Roora in Japan: Hahaha...I really am bad at this...

Well, I hope everyone has been doing well since Halloween...

Sorry I haven't updated since then. In fact, I hadn't even downloaded the pictures from my camera since then. To bring you up to date, I am now starting spring vacation - two whole glorius months of being able to sleep in! Oh, and go see Japan too. ^_^ Since it has been so long, and I can't even remember everything I have done since Halloween, I will proceed with a picture tour!

Okay, this is a picture of a bunch of desserts - the @Home group (group of Japanese kids from the college who like to hang out with foreignors and organize events) decided to have this Otyakai - which translates to tea party. We all got split up into groups, made a dessert, and when they were finished, we got to try everything with couple different types of tea. My group was assigned an Indian dessert, which in Japanese is pronounced baafi. This is about as close as you can get to saying barf in Japanese, and since the first step of making it was to curdle milk, it pretty much looked like it to start with. It eventually got better though - added coconut and some other stuff - and it wasn't too bad in the end.

The barfi is the whitish stuff in the front middle.

This picture I took during the break period in Japanese class - all four of the Koreans in the class fell asleep. And they were all in a row.

I found it funny at the time.

I guess it really isn't all that funny.

Ah, I'm easily amused.

Ah, we have now arrived at Thanksgiving! A bunch of American students decided that we wanted to have a Thanksgiving meal, and since the meeting room was already booked for later in the evening, it ended up being a Thanksgiving lunch.

I attempted to make Mom's amazing stuffing, but mine was not nearly as good as hers! And the celery was soooo expensive! $1 for a single stalk of celery!

But we did manage to find plenty of jellied cranberry sauce at the import store! So happy!

Since Japanese people apparently prefer chicken to turkey, turkey is all but impossible to find in Japan. But fish is pretty popular, so our main dish was grilled fish...

Appropriately Japanese I guess...

There was also a vegetable stew type thing with beef in it, so fish wasn't the only meat.

This is the shrimp that Chris tried to force me to eat. I decided at this point that I definitely do not eat anything that still has its eyes.

And it was really, really burnt.

The first of two days of nabe parties! (Nabe is the Japanese word for a cooking pot, so anytime you make a soup which involves throwing everything in a pot and cooking it together, it is called nabe.)

These are guys from my lab - starting from the left

Hirotsu - fourth year undergraduate student

Ichiki-san - I think he is post-Phd. Looks very young though

Hayashi-san - 2nd year masters, I think

Nishigaki-san - my tutor. But I still can't remember whether he is first or second year masters.

This was my first experience with a kotatsu, and I have been addicted ever since. Kotatsu is the type of table that we were sitting at - underneath the blanket is the second part of the table, which has a low powered electric heater built in. Then there is another blanket on the floor underneath the table. Since gas is very expensive in Japan, most houses aren't heated a whole lot, and people use a kotatsu instead. Pretty soon after this, I bought a kotatsu as well, and since there isn't too much space in my room, I ended up taking apart my bed, and pushing the mattress against the wall, and I now sleep on a futon on the floor, underneath my kotatsu. For my next birthday present, I already asked my parents to pay to have my kotatsu shipped back to the U.S. I love my kotatsu. ^_^

There was also drinking involved.