KCP Undoukai (School Sports Day)

Things are going great still. I have had some problems with making it home before midnight which is something very important to my host mother, Tomokosan. I dont really have much more room to screw up with that, but otherwise we are still getting along very well. One of her friends from the chorus group is an expert of calligraphy and he is going to teach me this monday for maybe 1 - 1 1/2 hours. Therefore I bought a new brush since the bristles on my previous brushes are already starting to open up. The brush I bought is the biggest one I have now, hopefully he can show me what to do so it wont happen again.

Im doing really well on the KCP Level 3 kanji tests but I have yet to get an A on the grammar. Oddly enough its not usually the grammar that trips me up, but its when I write the wrong kanji or miss the vocabulary. Im still getting Bs on them though so there is nothing to worry about here.

Ive gone bowling several times now, and not yesterday, but on the previous time I bowled my best score so far, I think it was 104. At the beginning I was bowling with a 7lb ball, but Ive moved up to a 10lb now. Despite all the interesting and friendly Japanese people Ive met I still dont really have any close Japanese friends aside from Tomokosan and maybe her sister Hiromisan. However when I went bowling in Asakusa after the festival a group of 4 japanese joined us at the adjacent lane. The leader of the group (I suppose I can call him that) was a 56 y.o. businessman. He was very friendly with us and gave us two bottles of water and one tea. I asked him why he placed them in front of us and he said they were a gift. Later I decided to go to the konbini to buy some beer. When I said I was leaving he said well then lets go together. When we got there he grabbed about 10 beers off the shelf (four were the 18oz size) as well as toasted raamen snack, beef jerky, potato chips, and dried squid. Altogether it was 3000yen and when I tried to give him 1000 he would not accept it. He bought all that stuff for us maybe simply because we were americans who spoke japanese! That same day in Asakusa I bought some whale jerky at at store that only sold whale products. It was very good.

This previous thursday was the undoukai (school sports day). This is a tradition among Japanese education, so it was pretty cool to participate in one. My flickr site includes many pictures from the costume part of it. There were several events including the rope relay, leap frog, skip race, sit-up contest, tug-o-war, cosplay contest, and a 4 person 400m relay (so each person ran 100m). I signed up for the relay and since I didnt really have the right shoes I bought some pumas for 3900yen (from what Ive seen so far a very good deal, the cheapest running shoes Ive seen so far). Who knows if I really needed the shoes or not, because my team won the first round as well as the final, it was no contest. I think everyone was amazed by my explosive speed (which fortunately still remains after my three year gap of not much running) from all those years of competitive soccer. Of course if my teammates werent fast as well we could have lost. Additionally the yellow team (all level 3 classes) was the yusho (first place) of the whole undoukai. Afterwards I went out to drink with several of my classmates (The group was all koreans except for one of my american friends. It was a great bonding experience with them.

One of my friends who I will refer to as beatk (his nickname) I had never even spoke to before thursday night, but we really hit it off. He is now my korean brother. He asked me who I like the most in the class. When I talked to beatk about this he said that she thinks I am very young, almost as if she sees me as a child. He told me in order to get past that I have to make my heart/spirit wider. I think what he meant to say is I need to be more of a gentleman and to act older than I actually am. So friday I invited her to go with me to Hiromi-sans koten (private exhibition) and she said yes. So we will go on sunday after she is done with church.

This week I started the tea ceremony class. It is every monday and friday from 11-1pm. I really enjoy the class. Its amazing how exact everything is. There is a precise method for everything, but its nothing too complicated, with practice it becomes second nature. By far the hardest part is sitting seiza for so long. We get about 3 breaks where we walk out of tghe room and stand, and it extremely difficult to make it through the class. Hopefully by the end it wont be so tough. I guess thats about it for now. Im drinking an extremely bitter cup of tea at the moment. Since tomoko-san went out today I made the tea myself for the first time, I suppose I put too many leaves in.

Oh and one last thing, last week I found some 18month aged cheddar at a liquor store. It was about 770 yen for a peice slightly larger than what you get from bravo farms. Such a terrible price to pay for only average quality cheddar, but I needed to buy it. The japanese dont really eat cheese unless its on a hamburger or pizza. And Ive had pizza at three different places now, the best one remains the first one I went to in harajuku. It was so good! Just about what you would get in Italy.