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Hi Everyone!!!

It is Friday at 1:45pm and I am done with school for the weekend!! YAY!!! This week’s school was sooo hard. For Noel and the rest of the class it was all review, but for me it was all new crap and i couldn’t understand word of what anyone said. i must say though, i can already understand some of what people around me are saying just from this one week. which is awesome. i know one (yes they have more than one) of their alphabets now and can kind of piece together words. i squeal with excitement when i do of course, and people look at me like i am insane. I sound out one word, like this:

de…….n…….wa then i have to think of what denwa means, and then i yell out PHONE!!! it means PHONE!!!

Then of course i look right below the sign that i just read and there is a phone booth right below it.

I do stupid things like this all the time though, I am used to it already, and the people here just see me as a crazy tourist, so it all works out.

The rainy season has begun. It rains and rains and rains, and then stops for a half hour, and then it pours, and sometimes it rains in the morning and not in the afternoon, and vice versa. It’s not been bad though. Today on the board Nakozowa Sensee (Nakazowa - last or family name; Sensee - Professor) wrote:

Typhoon tonight and tomorrow.

Then he went on teaching like nothing wrong or scary was said. Some of us girls exchanged looks, as we shifted uncomfortably in our seats. At the end of class someone finally had the guts to ask: “What is a typhoon, what happens during one, and will we die?” (Or something along those lines…) Our teacher laughed and told us that a typhoon is nothing more than a big rain storm, and that they are very common here during the rainy season. It has stopped raining now, which is nice, but I am a little worried about that typhoon coming up later tonight…

Hmm, where should I begin with the cool stuff, ah fireflies.

Fireflies are rarely seen in Japan. You could think of them pretty rare in Michigan too. There are the nights during the summer that we see about 5 or 6 in our backyard, and we of course capture them in jars to have our own personal “light-up-butt-bug”. But here, in some spots, there are thousands and thousands of lightening bugs as far as the eye can see, IF… you know how to get there. Well Jeff’s teacher friend knew where a place was right by his house, and invited Jeff and Asusa, as well as Noel and myself. We drove out there and walked across the street, over the train-tracks, through a pretty large rice field, and down a road to them. We got there later at night so there were less out than there would have been had we gotten there at say 8:00 or so. But there were still so many of them, and they were so amazing to look at. We tried to take some pictures, to show how many there actually are, but I doubt any will come out. It was so cool to see them though. They nest on the other side of the rice field in a deep ditch with a river running through it, and that is where they were, in the ditch, along the water. They were all so cute!!!

So that was lightening bugs. Last night Jeff took out Noel, myself of course, and our friend Jenny to a store called Uni-Qlo. Asusa described it to me as: “The Old Navy of Japan”. We had walked into one in Kyoto, but didn’t shop that much. I did notice that they sold Kimono’s though, and Jenny and I wanted to buy one while we are over here, and so we could wear them at the Gion festival in July. Jeff told us he would take us there, and he did last night. I bought a light blue Kimono with pink and purple flowers, and Jenny bought a black one with red and pink flowers. They are pretty. As soon as we figure out how to wear them, we will take pictures.

Today we watched a movie, as it is Friday, and they want to have something interesting for us to do after class. It was the strangest movie in the world, I would have to say. I don’t even know where to start telling you stuff about it. Maybe another day. But one of the plots of the movie was about a woman who was trying to succeed in a Ramen Noodle shop and the whole time she is trying out all these different Ramen places to make her noodles the best. Well after watching every person in the movie eat Ramen, you begin to want Ramen.

So now it is 6:11 pm and I just got from eating Ramen with a group of people who also watched the movie. It was good. Now I am going to check on my laundry, and perhaps take a rest.

Oh! Tomorrow night Noel’s roommate Yoshi invited us to go out for Sushi with him. He is a very nice guy, and even though we don’t eat Sushi, we are not going to turn down his first invitation. So to eat Sushi we go! (I will be eating the vegetarian role, and some rice most likely, but the experience should be well worth the trip.)

Sorry I do not have a picture to add to this entry… wait let me see if there is a good one somewhere…

Okay, I will show you a picture of the “Massage chairs” in the hardware store we went to. Let me clarify the “hardware” store: Jeff calls it a hardware store, because the first level is all appliances and other things, like tools, but the next floor up is a more like an electronics store… but we call it the hardware store because… well why not just because??? So moving on, there are all these massage chairs, as you can see, and we all spent about an hour resting in them. They are nice chairs, but a little too HARD of a massage. There is a place to put your feet, and imagine you are getting your pulse taken at the doctors, that’s what they feel like, i was a little scared. And the “massage” part of the chair was wonderful in some spots, but in other areas it felt like someone was just pushing you really hard in your back. They are high tech alright, but trying to figure out how to use them is another story…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2004 at 6:37 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.