hisashiburi

Hisashiburi is the Japanese term for 'it's been a while' or 'long time, no see'. It has been quite a while since I've really posted anything of interest. It's not for lack of creative thought, which has actually been quite strong recently. I've had a very good month of studying and learned quite a bit of kanji. I think the realization that we only have about 3 solid months left in Kyoto is finally beginning to dawn on me. It's so sad really because the entire life that I created here will dissipate as soon as we move back to America. I really am satisfied with the life we have lead here, and though there are more things I would like to do, so far I do not feel like I have wasted the time I've had here. In fact, I feel like I have learned much more than I had expected to learn, including scholastic issues and Japanese language.

Yesterday we had a really nice day snowboarding in Gifu. The slopes themselves were nothing too spectacular, but the snow was really nice and not icy. Craig and I went with 4 other Japanese people and one of our foreign friends. (By foreign, I mean non-Japanese - I guess that's some of my Japanese influencing my English). I had a lot of fun with two of them in particular, Eiji and Noriko, because they were about as skilled at snowboarding as I was, and they liked to take a lot of breaks too :) We left at 5 AM and returned at 1 AM the next day - quite a long day!!! Then we slept in a little this morning and had this great strawberry french toast that Craig has learned to make recently. He altered it a little bit by adding a strawberry sauce and not using a few ingredients that are hard to find or expensive to buy here.

We've actually been doing a lot of cooking here now. My friend, Elisha, is now our roommate and so she and her boyfriend, Jin, have dinner with us nearly every night. It's great because we can cook nice big dinners and pay only half each, which significantly cuts down on our food costs. We actually realized that it is not much more expensive to buy food for 4 people than it is for 2. This is because the core ingredients are the same but you just add a little more meat or vegetables to the recipe to serve 4. It has been working out really well so far, and it's interesting have people around all the time.

Today, Mike came over and we watched Death to Smoochy, which I thought was a quirky and slightly over-the-top black comedy about a Barney-like character. The movie got a lot of mediocre reviews here, here and http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/review.asp?mid=2043724, but I didn't think it was half bad, and agree with the more pleasant critique of it here. Anyways, check it out for yourself, or at least watch the trailer to get a better glimpse of the movie. It was an interesting spend of nearly two hours of my lazy Sunday.

We're getting excited about upcoming things such as hearing from the rest of the law schools I applied to, planning our trips to Greece and Tibet, and eventually (but sooner than later) moving back to the States. In the meantime, we're trying to get as much work as possible (which has not been too good for me because the English classes ended at the schools I was at last month and I will teach at English clubs for only 15 days in March so I need to find more work!). That actually reminds me that I have an email to send off, and it's getting late here, so I've got to get to bed. Oyasumi!

Posted by Kristen at February 29, 2004 11:24 PM | TrackBack