Tokidoki Eiga wo Mimasu

lets us see can i get this down right. sunday, was it? woke up around 11:30, got preened and prepped, went out to the cafeteria, loaded up on semi palatable gruel, and immediately after plopping down in my chair, max, the australian fellow who used to have a mohawk and still has a car axed me did i want to drive off and try to find some gorge somewhere. so, slipped the food down my gullet, (now i'm remembering it was actually pretty good: gyoza and eggrolls) got my hat and my camera and set off with max and 3 other gaijin to track down this gorge place. we were doing pretty good until the veins on the map started getting more and more atrophied, and eventually dissapeared altogether. we rolled into a dead end at the base of a dam with a large terraced park where the local community was having a little festival. we parked in the grass next to the 50 or 60 other cars, popped out into the alcove park area and got gawked at by an entire town. there was a really beautiful stream next to the park, widened because of the dam, where a bunch of folks were casting lines in their rubber pants. walked back up the bank of the stream, bought some vendor stuff, got oggled some more, and decided to go find the gorge. we tried a few directions until we ended up on a gravelly road with big ass rocks bouncing up and hitting the undercarriage of max's crappy little car, but we kept going, i think because we figured it had to pop out onto a regular road somewhere. it just kept winding around on a narrow precipice, though, and getting rockier and tinier. we finally found a slightly wider patch of the road where two of us had to get out and negotiate the about face of the car so we could bounce back over the road and get back onto a paved street, and when we got out to the street, no one cared much if we saw the gorge, so we just headed back to school.

back at school, i caught a cab out to the mall and met up with m'ladies (the taiwanese crew, remember?) for one of their birthdays. we went to a japanized itallian restaurant and had some decent pasta, but the real attraction at this place is apparently their dessert bread cubes (no idea what the hell they're called). big bricks of really soft warm bread heavily draped in honey, chocolate or caramel and topped with a scoop of icecream. if you want more topping, the waiter comes out, sings a song about your topping, and drizzles it on until you tell him to stop. damn fine. the japanese version of pizza is pretty good. this place's toppings included corn, big strips of bacon, and a complete fried egg smack in the middle. after the food and the whatnot at the restaurant, we went to the arcade to take pictures in a type of photo booth called a "puricura", a squashing of the words "print" and "club". in a puricura, people crowd into a photo booth with a green screen background that can be changed from a big list of choices, snap the pics, and then walk around to the outside of the booth where they can take 27th century electro-laser pens and write all over the photos. when they're printed out, they have sticky backs so you can paste a tender memory somewhere on your stuff. so, after the mall antics, came back and, as far as i can remember, shuffled around a bit, finally got around to doing homework, and went to bed.

aiu festival this weekend, should be super magic time. the japanese students have been working their dang asses off getting ready for this thing for the past month while us int'l students bobble around and whack eachother in the junk and whatnot. there's a promotional poster for the festival that a bunch of students including m'damn self posed for which is hanging up all over the city, in the train station and mall. apparently the whole community gets pumped and comes out to watch the students perform and make food and speeches and stuff. gonna be good, i think.