is either finding a japanese style karaoke place in Michigan or buying a good karaoke machine, either way, once i'm home, prepare to start singing!

I had such a great day today! It started a little glumly with a trip through the rain to school but its Friday, which means only 3 classes instead of four! I ended up forgetting my power cord and I wanted my sensei to translate a letter I received from my weekend homestay family so I had to bike home and back during lunch, which ended up being just fine because I got a nice workout and it had stopped raining. It started again when I got home and I worried it would rain all night because I had plans to meet with Bou-chan but it cleared up as I was on my way to Shiga and it stayed clear for the rest of the night! How Fortuitous! Tonight was amazing! Hanging with Bouchan always is, of course, she is terribly lovely. Hanging with Bouchan is interesting because with her I experience all the fun girly things girls do in middle school that I missed out on, like giggling incessantly over cute boys and giggling over starting a singing group and giggling over… I think you get the picture. Its super fun! We went out to castle road again and had tempura dinner with more chawanmushi and miso and rice and more of those tasty pickles like mom makes back home. It was very good! Then we went to @time and played billiards and karaoked! Billiards with Bouchan is especially fun because it doesn’t matter who wins, as long as someone gets a ball in. normally I’m very competitive but when I play with her and Akiko it is more like we are playing collectively against the balls. So the fact that she destroyed me was completely fine (haha ^-^). Karaoke was of course super fun! My favorite thing to do ever! It is officially going on my Hobbies list. I just wish that they had it in America. “The rose” was playing in the restaurant so I sang that first along with “Somewhere only we know”, “Let’s give them something to talk about”, “The song remembers when”, “Foolish Games”, “Perfect Situation”, “The River of Dreams”, “Don’t Ask Me Why”, and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to me” as well as accompanied in such songs as “Lonely” (by Akon), “Lovefool”, and “Complicated”. Bouchan also sang some pretty awesome sounding Chinese and Japanese songs that I liked. It was an utterly Awesome night! Tomorrow is studying and resting and then Sunday is off to Kyoto to see Yasukochan, to see the Golden Temple and to… you guessed it, sing more Karaoke!!! Haha, I’m really excited. There is the possible talk of maybe going to @time again on Monday, but since Akiko is going with me to Kyoto Sunday maybe she will be too tired. We will see. Monday is a holiday so I have no school which is epic! :D

today the lake looked like an endless expanse of wet grey sand.

I believe a clarification is in order. Apparently my posts all come off as very depressed or sad. I do not know if this is one of the unwanted byproducts of expressing ones thoughts without the help of body language and tone or if I simply only write about the sorts of things that seem unpleasant. Possibly both. Either way, I feel the need to inform you all that I am having an amazing time. Certainly I have my down points, moments of homesickness that come in waves every other week or so, or days like today when I just never want to hear Japanese again (haha) but I assure you I take these moments in stride and laugh them off. When I’m writing my posts I’m almost always laughing at the things that bother me, or simply informing you of a condition, like how unbelievably hot it is here, it isn’t a complaint, rather a surprised bservation of the weather. I usually write my posts at night, when I am most tired, and perhaps that is why I come off lackluster and unhappy. I assure you this is not the case. I’m extremely happy. I’m enjoying myself to the fullest. I love Japan! I love the food, which is amazing, and the scenery, which is gorgeous. I’ve felt ill of late, which may also be why I sound unhappy, but most days I’m very happy, so long as I’m not in class :p. Most days I’m dying for the day when I can come back. I plan it often, and am very excited for it. So please don’t feel that I am regretting my choice and don’t worry about me too much, I’m doing very well thank you. And try not to miss me too much (I know, it’s a feat, I am terribly missable) but there are only 18 days left until I’m home and then you can all bask in my magnificence once more! Feel free to count the days :p

the view from my bicycle

I love living by the lake. I ride my bike past it every day. I take the slightly longer less inhabited road so I can look at it on my way to school. Every day it looks differently and I try to describe it in words as I pass. One day it looked like a choppy slate of steel; another day I could find no words to describe it besides what I always imagined Galadriel’s mirror to look like; a lake of liquid mercury; a black and rocky terrain; the perfect blue-green color you always imagine a lake to be; a mirror reflecting direct and pure sunlight, as if you put a mirror directly under a flashlight; today it looked like cotton candy. I don’t know how else to describe it. It looked like a rippled mirror reflecting the colors of cotton candy, baby blue and pallid orange and pink. I took a picture of it. It was so beautiful and innocent looking that it didn’t seem real. There were few clouds in the sky, too, which allowed the mountains to stand out against the pink of the horizon. It seemed like something from a child’s cartoon. I may have been my favorite form yet.

nom nom nom ...nom nom nooom noooom ugggggg

It is unbelievably hot here, I mean wow. They tell you that it is going to be, but they make it seem like it will be unbelievably hot the whole time, so when the whole first month passes and you don’t feel the slightest inclination to turn on the AC you start to feel confident that they were exaggerating and that you are simply more adaptable than the average student. No, no you are not. It’s awful, haha. I’m having a terribly time at trying to stay hydrated; especially considering my Okaasan is shoving tea down my throat at every opportunity. I can’t say no (she won’t listen) so I’ve decided to just start pouring it out. I feel bad about wasting it, but I can’t see any other option. If I drank it all I would never be able to stay hydrated.
Speaking of my Okaasan forcing sustenance at me, I’m almost certainly going to come back to America fat. I really expected to lose weight here, what with the healthy food and the bike riding all the time, but I can’t imagine how that will happen with the way my Okaasan forces me to eat. Last night she was sitting there, shoveling food onto my plate (even after I begged her to stop because I was full), and talking about how Americans were fat because they eat too many cheeseburgers. I was almost in tears I was so full and she kept adding more food! Note that she doesn’t eat half as much as she makes me eat.

Kawaii!

My weekend homestay was awesome. I liked the family a lot better than my long term homestay, which makes coming back a bit of a bummer. It was a mother and father, their son and his wife and daughter. The girl was only 2, which was adorable, but a bit of a brat. They pretty much did anything she wanted and their lives revolved around her. She couldn’t speak very well, probably because she never had to, but she spoke English just as well as Japanese if not better, which was kinda cool. She almost never used more than one word at a time and it was usually either Kawaii (cute), doozo (here you are, as in giving something) or good, goodbye, hello, or thank you. It was actually really good for me to have a youngster in the house though because the family was used to speaking very simple Japanese all the time and it was a lot easier to pick up words. The wife was amazing. She was 29 but she seemed younger and she was a lot of fun. I met her friend abby, too, who was from the Philippines but spoke Japanese and English a little. She was super fun. They both really want me to come back and homestay with them again. I’m hoping against hope that if I come back they will ask me to long term instead of short term.
My teachers were so concerned about me and my failing ability to speak and hear any Japanese that they went to the homestay director and she asked my Okaasan to give me a bed instead of a futon. I feel really awful and lame about it. I wasn’t complaining, and I intended to just get used to it and now I feel very much like a lame American. That being said, best sleep I’ve gotten since I came here (of course I wasn’t feeling well again so I went to bed at 7 and slept until 6 so that might have something to do with it). I was fully attentive in class today and am back up to my normal ability to hear and think in Japanese, which is good, but I can’t tell if it’s because my amateur diagnosis was correct and my home remedies worked or because I got a bed, as the two coincided. Oh well.

さどうのくらす

I just got out of my Sadou lesson! I’m supposed to use this time at cocos for studying but I had to write this post while my memory was still fresh. It was so great. They showed us the procedure twice, the first time I taped the whole thing and the second we got to participate. I want to do it again but they made it seem like something you can’t just go and do? I think they misunderstood my question, I will look into it. They gave us each a sweet cake like snack and frothy green tea. It was fun, and I managed to go quite a while before my feet fell painfully asleep. I can’t post the pictures now, because I don’t have the cord needed here, but they will be up soon!

nom nom nom! ^-^

The Breakfast situation has greatly improved! I have found that Natto isn’t so bad so long as you don’t try to eat all of it at once. Two bites every now and then with tastier food between, and its actually quite pleasant. Also I’ve worked it out so that I only have to eat half a package in the morning, and the other half at dinner. This morning my Okaasan put umeboshi ______ on my rice this morning, AMAZING! Bou-chan was so very right. Also, she served sweet pickles, just like the ones mom makes back home!!!!! I was very happy. Today we had fried leftover salmon and French fries for breakfast, haha. On a side note, I have discovered that I love salmon, which is interesting (I do sincerely apologize to everyone who tried to convince me it was good) because every time I’ve ever had it before it’s been awful. Today I get to do the Tea Ceremony! I’m super excited! (do you remember, mom, when I tried to get my friends to build a tea ceremony house in those corn fields behind our neighborhood? Good times). I get to call Kateland at Lunch and we are going to Videls for melon pan!!! Good day!