Jan. 26th

Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay in updating, I just keep procrastinating :P. Anyway, aren't our bear donuts cute!! Our friend Shuhei came over for dinner a couple weeks ago (I made curry) and he brought some donuts from Mr. Donuts (I LOVE Mr. Donuts!) and he gave us these adorable bear donuts that they were selling. I hadn't seen them before, maybe they were the week's special or something. Anywho, life's good. Nothing too wierd or exciting happening lately, but still having fun! Today Braden and I went to Aikido practice and learned some new moves. Aikido's fun but the gym is FREEZING. The last time I went I was so cold and miserable. This time was a little better though, cause I decided to wear clothes underneath my dogi. I usually just wear my dogi pants, a regular shirt, and my dogi top, but last week in the locker room when we were changing after practice, I noticed that the other girls were wearing pants and long sleeved shirts underneath their dogis, so I decided to do that too. It helped keep my body a little warmer, but my feet still felt like ice blocks by the end (we practice barefoot). Our Kyokushin dojo was also cold, but Kyokushin is really energetic, and we were always moving and punching and kicking, which helped keep us warm. Aikido is a little slower and more methodical. We stand still and watch the senpais (a senpai is a more experienced student) demonstrate a move a few times, then we repeat it slowly until we get it right. Once we get it right we can move faster, but then we eventually have to stop to learn a new move, and go slowly again, etc etc, so I never really warm up. But even though its not as energetic as kyokushin, its still challenging, and it still hurts sometimes. We never hit eachother, like we did in Kyokushin, but we grab onto and throw each other and fall alot, and that can hurt sometimes, especially if you fall incorrectly (in Kyokushin we did practice falling and rolling sometimes, which has been helpful). We practice rolling and falling a lot in Aikido too, its important to know how to fall correctly so you don't hurt yourself doing a move (or having a move done to you). So yeah. Aikido. Its fun. In other news, the end of Braden's first semester is coming up, and after that, Spring Break! And boy is it gonna be great. Its a month and a half long!!! I was really surprised when I found that out. I don't think I've EVER had a spring break that long. But I think that the summer break in Japan is shorter than in America, so I guess that makes up for it. Hiroko did tell us, though, that college students get a lot of breaks, and longer breaks, than the junior high and high school students. Like I mentioned before, college is a time for Japanese students to RELAX. lol. At least for some ;P. I'll also be finishing up one of my Japanese classes (I'll take another one when the other classes start up again). For our final project we made a video about our trip to the Adachi Art Museum. We gave the teacher our photos, she made them into a slide show, and then she recorded us narrating our trip in Japanese :). Its gonna be posted on the Shimane University website at some point, and when it is I'll be sure to include a link so you can all hear my slow and simple Japanese, lol.

Jan. 15th

Sorry I don't have a picture for you all today, maybe next time :P. These last couple weeks after New Years have been pretty quiet. It snowed a few times, and its supposed to snow again tonight, I think. On the Shimane Campus today they're holding college entrance exams for the high school students in the region. College entrance exams are a HUGE deal here. They cancelled a whole day of classes yesterday to prepare for it, and today the college students aren't even allowed to enter the campus for any reason, so as not to disturb the testing atmosphere. Japanese students study A LOT for these exams, and I've heard they're very difficult. I can only imagine its something like the ACTs or the SATs but with harder questions 0_o. From what I've heard though, from other Japanese people, high school in Japan is very hard and the students study a TON, but then once they get to college its a breeze. Braden admits that he gets very little homework and his classes aren't all that difficult, so it seems to be true. Braden said he got way more homework at CWU, and here he hasn't even had to take any tests. But I think those poor stressed out high school students deserve a break after studying every day and night for weeks for those college entrance exams :P. Hope everyone at home is doing well. Until next time :).

Jan 1st - Ringing in the New Year!

Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu! Honnen mo dozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu! (Congratulations on the dawning of a new year! This year, please continue to be kind to me!) Well, Braden and I hope all of you had a safe and happy New Year's weekend. We sure did!! We did so much stuff, I don't know how to write about it all without writing a whole novel! lol. I'll try to keep it concise but get in all the fun details ;). First off, we took a bus to Shiga Prefecture to visit Hiroko and her family (I mentioned her before. She's the one who picked us up at the airport in Kyoto when we first got to Japan). It was really nice to see her and her family again, they are all super nice, and her daughters are so cute and well behaved. Anju is the youngest, 7 years old, and she's so adorable, and she just LOVES Braden, lol. She always wanted to sit in his lap and hold his hand and play games with him, and Braden played with her a ton, it was so cute, he's gonna be a great dad :). The first few days we just hung out with the family and helped them clean their house for New Year's (its a Japanese tradition for people to clean their houses and businesses for the New Year, sorta like spring cleaning for Americans, except I don't know that many Americans who actually do it, but a lot of Japanese do!). We also helped Hiroko's parents clean their small travel agency, and then afterwards they took us to eat Korean Yaki Niku (Yaki niku just means fried meat, and since we were eating it Korean style there was also kimchee and lettuce to put the meat in, so it was a lot like eating Bulgogi. It was so yummy!). On New Year's Eve I helped Hiroko make the New Year's Day meal, which is pretty complicated, there's a LOT of different traditional Japanese New Year's food, and each one needs to be represented in the meal or it's not complete! I also went with Hiroko to do some last minute New Year's shopping, which felt a lot like last minute Christmas shopping, cause it was all snowy but it looked like EVERYONE was out and about buying last minute New Year's gifts and food. That night we ate Kimchee Nabe (So good! Another Japanese spin on Korean food, which is pretty popular here). Then, at midnight, we walked with Hiroko's family to the local Shinto Shrine to ring the bell. We literally "rang" in the New Year, it was really cool! The walk to the shrine was really atmospheric. It had snowed practically all day and there was a beautiful new layer of snow on the ground, and as we walked the dark streets up to the shrine we could hear the bell ringing in the distance. It was really neat. The bell had a deep sound and it resonated for several seconds after each ring, it sounded almost other-worldly. When we got to the shrine we lined up behind some of the locals and each of us took a turn ringing the bell. When it was Braden's turn, he rang it a little too hard, and after the hammer hit the bell it fell back hard and hit the roof of the building behind us, knocking off a roof tile! It was pretty funny, but Braden felt bad too, so the next morning we went back and made an offering in the Shrine's donation box ;P. New Year's morning everyone woke up early (despite staying up late to ring the bell) and we ate white miso soup and mochi (little gummy rice cakes) for breakfast. Then we went with Hiroko and her family as they visited their nearby relatives, wishing each a Happy New Year, giving them a gift, and paying their respects at the family's small shrines, which consisted of ringing a small bell and saying a short prayer while holding prayer beads in their hands. Braden and I politely watched and smelled the fragrant incense that filled the rooms with the shrines. At lunch time we ate what's called "Osechi Riouri". It consists of lots of traditional New Year's foods (many of which I hadn't eated before, EVER). I had octopus, black beans with flakes of real edible gold on them (gold doesn't taste good by the way :P), lotus roots, bamboo, shrimp, mochi, little jellied potato/seaweed thingies, sushi, marinated cod (Hiroko's cod was REALLY good!), fish cakes, teriyaki chicken, carrots, vinegared radish/persimmon/carrot, fish eggs, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. Even though New Year's food isn't my favorite Japanese food (Nabe is way tastier in my opinion) there were still some yummy things. There were also some things that I didn't like. The worst (for me) was the seaweed wrapped fish eggs. I put it in my mouth, then must've made a funy face cause all the kids started to giggle, and Hiroko told me I could spit it out but I didn't want to, so I stuffed some rice in my mouth and chewed and swallowed while nearly gagging! The little kids thought it was hilarious though lol. At least I made someone laugh, so it's all good ;). After lunch we visited Hiroko's Aunt and Uncle who live in Kyoto. On the way we stopped at a famous Buddhist Temple that has a beautiful pagoda-looking tower. At every large temple and shrine in Japan you can buy charms for your car and household, and one of the things they were selling were beautiful white arrows with blessings for the home written on them. I thought the arrows were really cool, so I bought one ;). I have it displayed currently in our entry way. After that we went to Hiroko's aunt and uncle's apartment and we ate more Osechi Riouri for dinner (I made sure to avoid anything resembling fish eggs wrapped in seaweed) and Hiroko's uncle was so funny, he kept bringing out more and more food, even after everyone was stuffed, and he kept asking Braden and I if we wanted more, and the food kept coming and the family had to keep telling him we were full! He was really nice and funny, and he and his wife had the cutest little pomeranian named Coco. While the kids stayed and played, Hiroko and her parents took us to a local New Year's Festival/Market near a Shinto Shrine dedicated to the Fox Spirit. It was a really pretty shrine with lots of Torii gates and bells, and the stores had lots of cute bunny and fox figurines, and they were selling lots of food too, but we were so stuffed we didn't try any ;). After buying a cute bunny figurine (the bunny figurines were being sold to celebrate the New Zodiac animal for this year, the Rabbit) we went back to Hiroko's aunt and uncle's apartment and said good bye and drove back to Shiga Ken. It was a busy but very fun New Year's :). But the trip wasn't over yet! The next day we took the train to Kyoto, and went to the bus stop where were planning to catch our bus back to Matsue (we had already bought tickets a couple weeks before). But the bus never came o_0. Finally a loudspeaker announced that heavy snowfall in the Matsue region was stopping the buses. There was another girl waiting for the bus too, and since the announcer was a little hard to understand Braden asked her what he said, and so she repeated it for us, and even helped us find the office where we could refund our bus tickets so we could buy train tickets to Matsue. She was super nice, and since she was going to Matsue too we ended up traveling with her the whole way, and she helped us get around the train station in Kyoto (which is very big) and Okayama (also pretty big). We took the Shinkansen to Okayama, and once there we found out that all the trains were running late since the trains hadn't been running that morning (due to bad weather). We had to wait a couple hours to catch a train (there was an earlier train that we tried to catch, but it got so packed with people they had to turn us and a few others away and we had to wait for the next one). We finally caught the train and got to Matsue, which was a snowy, slushy mess! We said goodbye to our kind escort, and tried to take a bus home, only to discover that the city buses weren't running at all, because the roads were so bad. There were quite a few cars out still, but traffic was terrible, because cars kept getting stuck in the intersections :P. We tried calling people for a ride, but everyone was snowed in. In the end, we walked back to our apartment, carrying our luggage since the snow was too deep to drag them on their wheels. It was about a two or three mile hike through snow and slush, and then when we got home we had to get up our staircase which was drowned in deep snow! We made it up though, and, exhausted, ate dinner and went to sleep. What was supposed to be a five hour trip turned into a ten hour one! But we got home safe, for which we're very grateful, and now we can relax for a few days before school starts again. It rained a lot today, and the roads are starting to clear a bit, hopefully they'll be completely clear soon. Well, this ended up being really long, sorry, but I hope you enjoyed it!!!