back to the life

The end of winter break passed without much going on. Hannah and I went to Nara one day and we walked around and went to the big Buddha and went to a beautiful shrine (all the things there are to do in Nara). Another day I was sick and didn't do anything. Over the course of 5 or so days I read the entirety of White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Which reminds me, some folks have been asking me about what I have been reading, so here are the books I have read since coming to Japan: 

The Elephant Vanishes (short stories) by Murakami Haruki

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and a bunch of other architects

The Silent Cry by Oe Kenzaburo

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Life is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera

The Old Capital by Kawabata Yasunari

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

One of my new year's resolutions is to keep reading, a lot. I bought The Dragons of Blueland, the third in the My Father's Dragon series, in Japanese, except in Japanese it is called Elmer and the 16 Dragons. I started reading that but it is pretty slow going. 

Another New Year's resolution is to bike a lot more. I bought a bike, which should help. It is only an hour and a half from my house to school, so especially when the weather starts to get better, I will definitely be biking all over the Kyoto outskirts. 

I have only had Japanese class the past 2 days of class, but I am pretty excited for it. My teacher this semester, Kuwahira-sensei, I thought would be cool and aloof, but I was wrong. She is totally off the wall bonkers! So far she has gotten very excited about: having us conjugate verbs into the passive form, my presentation on being hung over during my new years shrine visits with my host family, and a vocab quiz we have next week. Her handwriting is a little sloppy but only because she is writing so quickly, because she is so excited about writing stuff on the board. 

I also bought bachi (taiko drumsticks) of my own so I can actually practice taiko at home. I think I am also going to buy a drum. 

Yesterday I went with Hannah and Richard to see K-20, a Japanese movie that had an amazing poster. The poster was so wild, even, that we based the decision to see the movie entirely on the strength of the poster. Bad idea. We really didn't understand very much of the movie, not because we didn't understand the dialogue, but because the movie just didn't make very much sense.