Friday October 10, 1997: 10:30am
Holiday! Today is Sports/Fitness day, I like it! Anyways, I figured that the best way to honour this holiday would be to go for a run first thing when I got up. Oh, I saw a strange sight - 2 guys practicing baseball pitching IN A PARKING LOT! Now, I don't care *how* good they are - they've got to slip up sometime, and when they do... crash! bang! boom!
Also on my run I took a short break to watch a bit of a little league baseball game that was being played by the Asakawa. Wow, the pitcher was awesome! Anyway, right now I'm on my way to the Yasukuni Jinja, where there is supposedly a funky festival going on. Cool.
Yasukuni Jinja - 11:45am
Well, this is definitely neat. I'm at this old archery ritual thing (called Kusajishi shiki) - so there are these guys dressed up in real old archery outfits, doing archery. BUT, there's a whole ceremony to it... like, they have to kneel at certain times, and turn at certain times, and say certain things, and arrange their clothing in a certain way. Then occasionally they shoot some arrows at this fake deer maybe 20 metres away. It's quite neat. Their bows are _really_ tall - taller than them at least. Now I've never done archery so I don't know if this is normal, but...
Oh, and I have yet to see anyone hit the deer! Maybe they're not supposed to (or maybe it's because I can't see the deer because of the crowds...)
5 minutes later
A hit!
3:30pm
Wow I am in the most amazing park - Shinjuku Gyoen. Really, it's incredible! It's something like 60 hectares, and 3.5 kms circumference - and the inside is quiet and peaceful, although there are tons of people here. There are all these huge trees and wooded paths... ponds, birds, pavilions, huge wide lawns.. and since it's such a beautiful day (blue sky, no clouds, slight breeze, perfect temperature) there are people lying on the lawns everywhere. Everything is so beautiful! Hmm, it says in the brochure here that the whole park is a mixture of 3 styles; Japanese, English, and French. Neat. I'm gonna rest here for awhile.
Oh, earlier on I went to the Van Gogh exhibit I'd heard so much about and it was fabulous! It even had the Sunflowers! Actually, there were about 15 Van Gogh's - I was extremely impressed!
And then I was going to go to a Yabusame (a Japanese horseback archery ritual) but I got *completely* distracted by a huge spontaneous flea market just in the middle of the high-rise centre of Shinjuku! How strange! Obviously they were just set up for today - and I LOVE 2nd had stuff so I just couldn't possibly pass up the chance to take a look around.
Ok, rest time.
7pm
Had my Thanksgiving mashed taters tonight - they were good, but I definitely didn't make enough. I'd forgotten just *how much* I love mashed potatoes! Tomorrow is pancakes...
Saturday October 11, 1997: 5:10pm
Today is stunning. Both yesterday and today have been the carbon copy of a perfect Canadian summer day. Now, I was going to wait until tomorrow to gloat about the weather (since tomorrow's supposed to be pretty much the same) but since when do I postpone gloating?? Hee heheh.
So instead of taking one of my usual running routes I decided to explore today. See, there was this little wooden path I'd noticed not too long ago, and I couldn't believe I hadn't explored it yet. So, that was my first destination, but it ended up only being about 30 metres long, so I explored down by the Tamagawa (Tama River) instead - which is so neat! See, I run along the Tamagawa everyday almost - but today I went in the opposite direction.. wowee, there's just so much nature over there!
And on the way home I discovered a grocery store that I hadn't seen before, so I went in to look for pumpkin puree - no luck. I wasn't really surprised though.
Ooo - stuffed myself silly with pancakes this morning - great stuff!
Sunday October 12, 1997: 9pm
Well today was fun! It was my first Japanese/English lesson with Mikako-chan - we met at the Hachioji station at 1:30 or so... and from there we headed over to the Keio Hachioji Station. On the way there we stopped off at a restaurant for lunch, but actually I only had a coffee cuz I'd eaten a late breakfast. Anyways, I think we were there for over an hour... it was "Japanese time" - so Mikako-chan was doing most of the talking, but I was trying! Actually, now that I think about it, I was talking quite a bit, but I know I was making just tons of mistakes. No matter, it was fun. We seem to get along.
Ah, so from Hachioji we went by train to the Tama Zoo, which is really close to my apartment, yet I've never been. It's actually quite the large zoo - bigger than Ueno's (not that I've been) - Mikako-chan said that it used to get a lot of press because of its koalas - or something like that.
So we got to the zoo at 3:30 or so, so we had an hour and a half to wander. And, it then became "English time" so I was doing a lot more talking. Ah, so we saw the koalas and they were so cute! We spent a lot of time just talking - explaining things about English or Japanese - so really the koalas were all we ended up seeing! But that's fine cuz it was fun.
From the zoo we went back to Hachioji, where we went to a bookstore to check out dictionaries because I'd been telling her how it was *impossible* to find a good Eng->Jap dictionary without an OBSCENE amount of kanjis. So we hung around the bookstore for quite awhile, being the wild dudettes that we are. Hee hee. Well, really we were chatting about anything. Ooo - we did a print club of course.
And now I'm home - got back about half an hour ago. Mikako-chan and I'll definitely do our lesson-thing again - Actually, I was telling her how I was going to go to Nikko when the leaves change colour, so we're going to go together. Cool. Okedokee, sleep time.
Monday October 13, 1997: 9pm
MY PHONE WORKS! IT WORKS! It works it works it works! After *2 months* of not being able to call out.. I can! This is so cool.
And to top things off, I'm happy to report that my chin is completely back to normal! Cool.
But on a sadder note, today was my last lesson with Mitake-sensei.. how sad. I brought her a cake because that was always one of our main topics of conversation - cake and ICE CREAM, of course. I think that's why we get along ;-)
Tomorrow I have my last lesson, but it's with Kobayashi-sensei. And, we're going to finish off my kanji textbook (the big 500!) and also my other textbook. Perfect timing!
Tuesday October 14, 1997: 9pm
Well, the last part of the last chapter in my textbook is a review of ALL 27 CHAPTERS of the whole book (of which we did maybe the last 13 or so) - and we went of it and I got every single question right except for 2, out of maybe 70! Sensei was so proud. *I* was so proud! If only I could speak like that! Anyways, it was a good ending to my 4 months of lessons. Wahduh, now I have to study on my own.. I'll have to keep up my motivation, although that shouldn't really be too hard.
15 mins. later
Cool! I just got a phone call from Mikako-chan, and she asked me if I'd like to go to a concert a friend of hers is playing in on Friday night. Neat!
Wednesday October 15, 1997: 9am
5 months ago to the day I arrived at the Narita airport. Amazing.
9pm
Well I couldn't go to calligraphy tonight because there was another suicide along the Chuo line and all the trains were stopped. Gosh, that's 2 in just over a week - horrible.
Actually, everything was really weird today - sirens have been going all evening, and the dog accross the street has been howling ever since I got home - usually it only barks. Strange.
Thursday October 16, 1997: 9pm
Really not much went on today. Hm well I guess at work it did - Hirabayashi-san and I put our code together after 4 months of working on it separately - and within an hour or 2 we had the error count down to zero! BUt then we tried runing it from a browser and we got some really strange error which we couldn't figure out... it has something to do with one of Hirabayashi-san's classes, so in a way I'd like to think it's his to fix... but it could easily be because I'm passing him some invalid value.. argh.
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