Normal Stuff

There's nothing super interesting to report at the moment, but I will report nonetheless!

A few days ago, a package came in the mail with the pottery that my host family made oer Golden Week while we were in Atami. If you recall, I also made a piece of pottery while I was in Minakami. I got that one sort of recently too so I thought to put up pictures of the finished products.

The one one the left is the one I made in Minakami, and the one on the right is the one I made in Atami.

Event-wise, things have been pretty quiet. This is partly because of some trouble with my cell phone over the weekend. Seeing as my friends live scattered about Tokyo, a cell phone is an absolute necessity if you want to have a social life. But mine wasn't working (I got it all worked out yesterday though so yay to that). Unfortunately, my weekend was rather boring because of that.

Yesterday was the one kind of cool thing. My Japanese class had another field trip (you may remember that last semester we went to a traditional Japanese sweet shop). This time we went to Shibuya to visit NHK Studio Park. NHK is the big public owned broadcasting company here in Japan (when I say public, think more like BBC and less like PBS). It was pretty fun though not super amazing. However, the tickets were paid for by our tuition so we didn't have to worry about money (except for transportation as I actually have to pay to go to Shibuya since it isn't on my commuter pass).

This is Bobby from my Japanese class pretending to be a newscaster on NHK's Ohayoo Nippon (morning news program, the title tranlates as "Good Morning Japan").

And just for fun, last night Mami and I were teaching Su-chan how to do the peace sign for photos.

He is one cool kid isn't he?

花見

I have been a busy bee the past week and a half. Finally I have some time to relax a little bit.

Spring has finally come and with it some wonderfully gorgeous weather. The Japanese love spring since that's the time one can see the cherry blossoms. They have what are called "hanami". That's actually the title of this post. Separately, the two kanji mean flower (hana) and look/view/see (mi); translated, hanami is usually called a blossom viewing party. People flock outside to picnic under the cherry blossoms. I myself did this several times with my host family.This photo is from my first hanami. Mami, Su-chan, my host dad (I still feel weird calling him Yosuke...) went to an area near Yasukuni shrine which is famous for its blossoms on a Friday evening. This meant there were a bunch of people there picnicing and wandering around. Because of that, my host dad eventually took Su-chan home so that Mami and I could walk around unencumbered by a two-year-old. Taking pictures was hard since it was night, but I got a few good ones like the one above.

The next morning was more blossom viewing. This time we all went to a park in Shinjuku which was more open so that Su-chan could run around. Now you can see some blossoms in daylight!

And here we have Su-chan in a tree. See? This park was great for him. Lots of opportunities for him to do silly things. I was impressed that he actually looked at me when I took this picture. Usually he does something weird when you try to get a photo of him so that most of the time you get a blur...

...Or a photo like this. This was taken that night at Mami's parents house. We stayed that night in order to help welcome Jeremy, Mami's parents' new host student. We I told Su-chan I was taking a picture, he started running at me like the crazy child he is so this is the result.

This photo is of me at a park near where Mami's parents live. I went there with Mami's dad and Jeremy. We had been intending to go to another Hanami that a friend of Mami's was hosting, but Su-chan was not his usually genki self (genki being a Japanese word that means healthy and energetic) so we didn't go. The park was really pretty though and you can see a whole regiment of turtles on that thing in the water behind me.

After that weekend, I had to start classes which was not really any fun. No one wants to go from two months of break to three hours of Japanese in the morning. Luckily, however, my classes this semester seem like a lot of fun. Besides Japanese, I'm taking sociolinguistics, Ainu in a typological perspective, and media studies (this is maybe my favorite but that might just be because the professor is a Doctor Who fan).

Last week was also exciting because I got a visit from KENDRA! Her Semester at Sea ship came to Japan so I got to hang with her for a few days (when I wasn't in class anyway...I'm a good girl!) which was super awesome! Though a bit sad since that's the last visit from anyone back in the States that I'm getting while I'm here.

That pretty much brings us up to date. By the way, as a bit of trivia, today is my seven month anniversary here in Japan.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Easter!

Suguru's birthday

This was just too cute to wait so you get another post so soon! Today is Su-chan's 2nd birthday so we had a nice dinner though I doubt Su-chan really understood the concept. Anyway, in the picture is Su-chan blowing out candles. Sorry he's cropped funny, but it's impossible to get him to stay still long enough for a good photo usually. You do get to see the cake though. Let me tell you, the Japanese really know how to make a good cake. It was delicious. And my host family really spoils me as I got two slices (which is two fifths) of the cake. Yummmmmm.... I guess it's maybe too bad that my birthday is after I leave. Though I'd have to share it with my host dad. Though that could be pretty fun...


While at the Studio Ghibli Museum, I bought a Totoro plushie for Su-chan as he LOVES that movie (I'm sure by the time I leave Japan the number of times I will have seen that movie will be in the hundreds and I'm not kidding in the slightest). So here's a video of him playing with it right after he opened it. If you couldn't guess, the other two people in the video are my host parents. Enjoy!