SUNDAY 2/13
Pre-Valentine's Day! A friend of Carol's was visiting from Nara prefecture, so after church we went over to Carol's for lunch. After that, the rest of my afternoon was spent frosting the cupcakes I'd baked after Inspa the night before. And just so everyone knows, I am really proud of how my cupcakes turned out.
Look how cute they are! <3 This is 1/4 of the cupcakes I made. Apparently Japanese people aren't familiar with conversation hearts or sprinkles, but that's okay! The cupcakes were from a mix, but the frosting is homemade~
Carol's cupcakes, all from scratch.
The whole table.
What was this all for, you ask? It was for our Crossroad/Monthly Event, the Valentine's Violin Concert! Christer Tepper, a Christian violinist, came to play for us. He was amazing!
The whole crowd.
He also spoke, and Becky translated.
You get the idea. Anyway, it was a great night, and everyone loved him.
MONDAY 2/14
Valentine's Day! It was a true day off for me: I spent the better part of it in my room, chatting with my friends online. It was really nice. It was also awesome because it snowed all day! It doesn't snow here often, and usually when it does it isn't much. Becky said she's never seen so much snow in Tsu.
The view from my window. All day I kept looking outside at the snow.
I took a bunch of pictures. From inside. It was cold, okay?
No construction that day...
Accidentally had my flash on. But it came out kinda cool because you can see how huge the snowflakes were!
Non-flash version. This is right in front of the Center. I didn't walk far outside lol.
Looking left!
Looking right!
Little tree thing!
Little plant!
Trees!
...anyway. In the evening we went over to the Ismaili's house for dinner, along with Julia.
People in Tsu apparently don't know how to drive in the snow. It took way longer than it should've to get across the train tracks...
In front of the Ismaili's house.
The Ismailis are Albanian, so a lot of the food we had was Albanian. And all of it was delicious.
So pretty!
There were so many different things!
Group shot, complete with Anpanman.
I enjoyed my dessert, okay.
I mean, look at it!
It was a lovely evening with great company. <3 Overall, a really nice, simple kind of day.
TUESDAY 2/15
I had a class in the afternoon (a lady who only comes once a month). It was interesting; she had, in Japanese, some of the kinds of things she would talk to her husband about in the morning, and wanted them in English. Like, short, simple conversations. But there are so many set phrases in Japanese that don't exist in English that it was a challenge to figure out how to say what she wanted to say. A good challenge though! It was an interesting class. :)
After that, I met with Becky and Carol, and I don't remember what we did about dinner, but Becky and I went to gospel choir. There was a guy I'd never seen there before who talked to me afterwards, which is rare- people don't often talk to me unless they already know Becky or something. He seemed really nice, and he wanted to ask me about the English pronunciation in one of the songs I think, but our director started talking to me and that conversation kind of ended. I'll have to talk to him again next time if he's there. But I felt like I had lots of different conversations in Japanese that day, so I was pretty proud of myself. :D
After gospel choir, Carol came over to our apartment and the three of us previewed the movie for Movie Night while eating dessert together. It was nice~
WEDNESDAY 2/16
Becky and I walked over to the nearby elementary school to meet with the principal and vice-principal to see if there's any way I can volunteer for them. There's nothing as far as regular teaching, apparently, but they'd love to have me come play with the kids sometimes, and maybe come for special events, so we'll see! Other than that and my regular classes, my day was pretty chill.
THURSDAY 2/17
I had Japanese in the morning. (For the record, I LOVE my class. My teacher is super nice and encouraging, and I feel like I'm really learning a lot from her.) On my way home, I saw this.
Most of the snow was gone by Tuesday morning, but some of it seemed to linger in shady spots.
Anyway, I wanted to do a little shopping (mainly to pick up AAA's new album that I mentioned at the beginning of this post), and I also wanted to try McDonald's current Big America burger, the Miami Burger, so to Saty I went.
Dip tortilla chips in taco filling. So that's how this works.
You can't really see in this picture, but there's taco meat on top, then tortilla chips, and taco sauce on the bottom. So it's basically a taco burger. Authentic Miami? Probably not, but it was good!
In the afternoon, Carol, Becky and I met to discuss the upcoming class schedule for April (when the new term starts because that's when the Japanese school year starts). I decided to start four new classes. One will be an Asian drama discussion group twice a month (on the Fridays when there's no Movie Night). Two, a book discussion class and an academic writing class, will be on Wednesday nights, twice a month each, alternating weeks. And the fourth class is a general junior high/high school class that will be on Thursday nights. It's all tentative, and I haven't planned anything beyond the general concept, but that's the direction I'm heading.
Also, we went to dinner at Cutlet. I got katsu curry and it was pretty fantastic.
The rest of my night was pretty low-key. My girls all cancelled because they had tests to study for, so I used my time to do some stuff for the Center and to relax. A nice night.
FRIDAY 2/18
I had my various classes throughout the day, which for some reason I felt like were a lot of fun on this day. We had Movie Night at 9pm, which I headed up. It was a Japanese movie called Ima, ai ni yukimasu; the English title is Be With You. It's kind of a bittersweet movie about family, love and loss, with an interesting twist. We had some great discussion after the movie, and then a few girls stayed over with me and Becky. We stayed up pretty late eating and chatting. One of our friends from gospel choir came for the first time, and we discovered that we have very, very similar taste in music. Super exciting. :D We are so going to karaoke sometime.
So that's it for now! My next blog post will be about my trip to Osaka last weekend~ ☆
No comments:
Post a Comment