i sure do wish the air conditioner in my room worked. it's ridiculously hot these days, especially up here on the 2nd floor. can't wait to get back to PR where we have air conditioning and are allowed to use it :)

i think rather than shipping a box home, i may just get another suitcase (or just use a box) and take it with me on the plane and pay the fee. it could be anywhere from $75 to $200, but jenn mailed two pretty light boxes home via 20-day service and paid $250. even if this came out to be the same price, i'd have everything with me right away rather than having to wait 3 weeks. now i just have to decide if i trust a box to carry all my precious omiyage home. maybe i'll look for a duffel bag, that would be ideal.

also, since williams-sensei is not going home with us but rather staying here with the people doing the internships, those of us returning are on our own as far as getting to the airport (which is in oosaka, about an hour-long car ride away). when we got here, we carried all our luggage with us on like 4 trains, with a good bit of walking in between. that day was hell. so for the return trip, jenn and i are probably going to use a popular, cheap service here called takkyuubin. basically you take your suitcases to one of their offices (which are sprinkled liberally throughout the city), and pay like $25-30, and they deliver them to the airport you're going to, and you just pick them up the day of your flight. the only downside is it takes 2-3 days, so we'll have to send them on like wed. in order to be sure it's there on time. so the last few days we're here we won't have our luggage. that's why i'm thinking of getting a duffel bag - then i could keep a few days' clothes and toiletries in the duffel bag, and pack my purchases in the resulting space in one of my current suitcases.

i know, you care a lot. so here's some more stuff you are deeply interested in: the recounting of the weekend's events.

thursday my host mom told me about some places in the teramachi area i could go to get some of the things i still need to get before i leave. i went down there with jenn and spent way too much at the cd/music store - found some cool cds (which are always expensive here, $20-25 each), plus on the sheet music floor, i found a bunch of game and anime piano sheet music. i bought the entire final fantasy 7 book (like an inch thick) and two nausicaa (warriors of the wind) books. so much fun playing aeris' theme. have to learn the rest.

friday night we went out and did karaoke. surprisingly, the place we went to this time actually had stuff like dream theater, angra, and even stratovarius in there. so i did a dream theater song (another day) and nobody else knew it and it was horrible. but it was still cool that they had it :) now if only i could go with a bunch of friends from home, like andy and bryan.

shannon brought her host sister, yuiko (i think). she was awesome. she mentioned that she has been studying spanish and i asked how long and she said two years here and then she lived one year in chile. but she is perfectly fluent, and sounds just like a native of chile! after only 3 years of studying it. it was ridiculous. i'm now convinced the japanese people are genetically superior somehow :) it wasnt just that she had the chilean accent and everything, but she never stopped to search for a word or anything, and we didn't only talk about simple things. it was really cool to get to speak spanish with someone too.

saturday after class (grr) jenn, dia, alexis and i went to the Toji temple, because on the 21st of every month they have a flea market. i was hoping to find a kimono but they didn't have any in the sizes i'm looking for. there were some calligraphy scrolls i really wanted, but they were too expensive ($100 each). i didn't end up getting anything in toji itself, but on the way home we passed by this ghetto shop selling all kinds of random stuff from the hood of his car. he had some old used scrolls, and we asked him to show them to us. the prices were all really good (around $7-8 each), but you could tell he was making up the price in accordance with our reactions to it. so we quickly figured that out and stopped showing it when we thought one looked really cool, and the prices started coming in the range of $1-4, and one of them he said $1 and then changed his mind and said "this one, present, here." and gave it to me. score :) so in the end i got four of them, one for $4, two for $1 each, and one for free. my favorite one is calligraphy saying a phrase that roughly means "the silence of 1000 houses (a village) in the middle of the night," one is a painting of a mountain scene, one has a poem in chinese that my host family couldn't read and i'm going to ask phyllis to translate for me, and the free one has b&w pictures of all the members of the imperial family. total investment, $6. not bad :)

today (sunday) my host family took me to teramachi to order a hanko (stone stamp with your name carved into it that is used as a signature on documents, artwork, etc etc). last night we came up with the kanji writing for my name (we used 'dan' for simplicity). we decided on the kanji that is also read "hiku", to play a stringed instrument. at the hanko-ya-san, we picked out a stone block for it to be carved into, and wrote the kanji out for her. the blocks were cheap, ranging from $1.50 for tiny little ones to like $20 for big, elaborate marble ones with a figure carved into the top. i picked a plain block, average sized (the stamp surface is abt. 3/4" square, and it's about 3" tall), made of dark green and white marble, that cost $5. then a box to keep it in, also $5. however, the expensive part is the carving - that will be $30. still, not too bad. my host mom paid for the stone and box as a gift. it'll be ready on wed. they had a big selection of ink colors too, but she said i could get ink at a 100 yen shop, so i didn't need to buy it there.

after the hanko shop, my host mom went off to meet her friend and go to oosaka to see an opera, and my host dad and i went to fushimi to go to the super autobacs. that place was ridiculous, way better than the normal autobacs i went to last month. i wanted everything there. rather than explain it all and bore everyone, i'll just include the link to the pictures for anyone who's actually interested in cars.

http://binrock.net/c...os/index.php?rid=178

Originally posted on LiveJournal. Original post