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!

totemo kawaii!!!!

Be warned, I have a lot to say so this might get long…
On the third of July we had the Tanabata festival at Shiga University. It is one of the festivals where you tie wishes to the branches of a tree. Everyone who bought one wore their yukatas; doing so resulted in a free snow cone! I arrived early to get ready with Bou-chan. On the way there I managed to go a whole minute without using my hands! They all did their hair in fun Japanese ways but I think mine was too short so I just left it down and curly. The festival was mostly fun. Melville sensei had told us the tenkiyohou (weather forecast) had promised no rain but that didn’t stop it from raining the whole festival through (luckily I brought an umbrella!). We all looked cute (pics on fb, as always), though, and ate lots! I had some good Japanese fried chicken, tacoyaki (bleh I don’t care what anyone says), snow cones (mine was strawberry, but kind of tasted like bubblegum. Bou-chan was surprised to hear that we had snow cones in America, she thought it was just a Japanese thing :p), a hotdog (for Americas sake, I figured better a day early than never although it should be mentioned that an American hotdog is not the same as a Japanese hotdog 0.o) vinegar rice (:D), and some weird and untasty fish chips. Basically all we did there was eat (My favorite kind of festival!) and for free because Bou-chans friend, Hitomisan had lots of coupons ^-^. My feet were killing me though because my shoes are two sizes too small and made of very un-giving wood. Moreover it is unacceptable, when wearing a Yukata, to stand with your hip out to rest one foot. You must always stand with both feet flat on the ground and close together. Afterwards I got to practice my ability to ride my bike while holding an umbrella (especially challenging!). Next Sunday we will be going to Kyoto to another festival, although I don’t know if we will wear our Yukata’s again.

I feel like I’m in Japan. Before I came to homestay I never really felt like I was in Japan. Most of the time, I felt like I was just in East Lansing. Sure, there were a lot of Asians, but I was surrounded by white people do, I almost always spoke English and I lived in a very Americanized dorm. Now I live in a very Japanese house. It is a small two story building, no basement, maybe four of me by five of me (obviously not an exact measurement). When last checked I was 5 feet 8 and 1/8th inches. Feel free to do the math. The downstairs seems especially small as the rooms are all separated into very small rooms with a somewhat complicated hallway system. The upstairs, however, consists of three good sized rooms (mine, I believe, being the biggest). I love my room. It has its inconveniences, mainly that I have absolutely no shelving or drawers (the closet is full of linens; although I did manage to fit my snack bag inside). Even so, it’s gorgeous! I have Tatami floors and beautiful cloth sliding doors, both out to the hallway and for my closet. I sleep on a futon on the floor which is great any time I’m not trying to sleep! It makes your room look a lot bigger when you’re bed masquerades as the floor. I have a small bamboo and glass table on which to study and a strange yet intriguing chair that I have yet to truely test. It’s one of those cloth ones that are designed to keep you sitting upright but it’s made of cloth so it doesn’t really work, except that this one does appear to work. More on that later. My room is wonderfully Japanese and at night when I turn the light down low and look at my Japanese doors it isn’t hard to imagine feudal Japan (in the good way that probably never really existed, much the same as people think of England’s dark ages and think them romantic).
My okaasan is talkative and speaks very little English. I spent a lot of my time yesterday in the kitchen eating and helping to prepare our meals. My otoosan, however, doesn’t talk much and absolutely no English. He sits always in the TV room, even during meals. He listens to us talking and laughs at my poor Japanese skills. Not openly, but every now and then I hear him repeat the same word that my Okaasan is trying to get me to understand. I rather like the arrangement. The man intimidates me a little so it’s nice that I don’t have to try to talk to him.
We made some extremely good food yesterday for dinner including something she labeled “Chinese” which consisted of cold noodles, fried egg, ham and cucumber and some unknown sauce; a tofu dish with green peppers that look like they would be super spicy, but aren’t; some other dish she labeled as “seafood” which looked like choppy black something and fried tofu; miso soup and of course gohan (rice). This morning was not nearly so successful. Today I had my first ever run-in with the notorious natto (fermented bean paste) and my second run-in with the notorious umeboshi. The second didn’t go so badly, although this time it was considerably tarter and harder to eat (refers to previous post with link). Natto, however, was just as bad as I was always told it was. It is a sort of… slimy bean. Like a baked bean if it had no shell and was covered in goo. The taste is not so bad but the texture. It clings to everything like melted cheese! I couldn’t make myself finish it, but in Japan food is not to be wasted and I unfortunately told my Okaasan that it was okay (The first bite wasn’t so bad, like I said it tastes like a bean, and I rather imagined she would have put it in something, or with something, instead of having me eat it straight). To top it off she made me eggs, which is fine, I love eggs, but she made them sunny side up (maybe a little harder but she never turned them). I had already downed half of the natto before I chanced eating the yokes so I was happy to find them not so bad, not good, but certainly edible. (and I’ll have you know that I’m eating every last bite so stop telling people I’m so picky!). All throughout breakfast my Okaasan is telling me it won’t rain today. Amegafuranai to itteimashita! Just as I’m finished my breakfast the down poor starts (noticing a trend?). Luckily it lightened to a soft but soaking rain by the time that I came down fully equipped in the raingear my okaasan gave me. (As apparently riding your bike with an umbrella is unacceptable and dangerous). Still biking in the rain wasn’t fun, especially because I was so worried about my computer getting wet. On the bright side, my okaasan did make me coffee for breakfast as requested!
The best part of my day, however, came at lunch time. We all have mailboxes that are located in the hallway you use to enter the academic building from the dorms. So whenever you go back to your dorms you cast a quick glace to see if anything is in yours. Today, a glance wasn’t necessary as I made my way back to my old dorm for lunch as the package that had been stuffed into my two inch thick box (no jokes please) was noticeable right away. I’ve never understood the sort of people who hate their mothers, but maybe that is because mine is the type to mail an envelope stuffed full of chocolate, coffee and non-dairy creamer half way around the world just to make her poor, sleepy daughter happy. I love you mom! The best part came when, having noted the coffee but not the chocolate I dumped out the entire package on my bed in search of a note and saw the beautiful bars sitting them amidst the red glow of future caffeine! What a happy lunch time I had. I managed to come back home during a lull in the rain. A half hour longer on facebook would have caught me in a torrential downpour! Yey rainy season!
So, a little bit about how weird it is to live in a Japanese house. You are told to take a shower the minute you come in the door in the afternoon. It is kinda refreshing but a little annoying because it is still the hottest part of the day when you get out. Also, showers here are not standing under the fall of hot water and letting your cares melt away for a brief 15 minutes. It’s suds up, turn water on, rinse into drain in floor, end. The whole thing is supposed to be in prep for the bathtub I have no intention of ever using. I wash and face and brush my teeth every morning and night out of doors in a little sink on a little balcony attached to my room… with the spiders. Note that I’m not complaining, just explaining, as I am simply relieved that they have an American style toilet, so I am contented. It’s an experience, and I can enjoy it as such. I do worry about the bed situation though. I couldn’t sleep well last night (I never have been able to sleep on the floor) and I couldn’t pay attention at all today in class. I’m hoping I’ll get used to sleeping on a futon, rather than fail this second month from lack of sleep. I really ought to attempt to study now as I will have dinner within an hour and then I have to go back to JCMU to meet with Rurisan for speaking practice.