This past week has been pretty gloomy. It has rained almost everyday, and is consistently overcast. I haven't had a lot to do at work because I have been finishing things quickly, and my project leader is pretty busy. I finished two podcasts, Serial Season II and Dr. Death. They were both sad and a little scary, but they are definitely entertaining. Alex is in Florida this weekend, so we won't get to have a date. We had two new interns come on Friday, one is from Japan and one is from China. The Japanese intern's name is Eriko. She is only here for a week. The Chinese intern's name is Chiou (I'm not sure I spelled that right). She is here for three weeks. I don't honestly understand why students have such short internships, but apparently it is pretty common in Japan. They are both Master's students, one year older than me. Terry was excited to have someone to talk to in Chinese, I can't really communicate with them very well unless they try to talk in broken English. After work on Friday, Terry and I took Eriko and Chiou to the grocery store and home store. They could read everything much better than me, and actually helped Terry and I find some things that we have previously been having trouble locating. We went home and Eriko made us a type of Japanese stew. To eat it, you dip the vegetables in a scrambled raw egg. I was a little weirded out by this, because I thought only narcissistic-ally muscular guys ate them. However, it was actually pretty good! I tried a lemon whiskey highball, which was okay. Japanese people tend to like drinking a lot. Overall, it was a nice time! We just talked and ate the food they prepared and had a drink.Â
This Saturday I met up with Will Hobart, another student from UC. He is co-oping with a Japanese Chemical Engineering company in Shiga. We went to Nara, and I showed him the deer in the park. I actually bought crackers to feed them this time. That was a mistake. They literally chased me and bit my butt and hips, even putting a hole in my leggings. My best advice is to NOT feed them. They could trample you and they are so aggressive. I think I like the deer better in America. They know to keep their distance, have nicer coats, and aren't fat and aggressive from being fed constantly. Afterwards, we stopped at the same noodle shop that I went to with Terry, Lorentz, and Nakano. It was just as good as last time! We walked through the Temple to see the giant Buddha again, which was alright. I still don't understand why people are bowing to it, it seems kinda eerie to me. I tried strawberry mochi, which is a Japanese rice dessert. The rice is basically pounded down into paste and set in a form... it's like a soft rice cake maybe?? (see picture below). It was very good despite my poor abilities to describe it. I bought some more kit-kats on the way back to the train station! They were matcha (green tea) flavored, Sakura (cherry blossom) Sake (alcohol) flavored, and strawberry cheesecake (with almond and cranberry) flavored. I am not a fan of the matcha kit-kats, but the other two are pretty tasteful! After finally getting home, I was pretty tired so I took a nap and then cleaned my apartment.Â
This next picture was worth it..
Sunday was another rainy day. I was happy I remembered my umbrella this week. Last Sunday, I forgot mine so I had to buy one at the convenient store. On the way to church, I bought some things to eat at lunch. The church provides a lunch that you can purchase some weeks, but typically it has meat in it. I bought a pizza pastry, roasted sweet potato chunks, and strawberry chocolate covered almonds. The pizza was absolutely disgusting. It tasted like warm mayonnaise, which may have been the cheese?? Still not sure. The toppings were onion and corn. I couldn't finish it, it was pretty bad. I did enjoy the sweet potato and the almonds, but I think that the sweet potato would be better freshly roasted, because it kinda tastes strange when it has been in a package for a while. I helped Sue install Skype on her amazon kindle. It took me the better part of an hour because I had to add her email to the device itself, but she wanted a new email so that amazon wouldn't have access to all her messages and contacts. I am glad we were able to get it working, because without it she can't call her dad in America. I know all too well how hard it would be to not be able to contact your loved ones. It was still raining when I got home and poured all night, so I stayed inside. I worked briefly on something for IEEE, and folded and put away all of my laundry. I watched a few episodes of a documentary on the Vietnam war, while uploading pictures to Facebook. Alex called me and video-chatted me while riding his bike in Florida, it made me so happy to see his sunburned face! I hope you all are enjoying reading about my life here in Japan. As of today, there is less than 5 months until I can come home and tell you all about it in person. Miss you all dearly!
