Much, much later...
Well, it's been a couple months since I got back to the land of apple pie and constantly eroding civil liberties. Don't expect any extremely wise responses from me if you ask "How was Japan?" as I think my brain is still slowly digesting everything. What I can say is that the whole experience gave me a whole lot of perspective, and has made me rethink things that had been gathering cobwebs in the basement of my brain for too long.

The last week or so in Japan was really intense. Lots of packing, wrapping up things at work (that is, making it seem as if I'd been doing something all summer), and a whirlwind of sleep-deprived last-minute seeing and doing with my friends and Emi. I went out to a final dinner with my coworkers at a okonomiyake place, saw my host parents one last time in Kyoto, dropped off all my bags at Emi's place in Osaka and headed down south to one of those big Japanese festivals. You know, with the huge ancient ornate carts being pulled around by junbei-clad chuhai-drinking screaming men. Appropriately cultural while at the same time very loud, frantic and a bit touristy. I took all of this in with Lee, Ian and Emi.

Then I spent Sunday hitting up all the spots in Osaka one last time with Emi, from temples to bars, taking her dog Farukon out walking, bowling, clubbing, shopping... basically anything other than sleeping. I may have slept a couple hours that night, but I'm not sure. Monday, we took a taxi to the train station, rode to the airport, said our goodbyes and that was that.

I don't see my Kyoto friends around Stanford all that much, mainly because I'm back in the routine of spending time with my draw group friends & I'm pretty bad at keeping up with any friends who don't live in my general vicinity. I'm too easily distracted, I guess. Emi and I zap emails back and forth every other week or so. My Japanese ability is slowly declining, although I can still break it out as needed. Oh, and I'm posting one last photo gallery.

Monday 9/2/2002 11:45 PM JST
"So clean out your ears and just check the word"
Time for another update to my oft-neglected journal. Not much longer to go, I'll be flying out from Kansai International at 2:45pm two weeks from today (and arriving in SF the same day at 8:40am after ten hours, thanks International Date Line!). Packing up my life and whatnot should be nice and stressful, as well as some difficult goodbyes, but at the same time I'm looking forward to catching a few Giants games at Pac Bell.

Quick recap of the high school baseball championships at Koshien. Seven straight hours of awesome games (watched three out of the four played that Sunday), prominently featuring lost arts such as stealing third, racing for first base after a dropped third strike, and pulling off a squeeze play to tie the game in the ninth inning. Imperfection is a beautiful thing, as the uncertainy surrounding every fly ball and pitch in the dirt keeps things interesting all the time. When a game ends, the two teams solemnly face each other to bow, the losers choking back sobs and the winners restraining their shouts of victory, then finally exploding after their school's anthem and celebrating with their supporters. Yeah, good stuff.

Climbing Fuji-san was quite an experience. I won't call it hellish, because it could have been a lot worse, but let's just say I seriously prefer hiking in lush California to trudging uphill in sub-zero temperatures through desolate fields of hardened lava flow. The sunrise was awfully cloudy, but it was still a nice view from 11,000 feet up. The descent basically consisted of sliding downhill for several hours through volcanic dust and sand. I ended up taking out my contact lenses and relying on my Spiderman-like extrasensory perception for most of it, which was, um, challenging.

The weekend in Tokyo was definitely not something to be missed- I would have been really foolish to spend five months in Japan without ever setting foot in Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harujuku, Roppongi, Ebisu, Asakusa, Odaiba, etc etc. Got to see a lot of friends who I hadn't hung out with in a long while, and actually ran into Shin on the subway (a miraculous feat considering both Tokyo's insanely large population and the complexity of the mass-transit system crisscrossing the metropolitatan area). I also have two really, really good stories to tell, but I'm afraid that this journal cannot do them justice. So if you're curious about how I came to receive five peanuts on the street in Ikebukuro, or about my newly forged connection with a Japanese gangster family, ask the next time you talk to me. All in all, the weekend was really expensive, I barely slept at all, and it was one of my best experiences in Japan so far.

Other than that, I've basically just been working on tying things up at work, hanging out with Emi in Osaka (two weeks until we're just-friends), and I've started to contemplate the horrible task of packing without actually starting it. Did I mention my ingenious idea to throw away all my socks and buy new ones at Costco when I get back? All right, time for bed, tune in next time.

Wednesday 8/22/2002 11:38 AM JST
"People give your ears, cause I be sublime"
Just a quickie, as I'm about to cut out of work to catch the shinkansen in Kyoto. Climbing Fuji-san tonight with Roger and Emi, going to watch sunrise from the top at 4:30am tomorrow hopefully. Then a weekend of ridiculousness in Tokyo. Last weekend was awesome, got philosophical with Shin in Nara and watched some great baseball at the national high school championships at Koshien, more details later gotta run bye!

Monday 8/12/2002 9:38 AM JST
"Now he wears a frown, and the jimmy hates that"
Yes, so clearly I don't possess the diligence required to write in this journal every day... so here's another extended rambling to cover the last couple of weeks.

I've been spending lots of time on the weekends hanging out in Osaka, as expected. Emi and I have been frequenting a bar called Dusk that has cheap nomihodai, good hip-hop and a member of the staff who's not only a Japanese midget, but also has bright orange hair and a mullet. We went to the Kaiyukan (Osaka Aquarium) which was super nice, and ended up watching a big fireworks show on the waterfront. There are fireworks going on somewhere in Japan pretty much every day during the summer, whether as part of a festival or just a random event, which is pretty cool.

So the Niners got pounded by the Redskins at the Osaka Dome the weekend before last. On the bright side, though, I got to see all my favorite players in promo spots on TV speaking terrible Japanese. You've never truly laughed until you've seen Jeff Garcia butchering "arigatoo gozaimasu" as he reads it off a cue card. Oh, and all the clubs in Osaka were filled with third-string scrubs from both teams and other assorted hangers-on, which was interesting. Lots of non-Japanese speaking thug types trying to hit on women and getting into assorted fisticuffs on the streets.

You know how Goodwill, The Salvation Army, and all those other places never seem to have quite as much cool vintage clothing as they should? It's because all the best stuff is in Japan. I just bought a red breakbeat-style Puma windbreaker, a blue workshirt for some company called Weetabix with a "Todd" nametag on it, and t-shirt that says "I pledge allegiance to the funk, the whole funk, and nothing but the the funk. So help me James, Sly and George. Amen." along with pictures of James, Sly and George.

I ended up going to Nara on a Thursday night with Dan and Tarun, two of my wacky Canadian coworkers. Dan looks like a slightly scruffier version of Jon Sondag, which is pretty weird. Anyways, Nara was the first capital of Japan, but the imperial folks decided to move because the nightlife was shitty. This tradition has continue to the present day, so especially on a weeknight, there was nothing going on. We went to the one functioning gaijin bar where some mildly frightening middle-aged Brits tried to sell us illicit drugs, then ended up basically wandering around, taking pictures of random drunks on the streets, visiting/disrespecting various monuments and whatnot, and playing with the deer which freely roam all over Nara. The night concluded with breakfast at 5:30am, and taking the train back up to Takanohara to go to work. Ugggghhhh...

Speaking of work... I've been getting to know my coworkers a bit better, having been out to dinner with them a few times for various reasons. Interesting people for the most part, though definitely not a rambunctious party crowd. But they keep me entertained for the most part. Work is pretty slow, given that my group's research is vague and largely impractical, and that the project I'm working on was completely undocumented and poorly planned by the person before me. So I spend probably too much time emailing and surfing the Internet, with a bit of work splashed in here and there to make things interesting. I've been playing basketball with a company group every week, and today started playing soccer too despite having absolutely no aptitude whatsoever.

The weather's been cooling off slightly, though going outside still guarantees gratuitous sweat within minutes. Next weekend should be fun, with Daimon-ji-yaki on Friday (enormous fires lit on the sides of mountains in Kyoto to guide the souls of the dead), hanging out with Shin on Saturday, and heading to the high school baseball championships at Koshien near Kobe on Sunday with some Stanford folks (baseball without all the commercialism and ice-cold beer). Only five more weeks left here. I'm definitely enjoying myself, but at the same time I'm looking forward to being back on my own turf, eating Quizno's sandwiches and burritos from La Costena, and throwing back forties in Suites with my homies.

Thursday 7/18 10:07 PM JST
"The moon dabbles in the morning sky, as the minutes just creep on by"
I'm kicking back at my apartment, watching a weird Japanese TV drama with a thumping Run Lola Run-like techno soundtrack and taking occasional breaks to apply copious quantities of aloe gel. The beach this past weekend with Emi was fun, but I managed to get burnt to a crisp after only a couple hours of exposure to the sun. It was also very Japanese: gorgeous white sand (imported from Australia), stunning rock formations and cliffs (held together by cement) and a crowd of about 200 junior high school students all taking some sort of swimming test together and shouting together in unison. Afterwards we went to a semi-cheesy tourist attraction called Adventure World (sort of like Marine World before they built rollercoasters and turned all the animals into dog food). All in all a well spent weekend, though I'm not quite sure how/when to tell Emi that when I fly back to Cali in September, it's sayoonara. Nicknames from Richard notwithstanding, I'd rather not have another girl holding a grudge against me, even if it's across the Pacific.

Ooh, this TV show is spicy! Anyways, what else... Japanese supermarkets are pretty crazy. They manage to fit about twice the inventory of Safeway into a quarter of the space, and make you bag your own groceries. The laundry detergent I use is called Attack! and one time I saw a baby diaper brand called GOO.N (not sure why that period is in the middle of the name...). The shopping carts are the same size as regular carry-around hand baskets, which makes me feel like even more of a big clumsy gorilla. Oh, and one supermarket I went to in Shirahama had some sort of custom-made American hip-hop mix playing over the store speakers. Definitely the first time I've ever heard Busta Rhymes while buying fresh fruit.

Had dinner with the Matsunagas (my host family from last quarter) on Tuesday, which was cool, and then checked out Gion Matsuri afterwards, one of Kyoto's three big festivals during the year. It goes on all month, but this week was pretty much the climax, with huge throngs of people packing the streets to check out these huge intricate floats and displays in front of homes with ancient priceless family treasures (art, swords, clothing) that only see the light of day every once in awhile. Lots of cheap and tasty food available at little stands in front of restaurants, from the nicest places to McDonald's and Circle-K.

This weekend I'm taking the train up to Nagoya to hang out with Shin, and hopefully watch some sumo at the tournament that's going on there right now. He's currently sort of incapacitated, though: he was hanging out with a really old guy who makes terrifically expensive Japanese lacquer, and the toxic tree sap that they use to make it got on his hands, so Shin's is currently wrapped in Shinjo-like bandages up to his shoulders. I'm also planning on attending the Japanese high school baseball championships at Koshien (near Kobe) in August, by far the country's most-watched sporting event.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned before all the American entertainment personalities who make complete asses of themselves in Japanese TV commercials. Bruce Willis, Penelope Cruz, Ewan McGregor, and even my beloved Simpsons (click on each of the previous names to check out some completely insane commercials, more available at Japander.com). Definitely an interesting interpretation of the voices of the Simpsons, not to mention the fact that I seriously doubt Nelson can surf. Also, the Japanese version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is pretty funny, they found a guy who looks like Regis' East Asian cousin, and the show ingeniously fast forwards through all of the easy questions at the beginning. Too bad the top prize is only a hundred grand in US dollars.

I haven't been able to figure my trash pickup schedule (it reads like an IRS tax form), so I think I'm just going to take all my stinky bags of trash to the train station and dump them in the cans there. Apparently there were some late trains in the morning on Wednesday, which is seriously unheard of. If a train's a minute and a half late, they announce it over the intercom and apologize profusely; usually, I set my watch by the trains, no joke. Okay, back to watching myself peel like an orange...

Wednesday 7/10/2002 8:31 PM JST
"When it comes to days like this, I've got lyrics to go"
So I'm sitting in my apartment in Kansai Science City, a half hour train ride south of Kyoto. Evenings have been pretty quiet so far as I gradually get unpacked, watch lots of whack-ass crazy Japanese variety shows on TV, do laundry and the like. Dryers consume way too much power to be practical in Japan, so most evenings I end up outside on my balcony hanging up damp clothes to dry, like a maid except I'm usually in a gray wifebeater.

Yes, the quarter in Kyoto came to a close last week, and now I'm living the solitary salaryman life in quasi-civilization; Gakkentoshi, as it's called, was basically built in the middle of nowhere fifteen years ago as a research park area, so nestled in the lush green hills north of Nara are bunches of random high-tech labs and surprisingly cozy East German-style apartments. My apartment is ridiculously spacious; I feel really bad not cooking in my huge kitchen, but between convenience stores, various restaurants and the 181-yen ramen place near the train station (= about a buck fifty) I'm actually probably eating cheaper than I would buying groceries at expensive Japanese supermarkets. My commute every day consists of about a ten-minute walk to the Takanohara station where I then ride a free bus to work (another ten minutes or so). The move in was a bitch, though, as I had five bags including a suitcase with at least a hundred pounds of clothes and books in it. Add the 100% humidity and four flights of stairs, and it was perhaps one of the most unpleasant days of my life.

What am I doing at my job? Good question...basically, I just fool around with really sweet gadgets all day. I've got one of the new lamp-like iMacs, a miniscule Sony Vaio, a color PDA with a built-in video camera, and a gnarly DoCoMo mobile phone that plays movies, music and Dance Dance Revolution. Somehow I'm supposed to be working on expressive speech synthesis (generating speech with emotions, attitudes, accents and whatnot in a bunch of different languages). My coworkers are really chill, split about evenly between foreigners and natives, so I'm practicing my Japanese occasionally without totally going insane.

Let's see, what happened last week... I had my EE final exam on Tuesday, and despite having practically never made it to class I waxed it by about a standard deviation. Bing Dinner on Thursday was at an amazing restaurant nestled in a garden with a little stream running through it, and though the beer didn't flow as freely as in Miyajima the kaiseki ryoori was pretty good (at around 60 bucks a head, it better have been... thanks again Helen Bing!). A wild night of karaoke followed... The center's closing ceremony was on Friday, and I spent the weekend hanging out with friends and my host family.

Saturday I went with otoo-san and okaa-san to Nijo castle in Kyoto, and then over to Arashiyama on the west side of town, a really nice area with lots of beautiful scenery, even older-school than the old-school rest of Kyoto. My host parents then left on Sunday morning for a trip to Singapore, and since I was starting work on Monday I was the one saying goodbye to them. They gave me a postcard on which okaa-san had painted a picture of my red and white Adidas, with a message written in calligraphy by otoo-san. I wasn't able to talk for a couple of minutes after that since I was trying so hard not to cry. I'm looking forward to hanging out with them in Kyoto during free time this summer.

Had dinner with Hiro, Dave and Roger on Saturday night, and ended up making a final trip to Bar Isn't It in Kyoto where Dave made good use of what he learned from my display at the Powers of Observation exhibition. On Sunday I went shopping with Roger, Ryooko and Ayuko, and ate like a wolf at the all-you can eat and drink beer garden atop the Takashimaya department store. The weather's actually sort of cool right now since a typhoon just passed. But Nara basically has two kinds of summer weather: either unbearably hot and humid, to the point where you step outside and are instantly soaked, or unbearably hot and humid with torrentious downpouring rain. Thusly, I'm heading to the beach in Shirahama down south this weekend with Emi...

Monday 7/1/2002 1:08 AM JST
"I run with Shaheed and the brother Abstract"
The rain outside right now is some of the hardest I've ever witnessed; we're right in the middle of typhoon season right now, so it's been pouring like crazy along with brutally sticky humidity. I just watched the Germany-Brazil World Cup final with some Stanford kids and a bunch of Japanese students from Doshisha and Ritsumeikan, then somehow ended up on the street discussing reruns of Full House and Alf with a chick advertising one of Kiyamachi's ubiquitous strip clubs. Then on the bike back home, the umbrella that I, um, borrowed from in front of a restaurant disintegrated thanks to a big gust of wind, so the last part of the ride was quite wet. No worries, though, as I'm now safe and dry in my room, listening to the bootleg Utada Hikaru album that I bought for 10,000 won on the street in Seoul.

Oh, wait, right, I haven't written any journal entries for nearly three weeks. Sorry, things have been busy. Where shall I start... a while back, I had lunch with my host parents and their host student from last quarter, Jessica, at a French restaurant on the top of Mt. Hiei, then spent the day exploring Enryaku-ji, a sprawling mountainside temple complex which overlooks Lake Biwa. We then drove down to the lake itself and visited a floating temple on the waterfront.

World Cup fever continued despite Japan's elimination by Turkey in the round of sixteen. However, Korea surprised a whole lot of people by knocking off one European soccer superpower after another, and I picked the perfect time to fly from Kansai International Airport across the Sea of Japan, or, shall we say, the East Sea, to the land of kimchee, Starbucks knockoffs and joyous soccer rioters who clean up after themselves. Richard and his family treated me incredibly nicely (thanks again!), as I got to check out some gorgeous palaces & gardens, eat lots of delicious cuisine, go bowling, sing karaoke, and take part in a gigantic 4 million person party on the streets of Seoul after Korea's win against Spain to advance to the semifinals. Seriously, the most insane-in-an-organized-and-safe-way celebration that I could ever imagine.

Other highlights included getting my hair cut at a salon full of middle-aged Korean ladies who thought I was the weirdest thing ever while Rich's sister Tina translated (ooh, the shampoo and scalp massage were nice), riding in a nicer Hyundai than I ever thought existed (including watching the England-Brazil soccer game on TV while driving around), buying a Be The Reds t-shirt, and Rich accidentally whacking a random old man on the street with his elbow and probably breaking his jaw. Did I mention the dog cafe? Yes, an extremely bizarre establishment with really expensive drinks and a crowd of about 20 resident dogs who sit on your lap, try to drink your rice milkshake, and take nasty dumps on the hardwood floor as the restaurant staff come running with paper towels. No, I did not eat any of the dogs.

Yep, so that was Korea. Four days of seeing sights, drinking beers I never knew existed and getting my culture on in general. Back to Japan... classes are just about wrapped up, as I had my Japanese final last Thursday and now my only obstacle is a EE final which I'm utterly screwed for. I'm in disbelief that the quarter is already over; I really, really enjoyed my Japanese class and hanging out with the "Tengu Team" in Kyoto, it's going to be hard to see everyone get scattered across Japan for our internships. And of course, my wonderful host parents. I really don't want to leave, and I'm afraid I'll probably start bawling when I move out in (gasp!) less than a week. I met with my internship people (in southern Kyoto prefecture, just north of Nara) on Friday, though, and my job should be pretty sweet. And my apartment is spacious, close to work, and free.

More random notes: visited Kinkaku-ji (the "Golden Pavilion"), a beautiful royal villa whose main attraction is a building completely covered in gold. Originally built in 1397, it was torched in 1950 by an insane monk who then tried to slit his own belly open on a hillside, but failed, and a sensational trial ensued. The reconstruction is quite nice. I went to Ryoan-ji, one of Japan's most famous Zen rock gardens, and meditated while birds chirped all over. I saw a Japanese dude with his hair all in cornrows, wearing an Allen Iverson jersey, just randomly dribbling around next to his tricked-out minivan at about 11pm in front of a convenience store. He wasn't any good. I went to a Hanshin Tigers baseball game against the Yokohama BayStars at the Osaka Dome, and despite all of the good karma I brought along, Hanshin lost its eighth straight game. However, I ate some really good yakisoba, and they don't stop selling beer after the seventh inning.

I saw a midnight showing of Star Wars Episode II (finally!) with Japanese subtitles. Natalie Portman is superfine, and Yoda is a total badass! Post-movie conversation topics (at a bar called Dylan where, well, they only play Bob Dylan) included wondering why Samuel L. Jackson didn't ever say "Is Marcellus Wallace a bitch?", speculating on whether Tusken Raiders possess reproductive equipment, speaking all of Anakin Skywalker's lines in Arnold Schwarzenegger's voice (trust me, the move would've been much funnier that way; imagine Arnold saying "I will be the strongest Jedi ever!"), and repeatedly high-fiving about Yoda.

Tuesday 6/11/2002 11:30 PM JST
"Hey yo Tip, what's wrong with snails?"
You know what this journal needs? Lots of random quotes from A Tribe Called Quest. Yes, that's the ticket.

Just finished viewing Germany-Cameroon downstairs in the kitchen with okaa-san. Watching soccer while eating sushi and trying to explain what exactly offsides is to my host mom (in Japanese) is some extreme cultural integration. It's funny, all the players' names sound the same when they're written with katakana, whether they're from Sweden or Tunisia.

And then there's tennis; you've got a mismash of English words and French words that have been bastardized into English, all pronounced with the Japanese syllabary. So "thirty-love" becomes "sa-ti rabu" and "deuce" turns into "ju-su", not to mention "naisu sa-bu" and "adobantaju rishiba" (say them out loud and they'll make sense). Unfortunately, I think the trash-talking I heard between the middle-aged Japanese women when I played last Friday defies translation.

Here's one for Jon and Andrew: I saw a dude crossing the street with a bright teal t-shirt with a generic phrase printed on it in big letters, like "Big Love" or "One Try" or some such nonsense. Except the letter "O" was replaced by a goofy smiling Gary Coleman head. I was trying to avoid getting crushed between a psycho taxi and a purple pimped out mini-minivan while laughing my ass off, though, so no photos. Back to eating octopus-shaped caramel-filled crackers...

Monday 6/10/2002 3:58 AM JST
"It probably moves with the morning wind"
Japan 1, Russia 0. The first World Cup victory ever for the Land of the Rising Sun, resulting in joyous citizens pouring into the streets from Sapporo to Oita. I spent most of the day today doing homework and napping in my room, and after dinner I met up with people at Bar Isn't It? to watch the game on a big screen. The excitement of the match was magnified by a crowd of fire-hazard proportions, and when Inamoto scored the game's only goal on a beautiful sequence at the beginning of the second half, the place erupted. When the final whistle blew, people were screaming, taking their shirts off and spraying each other with beer. With Ian, David, Lonnie, Justin and lots of Japanese kids, I headed over to the Kamogawa to celebrate, which entailed setting off large quantities of fireworks, playing soccer shirtless in the river, screaming every Japan-related chant in existence, waving a giant combined Japan/Korea flag, hugging and high-fiving random people, and helping promote hooliganism in general. I'm pretty sure this was the first time I've ever witnessed people moshing naked in the middle of a bonfire. The police tried occasionally to quiet things down, with minimal success; this definitely didn't reach South American riot proportions (sorry, Brent, no tanks), but it was still fun.

Lonnie and I went to get chicken pita sandwiches from a little stand near the river, intending to return to our respective homestays shortly thereafter, when we got a call telling us to head over to Kiyamachi. We found a huge crowd there of riotous proportions, hanging from street signs and chanting "Nippon! Nippon!" to various cadences. David happened to be in the wrong place when a Kyoto policeman's hat was stolen, and narrowly missed being thrashed by the cops. We bought some octopus balls and chuu-hai (watching riots in Moscow on TV at the tako-yaki place, complete with burned shells of cars flipping down streets), and enjoyed the festivities.

Afterwards we headed to a reggae bar to chill out away from the mayhem, where David played air guitar on a plastic three-foot alligator to "Bohemian Rhapsody" and we poured burning hot candle wax on our forearms to test our pain thresholds. Various other adventures ensued, including meeting some sort of hustler/pimp who sent his lackies to buy us bottles of Budweiser, almost getting beaten up by an angry Japanese mafia dude, more high-fiving and singing, and returning to the chicken pita place to socialize with the proprietors. Definitely a night I should have had my camera... well, actually, it probably would have been destroyed at some point, so maybe it's a good thing I didn't bring it along.

What else... Spider-man was rad on Saturday, although I think something was lost in the translation as Emi didn't see what was so great about it. We got dinner at a place called Bikkuri Donki, which means Surprise Donkey. I'm not sure whether this is intended to mean "Surprised Donkey" or "Surprise, Donkey!" (the latter being somewhat questionable in terms of what I'm willing and not willing to eat). Gosh, this is really getting long, but I'm glad I recorded it for posterity. Chances of attending class tomorrow morning are slim.

Saturday 6/8/2002 3:04 PM JST
The weather's been ludicrously hot in Kyoto this week since about Tuesday. Thus, I'm currently battling a massive addiction to C.C. Lemon, the Japanese carbonated lemon drink endorsed by The Simpsons, and a wide variety of frozen treats sold at convenience store, especially green tea ice cream. Apparently unbearable mugginess is what I have to look forward to all summer here in the Kansai region.

On Tuesday a bunch of Japanese students came over to the Stanford Center to watch the Japan-Belgium game on a big screen. Japan tied, which was a pretty big accomplishment, and I am now well-versed in loudly chanting "Nippon!" followed by three quick claps. Afterwards some of us headed to Pig & Whistle to watch the Korea-Poland game, which Korea won handily. I gave Rich a celebratory phone call around 5am his time in the US, luckily he was up watching too. Speaking of Korea, I'm flying out there on Wednesday the 19th, and staying until Sunday the 23rd to hang out with Rich and his family in Seoul, which should be awesome. After the Korea game, we headed down to the river to set off fireworks and drink, and ended up talking with a bunch of hilarious slacker high school kids who kept asking us questions about California girls' breasts.

Thursday afternoon I went to Katsura Rikyuu Imperial Villa in western Kyoto. Supposedly the purpose of the trip was for my Powers of Observation class, but really it was just a nice little sightseeing outing. For native Japanese it's really hard to get into Katsura, but foreigners have an easier time, so one of my Japanese teachers, Hotta Sensei, was along to help translate for me and also check out the villa for the first time. Katsura was, by far, the most beautiful Japanese garden I've seen yet, but they've got a strict no-photos policy (on the tour, you're followed closely by diligent security guards with earpieces who'll supposedly take your film and/or kick your ass if you try to photograph).

Yesterday I played tennis with my host parents and a few of their friends for three hours at Okazaki Park. Due to the aforementioned heat wave, it was pretty torturous to be playing an outdoor sport for three hours, but it was still a lot of fun. Today I slept in massively, and then walked over to Chishaku-in, a neat temple really nearby. I forgot to bring my camera, but I'll be sure to head there again sometime soon to take pictures, because there was a lot of gorgeous stuff. Now I'm cooling off back in my room for a bit before Emi comes up to Kyoto around 4. We're probably going to head to some temples, and then see Spider-man (I've been waiting to see that movie for far too long).

Monday 5/13 - Sunday 6/2 >>