3 Day Week

I have been toooo busy/lazy to blog!

Tuesday

• After my big day of travel on Monday (haha) I stayed in on Tuesday and rested up since it was the last day of Golden Week and all. And I studied! I continued studying kanji and such and kind of did my homework. Yawn, I don't think anything important happened on Tuesday.

Wednesday

• School again, ho hum.
• We got our kanji tests back from last week, and I got a 44% on my kanji test. Yep you read it. I studied for like 8 hours for that thing. I think the key is to have studied properly for the quizzes and reviewed in between, and I had forgotten we had quizzes and not reviewed, thus the 44%. The cool part though was that I totally aced the kanji quiz we took Wednesday, so don't worry parents and teachers, I'm trying to get back on the right track =)
• At lunch I went and picked up my hanko (stamp with your name on it for signing things) which is totally sweet. The guy at the shop is so nice though, and when I showed him my pickup slip, he was like "Ah! Wilson-saaan, Wiilsoon-saan" in kind of a sing-songy voice while he looked for my hanko, haha. After he found it, he started asking me things about America and New York and 9-11, and maybe about how he knew someone who died in 9-11.. I wasn't really sure, and I didn't really know what to say, so I left pretty soon after that.
• I had some stuff to do for my other class so I didn't try and do the bank thing that day, and did class stuff instead.
• Hometime after that, or so I intended. Instead, I ended up finding a place to get a haircut! I went to a place called "Wiki Wiki: A Beauty Shop" (that's right Mom and Dad and John, I went to the beauty shop this week! =D ) I knew I wanted it shorter, but I thought I might try and go for way shorter like I've always been wanting to since I'm in a foreign country and everything.
• The haircut guy was soooo super nice and awesome, and talked to me a long time about the style I was choosing and my concerns about it and stuff. Then the whole time he kept coming up with things to talk to me about and he was just really nice and cool =) It was the second longest Japanese conversation experience I've had here so far. I've really gotta fix that somehow... but being in class with foreigners all morning (and sometimes afternoon) and knowing if I don't go home and do my homework and study I'm gonna keep getting 44% on my kanji tests, I'm really not sure what else to do..
• My haircut turned out great! I was a little unsure at first if I really liked it or not, but I've been getting lots of nice compliments. It takes a little effort to style in the morning, but it's not bad at all. I feel hip and fresh. I'll put up pics some other time.
  
• After haircut, I met up with Hunter, Greg, and Jeannette for dinner, except Jeannette and I didn't want what the guys picked so we ditched them for Mos Burger. I had a big late lunch, so I just got some chicken nuggets (JUST 5 CHICKEN NUGGETS COST OVER 300 YEN THERE, UUGHH MOSBURGER WHY)
• Finally home, homework, you know the drill.

Thursday

• Class, yeah, whatever. We had a test on the last unit.
  
• We presented our research topics in ethnography which was way cool! Three of ours were on some aspect of arcade gaming, so that was neat, and the class had a lot of good input. I love that class!
• Then I went home, and that's about all I remember about Thursday!

Friday

• Class. We got back our chapter tests from last week, and I got a 66% on my chapter test. *Sigh* But, again! I felt a whooole lot better about this week's test. I finished early, I didn't feel stumped by anything, etc etc.
• I tried to get a bank account at Mizuho bank after that, but the lady was saying that I had to be living in Japan for 6 months to get one? I don't understand at all, Hunter and Teresa both got accounts at the same bank... I need to go back with some better dialogue prepared or a Japanese person or something... maybe Yuujiro could help me out.
  
• I went to Harajuku and did some clothes shopping that afternoon and some other stuff that evening.

Saturday night was the first real G Splash practice, woo! We did cute little self-introductions for a long time, and then the rest of the night was all basics training. They kept saying like, we know this is boring, but you really need to learn it!! It was nice, we seem to have a nice group =) And we foreigners have decided that on Tuesday practices, we're not allowed to talk to each other! (well, for as long as we can stand it anyway) Only to Japanese people!

The rest of this weekend has been ok, but suuper rainy. And now my room is suddenly super cold again and it's making me just want to lay in bed all day! =/ Arrrg it seems Golden Week didn't recharge me as well as I had hoped it would.. I need to get my head in the game, I know. Bleh.

Local Travel Day

I actually left DK House today! Wooo! It took a lot of effort for me to make myself, haha, but I had to go out and do something for golden week, right?

I got Yoshinoya for lunch on the way to the station and then headed for Akabane! No matter what route we take to...pretty much anywhere, we always end up stopping in Akabane or even transferring trains there. It seemed like a pretty hopping place, but we had never visited, so I made that my mission today! The verdict: Akabane is a pretty cool place! A little ways down the road out of the station, there's a covered street of shops and restaurants called LaLa Gardens. It's really long and had lots of cheap food options and some cheap clothing stores too. The best part, there's a DAISO store there! It's 5 floors! Daiso is a 100 yen store that was one of the places I went all the way to Harajuku to find and turns out there's one right in our backyard, haha. I saw one on my way back at the Kawaguchi station too! There was also a small arcade so of course I had to stop. I thought I saw a woman who was going to play some games, but when I followed her in she was just going to play the slots =/ This arcade was pretty small, but it made it a lot more accessible and friendly-seeming than the one in Shinjuku. There was only one Tekken station, and I challenged a guy and lost =/ My little percentage thingy on my profile is just gonna stay at 0% forever I guess, hah..

The entrance to LaLa Garden

I did some frivolous shopping at Daiso (a bottle of nail polish and two sets of little sock thingies all the girls wear with their uncomfortable shoes to make them more comfortable) and then did some more Akabane exploration. There was a big nice park! It had a really pretty fountain and playground stuff for the kids. The playground stuff here is neat and kind of unique, but most of it is just big concrete animal shapes or whatever, painted a million years ago so they look kind of sad now.. Still not much grass to be found in this park either.

It's a giraffe slide!!!

Woooaaahh!

Camel, Lion, and Squirrel stand watch over the sand pit.
Watch out little buddy!
Hahaha bear in a boat.


I walked back up and under the train tracks to the other side of the station and found a Baskin Robins (I was so tempted to get something... they were having a sale so a 400 yen item became like 240 or something amazing, but I wasn't hungry enough to really justify a whole ice cream cone) and then... Ito Yokado! Haha, it's the big one we can always see from the station. It's the span of the three story one in Warabi, but it's 6 floors! Woah! I was looking for some clothes there but didn't really find anything.. There was a whole clothes mall sort of place across the street though, but it was a little out of my price range.
You know you're in Ito Yokado when you see the glowing underwear mannequins. For serious.

Back to the station and it was time to move on. I needed to do some field research for ethnography, so I went on over to Akihabara. This was my first time going, and to those who don't know, Akihabara is known as Akihabara Electric Town, mostly because you can buy electronics there for cheap. There's also supposed to be a lot of anime stores and such there, but I didn't venture very far into the city before I found a SEGA arcade. It was full of all sorts of different people, lots of girls =) some foreigners.. I saw two people playing the same crane game win digital cameras within 5 seconds of each other! Every now and then I try and win something out of those, but I guess I don't have the touch, haha, and then I think about what I could've bought with that 100 yen I just spent....

There was a pretty big line of Tekken stations on the 4th floor (which was pretty much boys only, as usual. One girl watching her boyfriend play I guess when I left), and after watching for a while, one of the stations opened up with no challenger on the other side! Woo! I jumped in and happily played up to stage 3, trying to sort of train and figure out how the game works a little better, before some guy challenged me =/ I beat him once, but then he destroyed me ~__~ He would hit me with the same move at the beginning of the fight and I would pretty much be done from there. *sigh*

Then I saw that they had the Gundam game on this floor! It seemed kind of crowded, and since it was Akihabara of all places, I felt kind of intimidated, but I saw a little boy and his grandpa buying a card for the boy to try and play for the first time, so I felt more confident and got in line behind them. When it was almost my turn, I got up some confidence and asked one of the guys sitting next to me: "Excuse me, it's my first time trying to play so... are there any important details you could teach me about?" and got the becoming-standard "Err... you're first time playing..um....it's difficult to explain..umm..." look. His friend asked what I'd said, and he told him I wanted him to teach me about the game. I told him I had done the training but not played a game yet, and he looked at my card and said something about that the fact that I had done the training ok was amazing? Iiii'm not sure that's what he said at all, but I think he was trying to reassure me that it would be fine, which was nice, but after that he was pretty much done talking to me. He did say if I wanted to play with them I could wait for the next round, so I did that.

The game has a headset sort of thing where you can talk to the other people on your team. I'm actually not sure if they were on my team or not, but it seemed like it. It was hard for me to say much and I couldn't understand most of what they were saying... except lots of "Sorry" at the end when we lost, haha. I think I said "I died already" and "It's hard to move!" It's a fun game, but it's so hard to get the hang of the controls. Listening to them yell and get frustrated was funny though. My first game I got 4 points but my second one I got 20, so I guess I'm improving a little!

Afterwards I tried to like, initiate some kind of dialog with the two guys by hanging around as they met back up with some other friends waiting for the game. I told the one who had helped me, "It was hard!" but he just smiled and bowed a few times, so I left. I've gotta figure out what to do to get more socially involved with these people if this research is going to go anywhere. It's just weird to me because I know if anyone ever asks me or Nick to help them out with a game that we're really good at, or explain something, it's hard to get us to stop talking about it, because we're excited to share what we know and explain the ins and outs and make sure they have fun. Maybe it's just the nature of this game in particular.

I thought about looking around Akihabara some more, but it was starting to rain a little and I was getting a little tired of walking around. I'll probably go back sometime to check it out since it's fairly close to school. On the way home from our station I got a 7-11 spaghetti dinner which was OK. I'll definitely be eating a lot of Italian pasta when I get back to America =) I also enjoyed some of the Oreo's I bought last week! That's something nice to have here. I ate soo many Oreo's before I left because I thought I wasn't going to get any in Japan, haha. They are kind of expensive though, so that wasn't totally unjustified =)

Now I've painted my toenails (with regrettable results on the first foot unfortunately..) and blogged so I think I'll work on some studying and maybe get a game plan together for tomorrow's studying since it's the last day of golden week! As Nick said, the best part of a four-day weekend is the three-day week that comes after it, so I'm not too worried about this week =) That's it!

Kanji Power Day

I can feel it.... the kanji power! More on that later..

Today I got up and went to church. It was really nice out today, kind of cool and a little overcast. I wore a white dress with pink flowers and my good old pink sweater with my other good old white strappy shoes. We continued reading from Acts today, and it seems like that's how the sermon works at this church. I wish I could understand more of it, but I think he's just elaborating on the lessons learned from the chapter we read from the Bible. There was a cute moment for me when the Jr. High girl next to me had to help me find the chapter in the Japanese Bible... I still don't quite understand the page numbering ^^;; Haha, and one of the greeter ladies in the front hall said something like, you weren't here last week, I thought you had returned to America! hehe =)

I had big plans today to try and do some local traveling since it was nice out, but instead I just ended up talking to Nick for a long time and watching Naruto together online ^^; Then after he went to bed.. I took a nap! For like 2 hours! I was supposed to go eat lunch, but I took a really long nap instead, haha. And by the time I got up it was already like 3, so I decided to postpone lunch until dinner and try and get some studying done in the meantime. I did a little bit but somehow ended up laying in bed again, this time contemplating the state of my existence. Then I fell asleep for another two hours.

After a little more studying, I decided to get some dinner since it was late enough for dinner! I did do a little bit of traveling by exploring a part of our neighborhood we hadn't been to before. Here's what I saw!

• A grocery store, smaller than Yaoko but maybe a little closer to us
• An A-frame house with a blue roof
• Two little girls riding unicycles (!?)
• A much larger grocery store! Probably the same size or a little bigger than Yaoko, but with a huuuuge parking lot. It made me feel at home.
• 
• A tiny little stand-up fast food place. It seemed to be selling sort of udon/rice/etc sets. I might get it for dinner sometime.
• Lots of people who, in general, looked a LOT more normal and laid-back than I'm used to seeing. Everyone was wearing jeans and a comfortable shirt. This was very reassuring since all I see every day are materialistic college students who put a lot of effort into their appearance. It was nice to see that once you get out of the city, things seem to go back to normal.

I checked out the big grocery store without any real intentions to buy anything, but I ended up buying three things.

1. Gum.
2. My first souvenir! This one is for my dear Eba of course, who I'm sure will not mind that it came from a grocery store. I won't say what it is, but it's super cute and I know she'll like it. I thought about getting one for myself, but it's not really the type of thing I would buy for myself, so I'll just be happy to have it out in my room and I can look at it for a couple months before I give it to her =) (unless I decide that it really is too cute and I must have one as well)
   
3. Rose?/Roast?/Something like that Katsudon set. I needed dinner and it was starting to get dark out, and I saw this dinner set. They sell them at Yaoko and I had been notoriously waiting for "something really good to happen" as an excuse to spend the 580 yen on one. Well, this one was marked down 100 yen since it was getting late in the day, and that was good enough for me. (Plus it's Golden Week!) I had been prepared to spend 480 on a large gyuudon anyway, so I felt justified. It was pretty good, and had kind of a different flavor to it. I guess that was the rose/roast/whatever. It wasn't spectacular though, so I'm glad I wasn't eating it in celebration.

Back at the ranch, I thought about my reasons for studying Japanese, and how they seem to be becoming fewer and fewer. The other day I told Nick that I feel like I need to start treating learning Japanese like it's my job while I'm here, and I just have to do my job. I think for the most part right now, I want to get rid of that feeling like I'm struggling to stay afloat every day in class because of kanji and vocab. I hate feeling like I'm the only one who doesn't know something in class, and it's not a feeling I'm used to. I feel like the only way to correct that this late in the game, however, is some hardcore dedication.

I'm not sure if I have it in me or not, but I decided to go ahead and turn on the Naruto music and buckle down with studying kanji tonight. I learned the first half of this week's new kanji for Wednesday, and also went through the first lesson in the Basic Kanji Book I bought the other day. Learning the new compounds and reinforcing the old ones gave me a little bit of a feeling of accomplishment, like I might actually be able to remember and use some of them. I feel like to get where I need to be, I would need to be constantly reviewing the kanji we're learning in class, and then try and do at least 2 or 3 lessons in the basic book a week. Somewhere in there I want to study grammar from the IJ book too so I'm not missing all that for the placement test in the fall.

It's sort of my nature to really decide to dedicate myself to something, stick with it a few days, and then forget about it. (With the exception of a few small, habitual things I've been able to change or make a habit of doing, like drinking only water at meals and reading the Bible every night) So even if I feel pumped up and think to myself, "Ok, I'm going to study kanji for at least an hour every day, and study IJ grammar every other day," or even a smaller more manageable goal, I can't truly believe that I'm going to do it because there are so many other things I can think of that I've abandoned so easily. But when I did think about this plan, I felt for the first time that I might actually make a good grade in Japanese this semester, learn something, and have a chance at passing the placement exam when I get back. It's just scary knowing I've been here over a month and I can honestly say I haven't really learned anything. It might just take a level of dedication I'm not capable of committing myself to, I'm not sure yet.. I think I might have had a better chance if I had been here a year ago when I was feeling more "into" learning Japanese, or maybe if I was in Greg's class where I would get the feeling that I was learning and I was progressing, and not that I was just barely hanging on. We'll see how this all pans out I suppose.

For now I think I'll look at the IJ book until Nick gets online and think about what strategies I can use to make a new Japanese best friend once lock practice starts next week. And eat my next piece of tiny cake.

A Good Day

Here's a list of the things I got done today!

• Slept in
  
• Almost did a handstand a few times!
• Used the traditional just-sitting-in-front-of-everyone shower station things in the shower room (although nobody was in there)
  
• Did leg stretching exercises for 40 minutes
  
• Organized my class papers and wrote down assignments for next week
• Bought groceries
  
• Finished Kanji worksheet for Wednesday
• Wrote about half of task reading worksheet for Wednesday
• Made online Kanji flashcards for Wednesday's quiz
• Wrote some emails
• Contemplated my purpose in life
• Drew a picture
• Ate a tiny piece of cake (for golden week! it says so on the box)
• Watched some Naruto with Nick
• Thought some more about my purpose in life

That all chalks up to a good day in my book =) Why can't every week be Golden Week?

I <3 Friday Day

Friday morning was finishing up homework on the train morning, and I got it all done! Awesome! Then we had Kobayashi sensei for the first half of class. It was fine and normal at first, but then we were supposed to move on to using the grammar book which almost nobody brought, including me, aaand apparently we were supposed to have already done the like 6 pages of exercises in that book, which almost nobody had done, including me. I don't ever remember him telling us to do those before hand and we did them in class last week... I was panicking the whole time because he was calling on people to read the sentences and what they filled in the blanks, and not only did I have no clue on most of them, they were all full of kanji I didn't know! So as soon as I knew I wasn't called on for one sentence, I would rush to start looking up all the kanji in the next sentence in case he called on me. Miraculously, out of like 6 pages I didn't get called on (I think maybe he was trying to stick to the people who had actually done the exercises in advance, and I clearly looked like I hadn't, haha), but needless to say I didn't learn a THING in that class because, once again, looking up kanji overrode listening to Kobayashi's helpful grammar points. *sigh*

I got to take a nap during the break between the two halves of class which was super nice, and it felt way longer than 15 minutes =) The second half of class wasn't bad at all. It was the ridiculous Noguchi sensei who always says something or does something hilarious. That class always seemed to be too laid back and drug out though. We did some simple listening practice for a loooong time and then we continued a video that we had started last class. It was by some famous sci fi author guy I think? It was about the idea that in the future, you could have a lock on your door or bag or something that was voice activated (in this case, represented by a large human ear model, creepy) and you used a word or phrases only you knew. (As Noguchi pointed out though, someone could hear you saying it though...) But then they had a really cute little mini-drama about a couple who gets in a fight and the girlfriend changes the password to her house. It was so sweet and the ending made me tear up in class ^^;;;; I need to gain more control over my emotions, haha.

The end of this class marked the beginning of Golden Week for me! It's just a week in Japan where a lot of their national holidays and stuff happen to fall, so I think maybe a lot of kids get off school the whole week or some people get off work. We get Monday and Tuesday off from school which is amaaazziing. I'm still trying to decide if I want to try and travel anywhere, but for now I'm just taking advantage of the free time to do things I want to do and get caught up on some studying.

After some lunch and computer labbing I went on home for the day and took a celebratory nap from 4:00pm to 6:00pm which was a great idea if I may say so. I needed that nap! Then I managed to feel motivated enough to clean my room and blog! Wow! The rest of the evening was spent eating dinner, getting my butt kicked at Smash on N64 (aahh it feels like such a different game.. I was embarassed), and talking to Nick. And that's about all that happened on Friday!

Silver Week

Recap! I'm not sure if there is a Silver Week, but this coming week is Golden Week, sooo, yep.

Monday

• I don't even remember....haha.
• G-Splash practice was Hip Hop trials, which basically means it's your last chance to check it out and decide which genre you want to do for the next month. They taught us a short part of a routine to House of Pain's "Jump Around" which was totally awesome. As soon as Jen and I heard it come on we started dancing, haha. And we started jumping EVERY time he told us to jump around. Us crazy Americans.
• I liked this routine a lot better than the audition routine, it was way more fun and I could get into it a lot easier. It was a workout though! Hip hop wears me out, haha.
• I think we got katsudon after practice? I don't remember...

Tuesday

• NO SCHOOL YEESSSSS!!
• I erroneously stated in a previous day that this was due to Children's Day, but it was actually for Showa Day which is.... some other holiday, haha. Nothing exciting happened, but we got out of school, so it's a wonderful holiday.
• I think I slept...some? What did I do that day? I went to the grocery store...I meant to study all day, but I didn't really start until later afternoon. OH YEAH, there was KANJI TEST.
• Since I hadn't studied for or done so hot on the previous two kanji quizzes, I knew I was in for a lot of studying. Basically I had 125 kanji compounds to memorize before the next morning. I studied those darned kanji from about 6:30 pm to 11:00pm, slept from 11:30-2:00am, studied from 2:00am-3:00am, slept from 3:00am-5:00am, studied from 5:00am-9:15am, and then all through first class and break. And that brings us tooo...

Wednesday

• What an awful test!! You had to know those kanji frontwards and backwards to get anywhere close, and apparently I only barely knew them frontwards, even after all that studying. There was even a little section full of kanji we hadn't studied over the past two weeks, but I guess she thought we ought to know? They might have been in a book exercise that we did now that I think about it....
• Oh well, at least we only had one kanji day this week.
• Oh crap, I was supposed to have field notes done from my field site for Symbolic Practice this afternoon! *runs off to Shinjuku after class to visit an arcade*
• I took some semi-useless notes in one arcade and then went to a different one that had a floor full of fighting games. It was pretty empty, and only one girl was there with her boyfriend. I tried to play Tekken 6, but I lost the first round three times in a row! Turns out if somebody else is playing on the other side, you automatically challenge them when you put your money in, whoops! I didn't learn this until yesterday, haha.
• G-splash this night was LOCK TRIALS WOO! I love locking. The routine was really fun again! They taught it to us really fast, and we met yet another pair of adorable lock teachers! The girl made tons of sound effects and it was awesome, haha. The lock teachers are best all around =) Needless to say, I signed up for lock during the sign-up period at the end of practice! Hip hop was really fun and I liked learning the moves, but it was love at first sight with me and lock, and I would be sad if I didn't do it.
• Yoshinoya Takeout Dinner!

Thursday

• Class? Whatever. We played stupid games again, it was stupid. I'm going to start bringing a kanji list to that class to study while we waste time =/ We did watch a cool video though.
• Symbolic Practice is such a fun class. We work in small groups every day and it's always awesome. I got some good feedback from my group on where I ought to take my research, and I think I'm going to try and look at how beginners and females are accepted/treated/taught to play in the arcades by regular visitors.
• With no more G-Splash practice until next week, I decided to go do some more field research in Shinjuku! I went back to my arcade from last time and this time resolved to figure out the secrets of the impossible Tekken game, get a card for it, and try the Gundam game Greg always plays. I figured out the whole challenging thing when I started playing a game and it was a loooot easier, and missing some of the things that had been written on the screen, and then someone challenged me later on. Jerk. I did beat one challenger that day though! It was awesome! I think they might have been going easy on me though.
• I watched some other people play for a long time and kept waiting for someone to seem not-involved enough that I could ask them about cards, but I ended up figuring that out on my own too =/ 500 yen card, ooooof. But it saves your progress and such, and you can customize your name and profile and things like that, and Tekken only costs 100 yen to play.
• Next challenge was the Gundam game! This one is intimidating because you end up in teams or something, and it's in this huge pod thing with a huge screen and controls like you're really in a giant robot. I asked some guys playing psp outside of the area, "Excuse me, I want to try this one but it's my first time sooo...how do I...?" And he was like, um err, I think trying to say it's kind of complicated, and told me about how you get a card (which I had already done, 300 yen), and how it costs 500 (!!!!) yen to play, and you get to play twice, but the first time is computer training (I had already learned most of this from Greg) and then he directed me to some instruction manuals you could take from a kiosk. Lame =/ But he was very nice in explaining, I think he was just preoccupied with his PSP playing. Come on man, I need some data! Haha.
• So that game was an interesting experience. The screen was huuuge, and I couldn't read most of the Japanese. The game has a rumble feature which adds to the realism. Normally I LOVE that sort of thing (roller coasters, the 3d rides like Spiderman at Universal Studios, the cheap things in the mall where you sit in a pod thing and it has a video and the pod thing moves with it, haha) but this one just made me feel reeeally disoriented and kind of uncomfortable, haha. I still don't have the hang of the controls really... It was fun but difficult. And too difficult for me to be willing to drop another 500 yen right there to try and get better =/ I spent a total of 1800 yen that day T____T I don't know if I can afford this research...
• Shinjuku dinner with Greg, Jen and Hunter at a gyouza (dumplings) place! It was no Marco and Luca's (amazing dumplings in Charlottesville for super super cheap), but it was very good and super filling!
• Home, where I slacked off on homework for the third night in a row! I'm just too tired/wanting to talk to Nick/convinced I can get it done in the morning (which I usually can =) )
• I also read some really nice articles I want to share later that got me thinking about the future, but I think I'll save them for their own post.
  

Korean Church Day

First off, here are some videos I took at the rehearsal before G Splash auditions, so you can see the kind of routines we were doing! We're all a little rusty/hesitant looking, but that's only because we were sooo sore and exhausted from Break and House the past two days, and we didn't want to wear ourselves out for our auditions! We definitely gave it our all for the real thing =)


First was Hip Hop. I think this was my least favorite. I couldn't really get into it, maybe it was the music? Some of the moves were kind of tricky too.



Lock!! My favorite genre and my favorite routine! Every time I did this one I had so much fun and started smiling and getting really into it =D They dance to such funky music!



Oh no, it's Break!! Every time the synthesizer part came in on this song I cracked up. I had the most trouble with the part where we first go down on the ground and kick our legs out in front... Haha, don't pay attention to the fact that none of the girls in this clip got the freeze!! Look in the back of the room, there's a group of guys there so look to them to see how it's done. I did it in auditions though!


House! This one doesn't look too impressive from this angle, and I started the video late, but this routine had the most footwork out of all of them and it was so easy to forget! When the real members do House, it looks so pretty and graceful and like they're having a good time =) Also, I apparently insulted Jeannette at the beginning of this video.



The last one, Girls/Girls Hip Hop! I made sure to film Hunter a lot in this one =) He was one of the few guys who actually seemed to have gotten the hang of it, haha. Is it that hard to shake your hips? I got my OWN car!



Today I went to church with Mia! I'm not exactly sure where we were, but it was somewhere outside of Shinjuku, she said it was sort of like the Korea Town of that area. The building was really tall, and there were different services on each floor. We went to the English service, where all the songs and stuff at first are in English, and then the sermon is in Korean but translated into English. They also have all Korean service, Chinese, and Japanese services. It was a pretty small room/group, but the church itself seemed to still be really busy with services even when we left! It was really interesting =) The atmosphere was kind of that revival, hand raising/clapping atmosphere (projector with song lyrics and everything!) like I experienced a lot in my church growing up. Although I think I've come to enjoy the more traditional services like the one I go to in Charlottesville (University Baptist Church) and the one here in Nishi Kawaguchi, it was really really nice to see people who were not only from a country foreign to me, but in a country foreign to them, having such passion about living for Christ.

Afterwards, they served lunch and had a Bible study. Lunch was really interesting! Mia told me it was sort of a common Korean dish called "bibimbap" (I did not remember that, I had to look it up, haha, though I did learn the Korean word for "and then" today from listening to the service!) which basically means mixed rice. It was a bowl of rice with various different vegetables and a sauce placed on top, and you're supposed to mix it up. I was explaining this to Mia afterwards and I should probably explain this to my parents/people who know me very well at all; I think that when there's a dish I'm familiar with that has vegetables I know I don't prefer, I usually eat around them as you probably all know, haha. But when it comes to something completely new and different, I've just been going for it! I ate that whole thing, and I couldn't tell you what was in it, except there was some ground beef, carrots, and maybe some of those funky mushrooms I've only seen in Japan. It was very fresh and greeny and kind of spicy! My first Korean food =D We also got little "tiramisu" (but not really) cakes for dessert, and Mia and I both ended up having two, haha!

The Bible study afterwards was nice too. Although my church here in Saitama is good listening practice for my Japanese, it was really nice having someone translate today (well, especially because I don't know Korean!). They talked about how God fills the emptiness in your heart, and through God you can do anything. My favorite part was where she talked about how when there are waves in your life, God can help you get through them and teach you to manage them, like a surfer! And how the Bible says to always be thankful and joyful no matter what situation God has put you in, and like how surfers really love the big waves because they're so exciting, we should be excited when God puts us in tough situations or tough times, and ride through them with his help!

Oh yeah, the usual church outfit update: I put together this outfit yesterday because everything else was in the wash, and Jeannette said it looked like I was going to church, so I decided to wear it to church! I wore my white jeans mom talked me into bringing even though I was hesitant, my black dressy tank top with tiny white polkadots which I love, a black light sweater, and black heeled sandals which destroyed my feet, but oh well. It was such a nice day today, I'm so happy it's warming up!

I was really sleepy when I got back, so I slept from about 4:30-7:00 ^^;;; And then I ate dinner, and I've not been getting much done since then.... I'm going to see which assignments I have for Japanese tomorrow and decide when to do them. Luckily we get Tuesday off from school this week because it's Children's Day! Thanks kids!