Mado O Akete Samuku Naru

baboobaboobaboobabooo... my brains is become pudd'n. i have two chapters of words to memorize, some sentence structures to get down, and takusan kanji oboiru tsumori desu, yo. (i'm going to memorize a lot of kanji). it's kind of piling up on me. i'm doing alright, though, dammit. maybe a few too many extended afternoon naps, but otherwise decent.

nothing much of major consequence happened during the week. had dinner with m'ladies out at the damned mall and got a haircut after some frantic gesturing about which barberin' tools to apply to which parts of my head. saturday night, took the bus out to the local neighborhood city hall or council building or some such for their fuyu matsuri, or winter festival. fireworks were going off as we pulled up, and they had their large parking lot filled with a bunch of huge snow sculptures and food booths. there was an enormous castle with a wall around it that said "cinderella" in carved out letters, a snoopy sculpture, an anpan man, a bunch of mini-kamakuras and a huge slide. i walked around buying a few whatnots to eat, and then some kids came up to me and said they recognized me as santa from television. then they started singing a song that had something to do with butts and threw snowballs at me while chasing me toward the supermarket across the street. i stayed over there and bought a few things, ran into some students who came out for the doings, walked down to the bus stop with them and had a snowball fight while waiting for the bus. it was a pretty fun little festival for a dinky little place like wada.

sunday, sunday... got up pretty early to ride a series of busses, with two of the taiwanese girls and a brittish feller, out to a place on the sea called the selion tower. selion is a big tall glass rectangle with a museum, restaurant, and indoor observation deck at the top. we could see the whole city from up there, the mountains, the harbor at the base of the tower where a giant ship was being loaded or unloaded with massive cranes, a railyard, the whole thing covered with snow. we made a few loops up there, then went down to a flea market to meet up with aki, the lady from the akita christmas thing, who was selling some of her stuff with the friend i met at the itallian place. among the stuff she was selling were homemade candles and jewelry, and an unopened box of plastic farm animals with names like "king cock", which she bought for no apparent reason sometime in the recent past. i sat around talking with her for a while about more english and japanese language difficulties, and she dug around in the stuff the people next to her were selling, trying on an enormous pair of orange glasses. we had to catch a bus back to the station, so i bought a few of the candles, made some half-plans, and left. i'd like to go back in the spring, maybe with this one dude, name's carls quinn? it was too cold to really walk along the harbor, and there was an empty rock garden inside the wide base of the tower that looked like it was only in use during warmer weather.

came back and fell asleep. while i was sleeping, i guess i missed a chance to go wandering in the woods with a few peoples and cook norwegian bread on a campfire. i was sitting in the cafeteria eating instant noodles and trying to wake the hell up when they all came back covered in snow and smelling like smoke. i don't want to miss stuff like that, so no more sleeping in the middle of the damn day, i'll just drink coffee or avoid sitting down or something.

time to go learn more stuff now. i volunteered for something on thursday, but i'm not exactly sure what.