of the mountainside.

Front 2 back: Martin, Pat, Me

Cool Owl statue at one of the
rest stops atop the mountian.

We're totaling holding this up.
Pat even has a stat bonus of x49 strength.

Group shot in front of a shrine. It had this
huge stone inside of it, not really sure what it was.

Yet another awesome pic of the leaves.

Me taking pics of the surroundings,
Ho-san caught this one.

Definitely one of my favorite pics. I really
wonder how the rocks were formed in such a way.

How cool is that statue behind us.

Getting playful with my camera.

We stumbled upon a portion where you walk
under an overhanging rock and we found all
kinds of 1 yen coins stuck in the cracks.
Apparently you do this to make a wish. The
most expensive wish we found was a 5 yen coin.

Cool little waterfall. Pales in comparison to
Cumberland falls back in the good ole Corbin.
Still yet it was very pretty.

Cool closeup I got of this spider.

Small shrine next to waterfall. People leave
coins and food for the deity or the dead.

Awesome red leaves.

Not sure if I already posted this one. They
look the same, but I can assure it's a different area.

Mediation is the key to preserving one's mind...
Or something like that...got a lot of stares from
the natives when they were taking this one.

Almost looks like it's on fire. On fire with the
flames of creation...how deep is that....

We started getting really goofy later on....

This one takes the cake though. WARNING
this picture may contain an ugly face not suitable
for the average person to see:

So yeah, there's still like 100 plus more pics I could throw up but these are some of my favorites.
After seeing this I'm really freaking pumped up about coming back before the end of March to make it to the Sakura viewing. Sakura is what we know as Cherry blossoms, they hold a similar event in D.C. every year. Except in Japan it's like a country wide thing, and everyone comes out to do it.

After a tiring trip from leaf peeping I went and taught my English class and the numbers seem to keep going down. But hey, I still get paid the same, and I can't blame them for not coming because:
A. They didn't pay for the class.
B. They don't get a grade.

Thursday I was bad bad boy and stayed home and didn't attend class. I studied all day for my test on Friday which I ended up getting the highest in the class on the listening portion as usual, and we'll get our writing results next Tuesday. We also had two Kanji quizzes on Friday as well. For those of you who don't know Japan has three scripts which are Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana is the main form of the Japanese language, Katakana is a script used for adapting foreign words (I hate this because some things are so hard to figure out even if they originate from American, i.e. New York will read like "Nyuu Yokuu"), and lastly is Kanji which is adapted from the Chinese script. Kanji is written the same in China as it is in Japan but it has different meanings all together. Ironically enough I actually got a higher score than the Chinese girl on the Kanji quizzes which suprised me, being that it's not my native language and all. I got perfect marks on those if anyone is wondering ;D

After all that studying and tests we were beat, and we all stayed in Friday night. Well for the most part, Martin drove us to the grocery store where we bought items to prepare for a cookout we had today (Sat. Nov 22). It's so nice not to have to freaking bike everywhere now that Martin has a car. I still bike to everyday places but far away trips are much easier now. Too bad he'll be in Tokyo next semester...

After grocery shopping I came back and did my usual chicken, and Pat made a homemade pizza. Now the interesting part about this is that he didn't use a recipe for the dough/crust what so ever. He used to work at Papa John's and just tried to do it from scratch. While it wasn't the best pizza I'd ever tasted it was pretty awesome for a first attempt, and mind you an first attempt without a recipe. We through pepporini and chicken on ther which a crap load of mozzarella, and that cheese (enough for one more pizza of the same size) was like $6 bucks. Milk is cheap here, but cheese is not.

Pat and I then played some Warcraft 3 together and I ended up going to bed around 5 AM. I got up at about four hours later to start cooking for the event they were holding here at the dorm. Everyone seemed kind of mad that we weren't done cooking till almost 11 but no one told me that I needed to have my dish ready BY 10 AM (the start of the event). So Ho-san, Pat, and Me cooked my chicken I'm famous for here and of course it was gone within five minutes of putting it out, mind you that's 8 chicken breats worth of chicken gone that quickly.

Other than that the whole ordeal was somewhat lackluster, there was some dancing they tried to get me to do, but I had to pass on that. The coolest thing they had out were Taito drums which I'd yet to see or hear in real life. These guys who did this were awesome. Here are a few pics from that event.

Ho-san, Martin, and Pat digging in. Behind
Martin is Stephan (the other German student).

Pat and Emily. Looks like Emily is falling asleep.

Part of the dance circle, next to the drum in back
is Kentah. He's one of our RAs and is very cool.

Dance Circle from afar.

Cookout setup.

The girl in stripes is Melissa who is from
Australia. She is braver than I for joining that circle.

In the middle of the dance circle stood this woman.
She lead the dance and you had to mimic the moves she did.
Also, in the back to the far right of the pic is Rin-san or fellow
student in our language classes who is from China.

Everyone got a chance to hit the
drums, even kids!

The master at work.

Group shot that I think I took a little too fast...

I think the volume is high on this video so be forewarned:

Needless to say I've had a lot going on and that's why I don't have much of a chance to post lately. I've got a three day weekend and we're going to the lake to relax and chill out tomorrow. My next test isn't for another two weeks so I don't have to stress out for a while. Hope everyone enjoyed this horribly long post!