Oct. 10th

Melissa: Happy Health and Sports Day everyone! Today commemorates the anniversary of the opening ceremony of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Its a national holiday to promote an active and healthy lifestyle. From the number of bicyclists I've seen so far in Matsue, I think the people here are doing a pretty good job. I'm in the computer lab of the international student house right now and I can hear loud music coming from the University, but I'm not sure what's going on over there. When I'm done here Braden and I are gonna check it out. Yesterday I downloaded Skype and called my family. It was so nice to talk to them! Braden and I still don't have our own phones. We're planning on buying cellphones at some point, but we were told it would be better to wait until we got our foreigner ID's and students ID before trying to sign up for a phone plan, and we still have to wait a week or so for those. Oh well, I have the internet in the meantime! The last couple days have been pretty uneventful otherwise. Braden hasn't started classes yet, so we've just been riding our bikes around the city, taking in the sites, and going to the store pretty often. Since everything comes in small packages and since we can only buy so much at once to take home on our bikes, we end up going to the store pretty often :P. Oh, last night we did do something fun, we went to a Welcome party for all the international students. Everyone brought some food (Braden and I brought some Japanese cookies that we bought at the store) so there was a large variety of dishes to choose from. There was sushi, curry, some sort of squash dish, a pineapple noodle dish that I really liked, lots of rice, and other dishes I don't know the names of. There weren't any serving spoons though so everyone just kinda dug into everything with their chopsticks. Hopefully no one has the flu or everyone's gonna get it, hehe. One of the Japanese students, Yoichi, is sort of the RA here. He's from Ishigaki, in Okinawa, which is one of the areas Braden lived in during his mission. He lives in the apartment complex with the other single students and is there to answer our questions and help us out and stuff. He's super nice, and musically talented too. Last night he played a Shamisen for us. Its some sort of traditional japanese stringed instrument that you play sort of like a guitar. Afterwards he started teaching one of the Chinese girls how to play it. He also brought a BIG bottle of Okinawan sake 0_o, and after the introductions and food alot of the students participated in a drinking game where they had to remember their neighbor's name or else they had to take a drink of sake. Braden and I just watched, hehe. So far all the other students here are really nice. They try to talk to me sometimes, but since I don't speak japanese very well yet, I just look at them blankly and guess what they're trying to say, lol. Some of them will try to use english after that, but only a few of them know english really well. I'm gonna study Japanese every day though, so hopefully I'll be speaking it before too long :).

Braden: Well, not too much has been happening recently. I'm still just kind of waiting for classes to start. We're kind of stuck in a limbo right now where we're still waiting for our Gaijin registration cards and my Shimane student ID to be done, and until then we can't get cell phones. Also, with the post office closed today, we can't withdraw any money. Mostly we've just been kind of laying around and playing games, watching anime and studying Japanese. I can't wait until I actually have a full schedule. I'm gonna work my absolute hardest on everything I am given. I absolutely can't wait until karate starts again. I've been feeling myself getting fat again, which is terrible. We need to start P90X again. Last night was cool. I got to talk to lost of international students at the dorms welcoming party. Well, I don't have much else to write about right now. Until next time!