Welcome to the New Age

It's still Wednesday in America!
I'm sorry to make you wait--I went to a concert last night [Miyavi again], and by the time I got home and settled down, I was dog-tired.

How is everyone doing? I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. 

I spent my Thursday working ahead and trying to get all of my homework and projects done for stuff due before Christmas break, and I was even feeling adventurous enough to try to work into my Christmas break stuff, but I only barely scratched the surface on that. I'll get to it soon. I hope. 

Last weekend was pretty lazy. I didn't really do too much, save for go out for dinner with my Thai friend one night. This break is going to be so busy for me that I knew ahead that I needed to go ahead and get whatever rest I could manage before I started doing things. 

Monday, Christmas Eve, some friends and I got together and had a little party. 
We had nabe for dinner, with sparkling apple and grape juice to drink, as well as some sweets and home-made eggnog, since you can't find eggnog here. 

Me getting ready to make the eggnog.

Whisking the whites into a meringue. It takes forever without an electric mixer, so I spent most of my time sitting there and wondering who came up with the idea in the first place, since of course it's been around longer than the electric mixer.

They must have been very bored. 

The broth getting hot and ready to have stuff put in it, as well as a Korean dish to the left, and three stacks of tofu.

Everything ready.

Everything partially eaten, with the addition of mangoes and a Vietnamese dish. 

We ate until we were stuffed, and there was still leftovers. Somehow, I suppose since we did the party in my room, it was because of that, but regardless, there was a lot of food left over and it took me waiting on my friend who came in Wednesday to finish it all off. Even now, there's still cookies and the like left. That will take a while, I imagine. 

Christmas was uneventful. I was initially planning on going to see my best friend at the airport, but she was unable to make the proper flight, so we had to cancel our plans. I spent the day with my friend from New Zealand, eating breakfast foods and listening to radio from NZ and hanging out. Afterwards, I took a nap and read. 

Wednesday, after I couldn't sleep very well the night previously, I got up early and then picked my friend up from the train station in Machida. We came home, I fed him breakfast, we took a nap, and then went out and about. 
He forgot the tickets to the concert, so we had to run back home, and then dash back and try to make the concert on time. Which we did, fortunately.
And it was amazing, as usual, and I was finally able to reach out and touch him at the end when he stretched out his hand to fans. It was wonderful and I am happy.

Today, I should be going to see the Hobbit. I'll let you guys know about it, although I'm sure you've seen it all before by now, next week. 
What else... Not too much. I should be doing quite a bit this week, so I'll write it down and try to remember it all.

Until then!
-RD

They Never Look to See Me Fly, So I Never Have to Lie.

Hey guys!
Writing this one a bit early--well, I'm starting to write it, anyway. I might be able to finish it, too, with as little as I've been doing lately.
It's just tedious and bad timing to write it on Wednesday evenings, especially now that I've started going to the gym on top of my two afternoon classes and what not. Last semester I was so busy all of the time that I just didn't notice it to begin with, but now that I've freed up my schedule a little bit, oh boy, do I notice.

Crummy winter mood has continued and I haven't done much as a result of it.
However! Friday is my last day of classes, and provided the world doesn't end on Saturday afternoon (since I'm a day ahead of the Mayans and all), I have a lot scheduled over my winter break. I wasn't expecting to be so busy, but surprise, surprise. It stands in stark contrast to my summer schedule, as the only "free time" I will have, it seems, will be the first and last weekend of my break.
Christmas Eve, I'm going to a friend's house to spend the night, and we'll all spend Christmas morning together [I need to go buy some presents of some kind. Uh-oh.]. That evening, I've got to go to Narita airport to pick up my best friend, who is returning to Japan from her study abroad in California. We'll spend the night together in Tokyo, going out for her much-craved sushi, maybe to karaoke, and so forth. I'll spend time with her until the evening of the 26th, and from there I will dash to Shibuya to go to a concert to see Miyavi before I leave.
In Shibuya, I'm meeting up with one of my friends from the States, whose doing a study-abroad in Nagoya at the moment, as well as my friend from NZ. My friend doing the study abroad will probably stay with me until Jan. 1st or 2nd, and on the 3rd, I've got a friend from Kobe coming up to visit me.
And then, that weekend, my friend from Vietnam wants to make Vietnamese food together. I can't argue with that.
But, my goodness. Since when have I been a busy bee?

I haven't really been lately, though. I didn't do anything this weekend except lay around the house and sleep. Monday I got up just long enough to go to the gym, and then that evening a friend asked if I'd be willing to help her friend with a project. Being a model for photos or something. So, I said I would. Afterwards, my friend and I went to go get ramen together, and I've eaten so little oil recently that even that put my stomach off for an hour or two.
I'm not looking forward to having to eat when I'm back in the States if it's already this bad. But, hopefully this will be not just a temporary change, but rather a lifestyle change, and I'll never have to go back to eating the amount of grease and oil that I ate before.
Fingers crossed.
From the ramen shop, we went to the grocery store, where I stocked up a bit on a few things like fruits and vegetables, and I also bought a couple of freezable foods to get ready for my friends coming to see me. Avocados are still reasonable, oranges, apples, and pumpkin are all still good to go for the time being.
What else--Oh! Sweet potatoes are pretty cheap at the moment, but since I'm trying to avoid as much starch as possible, I'm kind of avoiding those. But a big one, at the moment, is only about 100 yen.

Speaking of prices, though, have you seen the USD-JPY exchange rate recently? I wish I'd had it this high since I got here! Goodness. I'm about to have to get extra frugal, since I want to be able to see my best friend again before I leave Japan for a while.

I've been re-watching the Lord of the Rings series, as my friend coming up for the concert and I are planning on going to see the Hobbit soon. Today, my NZ friend is letting me borrow her iPad while I go to the gym so that I might watch Return of the King while doing my cardio.
I must say, I'm rather looking forward to that. It will make my stationary biking so much more entertaining.

But, that's all that I've really got planned. We're going over some really difficult things in Japanese at the moment (honorific form will be the death of me, I promise), so I need to study.
Saturday I've got work, and then after that I might be hanging out with my friend from Thailand.

But, really... That's all that's been going on. I haven't been doing much, so I can't really elaborate on any money-saving ideas at the moment.
Sorry about that. I should start having some as of next week, though, I hope.

In the mean time, have a really swell song:




Toodles for now, dolls~

-RD

So Stay With Me and I'll Have it Made.

So I've started going back and listening to a lot of old Japanese songs that I used to listen to when I was in my mid-teens. 
And now that I can actually get the gist of what they're saying, some of them are actually pretty downright creepy. It's not that I like the songs any less, they're just... Not quite what I thought they were. It's pretty funny.

Well, I have just been downright busy as of late!
Let's get down to business and let me tell you all about it, shall we? I may need to be a little brief; I've got some things to do still before I can go to sleep, and gosh only knows how much I want to go to sleep right now.

Thursday, after class, I was approached by a friend of mine to see about surprising my friend from Thailand for her birthday. Karaoke, cake, and rice balls made up that delightful evening. It was a good time, although it was so abrupt that I didn't manage any photos. They would likely have people in them, at any rate, so you probably wouldn't see them. I managed to sing my first two songs in Japanese completely without the crutch of the actual singer singing the song, and that's where I began to realise that some of these songs that I listen to are actually kind of creepy. 
But they're still delightful. 
We all left the karaoke bar at about midnight and I came home, did some homework, and promptly fell asleep.

Friday, for my Folklore class, for whatever reason, we all took a trip to a local elementary school. I'm not one much for kids, but I must admit that I did really, genuinely enjoy myself. We hung out with kids from about grades 3~6, and we all had automatic celebrity status for being foreign. We arrived early, so while we were initially only going to hang out with the sixth graders, we had recess with the 3~5th graders, and it made me realise just how much I miss recess. 
Can we start having recess in college? 
Anyway, some girls started talking to me when they realised that I spoke some Japanese, and we introduced ourselves and talked for a little bit before their turn to play came up. 
Once recess was over and the teachers were trying to round the kids back up to go back to class, three boys came up to me, and I noticed that the two on the outside were practically dragging the one in the middle up to me.
Suddenly, with a thick Japanese accent, I heard the boy in the middle say "You... You are very beautiful!" before wriggling out of his friends'grip and bolting away into the safety of the school building, his friends not too far behind him. He was the winner of adorable for the week, if not month. I wish I had gotten time to thank him for the compliment, haha. 
After recess, we went up to the sixth graders' rooms, played games, did origami, and made general small talk. I've had a bit of an aversion to origami since fifth grade, when I had to make 100 paper cranes or so for some project one of the teachers wanted to do, so as a result, I've forgotten how to do that. A really shy girl overcame her fear to help me out, so, in the end, we traded paper cranes. 
Didn't get to spend too much time with the kids, though, as we had to head back pretty quickly. 
After the field trip, I ran into some friends of mine back at the university, and we made plans to hang out in the evening. Stopping at the convenience store, I chanced upon some tortilla chips, plain tortilla chips, for the first time since I've been here. 
So I bought two bags and planned some guacamole and chips in our evening together.
But first, I had to head back to the university and exercise. While I was on the bus and waiting to leave, the 7.2 earthquake hit the northeast part of Japan. It was still really strong by the time it got to Tokyo, and, I must admit, it had me a little nervous. But, the shocks on the bus likely just exacerbated the shaking, so it probably wasn't quite as bad as I felt it, although people were talking about how it was a lot stronger than the usual ones.
At any rate, everything is fine and life went on as usual. I met up with another friend of mine and we put in our exercise for the evening, before I returned home, showered, and got chips and dip ready for my evening with friends.
And we spent it watching Whose Line is it Anyway. Eleven episodes of it in one solid marathon, and it was so much fun. 

Saturday, like I told you all I might be doing, I went back up to Aikawa/Miyagase. 
It was a little late for the full effect of the changing leaves, but there was still some lingering things.
Let me upload some pictures... I'll write in-between some of them to explain where we were and what we were doing. 
The first set are right off of the bus near the river.

First picture off of the bus.

Flowers still blooming! Wow!

Find the bird! I was so pleased with this.

If it were warm, I would have loved to play in it.

But it wasn't warm, so we couldn't play.

We left the are and began our walk to... Wherever it was we were going. We had left early, so it was still only almost noon by this time. The days here have gotten really short, so my friend and I had decided it would be best to leave early, which was a good decision. Along the way, we'd stop at the convenient store and get lunch, but that wasn't going to be for a while yet.

We found trees that were still changing colours. 

And we really.

Really.

Liked this one.

For obvious reasons.

I wanted over in that bamboo thicket, but I couldn't make it.

My friend joked about me being a "crazy bamboo princess from a bamboo forest" and warned me that if I were doing anything strange like knocking on the bamboo, he was going to say that he didn't know me.

I can't help I like the sound it makes, haha. It's a hollow echo of some sort, and it's very lovely.

I'm a bamboo maiden, guys! 

Peeking at a shrine.

This was one of two situations that I managed.

I may need to go to China for some bamboo forests.

We had our lunch by the river and headed off again. Initially, we weren't intending to go to Miyagase Dam again, but we decided to head that way since there's a lot more over that way that we hadn't seen. After eating, I had some soba noodles with tempura vegetables on top of it in a nice broth, and he and I split a piece of sweet bread, we headed back out.

Ran into this pretty lady.

Who either is very fond of the Green Bay Packers, Australia, or Brazil.

Not sure yet, but since Japan has a lot of Brazilian/Brazilian-Japanese people in it, perhaps Brazil.

This was the other bamboo area that I could find, although I still couldn't go stand in them.

Oh, Miyagase. It has been a while.

This was off on another bridge that lead off somewhere. I couldn't go in, though. 

Because this little fellow was blocking me.

"It's dangerous! You can't go in here."

He's the friend to the crocodile/godzilla sign from last time.

It looked like wavy waffles to me and it was amusing.

Speaking of our dinosaur/godzilla/dragon thing. 

It says the same thing.

My friend and I weren't sure if this little fellow was dead or not, really, but he was lovely.

The silvery parts were actually a little reflective. 

It was really neat.

From the top of the dam.

You can still see a little bit of colour from the fall.

We were going to explore some of the dam area again, but we looked off and there was a highway that the dam connected to which we hadn't gone to yet, so we decided that it was time that we head that way.  

... What?

It was about this point that he and I came across a hiking trail which we expected to be aimed at older people to look at trees or such. So, with me grabbing a hiking stick [my legs were tired from exercising the day before and I found a really nice one], we set off on the trail.

The entry.

 We soon found out that the area wasn't for kids, though, as there was even a sign warning about bears.

Sure enough.

But, deciding that we may as well, he and I climbed that mountain, and several times in my poor shoes and with my legs in their weakened state, I had my life flash before my eyes. 
But it was well worth it.

Although the path was obscenely narrow in some places.

View from the top.

 We finished climbing, completely free of bear and bear-hunter incidents, and managed to get back down [after knocking several rocks off and listening to them fall for what felt like ages], and then continued our walk. We still had a little daylight left.

... Bear bridge.

That's nice. Thank you.

 On the way to the mountain that we climbed, we had come across what was going to be a light show by the time evening rolled around, so we headed back to where that was. 

Fair treats, Japanese style.

A campfire for freezing people while we were waiting for the lights to start.

And voila! 

 It turns out that he and I had found the end portion of the light show, and so we started heading to where the hubbub was. 
I managed to take a couple of photos, but since my camera isn't very good with light shows, I kind of gave up after a while. 

Christmas is a time for lovers around here, usually.

"Love love bridge."

Yeah, made me feel gross, too. 

After exploring, we got some dinner and headed back home. 
We had been out for nearly 12 hours, and it was all quite fun, although I was positively exhausted by the time all was said and done. 

Sunday wasn't much, except for Mexican food with a friend. 

Monday I cleaned, and then went to an izakaya, the Japanese traditional style food/bar places, with some friends of mine that I hadn't seen since last semester. It was a good time, but there aren't any pictures from that, either. 

Yesterday I went to class, I went to work, and then I got busy with homework.

Today I went to class, and went to the gym.
I made dinner when I got home.
Took a shower.
And we're here now.

So, with all of that, I must bid you all a fond farewell.
I've got a vocabulary quiz tomorrow that I have only barely studied for. 
Will catch you all later!

-RD