Do You Have A Vitality?

I'll try to answer everyone's comments in later entries. A mandatory Japanese cell phone, television, and toilet update will come on a slow news day. I'll try to introduce my homestay family as I get the chance too. I can't figure out how to respond to comment otherwise, because all my webpages are defaulting to japanese now that i'm in japan.



So I've had alot of free time lately and spent alot of my time thursday going on a walk. This graffiti and the cadillac were just amusing to see. The cadillac is probably 4x the size of any other japanese car that drives on these streets and must really be a pain to maneuver through these streets.

Anyway after my walk I decided to go on a train ride to test my mettle and went out to Yokohama (cost about 2$). I figured it would be good practice to do so. Picture below is my station (Midorigaoka) which has become one of the only japanese words that I can pronounce perfectly every time. Mostly by necessity.

So I really just kinda wandered around Yokohama (a port city) with no real plan. I sat down for some curry, hit up an arcade, and then headed home for the day. By 6 o clock I crashed until 8am. And now my homestay family calls me bear ('kuma') because of my sleeping habits. (I went on the next day to take another 3 hour nap, and then sleep another 11 hours). I'm not sure if it is jet lag or what , but by 9 o clock I'm as good as dead, and usually have to go to bed.

Previously I had let my homestay family know that I started running this summer and so my homestay father took me on a bikeride to Komazawa Olympic Stadium (maybe 3 kilometres from the house). Komazawa hosted most of the cycling events in the 1964 olympics. Today it has been converted into a nice running/cycling track and a cheap (2$ per hour) gym. We also stopped by a small shrine as well and he taught me the procedures for entering a shrine.






As for today, I found out that my homestay brother (Kenshiro) was having a high school festival and I decided to go along. It was really intense. The students worked really hard on their plays. I watched CATS in Japanese, some play about a french guy that can put his hands through walls(?), a swing musical, and lastly the high school hip-hop dance group. I was swamped by japanese high schoolers from the moment I entered the building though. Everyone threw out broken english (they didn't even know that i spoke english) to try and get me to come to see their plays. Once again, I seemed to be the only one that found it excrutiatingly hot. I sweat through two shirts and didn't see a drop on anyone else's body. I'm unusually excited for winter because of this. Picture on the right in the suit is Kenshiro, obviously you can't tell in the picture, but he sings quite well.



Later on I went to Shinjuku to try and find the 'largest bookstore in japan.' My first problem was that the subway map didn't feature 'readings' for the city names. Sorry if this doesn't make sense for my family members, but basically... I couldn't read the map because it had lots of difficult characters on it. Secondly, I was told to take the south exit from the subway, but the subway station only had an east and west exit. So... basically I just checked out the area until a friend from a few summers ago invited me to come hang out in harajuku (sort of a fashion center in japan). It was a nice change of pace because by this point, I had been speaking nothing but Japanese for the last 3 or so days. Anyway, below is a picture of harajuku (crowded) and Sam and Kyle. Both are actually from Virginia too.