Feb. 5th

Last week I graduated from my first ever beginner's Japanese class. I even got a certificate, lol XD. Today to celebrate we had a tempura party. We all went to the Matsue International Community Center kitchen and fried up lots of tempura covered veggies and made some shishkabobs. It was all very yummy :). I love my classmates by the way. Since all of us speak different languages, and our Japanese skills are rudimentary at best, communication can be difficult, but for some reason we can always find a way to make everything completely hilarious with our simple Japanese :D. I don't know how we do it, and I don't think anyone but ourselves and our teachers would understand any of our inside jokes, but class was always good times, and I can't wait for next semester, I hope all my same classmates are in it :). Yesterday I went on a long walk to find the MICC (where we had our party) and right next to it I found a Japanese cemetary. I've never seen anything quite like a Japanese cemetary before. It's just sitting in the middle of the city, on a little hill, and the whole thing is made up of concrete and marble sidewalks and headstones, and pretty stone lanterns and incense holders, and you can smell the incense as you walk through it. It was really pretty and I took several pictures. Here's just a couple that I took:

There were some gravestones that looked really old. The cemetary itself doesn't seem that old, so I think maybe they were brought there from other older cemetaries. The plots themselves are shared by whole families, not by individual people, and some of them have the family name etched on the main headstone, and then on another stone you can seem the names of all the people who are represented there. Everyone in Japan is cremated, and the ashes aren't always kept in the cemetary, but the family grave is the place where people go to pay their respects to their dead ancestors. The cemetary is located in a quieter part of town and it was quite pleasant to walk through. On the way home from the Tempura party Braden and I stopped at Book Off, which is a chain of used-books stores in Japan. You can get awesome deals there. Today I bought a Tintin book (Cigars of the Pharoahs) in great condition for only a little over a dollar!!! XD. I also bought a manga for the same price. There are so many books in Japan (especially mangas and light novels) and you can always find them for really cheap at Book Off. I don't go there too often cause whenever I go I wanna buy a ton, but this time I decided I needed to make an exception (It was a Tintin book for only a dollar!!!). Lol.