And here I am again all! It has been a while, but nobody reads this so nobody cares I think. Nonetheless I'm back. 

I'm home from Tokyo and trying to concentrate on schoolwork when more interesting things like Supernatural and Ravelry beckon. Now, today is the 8th of October, and I'm impatiently waiting for the forums of NaNoWriMo to reset and everything to get ready for next month. I will tell you though, I have this much less planned out than last year's story. At least that one I had a plan for where it was headed. This one I have some characters and a possible antagonist. Which sounds good I suppose, but there is no story at this point. In any case that isn't for another month.

Today I spent an hour looking through sock patterns on ravelry. If I didn't already have three projects going I would let myself start this new one. I have made socks before, and they were a pain in the but, but I enjoyed making them and would like to do another pair. I've got self striping yarn so I think just basic socks with no extra patterns should be best. The cables and fancy stitches and suck on the socks I've seen are very hard to see on the socks made with striped or variegated  yarns. 

That about wraps up this ransom post, pictures of knitting to follow (hopefully before too long).
ジャーまたね!

funny Japan 面白い日本

Here are the promised anecdotes I spoke of before! Yay!

First, not actually funny, but interesting (which also fits into the title of this post btw. The word 面白い omoshiroi not only means funny, but also interesting) Most people in Japan don't have separate washer/dryer machines. This means that if they have a dryer at all it is a multi-purpose thing in the same drum as your washer, and it also doesn't work so well. Almost everyone in Japan hang dries their laundry.

My neighboring building

Apartment buildings even have laundry lines/racks placed standard on balconies with convenient frequency.

To get on with my story. I had done laundry late the night before and hung out a bunch of shirts and things to dry before I left for school that morning. My building does not have those happy laundry racks, but the divider on the balcony between mine and my neighbor's area has a ridge along the top that enables hangers to sit there securely. It was kinda windy that day and when I came home my stuff had all been knocked off the hangers, or the hangers had fallen down and all my, still only partially dry, clothes were on the floor. Until I started hanging them back up and noticed that I had more hangers than clothes.

Now the shirt that I was missing wasn't worth much, in fact I'd bought it used at Goodwill for $1 but it was one of my favorites and I leaned as far over the balcony as I felt safe hoping to see it lying on the ground so I could go pick it up. It wasn't there. Nor was it there between the bushes and the big picture windows in the lobby when I went downstairs. So I gave up on finding it, thinking some homeless person had found it on the sidewalk and took it, or that it may have been picked up and thrown away. But lo and behold three days later I was coming home from school and what do I see folded up all nice and neat and reeking of fabric softener on the table in the lobby? You guessed it. Some nice person, probably the manager's wife, but not necessarily, had found my shirt and washed it, and left it out so I could find it!

On Writing and Homework

In the interest of avoiding homework, (some of which is already overdue, figures really) I've decided to return once more to Blogger and see if I have anything interesting to say. As my readers will know, both of you, the NaNo story I've been working on for going on 9 months here is nearly finished! Yay! Fanfare! I have something like 2 chapters left which include sending my banished gods back to the heavens, revealing that several humans aren't, a large battle that I'm completely unprepared for writing, a not-so-touching lover's reunion, and the general conclusion of the story. Sounds good right? I should even have some fun writing it all out when I finally get what's going on in the battle figured out. So far I know there has to be one and I have a list of things that must happen during it. Now I just have to figure out how it's all gonna go down. And type out the 20+ pages of shorthand I have in my NaNo notebook.

On a side note, last Friday was Friday the 13th! To make that a little more interesting it was Friday the 13th on a full moon. That only happens about every 80 years! There's a specific number of course, but I can't remember it, or where exactly I got this info from. I think it was weather.com, but I'm not completely sure.

Tokyo Skytree from my apartment on Friday the 13th with a full moon

And before I leave you, I'll have an interesting Japan story or two up here pretty soon, or try to anyway, I'm gonna point ya'll to my twitter, on which I say little of import, and only some if interest, but you'll hear from me more often than on Blogger. https://twitter.com

Cross-countries Homework

One thing most people won't tell you about studying abroad is about the actual studying part. For a lot of people who do, or are planning, a study abroad, you will probably be going to a country that speaks English as it's first or second language (either way, native speakers abound.) For those of you who aren't going abroad in Eastern Europe, and don't speak the language fluently, there probably won't be that many classes taught in English. This means putting quite a bit more effort into your run-of-the-mill courses, just to get by. Or if you're as bad as me in the language (2 semesters) only taking the English classes and hoping they transfer.

My school in Japan offers 6 majors that involve international communication or the English language specifically, but in any given semester there are only about 10 classes actually taught in English. Add to this the fact that half of those are "Basic English Writing and/or Reading"  and it gives me little opportunity for credit transfer. Especially so because my school back in the states is small and out in the sticks and doesn't offer Japanese in it's comprehensive 5 choices of language major/minors.

This is a problem both I and my European classmates all seem to be facing. We are in mandatory intensive Japanese language classes 3 hours a day 5 days a week, plus a Saturday (as some of these classes take long field trips) traditional culture class. What to do for those of us that have to keep 12 credit hours to remain enrolled in our home universities? Well one option, that my British friends have taken up, is online courses. Now I'm no expert on how British unis operate, save for knowing that they're different than American ones, so I suspect that the course they all seem to be in despite coming from 4 different schools is mandatory. I for one though, absolutely loathe online classes. So that was a definite no for me unless I had absolutely no other option.

Or I could go the way of my Colombian friend who signed up for all the English classes she could fit in her schedule and was allowed to take (the office made her drop 2 courses because she had too many hours.) I'm not that dedicated, and most certainly more lazy than that so I signed up for a couple of English taught classes that looked like they might fill electives and while poking around on my uni's website, discovered a handy thing that no one in my school, be it teacher, adviser, or international office staff thought to tell me about. There is a "Study Abroad" course I can register for! It is worth 12 hours and there are 2 separate modules, so if worst comes to worst and "Independent Study in Foreign Language" and "East Asian Culture" can't cover my bases and give me actual credit toward graduation, then the studying abroad module will at least keep me enrolled, which means keeping my scholarships and keeping my flat rate tuition from when I first enrolled 2 years ago. よかった！

So if you plan to study abroad, also plan to do more study than you probably do currently, also look through your school's course registration listings to see if there are any useful things like a study abroad module you can sign up for, just to show your school that you do, in fact, still exist. (Unlike my school that has threatened to put me on academic probation, then shut down most of their offices for summer break so I can't get in contact with anyone to argue the point.)

Current Projects

Since I haven't written in a while I felt like I needed to do something. So I thought, well why not? I'll just give them a run down of current projects! So some things I have running now... Japanese class (of course) 3 hours a day, 5 days a week with the occasional Saturday culture class thrown in. These are only occasional because the teacher is actually a full time historian working at the Tokyo National Museum and teaches all us lovely exchange students on a volunteer basis. 

We learned about e-maki or scroll painting in the last one and about how they were the predecessors to modern manga. Yet another thing that Japan owes to China in the beginning but has made its own over the years (along with the kimono, ramen, kanji, Buddhism ... the list goes on.) But she brought in carbon paper and dollar store hanging scrolls and calligraphy sets for everyone to try their hands at Japanese painting. It's pretty hard don't get your hopes up for my skill, despite my long years of art class, I always did drawing and using a brush is a lot different from a pen or pencil.

Also in the works is a rabbit eared hat (blog address if you want to check her other stuff out) for a friend of mine who just moved north from warmer climes. This means that I now have no particularly good excuses to visit Florida, but can finally make her those cute fuzzy things she used to love when she lived outside the same town that I lived outside, albeit on different sides. So because I don't particularly care for the hat pattern that goes with the bunny ears, I decided to use M.K. Carroll's Top Down Ribbed Beanie instead.

A note on this hat: not only do I generally dislike using solid white yarn because it gets dirty easily and like solid black yarn the individual stitches are often hard to see, but this stuff is fuzzy. I don't know if I will ever knit anything fuzzy again in my life after this. I really dislike the fact that I can't see my stitches to see where I messed up when I end up with an odd number of stitches instead of an even number. Oh well, I'm trying. I made the hat way too big the first time around and took it out to try it smaller. If my luck holds out I'll end up with it being too small this time.  It looks a little like a squid at the moment because I have it bunched up on the needles so my stitches won't slid off while it's in the night stand drawer, but I think I'll be done with it in about 12 rows of ribbing. 

Ice-cream in Japan

So my desperate fandom of ice cream is nothing new to those who know me. I once braved the cold out in December for nothing more than to walk three blocks to the nearest crepe shop to get an annin ice cream cone then come back to where my friends were hanging out at. Ice cream and popsicles can be found in any convenience store around the country, but with summer coming on and the weather warming up I have noticed a profusion of new varieties, not just in conbinis but also in  the local supermarkets.

がりがりくん Garigari-kun so named (I believe) because gari-gari is the sound your teeth make when you chew on the little tiny ice pellets all throughout the popcicle. It is the cheapest option for conbini ice, averaging about $0.70 depending on where you get it, and comes in a multitude of flavors. From normal to I cannot believe they are actually trying to sell that. I've tried their white soda flavor, which is actually light blue, and tastes like any of an assortment of fake fruit flavors.

Ones I have also liked are Pineapple, Kiwi, Nashi (a type of delicious Japanese pear), and Peach. Ones I'd like to try are cream-puff (also called shu cream) and grape. Flavors I've seen that I think I'll avoid... Stew, yes folks stew flavored popsicles, speghetti, which I've been told has actual chunks of tomato in the popsicle, and corn soup, good when hot but as dessert?

チズスーチーク lit. Cheeze stick. This is not actually an ice cream bar. It is baked cheesecake, frozen, dipped in a white chocolate shell and sold in $1.20 increments. Need I really say more? Sooo good.

My personal favorite is Annin (pronounced an-neen) anything. Annin is a Chinese desert kinda like runny pudding, that I think tastes like marzipan. You can get it in various shapes, forms, and consistencies, but given my love for all things ice cream this one tops the list. There's a shop not far from where I live (refer to anecdote in first paragraph) called Hakusan Crepe that takes vanilla ice cream and puts in all the flavors to make the thing you ordered and mixes it in a blender right there! They have a cantaloupe (melon) flavor that also has fresh fruit in it and tastes pretty good. There's also a convenient bench sitting out on the sidewalk so you can sit and enjoy your cone without the hassle of walking at the same time.

Spring? Festivals

With summer in Japan inevitably come festivals. Now there are of course spring events and festivals ( お花見 flower viewing and かなまら祭り kanamara festival) but you don't hear much about the festivals until summer. The summer festival is a time for food stalls that sell chocolate dipped bananas and fried squid on a stick, for kids games for $4 each, and, for everybody over the age of 14, it is possibly the only time where people think wandering around wearing yukata (informal/ligher-weight-for-summer kimono) is okay. Personally that's my favorite part. Though the fresh made yakisoba is a close second.

So last week when I started seeing posters up in the train stations around here (there are 3 within walking distance) I got a little excited. So I had some extra time today after my traditional dance class was over and I headed toward the festival. I guess it isn't summer-ish enough for the yukatas to come out yet at the end of April, though we're supposed to be in the 70's all next week. Unfortunately my phone died just as I was getting there so the picture below is one I found on the internet. Sorry! But this is what the flowers did look like today.


As I was leaving the festival and contemplating whether or not to buy the aforementioned yakisoba, I picked up a mother's day present for my mom, a green handkerchief with turtles on it because she likes turtles so much, and headed home. Only to find that the street was blocked so the parade could go through. More than the flowers, I really wanted to take pictures of the parade. It was about 80 old ladies and several, not many, old men doing some traditional dance as they moved at a snail's pace down the road. It was really funny because at the end of each repeat of the dance they all yelled, "Sore sore sore! Yatta sore!" which may have a traditional value, have something to do with the so-badly-recorded-you-can't-understand song that was playing, or could mean, "There, there, there! Yay over there!" There was this one lady who was really into it and yelling way louder than anyone else in the whole group, and was just smiling like nobody's business.

So if you ever show up in central Tokyo in late April, the Tsutsuji Matsuri is something worth spending a couple hours on before you move on to your regularly scheduled activities.

Day Trip to Nara

Well I told you already that I was staying in Kyoto with my friend, but our first day of vacation was actually spent mostly in Nara. If you're not sure where that is, it's about an hour (by train, is there any other way to travel in Japan?) west from Kyoto station. We were lucky enough to get a rapid train and got there in 40 min, at about 10 am. There were tourist maps in 6 languages at a stand in the station, and unlike both Kyoto and Osaka stations this one was pretty small, we didn't get lost trying to find the exit, and most of the things there were to see are fairly close together and on the same side of the station.

There was a tourist info center right next to the station. I had to take a picture of it though because the building was really interesting. It was mostly western but had some very Asian elements to it in a combination that is very rare to see,  even in a place like Japan that loves to mix the modern and traditional in all kinds of interesting ways. We started out just going down the main street, heading eventually toward the 5 tiered pagoda. We saw an old burial ground on the map, but somehow managed to walk right past it without seeing it. Oh well, the pagoda was pretty cool, and the temple that went with it.

We made our way over to Todaiji Temple from there, passing a couple of gardens, one was free for foreign tourists and the other was about 600 yen for everyone. We didn't end up going to either one because they were both closed for the spring pruning and replanting. If we'd been one week earlier or later in the season we would've been able to go in. Despite this, it was a nice walk through some residential backstreets and the whole place was pretty quiet. Though that may be because it was the off season on a weekday.
If you are wondering, yes, there are deer, after all the whole city was named after the deer, that just wander around and will let you pet them, but only if you have food. If you're not offering them anything to eat they either ignore you or run off if you get too close.

We stopped beside a lake outside Daibutsudo, the temple of the great Buddha, to eat our lunch and one decided that she wanted to share. My friend picked up our food to keep the deer away from it, but the map that we had spread out on the bench between us to look at while we ate wasn't so lucky. This deer here grabbed it right out from under my leg and tried to eat it! I took it away from her then she started snuffling around my legs looking for something else and must have thought my shoelaces looked good because they were her next targets. The deer are nice and all, and there're stands that sell rice cracker things for you to feed them all over the place so it's not like feeding them is discouraged, but you might want to remember that they've learned to beg borrow or steal food if they can get it. Just like seagulls or those disgusting monkeys you see on documentaries about India, so if you wanna eat something yourself, be careful!

 We finished up the afternoon with a trip to the Forest of 1000 Lanterns. The whole thing was beautiful there was a shrine at the beginning and a whole bunch of the stone lanterns lustered everywhere. Then you follow this walking trail back behind the shrine and through the forest where there are torii and lanterns and small shrines dotting the sides of the path. The walk took us about 15 minutes, and when we came out at the other end of the park we were a little out of the city. There were a few more things to do here and there, the Edo-style townhouse probably topping the list, before we headed home. If the gardens had been open it would have been dark by the time we headed home. As it was we got back to the station to head back to the hostel at about 4 pm.

Kyoto Here I Come!

So this trip I've been looking forward to for a while now started today. Got to Kyoto from Tokyo by bus, not uncomfortably,  but the ride was 7 hours. Still for only $60 it was a good trip.  Made it to the hostel in Kyoto, a place called Khaosan Guest House, (apparently they have a few other branches in other big cities) without too much trouble, and so far it's really nice. Lots of people hanging out in the common room and chatting from, so far as I've talked to them, 6 different countries.

Olympic Legwarmers

So in honor of the olympics I thought I would do some knitting. During the games I`m challenging myself to complete a pair of legwarmers. I`m using a pattern called Mosey with some yarn I was
lucky enough to find in Nippori Fabric Town when I was there with a friend. More about that in a bit. The yarn is pure wool and was super cheap, which means not great quality, but these are leg warmers, and I`m a poor college student so thats just how it adds up. Everything`s knitting up really nice so far, except for some dropped stitches and my inability to gauge. (No matter what it turns out longer than it should even if the width is right.)








As I was saying earlier about Nippori Fabric Town; it is not a place for knitters or any other type of needle crafter really. There`s bolts and bolts of fabric overflowing (literally, in boxes on the sidewalks) from shops on either side of the street, and shops selling buttons and thread and dyes and even leather, but I only found two places selling yarn. In both places it was more as an afterthought than as an actual sales item from the looks of it, and one of the places only had a few solid colors of acrylic. My wool yarn was a lucky find, at one of the three Tomato stores on the street and there was just enough of the color for me to make both legwarmers if my gauge is right *cringe* I may have to stop the pattern a few rows early. Luckily this won`t be a problem, and the extra inch I would have added by finishing the complete pattern with my bad gauge would have made them too long anyway.

 This beautiful coat I found on display outside a shop selling all kinds of leather, and smelling like heaven. I would love to own this jacket so I`m showing it off and wishing to no avail that it was priced so I could afford to buy it.

Spring Break! 春休み！

Wow, it`s been a long time since I`ve posted! Sorry for that. So I`ve been quite busy actually, but I won`t bore anyone with school details; say only I am in over my head with studying over break. I`m actually really excited because my mom`s just told me that she was able to get time off work and can come to Japan to see me! Vacation of a lifetime for her, and great time to show off my (admittedly still bad) language skills.

Other than learning 180 kanji and 20 new grammar points in two months and my mom coming to distract me from studying, I`m looking forward to a week long trip to Kyoto and the vicinity coming up here for me in about two weeks. I`m planning on spending lots of money on food and hitting all the open air markets and thrift shops I can find. As far as temples go there`s only a few I have specific plans for visiting, but I`ll see what looks fun to do when I`m there. Ha, I`m not such a good trip planner.

NaNoWriMo is over but I`m still working on my writing, though because of a broken computer, I have been put on hold for posting updates to my writing blog, as well as a lot of other things. I`m borrowing a school computer for this right now actually. I`ve met with my writing buddies about 3 times since NaNo ended actually, and we three are in various stages of still writing to editing. The beauty of using fountain pens while hand writing instead of ball points has recently made itself known as well. I`ve been using this lovely purple
one I found at a nearby stationary shop recently and I love it!

As for knitting ... Sigh. I`m still working on the Haruni Shawl from Ravelry, though I`m now in the final stages. I can`t wait to take it off the needles and block it to see how the lacework looks.




And here`s a lovely picture of a small Buddhist Temple near where I`m living now. We had a cold snap for the last few days and actually got snow yesterday. How cool is that? Of course back home in the US they have about 10in (25cm) on the ground right now. Nonetheless, this was a good picture and I thought I`d share it.