Oct. 20th

Melissa: Yesterday while Braden and I were in the mall we picked up our very first official Inkan (which we had ordered a few days before). In Japan, people don't sign their names to make documents legal, they stamp them with a name stamp with red ink. Ours says Benaito in Katakana, which is about as close as we're gonna get to our real name, hehe. While there I also bought a Japanese to English dictionary, which also includes an English to Japanese section, but unfortunately that section only uses Kanji for the Japanese, with no Hiragana to help me out :P. It might help some people if I explain written Japanese a little bit. In Japan they use three different written languages. Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. The first two, Hiragana and Katakana, are phonetic - that is, each symbol represents a set sound. All of the sounds (except n) are a whole syllable, not just a letter (In English we have m, n, k, etc. In Japanese the letters are na, ma, ka, etc). Hiragana is used to write only Japanese words - mostly particles, prepositions, verb conjugations, and a lot of grammar stuff. Katakana is used to write foreign words or names. Kanji symbols are Chinese characters, and each symbol represents a whole word or idea, rather than just a sound. Kanji is used a lot for nouns, verbs, and Japanese names. Sometimes in children's books or games there are hiragana symbols next to the kanji symbols to help children sound it out, since they haven't learned all their kanji yet (There are about 2000 kanji that are considered important for day to day living and reading. Obviously it takes years of study to learn them all :P). I have basically learned most Hiragana and Katakana, but my Kanji knowledge is less than that of a first grade Japanese kid :P. I can read things like sun/day, moon/month, (some symbols have more than one meaning as you can see), water, rice, fire, person, woman, child, etc.). I still have ALOT to learn.

After buying our inkan and dictionary we walked by the movie theater and noticed that The Borrower Arrietty by Studio Ghibli was playing, so we decided we'd splurge and watch it ^_^. It was soooooo good! Course, most anything by them is good. Everything they do is beautiful! The animation was gorgeous of course, I especially liked the way they animated the interaction between Arrietty and the human boy, they did a really good job of making him seem big and intimidating in the eyes of Arrietty and her family, even though he's really just a young man. The music was beautiful too, and kind of celtic sounding. I already can't wait for it to come out on DVD so I can watch it again! The movie's been out for a while, so maybe it'll come out on DVD pretty soon. There were only maybe four or five other people in the movie theater with us (which was probably a good thing, cause there was no one close by us to be annoyed with Braden constantly whispering to me the translation of everything being said :P).

Anywho, that was the highlight of my day right there. The day before in Karate we got another good workout, but I felt like I was doing pretty poorly. I was still sore from the last workout, and as a result my balance was out of wack, and we ended up going over a lot of kata, and since I was already out of practice, and since they do their kata a little bit differently in IKO Matsui, the Sensei and Senpai had to be constantly correcting me, and since my Japanese is terrible, that was a little hard for them to do, they had to mime everything for me :P. Most of the day I just felt embarrassed and nervous and sore, so I wasn't having the greatest time, but I'm sure that after a few weeks I'll be back into the swing of things.

I just remembered something else I did at the mall yesterday, I got a haircut. The last few classes in Karate I've been annoyed with my hair because even though it's in a ponytail when I go, the ponytail was long enough that it whipped me in the face everytime I turned my head quickly. I'm not very good at putting my hair in a bun, so I decided I should just get a haircut. I didn't cut it too short, just shoulder length, long enough for a ponytail but not so long that it hits me :). I didn't know how to tell the guy cutting my hair that I wanted layers, and neither did Braden, though he tried to look it up, but the guy must've figure it out cause he did put some subtle layers in my hair. I thought it turned out pretty well even though it was just a cheap salon in the mall that only cost about 12 dollars. I'll put some pics up a little later. Right now blogspot is telling me that image uploads are disabled for two hours due to maintenance :P.