Field trip to the Planetarium!!!

This morning I ate by myself. Miyabi didn't go to school again and Yuko alternated between doing the dishes in the kitchen and caring for Miyabi. She told me Miyabi's itchy bump things spread down to her chest and stomach last night and were starting to appear on her legs. Ugh that sounds horrible.

It's interesting though, because I always thought chicken pox looked like it does in cartoons, a bunch of red itchy dots all over your body lol. But no, it's more like a bunch of mosquito bites.

 Since it's Wednesday classes were owaru (over) at 10:50, woooohooo. Which was perfect, because I was starving. So I went to Dagane for lunch. Yesterday I'd gone to the place next to the gym because Emma wanted to eat there, and I'd never tried the food there. I didn't like it at all! I got katsudon, but it was covered with a ton of egg and butter. Blech.
So today I stuck to my usual misokatsudon, which is always good!

And it's always so photogenic too! Damn, I'm craving it again even though I just ate dinner and like 10 pieces of chocolate...

I ate with Minju and Rashaa because Emma left to go eat tempura with her host mom (she'd forgotten to sign up for the planetarium and now it was all full, since only 50 people can go) and Rana, Esteban, and Rafa went to the gym. I really want to go swim in the gym now that I have my suit (and I kind of need to work off all the snacks I've been eating haha), but today I wanted to use the 3 hours before we left for the planetarium to watch the movie I have to watch for Folklore tomorrow.

So after we finished eating, I walked to the library to watch Onmiyoji II. I'd run into Esteban on the way to school this morning and he'd told me that he'd watched it last night and then started telling me all about this one super hot girl who had a demon in her and how she was half naked when the demon was exorcised from her and you could "see side-boob" and stuff. Wow. So yeah, he had enjoyed it and said it was way better than the first.
And I did like it better than the first one. Gosh, Hideaki Ito, the guy who plays one of the main characters is soooo hot! And he's from Gifu, ahh!

ugh, do me

When I had finished watching it, I still had about 40 minutes, so I decided to watch some of the movie we have to watch for next week. So I looked up what it was, and it was Spirited Away!!! I know that movie by heart, but I decided to watch it anyway.
About thirty minutes in, I turned off the subtitles since I know all of the lines anyway and I think that will be a better learning experience for me. I only watched about 35 minutes of it, but I'll probably watch more before class tomorrow.

While I was watching Spirited Away, this cute Japanese guy was walking around me looking for movies. He finally picked one out and was placed at a nearby cubicle to watch it. So when I was leaving, I decided to walk past him to see what sort of movie he'd picked to watch.

And I recognized the movie right away...

Guys, It was High School Musical...

Smh.

So we all met in the CJS lobby at 2:20 for the field trip. I sat next to Minju on the bus!

Minju and me

Again, because Heather took one too!

Cool building art

Famous misokatsudon place Minju was telling me about that we have to try!

The museum!

Matsui san was hilarious on the bus ride over! He got on the loudspeaker and was all like "I'm just talking to myself right now, but after the museum, I'll be heading over to a bar a few blocks down. The name is Shooter's and I'll be drinking there and anyone is welcome to join me." Hahaha I love him!
When we entered the museum, Matsui san bought all our tickets.

The ticket! So cute :)

First, we got to roam around the museum for an hour. I went around with Minju. We saw all sorts of cool things! I wish there had been more hands on stuff, though, because most things were just look and read all the Japanese. It turns out the tornado simulator I was excited about was just something to watch and not experience, and the freezing room was something you had to pay extra for and the aurora borealis show was only in January. Ah well!
We all went down to see the chocolate exhibit, but it turned out it cost 600 yen (more than the museum entrance fee!), so we didn't do that. Yuko told me later tonight that she really wanted to go see it because it had a bunch of huge chocolate sculptures lol.

Chocolate exhibit

Tornado simulation

Mole tunnel!

Minju coming out of a mole hole!

And me coming out! It was like whack-a-mole!!

I burned 3 calories in a minute on these bikes you could ride!

Physics stuff. Those things up there moved like a wave!

Minju an me on this camera thing where you could pixelate images to see what old digital imaging was like

Genitalia parts labeled in Nihongo, guys :)

Spaceship outside

Trains outside!

I'm an astronaut!

Another camera that showed the cells inside Minju and me

This thing used some sort of sensing technology to tell how tall I was and it was actually accurate!

Sensing thing that determined the temperature of my hand. I think that's maybe around body temperature? Idk... I think body temp might be 37 C though.

For Bridget. An EE thing. The ones in the NE direction were sticks of charcoal and the one on top had no voltage or whatever that number is

Periodic table of elements! The elements were inside the little windows. Except for the radioactive ones. Those were just the radioactive symbol signs.

This was fucking awesome!! You pressed the button on each of these things and it sent out scented puffs of air!! My favorites were apple and watermelon. This one is curry scented!

I found an American spaceship!

This was called the handshake mirror. It made your hand get all big and reach towards you!

These were cool pen things that made the wall glow wherever they touched it!

Whoo fat mirror!

Munchkin mirror!

Skinny mirror?

This is a hologram of a castle. Like you'd reach out to touch it, but your hand would just go straight through!

Me in a hamster wheel! It powered the water area.

Cool gold encrusted satellite.

Then we all met on the 6th floor to head into the planetarium. This one girl said this was her third time at the planetarium. That made me king of mad because she took the space Emma could have had.

We got to our assigned seats and Minju and I were in the second row! The chairs were super squishy that most people ended up falling asleep during the hour long presentation (I stayed awake, though!), and they could lean back and were also weirdly separated which is nice if you were by yourself because you wouldn't have to be too close to a stranger. But I felt like I was on my own little island.

Cute space alien that's the museum's mascot. It was projected on the screen.

Me in my churrr

Matsui san (I forgot at the beginning of the year he said we could call him Mitch), so Mitch got up to lecture us about turning off our cell phones and cameras and stuff and he was all like "No smoking, you know. And no marijuanas" hahahaha!

 The planetarium presentation was all in Japanese. I understood a bit of it though, mostly bits and pieces. It was focused on Cannis Minor. Each month has a different focus (January is the aurora borealis), so that was this month's. We were told the Greek mythological tale of Artemis. For some of it, it got super dark and the sky filled with stars, way more stars than the rest of the time and that was beautiful! Everyone oohed and ahed. It looked like a real night sky out in the country!
Towards the end, they played a rock and roll song in English idk why haha.
It ended at 5:30 and then we all left.
True to his word, Mitch stopped at Shooter's and most of the dorm kids followed suit. Heather and Natalia wanted me to go too, and I really wanted to, but then I would have gotten home way to late and I hadn't told Yuko I wouldn't be home for dinner, so after a brief moment of hesitation, I headed to the station to go home.
Esteban waited for me to buy my ticket to Nagoya (we were only one station away from Nagoya, yes!) and then the two of us rode the JR to Ichinomiya (such a short ride home tonight!).

Sacred tree near the museum

Cool shopping area

 At home, I ate alone again. I told Yuko about the museum. Then after I showered and everything, I went to my room and uploaded the planetarium pictures and simultaneously watched this Japanese movie called Su-ki-da (I Love You) that was pretty slow-paced and boring, but had like two cute moments.