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Published: September 28th 2008
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monkey business
This is right outside my apartment! In total, about 10 of them walked by on the fence! Konnichiwa!
I know, I know...it's been a while since I've written a new entry. Sorry everyone! It's hard to sit down at a computer and type when I have so many fun things to do here! 😉 Gives me lots to write about when I do, though. Without further delay, I bring you more tales from the Far East...
Saturday (08/16/2008)
Not much notable happened that day, so I wouldn't even bother to mention it except...THERE WERE MONKEYS OUTSIDE MY APARTMENT!!! Real. Live. Monkeys. Just hanging out along the fence in the back of the apartments here. Apparently it's pretty rare to see them, but we were lucky enough to have been about to take a trip to the store or dinner or something and BAM! there they were. About 10 of them scurried past on the fence. Amazing!
Monday (08/18/2008)
After school, the group made a quick run to Mos Burger and then ran back up the hill to school where we were to talk with Japanese high school kids. The goal of the afternoon was to help them to practice English, but they were so shy it was really hard to get them to
monkeying around
I love monkey sayings. They make it easy to title photos. say anything in English. We each sat with a group of 4 or 5 kids and tried to get them to talk to us. My group was two girls and two guys. They seemed really nice and brought games to play, but were SO shy. After that afternoon, I had new sympathy for our Japanese tutors. It was fun, but in a silent, let's play board games and avoid Megan's attempts to talk to us kind of way. 😉
Thursday (08/21/2008)
After school, we took a trip to our favorite Udon place. It's a cute little family-owned place and the owner has an adorable dog that we all want to steal. Their Udon is delicious and it's the only shop we've found that has Kimchi Udon, which is AMAZING. Who'd a thunk combining Korean spiciness with Japanese Udon would be so good? Turns out Udon-Ya-San, as we fondly call him, has a corner on the market. 😊 I got 100 yen off my meal because I drew a special red-tipped set from the big bucket of chop-sticks. Yay!
Later on that evening, I got together with a couple friends to make dinner. It was the first attempt
Megan-Sensei
Me with my group of high-school kids that I attempted to talk with in English. at having a weekly dinner that we would make together, so that we wouldn't always have to eat by ourselves and we could learn how to cook new things. (Works out well for me since my cooking skills are lacking.) Vanessa, Robin, and I made curry at Robin's apartment. It wasn't too hard because they sell good boxed curry so that you just add whatever vegetables and meat you want to it. It's basically just the sauce and comes in little blocks that turn yummy when you add water. My kind of cooking. 😊 Believe it or not, you can actually screw it up, as I did on my first attempt to make curry by myself...But our curry turned out wonderfully!
Friday (08/22/2008)
One of my tutors, Sayaka, had a Birthday earlier in the week, so we decided to have a little surprise party for her on Friday night. After school, a few of us went to a fantastic bakery and bought a couple adorable cakes. One was chocolate and had cute little mice made out of sugar on top with her name and "Happy Birthday" written in Japanese. The other was a white cake loaded with fruit
tea haiku
This was a cup with a Haiku poem on it at the Udon shop. It reads, "A glassful of drops. Each drop is tomorrow's dreams. Sip your dreams in drops." Pretty profound for a glass of tea, eh? on top. I know I've said this before, but the Japanese really know how to do bakeries. 😉
Sayaka frequently goes running with some of the people from our group, so to get her to the party, we had one of the guys (Kevin) tell her that he wanted to go running at 9 that night. This would normally have worked perfectly, but it was raining pretty steadily that night. She of course tried to cancel, but Kevin kept insisting that they had to go running. Luckily, she still didn't catch-on. It was pretty funny afterwards to talk to her about it because she was really confused about why he was so adamant about running in spite of the rain. In spite of the weather, we managed to thoroughly surprise her and everyone seemed to have a great time at the party. Plus, the cakes were AMAZING, and that always makes for an excellent party in my opinion.
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Susy Peasley
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Food, Glorious Food!
I've finally had time to catch up and actually read your posts vice having Harry tell me about them. The recurrent theme (beside shopping) is food, food food! No wonder we love you! Learn how to make those mice cakes, and teach me when you come back, ok?