Adventures in Nagoya!: Hanga is hard...

Read the post from yesterday first!!

Lol so this morning at breakfast, we were watching the news again. We had the same chocolate chip bread I'd had at the New Year's party ;P

Anyway, they were doing this whole segment about freaking Orlando Bloom and showing him in the new Lord of the Rings movie, so of course I was dying. I told Miyabi I loved him and she told her mom haha.

Yuko asked if he was American and I said no, and she asked if he was British and I said yes (I think so anyway because he was talking with a British accent).

Yuko asked my plans for this weekend and when I said I didn't have any yet, she invited me to come with everyone to Ken's uncle's house, which is about an hour away! Yaaay!!

She told me to make sure I did my homework beforehand because we'll be gone all day. Ha we'll see how that goes.

My bike seat was frozen again today. It was a cold ride to the station. :((( Why won't it get warm??

When I was at Rana's house last weekend, I asked those two Japanese girls when it starts to get warm here and they said March. Waaahhhh too far away D:

All the Japanese students started break today so the campus was like a ghost town and there were no food trucks and the bread shop was closed and the lady selling bread in R building wasn't there. So sad. There were some Japanese students around for club activities, though, like those on sports teams.

In Japanese class, this girl was talking about something she ate yesterday but forgot what it was called. Everyone, including our sensei was trying to figure out what it was. She said it was like a pancake and I was like "Oh! Okinomiyaki!"

And she was like "Yeah!!"

My sensei wanted to know what I had said, so I told everyone and explained what it was. Then sensei asked the girl where she'd eaten it and she was like "Aeon Mall at some place... Uhh it started with an A" and sensei and everyone else was baffled but I was like, "oh, Aratama Bashi?"

And she was like "yeah!"

And everyone was like "whooaa, sugoi, you know so much, Cate!"

Haha I mean I just know all that by talking to people and exploring. Taylor told me about the Aeon mall when we were in Aratama Bashi for karaoke.

But a lot of the dorm kids just sit in their rooms and play video games and go to konbinis for dinner.

Also everyone freaked out over my kitty tights haha. I got so many compliments. So now I have to go back and get the bunny and bear ones as well.

I aced my dialogue check and the katakana test was really easy so I'm pretty sure I got a 100 on that as well.

Oh and this one girl who's from China broke her leg when she fell down four flights of stairs at the subway station!! She came in today with a broken leg and in a wheelchair. I've been scared of falling down the subway stairs a few times because they're very steep. Ugh if I did break my leg I wouldn't be able to ride my bike to the station in the morning and my commute would take so much longer. Poor girl, that must be such an inconvenience for her time in Japan.

After class, I ate lunch at Dagane with Esteban and Rafael. We're three of the five people from Texas!

I had misokatsu again. :)

(Sooo good!)

After lunch we had Hanga. We got to make actual prints using our woodblocks! First we spread glue on the block, then ink using a Japanese round brush, and then we put a piece of Japanese paper over the woodblock and pressed this circular wooden thing with a handle over it. I wasn't strong enough to apply enough pressure, so mine was never completely black in the part that said Keito. Sensei did one for me and of course his looked really good.

(Sensei's is on top. Mine on bottom. My wood block is the black thing at the very top.)

I didn't like how it's hard to see the apostrophe thing on the ビ so I decided to carve out more on top. But I had to wait for the ink to dry first.

Once it was dry, I carved more out and then reprinted it. I was still sucking so sensei did mine again haha. And he made an awesome one!

The best yet! So I kept this as the one to turn in on the last day of class. My hands were covered in ink when class was over lol.

After class, I walked to the post office to exchange one of my traveler's checks. I had to leave through the North Gate, which I'd never been through before. I usually come through the South Gate.

On the way, I passed Nagoya Daigaku, where Ayuko went to school.

(Such colorful flags!)

The exchange rate was really good! I got 10,056 yen for 100 dollars! But ugh I'm burning through all the money I made working last year.

Then I walked back to Nanzan.

(Cool building)

(Sign for Nanzan)

I stopped in the Lawson's on campus to get a giant melon pan as a snack for the way home.

So all the breads have these bunny stickers on them that are super cute. The first time I ever got one, I saved it and stuck it on my wallet. Then, all the ones after that I just threw out. This weekend, Ayuko saw the one on my wallet and told me if you collect enough you can get a prize!! Whaaaaattt??? I was so mad! I've thrown out probably around 8 of them because I didn't know. Rawr.

So today at lunch I asked Rafael for the one on his bread and he gave it to me. This guy Matt also gave me the one from his bread!

Then when I bought my melon pan, I asked the Lawson's people about the stickers. The girl told me if I collected enough I would receive an "osara" but I couldn't for the life of me remember what an osara was.

Then the guy brought over the sheet you stick them on and I remembered osara was plate and you got this freaking adorable bunny plate.

So yeah, my goal is to collect 40 of these babies and I'm gonna get all my friends to help out!

Also, I saw the Weekly Jump magazine and it had Naruto on the cover and Naruto is the one manga I read (though I haven't read it since, like, October), so I bought it. More Japanese practice, gaiz!

Then I stopped in R building real quick to use the bathroom. I always go there because all the other buildings have squatty potties, but R has legit toilets with heated seats. ;)

And then I walked to the subway station to begin my long commute home. While I was sitting, waiting for the train, this foreign dude (older man, maybe 40s, 50s) started talking to me and asking if I was an exchange student and where I was from blah, blah. When he heard I study computer science, he started telling me all about this article he read recently about Paul something-or-other, the co-founder of Microsoft.

It was weird because every time I asked him about himself, he'd give me a short answer and then keep taking about the article or whatever. So all I know is he taught English at a school nearby.

He got off at Aratama Bashi and then I could finally eat my melon pan haha.

On my bike ride home, this guy in an 18 wheeler honked at me and did some hand motion. But I was doing nothing wrong! Ha maybe it's because he thought I was cute --- jk.

No one was home yet when I got home. So I read Naruto to catch up to where the magazine I bought is.

And guys, reading it I learned the CUTEST thing!

So you know the kanji for love, ai 愛

Well it's a combination of the kanji for heart, kokoro 心 and the kanji for "to accept/receive", ukeru 受.

So it's like, you get love when you receive someone's heart!!

Japanese is so cute, I can't even.

Oh and this was in the Jump magazine, which I thought was a magazine for kids lol

I could only read the first line which says "seeing this penis" (yeah I knew the word for penis haha) so of course I wanted to know what the rest said. So I typed it into Google translate and burst out laughing. This is what it said:

"Can not possibly be called a kid anymore when you see this dick"

Hahaha wtf Japan. And it's an ad I think for raisin bread in Nagoya because that's what the stuff on the side says. Wakarimaseeennnnn.

For dinner we had carrots and asparagus wrapped in meat, potatoes, cooked daikon, mushrooms, chicken, rice with furikake, salad, and this soup with clear noodles, seaweed and lettuce.

I asked Yuko what the clear noodles were. She didn't know, but she looked it up for me! It turns out they're originally a Chinese dish and are made with potato starch. They were really good!

They were called harusame. I thought they were made of shark because same means shark, I think, but Yuko said no.

And they're made of tenpun, which is starch.

We also all had a laugh because Yuko asked me how many fingers I had and I said 8 (thinking about that joke where the punch line is that your thumb isn't a finger) and we all talked about how funny it is that Americans don't count the thumb as a finger, but Japanese do. Yuko said I can say I had 10 fingers while I was in Japan lol.

She also taught me the names of all the fingers in Japanese and they all had yubi on the end (Japanese for finger), while in America all but the thumb do.

Also the Japanese names were all the same as American names except the ring finger is kusuriyubi (I knew that meant medicine finger wtf) and the thumb is parent finger. And the pinky is koyubi, aka baby finger, but that's like little finger.

So interesting!

Also, here are the charms Ayuko and I got: