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!