Raindrops on Kittens

I went to visit clayton's host family for dinner last night. Good Japanese practice! :) Went much better than in December when I went to visit Amelia's. :) Understood a whole lot more of the convo. :)

I was there for dinner, of course, but oh my god! The host family stuffed us. The mother started off by giving clayton and I a little cake-like thing called a madeline. Then, she offered us chocolate covered macadamias. So, apparently dessert first. :P :) Oh, there was also sashimi, which I didn't eat. :P

Then, came potato and beef, which is like traditional japanese home cooked food. Plus cucumber and turnip salad. So, I think, hey this much be the main dish.... WRONG! After that she served kontatsu donburi (breaded, fried pork and veggies over rice). Plus there was a noodle dish I didn't try.

But wait, there was more! Finally she served us dessert. Japanese purin (pudding). First I had since I came here, and a *huge* piece of chiffon cake with whipped cream! Crazy.

Before heading over there, I was nervous and kind of lazy, and since I had no food in the house this was pretty much the entirety of my food consumption that day. Turns out it was a good thing that I hadn't eaten. :P :)

later!
Much fun and good speaking/listening practice! :)

So, buta (pig) flu has hit Tokyo. On one hand I am amused because this means that most likely Sophia will close down, and for an entire week! (because a week is the minimum here.) But not so happy in that if they do I will either 1), miss out on a week of actual learning, or 2) if it is longer than a week, we will have to go to school on saturdays for extra classes. Not to mention I could get the buta flu. :P

We'll know soon what the school decides to do, but as it is only 2 weeks until midterm, I hope the school stays open!

ok. so I don't know how often I will be updating this from this point on. I really don't have anything important to say and life will be pretty routine from this point out. I go to school and go home. :P No one needs to hear about that day in and day out. However, if anything awesome or craptacular happens I will let you know. :P :)

Here's a little run down of what has happened lately.

Justin's b-day and my lost key:
Justin had his birthday last weekend. We went out to dinner to TGI Friday's, bar hopped, and then I crashed with two other girls at Justin's house. All in all it was a fabulous time. I got to Kenji, a friend of clayton's and I got to speak horrible japanese on and off all night. However.... I lost my key. You see, the theme that night was "oshare" and since I am not a brand-name girl I decided to try for "gothic oshare." (a term I made up) I wore black and metal, and part of this outfit was the handcuff belt that Puk(phil) made back in high school. Still have, wear, and love that thing! Anywho, this belt was made back before they makers of non-police-req handcuffs added that little level so the handcuffs could be removed without the key. I need a key or that belt isn't coming off! Anywho, while at dragon I had to heed the call of nature. So, I reach in my purse to grab my keychain. It breaks and my two keys, I think, fall into my purse. I find the handcuff one and off I go. Everything continues as mentioned above and I go home sunday morning. I get to my dorm, enter using my security card, and walk up the 3 flights of steps to my room. I reach into my purse for my room key.... and come up empty. It is not there! I have the end of the keychain and my handcuff key but my room key apparently didn't fall into my purse like I thought it did. Or it fell out at some other time during the night.

So, i have to borrow another key from my dorm managers. I ask Aaron, my favorite bar tender at dragon, if he could check if anyone found a key there the next time I saw him in class. But, alas, no one did. Justin hasn't seen it at his house, and it wasn't at the current restaurant we had drunken food at in the wee hours of the morning. Poo. So I told my dorm managers yesterday that the key was lost for good and they inform me that I have to pay 157.50 dollars for a "lost key fee." I could almost understand this if they were changing my lock, but they aren't. They just gave me a new key. My god! So this really sucks. I have been spending way too much lately but I am still in budget to make it to the end. I just won't be doing anything exiting.

That's all for now except for me announcing that I am going to see Kylie in concert in October. whoot!

Oh and I have had pizza in japan. Bacon and potato pizza but pizza none the less. :) Joy!

omg that bloody hurt! But I am better now. No aftercare instructions, but I plan to check online, and see if there are any general ones, just to be sure. It only cost me 10 bucks today, so yay! I actually will have some money left over. I am taking Lauren out to dinner to thank her for her time. :) She came with me today too.

Other than that, it was Golden week but I basically did nothing. No money and I am still walking kind of gimpy. I did see Justin get his industrial tho. It only cost him like 85 bucks. Less than mine did years ago! The piercing place was really clean and it made me want to get another piercing. Maybe get my eyebrow redone or something else. :)

On the school front, I did have some work over the break. I had to write two essays in Japanese. I had to read two chapters for Gender and Society. I still have to study for my kanji chapter test tomorrow. I'm also supposed to interview a japanese person and create a 5 minute presentation on a famous japanese person for monday and wednesday respectively. :P Don't wanna!

On the mindless entertainment front, I have now watched every Psych episode ever, and all of the first season of trueblood. I have even read books 1-9 of the Sookie Stackhouse books that Trueblood is based off of, and they are OK. :)

That is really all my updates for now. Justin's 22nd b-day is sunday and he wants to go out saturday. He wants us all to dress up all "oshare" and I have nothing to wear. Plus, I am gimpy and poor. So I think I am just going to go to Dragon's cocktail blast (all you can drink from 7-9 for 10 dollars) and then cut and run. I have reasons! :)

Finally, Happy B-day Brandt! Hope you have fun today! :)

Wow, turns out I have only four stitches, tho it took forever for the doctor last night to put them in. However, I was told that the wound is pretty bad. They want to wait until after golden week (next week) to take out the stitches. They wanted me to come to the hospital every day to clean the wound, but that would be about 30 bucks a day if you include taxi costs. (taxis are expensive!) So I opted out of that. I have anti-biotic cream and bandages. :P I guess I knew something like this was going to happen. :P :)

Anywho. I am out about 250 in medical expenses. That's it. That includes a late night visit, x-rays, meds, and the follow up today. During which I got a tetanus shot even tho I told them I had one only a year before (during my thumb incident). However, I am now good for tetanus shots for the next 25 years and have the papers to prove it! :)

Ok, I guess that is all. I am holding off making a claim to my insurance company until I get the stitches removed. I took a picture of my bandaged foot and the remains of blood on my floor, but have yet to upload the picts. Maybe later. For now, time to study japanese!

Later!

So, I have now gotten stitches in two countries. um...joy?

I woke up around 3am Sunday morning to a bad dream. In a panic to get out of my bed and turn on the lights I stumbled and fell. In my room, by the door (near where my bed is) there is what is called a genkan. Basically the importance of that place to this story is that is where the light switch is and it is at a different level to the rest of the floor, lower. I stumbled hard in the dark and crashed down into the genkan area. It was pitch black and I sat there for a bit, not sure how long, having a bit of a panic attack to see if I had broken anything. I thought I was good but reached down in the dark to touch my aching foot and came away with blood. Turned on the light and there was blood in puddles in the genkan. I panicked, and starting cleaning up the blood with on of my jeans. Then, I grabbed one of the hand towels to look at my foot. It was super bloody so I hobbled down the hall to the restroom to get some water to clean it out. I left a bit of blood in the hall, but just some drop. Oops. Then I look at the wound and saw that I had torn the bottom of my little toe where it connects to my foot and not just the skin, the muscle underneath. It was deep and not pretty. So here I am at like 330am, knowing I need medical help but not sure what to do about it. So I go back to my room. Get my school insurance info (should be fully covered) and hobble down 3 flights of stairs to wake the on-ste managers of my dorm/guest house. Angela was super helpful in that she called around to clinics to see who was open and could stitch up the wound. Then she gave me the clinic's name and asked if I wanted her to call a cab. Seriously. I totally thought she would help me out at the hospital. I am wounded and don't speak the language. So, i kind of stare at her in shock for a bit and say yes. She tells me that I will have to pay the hospital 50 up front and I will find out the total cost later. So I hobble back upstairs to get money and decide to wake up Lauren from next door. I ask her to come to the hospital with me and she does. She rocks! She was so cool about the whole thing.

We get in the taxi, go to the clinic/hospital and it looks closed. No lights, doors shut. Luckily we have the number for the hospital on us and we call them and a nurse comes out to open the doors. As we walk in the nurses start turning on the lights to everything. This is like no ER in the US. Everything is shutdown and we are the only ones there. However, this is good cause I got help pretty quickly. I had to feel out a form and that was pretty much it. They numbed my wound, cleaned it, and put quite a few stitches in it. Not sure the exact number but it took a while. They also took an x-ray to see if I had broken any bones in my foot (since he asked me to move my toe and I couldn't. But I told him I hadn't been able to move that toes since high school :P). The doctor said it wasn't clear but it didn't look like I had. The doctor and nurse gave me some antibiotics and pain meds. I have a foot that is all wrapped in gauze. I am not allowed to get it wet for two days and I have to come back to the clinic today for more info and to find out how much I owe. :P More expensive taxi fares for me. :P

But as I mentioned above I do have health insurance thru the UW and I am completely covered. However, i think I am going to have to pay everything up front and file a claim. I just hope it doesn't take forever because I to live off this money while I am here and can't afford to be out too much. About 600 and I could still make it until the end of the trip. If it is more than that then I will have to get the money back before I leave. Ack! But I will worry about that later.

later!

ok. I have been forgetting things left and right lately. Tho to be completely honest, it probably has a relationship with how much I have been drinking lately. One week I left my camera at a bar. This last weekend I left my jacket at aaron's bar (and I wasn't even tipsy!). Today, however, I have drank nothing (other than diet coke) and I leave my bloody purse at the grocery store by the station. I didn't realized this until I was all the way back at my dorm tho. So an extra mile of walking for me today, and awkward japanese kaiwa (conversation) practice. um yay. :P :)

Other than that, school is going good. I dropped my dumb Film and Lit course. The course seemed like it could be really neat, but the teacher sucked. I gave it a week, but it so wasn't worth it, and I didn't need the credits anyway. On the other hand,I love my Gender and Society class, the one I wasn't planning on taking at all. The teacher is awesome, and there is a lot of interaction with other students and the teacher during the class itself. Japanese isn't too bad yet. However, I had the most hellish kanji quiz ever last week. We had to learn 10 kanji and a little over 40 compounds using those kanji. Pretty normal there.
Here was the format of the quiz:
The teacher handed us a blank sheet of paper. Then, she proceeded to read out sentences that we had to copy down. We had to write the whole sentence making sure to write the kanji we had just studied. We could also write kanji for any of the other words if we wanted.

You have NO IDEA how evil this is! No one in the class had EVER had a kanji quiz or test like that before (grammar yes, kanji no.)Turns out we will have one like that every week. Boo! On the plus side we are reading the book "Chisai tsu ga kieta hi" in the grammar section. Too funny! My first real japanese book that I can read. :) Yes, it is a children's book, but still. It isn't a picture book, it is a real book. Whoot! So close to literacy!

Finally, in sad news, the manga I used to start teaching myself japanese, Gakkou no Ojikan, has ended. bummer. I love that series and I really means a lot me to personally. I can remember when it started and I couldn't read ANYTHING on the page. It took me a whole day to maybe translate 5 pages. Now, I can read one whole manga, without a dictionary, and know almost every word, in around 20 minutes. tops. :) How things have changed. I did read tho, that she, the author that is, is writing a spin-off with some of the characters from Gakkou as adults teaching at their old high school. I am so picking it up! :)

Ok, off to do homework. Later!

Ok, so I was at Kinokunya with Clayton. He went there to buy his kanji book because he wanted to pay with credit card and our campus doesn't have that ability. Anywho, while I was waiting for him to check out I picked up an english learning book. I figured I checked out what japan thinks you need to know when it comes to speaking english. And I saw this dialog (kaiwa).

A: want to see something cool?

B: what?

A: Ta-da!

B: Whoa! Front row tickets to an Arctic Monkey's show!

A: Yup!

B: That's so cool!

A: You may touch me.

Ok, read that last sentence again... WTF? I almost peed my pants. But I now have a new catch phrase. :)

Oh. My. God. This is going to be tough! I am more comfortable in the class than I was last semester when I went to intensive 3 for a day, but I can tell it will be work. I really didn't have to study much if at all last semester. Not the case here. It is work! I have made flash cards for vocab (didn't do that once last semester, only kanji), had to complete one grammar worksheet, and one small sakubun (essay) today. Plus, I have a vocab quiz tomorrow. Ack! So, this class is going to suck, but at the same time, it is so needed.

I don't know about my other classes yet because I haven't gone to them. I am planning on taking "Film and Literature" and "Gender and Society" (or something like that). Everyone I know is taking the second course so they want me to as well. That will be 16 credits, and might be overload with the work I will have to put in for Japanese, but I am still going to check it out.

Other than that, I am still waiting to see if lizabeth has had her baby yet. Last I heard she was 7cm dilated and well on her way, but I imagine she will be incommunicado for a bit after the birth. :)

Finally, here are picts I took from my phone the day Lauren and Amelia and I went to Akiba to get me a headset for skype.

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I forgot to mention. I am getting 120$ from the Japanese government as kind of a stimulus package thing. The economy isn't that great here so as part of this package the government is giving students free money. Whoot! I can get it starting 4/15. So we'll see. But still it's awesome! :)