April 2

Once again, it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. Speaking of sleeping, I recently had a dream about living in the dorms again at State. Alanna and I were living in our old room, but Natasha had been fortunate to get a single room across the hall and she had decked it out in lime-green everything. Anyway...

In real life, I ate breakfast with okaasan, who has rearranged the order she gives the breakfast components to me because she noticed I eat the toast last (when it’s become cold). Okaasan is very perceptive.... We watched the news as always, but when Obama and the other national leaders came on, she asked me if I thought Obama was charming. It was easy to agree when she said the other politicians aren’t (especially Aso), but I had to give her a “so-so” on the topic of Obama. We both agreed he looks much more tired having taken the role of president.

At school, I was fortunate to get a second chance to photograph the plane in the main street. I found out in class that today was the day the freshmen came back (and they had their version of “welcome week”). It was really cool though, because the main street was filled with students (like a mini-Cates Crawl) and club recruiting teams. The pillars and buildings were plastered with countless (well-designed) flyers advertising the clubs. The plane too is for one of the clubs. I wanted to understand what the clubs were, but there’s so much kanji (and extraneous information) on all the posters that I could rarely figure it out (even when there were giant drawings, as they were often unrelated). The coolest part of the whole thing though, was the live on the “green area” (yellow, dead grassy area). There were four student bands (two of which were all-girl-bands) who played awesome rock. None of the groups were very good (except, marginally, the last one), but it was pretty awesome to see three girls perform Dunderbob by the Ramones. Takeda sensei said there would be “urusai raibu” on the green area, but that just reflects her pessimistic outlook. I even, by chance, met ant talked a bit at the live with one of the Japanese students I had met earlier this year. It was fun to just sit outside and watch the performance, and now I’m psyched to see if I can see some real bands while I’m here in Japan. There are going to be more events like this in the coming weeks, so I’m pretty excited.

Afterward, I spent the afternoon on normal things like lunch and homework, until I went home. Okaasan, as she had told me, was out when I got back, so I took a nap. When okaasan got back (to a dark house) she was severely surprised to hear me welcome her home. She thought the house was empty, as I wasn’t using the heater or the lights (and suggested I do both when I’m home). I find it hard to understand that Japanese people do things like use space heaters instead of central heating and wait until non-peak hours to use dishwashers, but regularly leave lights on that they are not using.

We had semi-take-out dinner tonight. It was like up-scale Chinese. Okaasan had bought prepared food, but made fried rice too. She made me eat almost all of the yakisoba. We talked a bit about the kabuki, my day, and going to the movies. Okaasan thinks I don’t like going out and doing things, probably because I don’t spend every day of my weekend out. We talked about going to the movies, and I told her that I liked them, but they were so expensive! I don’t want to tell my host parents that one of the real reasons I don’t go out so often is it costs money to do anything (since I live on the residential side of the city and have to pay to get to the interesting side) and I want to save my money for things that I am specifically interested in. It seems like it would be selfish to admit because they are paying a large portion of my living expenses as it is.

At one point during dinner, the phone rang. Okaasan picked it up, and to my surprise, I could understand about 95% of the conversation. I was really happy. Unfortunately though, I still have a long way to go...