Onigiri, Onigiri, Aishiteru, Yo!

hi dudes. i best get this thing uppidy dated before too much happens to cram into one post. last weekend, what...? i can't quite remember the order here... i think it was friday night, went out on the town with rikako and a few americans. we stopped first at another tiny ramen place, where i had the biggest, best bowl of ramen i've ever had in my damn life, and then we went to a type of restaurant called a "nomihoudai" (nomi=drink, houdai=without restriction). you pay the all night rate of about 2300 yen (around 20 bucks) and the drinks keep coming. i think they must be extremely watered down, because i was fully functional when we left for the last train. any dang how, at the nomihoudai, we met some folks from akita city and talked with them sort of through rikako, along with whatever we could manage to spit out, played some made up drinking games and took pictures with them. a grand time. after the train home to the station nearest the school, we decided to walk the 3 or so miles home and stop off at a grocery store for some of japan's brilliant convenience food. theres a popular thing here in most convenience stores which is a hot dog bun crammed with whatever seems to be laying around at the time. i've seen yakisoba with mayo and a hard boiled egg, chicken balls and spaghetti, and a bunch of other variations thereof. the walk home was cold, envigorating, and grand, through rice paddies and over rivers in the dark.

saturday i got up really damned early to head off to a field trip/program called "ego de asobu" or "playing in english". about 15 folks went off to a community center in a town about an hour south of here called daisen-shi, where 7, 8, and 9 year olds come every weekend to learn english. we played games with them focusing on colors and numbers, like a fishing game where we would say to a kid in our group "o.k., go find aaaaaa... BLUE FISH!" and then they would run off to the 'pond' and try to snag a blue fish with a magnetic fishing pole. the kids had some questions prepared in english, and we were able to talk about where we came from using a little bit of japanese. it was pretty fun, great to have a chance to practice the old profession a little, over really fast though, only lasted about an hour and a half. as for what happened with the rest of that day, i haven't a clue.

this week: we got us some snooooow. snow. pretty fine. started falling pretty heavily maybe monday or tuesday night, and immediately there were about 20 people running out of doors and climbing out windows to go jump around in it and throw it at eachother and bodyslam eachother into it. i made myself a snowperson, a muddy sumbitch named takeshi-san, threw, and was thrown upon. the next day everything melted and takeshi-san dissapeared, then it snowed again and we built an even bigger, uglier snowperson with a bunch of people, and gave it a fez fashioned from a bucket. havent been sledding yet, maybe i can make it a project for the weekend.

last night, thanksgibbinz night. my thanksgiving dinner here at school was comprised of pork bits with sundry items in a brown sauce over rice, and some kind of egg drop soup. after dinner, a few folks, mostly americans, with a norwegian, a chilean, and some japanese folks thrown in, went to another nomihoudai/karaoke bar called "waddawadda". three floors of restaurant and bar. we got a private room with a karaoke setup, and ordered their nomihoudai meal deal, where the drinks flow freely and the appetizer dishes keep showing up on the table. we drank and sang and ate and had some general revelry, and then most of the group went back to school. i stayed in town with one american, one norwegian, and one japanese fella, and went to a dinky little rockabilly themed bar for a guinness and tried to talk to shou, the japanese guy about movies and music and america, which was hit and miss. good times, though. i can ask what kind of beer they have in japanese now, which thrills me to no end. after the rockabilly bar, we went back over to waddawadda for a few more hours of drinks and appetizers and karaoke, and took a taxi back here at about 3:30 in the morning. walking around in akita city is pretty treacherous right now, everything is slathered thickly with ice. everybody fall down go boom a few times last night, before and after the drinks.

tonight, in 15 minutes, i will head off to the big bastard mall for dinner with hina, a dude from hong kong named tomo, and hina's friend maki, who is the unnamed person featured in that first picture of hina way back when. dunno what we'll do, dinner i think, and maybe some other junk. no plans for the rest of the weekend yet, except maybe trying to go sledding somewhere... gotsta go.