Weekend Update

Hey there!

It's been both a very long and a very short week. I feel like I've been here forever, but also like I don't have time to get anything done at all. Classes are keeping me extremely busy, though I'm trying to enjoy myself too. Friday was lots of fun because I only had one class in morning. At lunch, I sat with two random Japanese students to try to talk, but they were very shy and didn't say much. After class, I went to buy my cell phone and am pleased to say that I managed that purchase with relatively little confusion, even though it was conducted entirely in Japanese. I now have unlimited text and email, so if you send a message to MKARIS@softbank.ne.jp you can reach me at any time, anywhere.

After I bought my phone, I went back to school for a mixer with some of the Japanese students. We mingled for an hour and then a group of about 10 American and 7 Japanese students walked down to the river. We chatted and compared cultures until the sun started to set. I think I made a few new friends, so I was pleased. Up until now I haven't had too much interaction with Japanese students at the school so it was nice to talk with some of them for such an extended period of time. After the river, most of us went to go get okonomiyaki with the Japanese students. At this point we switched over to English, and taught one of the Japanese students, Daiki, about Texan and Southern accents. It was amusing to hear him imitate us.

Finally, after dinner, we stopped by a fellow KCJS student's apartment to chat and unwind. Daiki and two other Japanese students tagged along, so we got to talk even more. I had to leave around 10 pm to make sure that I would catch the last train home, but it was still a nice end to a pleasant day.

Today I slept in for the first time since I got to Japan and did some homework before heading out to Kyoto eki to shop and get lunch. I met up with some other KCJS students and we went for Kaiten Zushi (conveyor-belt sushi) at a close-by mall. It was tasty and fun, but you had to be careful because some of the sushi plates were unexpectedly obscenely expensive. Most of the plates were only 120 yen (fairly typical for Kaiten Zushi) but some were as much as 1000 yen! I accidentally grabbed one for 300 yen, but luckily that was the most expensive one that I got. A girl in our group ending up having one for 680 yen!

After sushi, we hit up a 100 yen shop (gotta love those) and UNIQLO before heading back to Kyoto Eki for the Legendary Parfait (see picture) which we split eight ways. Finally, we browsed Yorobashi Camera (a massive multi-floor store with cameras and just about everything else ever invented-- from humidifiers and lingerie to manga and coffee) before I went back home for dinner.

Right now there is another student from Berkley staying at my host family's house for a few weeks. He just graduated and is traveling before his job starts in October. He is living in Yuka's room, next door to me. I'm jealous that he gets to explore Kyoto without homework weighing him down...

In other news, my life-skills survival cooking lessons continue. Today I learned how to make Kara-age. I spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out how to ask about the word for "sticky" (it's difficult to explain "sticky" and the Japanese have different words for different kinds of sticky). Honey is necha-necha, while raw meat is becha-becha, by the way. For dessert we had a dessert typical of Kyoto called Yatsuhashi, which was really, really good. We watched some fun Japanese variety shows wherein people had to do things like guess whether a person was a man or a woman, or an elementary student or a mother (only in Japan would these things be easily confused...) Fun fact: Variety shows have a weird thing where they borrow music from other sources. So I've heard the Star Trek theme playing while a man explains a new method for making cheese, a song from Princess Mononoke while a lady climbs around in a cave, Abba during a bit on how to save money on cooking supplies. I find it pretty entertaining.

Tomorrow is just homework, homework, homework so I'm not really looking forward to it, but oh well. At least I get to sleep in.

More soon!