This post is to promote my friend Keli'i's blog about life in AIU and Japan. Keli'i is my classmate in Japanese 300, and, aside from being extremely funny and eager to learn about anything and everything he can about Japan, is from Hawaii! He'll be in AIU for one year, so even after I come back to the Philippines, I hope you can look to his website ( Read more... )

I'm so behind on making posts!! But quick updates:

11月2日: We had a nabe party with V-ACT! Stayed at Tai's dorm and made kiritanpo nabe, and a kimchi nabe. Of course I only ate the kiritanpo one. (.w.;) Good fun! Followed by a drinking session with the usual gang (Chris, Ebib, Racquel, Rei, Marcela and Rebeca), with Mai and Saho as special guests ( Read more... )

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On October 27, we went on a free (rather, pre-paid) bus-trip to Furusato-mura Theme Park in Yokote city, and Oyasukyo Gorge. Lately I've had a bad habit of being too lazy to wear warm clothes (or at least, clothes besides a t-shirt), but knowing we'll be spending 90% of the time outdoors, the troublesome feeling of being cold won over the ( Read more... )

I have four days left until the midway point of my stay abroad (including the 2 weeks I have after the semester to tour around). Sometimes I wonder if I've really done anything worthwhile, if I've been making the most out of every day, etc. But when I think about that, all sorts of expectations pop up, and it ends up just depressing me. 笑 ( Read more... )

19th-20th of October was for the first Happo-cho program! Happo-cho is a series of trips to different places & communities around Happo-cho city. We help teach in English classes, interact with locals, and even stay with a host family for a night. For this month's trip, we went to a junior high school, a preschool, and an old folks home ( Read more... )

October 7-8 was the AIU festival. My camera was dead half the time so I couldn't get a lot of pictures, nor buy a lot of food from the stalls because lol poverty, but I did have lots of fun, especially with seeing how such a little school (~800 people including 100+ foreigners) could pull off an event like this. ( ・ω ( Read more... )

Been a while since my last post! Let's speed it up a bit.

９月３０日 - Had a cooking day with V-ACT! The Japanese members made Oyakodon, a chicken+egg+rice dish whose name means "mother and child"-don, and then dango. I, on the other hand, tried to make banana cue, a deep-fried, sugar-coated banana. I read the recipe for 20 seconds and tried my best ( Read more... )

Yesterday, I volunteered for the Akita Beach Clean-up club's trip to Shimohama beach along the Sea of Japan, with Kei, Heather, Danie, Cherry, Ken, McKenzie, Tomomi, Koudai, Aya, and 4 ABC members. It's about 30 minutes away from AIU by car, and 480円 from Wada to Shimohama station. I thought it was a good opportunity to visit a beach for free, ( Read more... )

I think I've been sleeping pretty late for the past few days! Ever since we've started sharing/buying ingredients and cooking for ourselves, we've usually been hanging out at Chris' dorm in Global Village with Ebib and whoever else happens to want to come along. Cooking leads to talking leads to movies leads to late nights but good times. We ( Read more... )