No More 3×5’s

Well, Halloween week is half over! Yay!! But, I want to put all the pictures up at one time, so you’ll have to wait for all of my cute kids in costume! But I will say that the only upside in this whole week is all the candy I keep getting from my students…and sometimes even from kids who aren’t even my students! It’s a beautiful thing!

Yesterday after church and lunch, we celebrated Jenny’s birthday by going to Cat’s Cafe and eating parfaits. It was a really fun time for everyone involved! And parfaits are pretty delicious!

The best selling point when it comes to Crocs is the ventilation holes. But in Japan, Crocs were so popular this summer that they decided to extend the trend to fit the winter needs of the Japanese people. But I don’t know how well it’s going to go over. Luckily, Nagoya’s not so snowy, so these Crocs actually have a chance for survival.

Winter Crocs

1. They’re trying to be a city known for beautiful architecture, so you have these gorgeous buildings surrounded by totally blah-looking ones.

2. There seems to be a coffee shop on every block, whether chain or local. You absolutely can never be without coffee if you really wanted it.

3. Fall is only just now starting to set in here. Most days are still in the 60’s with cooler evenings.

4. Because I use the subway system almost exclusively when I’m in town, Nagoya doesn’t feel like the third biggest city in Japan. It just feels like a lot of mini-towns all put together.

5. There’s a plethora of cats, pigeons, and koi. I don’t like the pigeons though.

6. Nagoya’s a port city, therefore the city’s mascot is a huge fish and different aspects of the city adapt it to their own mascot needs. The subway system makes it a fish-headed train conductor.

Halloween is coming…

And here’s the thing about working for ECC: I have to celebrate Halloween, complete with costume for an entire week. So, I have an entire week to dress as a witch. But on a plus note, the Halloween lessons are really easy, just easy vocab, games, and a craft, so no worries. It’s just the whole costume thing that I’m not such a fan of.

My current favorite band Boyce Avenue. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do. They’re on iTunes if you like their sound.

It’s currently 7:57 AM and I am awake and have been for about a half hour. All I can say is that getting up this early should be some kind of punishable offense, especially when you have trouble getting to sleep at night. I’m really looking forward to a nap this afternoon before work.

I had this insanely realistic dream while I was snoozing my alarm this morning that it was Friday and I had overslept. We’re talking, I woke up at 2:30 and my shift started in Tajimi at 3:05. It was so realistic that I actually thought it was Friday for about the first half hour after I woke up and had to ask Jen what day it was. On the other hand, in the dream, the role of my brother, who doesn’t actually live in Japan, was played by a Muppet. So, how realistic can it really be?

Sunday evening I had made plans to meet Joyce for dinner. So, we decided to get sushi and I suggested that we go to Kappazushi, conveyor belt sushi. Each plate costs 105 yen and you can eat as much as you want. You sit either at a table or at the counter and you choose the different sushi/sashimi that you want off the conveyor belt as it goes by. Sounds a bit strange, but I promise it’s not.

So, we met at Nagoya station, and Joyce thankfully had a map because I only knew that it was somewhere around the station, but I had no clue where it was. So, we set out at 6. After much navigating and chatting, we finally arrived at the restaurant at 6:25. Yeah, it wasn’t as close to the station as I had thought, but it was a nice walk. And it was so busy in there! We added our name to the long waiting list and proceeded to wait at least fifteen minutes for a table.

And let me tell you, if you’re a fan of sushi, you first experience at kappazushi will be a little like Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when everyone sees the chocolate room for the first time. Of course, there’s not Gene Wilder singing, but that feeling of awe and giddiness fill you just the same. We sat down at our table, looked at the conveyor belt for about thirty seconds before proceeding to grab anything that passed by that we liked or had ever wanted to try.

We ate sushi of all kinds and I got to try lots of different sushi/sashimi that I had always wanted to. Yellowtail and scallop are two new favorites. Uni and squid, on the other hand, are definitely not. What is uni you ask? Well, let me tell you. Joyce translated it as the paste made from sea urchin eggs. Yeah, if the translated version is not enough to turn you off from eating it, the appearance sure would be. It looks like a brown paste that may have been made from the sea urchin’s poop, not its eggs. But, being the adventurous girl that I am, I never say no to trying something at least once. Joyce warned me that it was an acquired taste, but I was willing. And if uni is an acquired taste, it’s not a taste that I want to experience a second time so that I can acquire it.

But after lots of sushi, green tea, talking, and three desserts (Don’t freak out! We each ate one and then shared an interesting looking egg torte.), we decided to head home at around 8:20. We started walking back to the station when we came across Izumoden, a wedding salon. It’s so Japanese can have a western style wedding ceremony. Izumoden is a chain business, and there’s actually one in Kasugai near our apartment. But this one was pretty fancy. There were all kinds of Christian mosaics, but my favorite one by far was of Jesus calming the storms. I have absolutely no idea what that could possibly have to do with getting married, but I took a photo of it anyway. But the wedding hall featured glass chairs as well as a glass piano. It was pretty fancy and a little too cheesy for my American tastes, but to each country their own I say.

So, I’m currently learning how to write kanji and let me tell you what…it’s really tough. There’s a specific stroke order that you have to write everything in, and I can’t get my kanji to look like they’re supposed to. The proportions are all wrong. Sometimes it just ends up looking like a kid’s scribbles…seriously. I do a lot of erasing.