First, kanji lesson of the week! Aizawa Sensei likes showing us random kanji, so I'll post some of the fun stuff here. First, in Japan clubs are a huge deal in high school - everyone is in one, pretty much. The term for students not in a club is pretty amusing (I think, anyway): 帰宅部. '帰' comes from 帰る, return, ’宅’ derives from お宅, the polite term for house, and 部 means 'club'. So, it's the "Return Home Club". XD Another one is more abstract. This character, 門, is the "gate" radical - it's in a lot of things. And the kanji for sound is '音'. Put them together and you get 闇, darkness. Why, you ask? It's because the only sense that is any use is your hearing...sound is your "gateway" to understanding what's going on in the dark. :D
Moving on to shiny things! I have to show off my Japanese cell phone a bit. Thanks to the 100-yen shop down the road and a bit of ingenuity, I now have a garish-fantastic phone that actually looks like a Japanese phone. My phone charms are a bit lacking (ie I only have 2), but this is a pretty good representation of peoples' phones here. Absolutely everything on one's phone is customizable, and people go to town on theirs. And most phones come in at least 6 different colors - it's easy to have an individualized phone. Makes me wish you could do this with things other than iPhones in America!
I will miss all the various smilies you can text. This is one of 8 pages of icons! Some are animated, while others aren't. My personal favorites are the ferris wheel, the ghost, and the rocket ship (none pictured here). As far as other cell phone tricks go, the Japanese predictive text option is great! It's a really clever system. English texting is sort of really fail, but livable. Having a cell phone here makes life really convenient. I can't access the internet or text internationally, but it's so much easier to stay in touch with people here! Plus, I feel much safer when traveling by myself.
Besides the normal class stuff, we haven't done much this week but bake! We made apple bread and strawberry bread yesterday, and it was delicious! I really wish I had the implements to make something like cupcakes, but that will have to wait until I get home.As far as travel plans are concerned, we're running out of weekends to go places so I'm starting to make final plans. The TM Revolution concert was sold out (sad day!), so instead I'm going to Nagoya with some friends before they go to a concert themselves. Jury's still out on if I'll join them. :) Other big plans are Tokyo in 1 week, Osaka (again) in 3, and Nara in 4. Might as well make the most of my time left, right?
Have a great end to your week!
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