April 27

Today, okaassan let me make pancakes!!! :D She just pulled out a bag of mix and asked if I could make it. I was making American pancakes (The kind that have brown spots) so I was embarrassed that they weren’t uniformly brown and “pretty” like restaurant ones, so okaasan brought out the shiny new frying pan half way through the process. It helped... until I almost burnt the last one. I think I OD’ed on pancakes a bit today (okaasan wouldn’t eat but one small pancake out of the whole mix, so I had to eat the rest or put the cooked pancakes in the fridge... which never taste good the second time) but I was happy.

I thought Japanese class would be long today because it’s just review for the final, but it went really fast. We played the kanji matching game and worked on practice worksheets, which made Takeda sensei really tolerable today. Class finished before I knew it and Tsuda sensei gave us chocolate at the end of class. :D

Shoudo class wasn’t bad (though disappointing). We wrote kanji on long strips of paper and finished our pieces with our inkan. History class wasn’t very bad either. I (and everyone else) gave my five-minute overview (reduced from ten minutes) of my term paper (yet to be written) and I was told I was very diplomatic based on my answer to a classmate’s question. I think it’s more an issue of being a scientist. Either way, most of my classmates went well over their five-minute limits and the professor was visibly bored.

Afterward, I saw the keizai (that’s Japanese for police d:) driving down the street. I have to say, they don’t seem very intimidating in their Suzuki Swift with “Police” written largest in English.

Okaasan made chicken katsu (Japanese fried chicken) for dinner tonight. :D She said we would go out for Italian tomorrow night because I said I wanted to eat pizza when I got back to the US. The truth is, I want to eat pizza when I get back to the US; I want American pizza... that costs $7 instead of $20 when considering low-end prices. Okaasan posed the option of kaitenzushi, but she seems set on Italian. She said it would be nice not to have to cook for once. :D

Okaasan’s friend has kimono, so she is going to let me wear one and take pictures. :D The only set-back, is that we scheduled for the 29th. I thought it would give me a better schedule for traveling, but in retrospect, the 29th would be useful. My original plan for Golden Week (my week off) was to head to Suzuka Speedway on the 30th, Nara for the 1st and 2nd, Osaka for the 3rd and maybe 4th, and then home for the 4th/5th. Now, Suzuka is going to have a super car exhibition from the 2nd to the 6th, but the weather’s crummy on the 4th and I wanted the 5th open to see JiWei, so I’m kind of in a tight spot. Osaka and Nara are very close to each other, so it wouldn’t make sense to put Suzuka between the two, but that means I only have a three-day period for both cities. D: I’m thinking Nara’s going to take the fall (and become a one-day trip) since my guide book says I can hit the three places I want to see in half of a day. The only issue now is that Osaka sounds like a fun place to go with friends, but everyone seems to have already gone there and I’m going solo so far. D:

If I play my cards perfectly though, I can pack everything I want to do into Golden Week:

29 Kimono
30 Nara
1 Nara/Osaka
2 Osaka
3 Suzuka
4 Home/Sleep
5 Baseball Game with JiWei