Nani Shiteru?! Oide! Ima!

hullo. i'm sitting on the floor in my dorm room with cords stretched every which way to facilitate simultaneous power charging and internet useage. the last couple days have been banana cakes. on friday night, my intro to japanese society prof. took a group out on the town to a german style brewhouse that makes a friggin tasty apple/rice beer, a restaurant called ichibantori, which means "number one chicken", and a jazz club in a tiny, narrow, 400 year old building on the river that runs through akita city. ichibantori's specialty was making all sorts of yakitori kebab stuff on a big grill right in the center of the restaurant. the chef would throw some new stuff on and a massive cloud of smoke would poof up and get sucked into the vent above the grill. we ate their specialty sampler platter with all the skewers, and a hotpot soup thing. at the brewhouse, we met some graduate students (daigakuinsei) from tokyo who were in town to present some research on something i'm not so sure i could understand even if english were their first language. at the jazz bar, a tiny, dark, beautiful old (i mean ooold) place with original wooden beams from the edo period (1600's), we had some more of that locally brewed beer and talked about some whatnot for a while, and a drunk feller came up to us and honked his nose a few times before leaving. herrmmm... caught the last train home and went nappy-byes.

on saturday afternoon, i walked to a local shrine in the nonsensical heat with a couple folks. we took a back road and cut between some rice paddies to get to the gate which stood before a long staircase to another gate in front of a clearing where there were a couple large ornate buildings with dragons and lions carved into the woodwork, and a few smaller structures for offerings and prayers. most of the offerings were packages of pasteries from the gas station down the street. we poked around for a while and headed back to school with the asshole sun strangling us the whole way. i was taking some pictures on the road when i fell right into a four foot deep concrete dich which was hidden by some overgrowth and sliced up my hand. it still hurts like an absolute bastard, but the taiwanese ladies took good care of poor me.

saturday night was hina's birthday party number three or four. we were supposed to have it in the bonafi house, a room attached to the convenience store on the corner, but it looked and smelled like a bait shop, and the convenience store owner came in to read us a ream of rules for using the room, so we took our vending machine spirits to the sporting complex parking lot and hung out in the near total darkness until it started to rain, whereupon we moved our party to the residence hall lobby. eventually, through various means, i was in the mood to apply some lipstick and vamp about through the lobby with some of the thirty-odd folks that showed up. some res. hall rules may or may not have been flouted, and i didn't go to bed until almost 5am.

today i woke up very slowly and decided it might be fun to not do much of anything. i ate, wandered, slept, ate, sat, tried very hard to complete the bulk of my sentences, and also sat. and ate. some of the westerners are out tonight singing karaoke and whatnot, but i am an old old man, and they are at the zenith of their verility, and tonight i cannot match their zeal, so i will write some letters, do some more sitting and turn in at a reasonable hour. tomorrow is respect for the elderly day, so no classes. sweet stuff.