I'm Captain Basch! Don't believe Ondore's lies!

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So, I've done quite a number of different things since my last entry, from routine things to pretty amazing awesome things. I've experienced okonomiyaki, which... I must say... is absolutely DELICIOUS. Everybody should have some okonomiyaki at some point in their life. Yum. Plus, they cook it right in front of your table. Like, well, ON your table, as it were.

Let's see, what else have I done... this weekend was Casey's 20th birthday, so we had a whole big day planned that was purdy fun. We went to Den Den town in Osaka, which, if you know what Akihabara is in Tokyo, that's basically what Den Den town is. A whole section of town that's devoted to electronics and otaku stores, basically. It was pretty much awesome fun. There were a whole bunch of figure stores, comic stores, doujinshi stores, toy stores... it was so much fun just walking around! After that, we went to downtown Osaka to go find a place to eat, and we ended up at this yakitori shop where you get to actually cook the food yourself! Ahaha, it was fun. You would order stuff and they'd bring it up in fairly small pieces, then you would cook them on a small grill that they put in the middle of your table. At one point, we had this ginormous flame, LOL. But that was pretty good. Then we went karaoke-ing! I pretty much love karaoke-ing. Oh, and apparently, all my friends think I need to go into voice acting. Like, really bad. They think my Japanese voice is the most adorable thing ever, and one of the songs I sang was this character song from Full Metal Alchemist and everyone was laughing so hard because they thought it was absolutely adorable. O_o

Hmm... oh, Sunday! On Sunday, Casey, Ellen and I went to Vicki's host family's house because her Okasan was putting on a welcoming party for her and told her to invite friends. OMG WE ATE SO MUCH FOOD. They just kept bringing us more... and more... and more... it was never-ending! Most of it was exceedingly delicious, though, I didn't even mind the shellfish. Then, when we thought we were all done, they started bringing out desserts!! There were malaysian crackers, Bounty candy bars (which are pretty much exactly the same as Mounds), cake, and cheesecake! HOLY CRAP! I've never been more full in my life! Though, then they made us all introduce ourselves to everyone there, which we hadn't been expecting. I felt so dumb, because I told everyone I was twelvety-one years old. AHAHA. I can't be put on the spot like that! Geez! But it was funny.

That's about it for the weekend. On Tuesday, our vacation day, we had a class trip to Fushimi Inari jinja, or the fox shrine. It was so beautiful! It's probably one of the prettiest shrines I've ever seen! Statues and mini-shrines and candles and foxes and torii gate after torii gate after torii gate! Huuuuge lines of them! Anytime you're walking, you're walking through tunnels of torii gates! The one downer was that... we were walking up a mountain, basically. I've never walked more stairs in my life! I was so flipping tired, and hot too! It wasn't even that hot out on Tuesday, but I was positively roasting! I probably lost about 50,000 pounds on that day alone!!! LOL But it was quite fun. Plus, I got the most adorable little good-luck charm for my phone and an O-furo for my kamidana. Overall, it was a very fun day. Plus, after we went to the shrine, we met up with Ellen's friend Kelly, who's living in Kyoto, and we travelled around Kyoto for a while. We went to this one shopping center and were looking around... when suddenly... we realized that it was the same exact shopping center that we went to when we toured Kyoto during orientation week! That made us all laugh a lot. It was a pretty fun, though tiring day. I was bushed by the time I got home!!

That's about it for the things I've done recently. Hmmm...
Oh yeah, hey. I might as well go into this now. Kansai-ben! The accent that all people in Kansai have (though it differs a bit from prefecture to prefecture). I pretty much love it. I've already started absorbing a lot from my family, plus the book that I purchased last semester going into a lot of the differences has been helping a lot too. But in all this exposure, I've started looking around and realizing when people are using Kansai-ben! Like, tons of characters that I've never realized before! For instance, I was listening to one of my favorite songs on the way back from school the other day - Dengeki Rhapdosy, Tentomon's character song from Digmon (ahaha, I know, it's so sad, but wah), and I was just listening... listening... when suddenly, I was like, wait, did he say 'omahen'? That's totally a Kansai way to conjugate something! So then I started listening closer, and I was like... um, yeah, he's using 'ya' instead of 'da'... AND he's adding 'de' to the end of some of his sentences... and OMG NOW IT MAKES SENSE WHY HE ALWAYS CALLED KOUSHIRO KOUSHIRO-HAN! Now, just to make sure, I checked out some random doujin scans I had on my computer... and... holy crap. Tentomon's got positively the strongest Kansai accent EVER. I don't know if it was just the doujin author emphasizing it more than usual or not, but he uses just about EVER nuance of the dialect there is. So if you want to learn Kansai-ben, seriously... just listen to Tentomon.
Funny stuff.
Yeah, I probably just bored a whole bunch of you out, but it made me excited. I'm totally on the lookout for more Kansai stuff whenever I read or watch stuff now, since I can actually tell when people are speaking it.

Ok, so I think I'm actually done now. I'm not sure what I'm doing this weekend... don't really have any specific plans, but I'll probably end up doing *something* lol. XD Catch y'all later!

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