sas and i moved into our room yesterday. my mom and i drove up to boston in the early morning. stupid though it was, i found myself anxiously watching the trees fly by on the highway - this will be my last time making this move-in drive. even sas was reminiscing as we struggled with our recalcitrant furniture in the boston summer heat. i've moved ( Read more... )

I haven't written till now; perhaps because, like a bone in my throat, I could not speak. Held breathless by my return to America and my resigned attitude of this fact, I began to come to terms with what I had just experienced and what it had meant to me. This translated to silence, for the most part - silence, as I remembered the mountains of ( Read more... )

Today is not, perhaps, so much more special than any other day. I ran to the supermarket in the morning to pick up some vegetables and chicken. Commuted to school, looking over the scarce material that I'd prepared for a presentation I had to do today in Geisha class. I'm very lax about the amount of work that I put into typical preparation because ( Read more... )

If I segment sections of my life into memorable mornings, I am left with a few reflections: as a kid the thing I looked forward to most in the morning was eating cereal; after I entered college and came home on breaks, a morning was defined by the coffee I made and the music playing on the satellite radio (the broadway station or the coffee house ( Read more... )

I will remember today as a pretty good day. If I am still on the starting rim of the hump towards fluency (and, barring that, at least being able to have some semblance of a conversation), and I have no doubts that I am, at least I am now earnestly engaged in the attempt to move upwards. My two conversation partners are two freshman japanese girls ( Read more... )

Well, golden week has ended here and it seems that Tokyo is intent on summoning the rainy season ahead of time. My lack of an umbrella will certainly become a liability in the next few weeks, though you can buy one pretty much anyway here as the natives brace themselves for five or so straight weeks of rain. I'm looking forward to it, to be honest ( Read more... )

Golden Week, which is essentially a week filled with national holidays, is about to begin. With every week that flies by, we are nearing the halfway point. Its frighteningly rapid approach speaks volumes to me. Some of my friends have declared that they are "finished with Tokyo," having seen what they wanted to see and now dreading the summer heat ( Read more... )

We flew over Japan with the mountains and clouds to keep us company. Okinawa is parallel with Taiwan and (nearly) Shanghai as well; though from an aeriel view it definitely completes the Japanese archipelago, the sheer distance from the other main islands means a completely different kind of person here. It's like comparing somebody in Virginia to ( Read more... )

I cannot stop listening to the Cinematic Orchestra. At an awkward party hosted for international students by the organization on campus that takes care of such sheep, I tried to relate my new-found love to a girl whose English in self-study is much better than my Japanese in comparable time. And that's been a trend. But as for the matter at hand: ( Read more... )

This is how my day went. I woke up at 6:30 and showered. I made some udon, which was deliciously scalding. I need to wait for my food to cool a little, I think. My fellow exchange students and I sallied forth from our rooms to make the walk to the Hiyoshi train station, which is about a mile away from our building and right outside of Tokyo proper ( Read more... )