Ask Don.

I posted something about this on facebook, but not everyone has it, so please, the next time you talk to Don, ask him what he thought about eating COD SPERM SOUP.

To Do.

As it blizzards outside, I am rethinking my new year's resolutions. Originally, like every previous year, I said that I wanted to exercise more, lose weight, blah blah blah, but now I'm editing. There are other things that I want to accomplish that are probably more important than how my clothes fit. And anyway, if I keep myself busy doing these things, I will spend less time eating all of the chocolate that people cruelly gave us for Christmas.

1) finish knitting my sweater. (I started it 2 years ago!) I will probably never have more free-time in my life, and the weather here certainly is conducive to staying indoors.

2) learn more Japanese. I am now visiting a woman in town once a week to work on my Japanese. Her English is really good, so we mostly end up bullshitting, in English, but having a set day to talk about Japanese, even for 30 minutes, makes me feel more responsible.

3) get my English classes started. I am going to be renting out a classroom in town two days a week to hold English conversation classes, but I'm procrastinating. The problem is advertising myself. It's ridiculously expensive to do it in the newspaper, so I'm relying on our radio show plugs and word-of-mouth. It costs money to rent the rooms, so I want to make sure I have enough people there to at least pay for the rent. But I am excited to start. I really miss teaching, and I'll finally have an excuse to wear all the teacher-clothes I packed!

Maybe #4 should be blogging more frequently, but I'd like to keep my list at 3 things. It is the magic number after all.

To Stay or Not To Stay

That is the question. I think I hear the music from Final Jeopardy playing faintly somewhere. . . the suspense continues.

Fun with Fabric

A friend of mine here is always making me things like hats, bags,
pins, pickles, etc. She is the crafty-est person I have ever met. She
knows how to make just about anything. When I first showed her the
knitting needle case I made a few months back, she whipped out her
measuring tape and started writing numbers down. However, right before Christmas I asked her if she had made it yet and she surprisingly
hadn't even started. So I told her not to bother and to let me make
it. I bought plenty if fabric so I made a lined zipper pouch to match.
I hope she likes it and I hope her expert-seamstress eyes don't look
too closely at my seams.

It's a New Year

We just wrapped up the holidays here and are settling back in to our normal everyday lives. After sorting through and labeling the hundreds of pictures we took since late December, I've made these two photo albums. The first is our Christmas experience in Rumoi, which includes making mochi (basically pounding steamed rice into goo), cookie decorating with my chat club and the English club in Rumoi HS, and a gift exchange with Jim and Dave. It was really fun, but both of us felt a little homesick, having to open presents on skype with our families.

The next slideshow is of our Tokyo and Kyoto adventure. This really made us feel like we were in Japan. So many beautiful, crazy, weird, and hilarious things! This is a long slideshow, and the captions explain a little, but here were our highlights:

• lots of women in kimono
• beautiful temples and shrines, all of which have been burned down at least once in their lifetime
• eery bamboo forests
• scary statues of gods that we're sure moved when we looked away
• the biggest buddha I will probably ever see in the biggest wooden building (50 meters high) I will probably ever stand in
• sushi on a conveyor belt
• quiet cobblestone streets with little bridges to doorways of tea houses where geisha might be entertaining
• ridiculously-detailed roofs
• a whose whole second and third story are covered in gold plating
• hilarious signs everywhere
• several people pushing dogs in strollers
• transvestite being photographed by a homeless man with a disposable camera
• a rare sighting of Mount Fuji