But what was the best part of my day, you ask?

That's easy!
CPK!!!!
(as in California Pizza Kitchen)
So it turns out there's a CPK in Kawasaki (haven't been to one of those since Triangle Town Centre!), so upon hearing of this Jason, Molly, Marshall and I headed down there for dinner last night. I had Thai Chicken Pizza, which was delicious! And it was exactly the same as the regular CPKs, it was kind of scary. They even had Diet Coke with free refills! (which if you know anything at all about Japan, you'll recognize is utterly 珍しい)
The vibe was so eerily similar that Marshall actually started to place his order in English! LoL.

...sometimes you just need a little American food.

Sankeien

Wednesday we had a field trip!
I didn't really have a good idea what it was all about going in--the excuse to have a day off of class was enough for me--but it turned out to be pretty interesting (if kind of cold--which is a problem only in that cold makes me sleeeeeeepy...)
So, the Yokohama Rotary Club (I know, right) was hosted this, I guess you'd call it a cultural day, down at Sankeien Garden. Sankeien is basically this large (for Japan) cultural garden with flowers and all these old, famous buildings that some rich dude basically bought and transported here from Kyoto.
LoL.
So we all met at Negishi station at 9am (that's earlier than class usually starts! some day off...) and took taxis over to Sankeien. Some of the Rotary Club members met us there and led us over to one of the buildings (semi open-air; hence the cold) where they took turns making various 日本語らしい greetings.
The first event of the day was some gagaku, or Japanese "classical music." It was neat, lots of flutes and drums and stuff, but kind of long. The best part came after, when 3 student volunteers got to try on these craaaaazy traditional costumes that (I guess?) were worn when playing the music. Not really sure on that score, but. Anyway, here's Nick--not that you can see him, really--dressed in what was by far the coolest costume. Next on the agenda was ikebana, or flower arranging--which I'd actually done once before, at HIF (cf. the "Culture Classes" post, I think). Here's my finished product! (^-^) Then we went into another room and got to watch a sort of traditional Japanese dance. The guy explained after, that it was meant to sort of tell a story, all about these various gods and things. Once he showed what each part of the dance meant, I understood much better.
Anyway, here's a video I took of part of his dance. It got really good right after I stopped, but sadly Bazes's head kept getting in the way, so I really had to.

Next was the most fun part--for me, at least. Back when we first heard about the field trip, pretty much all they said about it was that there was going to be a part where you could try on kimonos, so of course I signed up! I figured it was going to be pretty much the same as my yukata, but it turns out this one was an actual kimono, which I'd never gotten to wear before. The process is much more involved--it took 2 people to dress me! And here's a picture of the whole group: After that, we changed back into our street clothes, bundled up, and went outside for a tour of the park. It was a nice walk, but we didn't have a whole lot of time to see things, and by that time, I think people were pretty ready to go home, so the tour part did feel a bit of a chore. But the garden was pretty: I just wish I'd been able to appreciate it more.
Oh, and as always, there are *tons* more pics from all parts of the day up at my kodakgallery.

Bowling!

So, yet again this weekend was a total blast! Jason, Molly and I (Misa was sposed to come too, but her grandma got sick) met up with some of the HamaDai kids from the festival and went bowling!
I seriously haven't been bowling in years, it was チョーなつかしい。LOL.
The participants this time were as follows:
Ai, one of our group guides from the HamaDai festival.
Naoko, one of the others that we met at HamaDai, also showed up, along with a new face--Yan, who's another Chinese exchange student at HamaDai (tho you'd never guess it, her Japanese is phenomenal). Here's a shot of Naoko (R) and Yan (L). Yan had just been showing Naoko a few pointers, cause she was actually a really awesome bowler! (I dunno, maybe bowling is more popular in China...?)
Anyway, since there were so many of us, we split up into two teams and had a face-off. p(^.^)q
It was me-Naoko-Yan vs. Jason-Molly-Ai. Of course we won! (not really any thanks to me, tho...)
Yan is an absolute hoot--I swear, she's genki enough for 3 people all by herself. She kept making fun of Naoko (who's teeny) for using a light, little-kid bowling ball, and started calling her "kids," cause that's what was written on the ball. {^0^}
Here's a picture of everybody!! (except me, cause I was taking the picture). L-R is Molly, Jason, Ai, Naoko, and Yan in the front.
By that time it was around 6 or 7 pm, so we all went to an izakaya for dinner (except for Molly, who had to go home), and ended up staying til about 11:15, just hanging out and talking and everything. Poor Jason, the only guy... LOL. It actually was pretty funny, he was getting a lot of attention. Yan kept trying to feel his hair, and then Naoko and Ai accused him first of being "meticulous," and then decided he looked like he would be a 亭主関白, which basically translates into an old-fashioned, I'm-the-ruler-of-the-house type of husband. Haha. Which Jason did not take well. (^_-)

Oh yeah, and there's more pics from Saturday uploaded to the kodakgallery.

It's Christmas! (Huh?)

Well, not really. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. But that doesn't stop the Japanese! (see, they don't have Thanksgiving here--although we still get Friday off...not sure why...)
At any rate, this is the Christmas tree in Queen's Square Mall, by IUC. It's been up since we came back from Fall Break (i.e. the first Monday in November). Wow--now that's some holiday spirit!

And now, here's some random photos that I snapped walking home from school last week.

The ferris wheel by Pacifico
(and that's the corner of the World Porter's in the right fore)

View of Landmark Tower and some of the other buildings around Pacifico.

Ferris Wheel again! And that's Pacifico in the background
(with IUC on the 5th floor!!)

It's Friday? Seriously??

Wow, this was a long week. I mean, nothing in particular happened, I was just *super* tired. Too much messing around and staying up later than I should (lol). And amazingly, that tends to catch up with you. (I know, you're shocked)
We finished up the 接続詞 conjunctions section in AM class this week. It was seriously detailed and stuff--lots of going into all these expressions that mean *almost* *exactly* the same thing, but there's one case where you can't use it. Stuff like that--the difference between それで、そこで、それから、それなら、&c. Not the most interesting, but it's definitely something that I'm grateful we went through in detail, because while I mostly knew what those expressions meant, they can be kind of confusing and I wasn't totally 詳しい on them.
Next up is "Integrated Japanese Advanced Course" (ISJ for short)--sort of the sequel textbook to ASJ that we used in the first semester. It also looks fairly scary, in terms of that it goes into serious detail about everything. But then, that's why I'm here, right. It's also going to be a little heavier in the hw department I think--like with the 接続詞 hw, there's a bunch of "complete the sentence" problems in the textbook that we have to write out separately and turn in every day, in addition to the regular readings and stuff. Hmm...

PM class is also starting a new section as of next week--seems like we're going to be doing that for the rest of the term, i.e. each week's readings will have a different theme. Which I kind of like. This past week was 文化の発信 (umm... "Transmission of Culture," I guess you could call it) and next week will be 地球温暖化 "Global Warming" (ugh--at least it's a short week).

On the fun side, tomorrow is going to be super! Jason, Misa, Molly, and I are meeting up with some of the HamaDai kids that we met over break at the festival, and we're all gonna go bowling and then to dinner or something after. :-D Should be lots of fun, so I'm definitely looking forward to that.
Also, next week we will be super-cool cause 1) we're doing a special field trip thingy Wed and therefore have no class at all; and 2) Friday is a national holiday!! (I never know what it's for, I just appreciate the break--makes a nice change from Yale....)

Oh yeah, and this week in calligraphy (Tues) we got to start making seals (stamps) with our name-kanji, so we can sign our work. It's crazy complicated--it's a stone, so you have to actually carve the kanji onto it... But more on that later.

P.S. (and I promise this is it) note the new video above! See, I'm really doing the weekly thing! It's another (fairly) new single, and I just think the video is cute, tho kind of sad.

also (e.g. technological musings)

I'm currently totally into this band, MONGOL 800 (in Japanese it's ﾓﾝｺﾞﾙ８００ which gets shortened to ﾓﾝﾊﾟﾁ--cause let's face it, the Japanese can never resist shortening a long name).
They're kind of...I guess you'd call it indie rock-style music? Guitars, drums, but very upbeat songs. The closest comparison I can think of, is that they kind of remind me of the Plain White T's. In particular, I fell in love with the song 小さな恋の歌 (translated as something like "Little Love Song"? Whatever, it sounds better in Japanese) off their album MESSAGE. It's actually an album from several years ago--I'm not even sure if the band's really active anymore. But I first heard the song cause it featured in an episode of Propose Daisakusen (LOL).
Anyway, combination of it being kind of an older album, and not super popular anymore, I wasn't able to find a good download of it (don't give me that look) so I actually went out and bought the CD (I know, right!). But I was able to find it at Book-Off (in case you're not aware, a used book-manga-CD-DVD chain and the most incredible place known to man) for about 1000￥, or a little under $10. It was a really weird feeling, tho--I was realizing, it's literally been *years* since I've bought an actual CD (rather than an iTunes download).
So at any rate, that CDs been playing on repeat on my computer since yesterday :-)


P.S. On the related music note--there've been some edits to the blog. Due to various 面倒 like videos mysteriously disappearing from my playlist, &c, I've decided to replace the large video player that I had up before, with more of a "Video of the Week" system. Whether I'll actually update it *every week* remains to be seen (I'll try tho!) but I promise I will change the videos on a somewhat regular basis. I'm envisioning a combination of new-release videos and (if there's nothing interesting that week) older vids that piqued my interest.
And to keep track of it all, I'll be keeping a list of the archived videos from past weeks. Format is Date: Artist / Track. 見 links to the video on youtube (I take no responsibility if old links go dead--you've got a computer, you can look it up yourself).

So, enjoy! (and comments always welcome)

~sarah

First week thoughts

So the first week of 二学期 2nd term is over, and on the whole it went better than I thought. Having experienced the same people in my new morning class, I think that やっぱり the main cause of my old afternoon class's supreme draggy-ness was definitely the post-lunch coma. (And perhaps also the fact that I am not remotely politically inclined, and so found the subject matter completely uninteresting)

We've been doing 接続詞, i.e. conjunctions the past week (and all next week as well) in the morning, which wasn't as boring as you might think. So, plus on that score. In the afternoon class, we're currently reading news articles to do with Japanese culture, industry, and I think we even get to read about foreigners' problems in Japan. So, while there' still the whole "I'm tired and I want to go home" aspect going on, the energy level has definitely been bumped up a notch.

I also like my new teachers a lot, too--even though I definitely miss having class with my advisor, Satou Ari-sense. New faces are Akizawa-sensei (uses his laptop hooked to the TV to write notes instead of the blackboard; also seems to have a rather serious cat-fixation); and in the afternoon Satou Tsukasa-sensei (not to be confused with my advisor and 一学期 1st term teacher Satou Ari; she seems very nice and good at keeping class discussions going), and Goto-sensei (seems nice, but I've only had her one day so far, so haven't got a good read on her teaching style yet). The one returning face is [morning] Senda-sensei, who I had last term in the afternoon--I was really glad to see her back. We bonded 1st term over the revelation that Senda-sensei actually lived in Raleigh for several years, teaching! She was totally excited to hear that I was from Raleigh too (Raleigh-ite? Raleigh-an?) and so we occasionally reminisce over street names or restaurants. ;-P

It seems like the homework level has also been upped a bit this term. Or rather, just that it's more written homework rather than "make sure you've read and understood the grammar points" type homework (i.e. work you actually have to turn in, and therefore must do all of). So it seems like more. Whatever. I'm dealing.