3 for the price of 1

Sorry I haven't updated in three days. I've been rather busy and have been getting home far too late to care about writing a blog post. I'll start with Thursday.

I had to meet the Japanese student I'm tutoring at noon on Thursday. We had a 2 hour session where we read from a movie transcript again. It's really kind of fun trying to explain things to her. It makes you have to really think about the meaning behind what you say in English, which I don't do too often. It's so natural now, even if you know the meaning of words, it's hard to explain or define. Unfortunately the movie is rather odd. It's some weird movie with Angelina Jolie in a mental hospital and it's chock full of cuss words and sexual innuendos, all of which she asks me to explain. It's rather awkward.

After the session I left to go to my only class that day, History of International Relations. The one with the insane old guy. It was dreadfully boring, as he has a habit of rambling on for an hour about something I could say in one sentence. I'm not exaggerating either. He spent an entire hour trying to convey to us how people in the middle ages didn't view "nations" as we do know, like with invisible borders defining what nation every piece of land belongs too. Alright, we get it, move on. I ended up drawing the entire class. It's still at least more interesting of a class than some of the others offered.

I went out with the Cali people after class, and we eventually made our way to karaoke again. The night ended up being not so much fun, and I didn't get home till 2am, by which point I was exhausted and just wanted to sleep. Which I did, immediately.

The next day I woke feeling horrible, so apart from briefly meeting my tutor at noon for lunch, I lied in bed and slept the day away. Around evening I started playing DS for a few hours. There was a party that night for International students and Japanese students, so Tori and I went to that around 10. It was pretty fun. It was very casual and we met new people. There were a few girls from China, some guy from Mongolia, one from Korea, and one from India. And we met a few Japanese students as well. During our conversation with the kid from Mongolia he ended up telling me that, although Tori's is normal, my nose is large. I had been told the same thing by one of the Japanese students I met on Thursday night. I know it's fascinating because no Asian has large noses, but is it really necessary to mention it? I mean it's like me telling them that they're Asian, as if they don't know already. And of course the fact that I hate my nose, thanks so much Mom.

My Japanese has ceased functioning this weekend too apparently, as everytime someone tried to talk to me in Japanese, I would just be completely unable to utter anything and I sounded like an idiot. Although in my defense, sometimes they ask the weirdest questions, and I look confused only because I have no idea why they're asking me that, or I think I heard it wrong. The Korean kid we met was talking to me in Japanese, or trying, and he repeated the question like 4 times, really slowly in the end, and then just asked it in English. He asked me if I knew where Korea is, which of course I know where Korea is. I thought that was what he'd been asking, but I was just so confused as to why he would ask that. I would say most Americans know where Korea is, or at least all educated Americans. Perhaps I should've asked him if he knew where America is?

We went back to Tori's after the party because we still hadn't eaten dinner, so we ended up eating around midnight. I was really hungry and ate far too much too late. I got a little sick later. After eating we were just watching tv and completely lost track of time, and when I thought it was 1:30am, it was actually 3. So I came home immediately and went to sleep.

Now Saturday finally. There was a rather large and famous fireworks festival today, so we had all planned on going to that. We met around 3pm at Tsukuba Center, and one of the Japanese students led the way. It was 45min from Tsukuba Center by bike, after an already 30min ride from my dorm, ugh. Not to mention, those sidewalks were the most pathetic excuse for sidewalks I've ever seen. Sometimes they were just fine, and then other times they were barely wide enough for one bike, and one little wobble and you're either tumbling down a rather large hill or falling into the road. They were like this because the Japanese don't believe in weed killer, and it was all quite overgrown. They prefer to leave things natural. Which is great and all until I need a sidewalk. It was full of potholes as well, and I kept falling into them and ramming my ass into the seat very hard. It was unpleasant.

We got to the place around 4, and it didn't start till 6, so we scouted out a spot to sit (there wasn't much room), and found this rather uncomfortable spot on the side of a hill by a road, that was very steep and muddy and infested with spiders. We had a tarp to sit on, but it kept sliding down and we were still getting quite dirty. I went out with some of the others to buy food rather than sit on the hill. I bought a drink and some okonomiyaki, which was good I guess, just overpriced as usual at festivals.

Eventually just before 6 the road cleared of cars and we sped down the hill and claimed a spot on the oh so much better concrete. It turned out to be quite a horrible show to be honest. Apparently the Japanese take their fun in spurts because the entire show was like a couple minutes of fireworks and then a couple more minutes of just waiting. Sometimes it would be only one or two fireworks between breaks. It was rather boring after a while. Around 7 it actually became cool for about 10min. They were firing them from all over into what felt like a finale. Unfortunately that was the best part. After that we had to sit through an excruciating hour and a half of boring fireworks. Everyone gets really into it here too. Everytime anything would happen people would cry out in amazement and ooh and ahh and clap and stuff. I didn't really get it, it wasn't that amazing. Red, White, and Boom was way better, and only a half hour. We stuck around though, since we'd come so far, so we could see what we thought would be an awesome finale. Well there was no finale. It just ended. So anticlimactic.

Then we had to begin the agonizing ride home, while dodging around tons of people walking and traversing the death trap sidewalks of evil in the dark. It was nasty and humid today too, adding to the misery. We finally got back to Tsukuba Center and stopped by Jusco to buy food. Now we're home and about to eat dinner at 11pm >_> oh well. Although, even though it wasn't massive amounts of fun, we had fun laughing and joking about how miserable it was, that I'm sure I'll look back on it and be glad I went.

As a perfect end for a perfect day I stupidly left my bowl of piping hot noodles sitting on my bed, and then forgot about it and accidentally sat on it and spilled it all over my bed.

Tomorrow I'm doing nothing. I need to do laundry and catch up on my homework. I've done no homework in the past three days and I'm sure I've forgotten all the kanji I've worked so hard to learn already. So sad.

I've uploaded some pictures here now. The first one is of some of the students from the international student party thing on Friday night. I'm not in it cause I'm taking the picture obviously. The rest are of the Fireworks Festival. First of the god awful spider infested hill we were sitting on at first, then of the spot on the street we claimed. And a few pictures of the fireworks that actually came out ok.