February

As usual, not much happened on Monday and Tuesday. These are the days where I have the most class, so I leave early in the morning and don't get back until 6 or so.

On Monday I stopped at the grocery store to pick up some ingredients for the dinner I'm making on Wednesday. I was going to make chicken wrapped in bacon but there were a couple ingredients I couldn't find, so I'm making spaghetti with meat sauce. Believe it or not it's hard to find pure ground beef. The most common stuff is 50% beef and 50% pork. I did manage to find enough pure beef though.

For dinner we had Western style pasta with mushrooms, peppers, and big clams. The clams were a little intimidating but they tasted good. There are all kinds of different mushrooms here- from long white ones with tiny heads to bigger brown ones, also long.

Today I had hanga (woodblock printing) class. It's a lot harder than it sounds! I made my first print today- a copy of my name. In my first name the space around the letters is carved out and in my last name the space inside the letters is cut out. It's looks ok, nothing too good. I started working on carving my next print today. We didn't have any guidelines, so I had to just make something up and draw it. I'm not a very good artist, but I can do OK when I can see a picture. Luckily I had my iPod with me and a video on it that I could use. I won't tell you what I drew though- we'll wait for a couple weeks and see how it turns out and maybe I'll put a picture up.

Tonight for dinner we had curry rice. I'm really starting to like curry! Hopefully my spaghetti meal turns out ok tomorrow. I'm a little worried about getting the proportions right since I have to convert everything to metric.

Today was a sort of holiday in Japan. I'm not sure of the details but it has something to do with expelling evil. Often at a festival gathering someone will dress up as a demon and people throw beans at them and say 'Happiness in, demons/evil out'. After dinner we had little packages of beans to eat. Mrs. Y said that you're supposed to eat as many as your age, so I had to eat 20, and she was joking that Toki only got to eat 10! Before we ate the beans Toki and Mr. Y were running around having a bean fight, pelting each other with packets of beans. They really got me laughing!

Japanese Word of the Day: Taiyou (tie - yoh) : Sun. I learned this one because I had my new book, Breaking Dawn, sitting out in the family room, and Mr. Y asked me what it meant.... quite a challenge to explain! I also had a hard time explaining Groundhog Day to them. I resorted to Wikipedia pictures.