Its been a while since I last wrote so let me see if I can remember what happened since last time. Well the big thing was new years. My host family's daughter and her family came. There was an adorable 3 or 4 year old girl named Mai. I really love little kids and was so happy to be able to play with her, and to have someone who I could understand. Over the holidays we had food that had a lot of effort put into it. Some of the stuff was really great like yakiniku and crab but other stuff was just so weird I couldn't eat too much of it. Like there was mochi in a bowl of miso like soup. That stuff is so hard to eat.
On new years day I went to Ikuta temple. It was really crowded and there were food stands and like carnival type game booths set up so it really was a sight to behold. As you waddle your way through the sea of people and get up to the actually jinja (temple) you see more booths but these are selling charms and what not. I went up to the main part and threw in a few yen saying a little prayer to Heavenly Father in my head and walked around some more. As you will often seen in anime you can buy fortunes and you tie that fortune around a tree or around a fence covering a tree so that it either comes true or doesn't come true, which ever you want (its kind of confusing there). After that I came home and just did the usual try and kill time thing.
Taking a little detour here, Japan is so weird here religiously. Like this place is translated as a temple but it didn't seem to really be anything at all what you would think of for that word. The fact that there were just all sorts of vendors leading up to the place made it all feel more like a state fair or something rather then anything spiritual. And the fact that they sell good luck charms just is something thats hard to get my head around. Its like the gods (there is a huge vagueness about if there is one god or multiple) will bless you because you spent 300 yen on a cell phone strap. And I started my religion class on Thursday and its like the Japanese “religions” don't seem that concerned about validity. Like its no secret that budhissim is an evolvement of all sorts of beliefs across Asia. Coming from a Western (or even Middle Eastern point of view) a religion should atleast claim to be a powerful being's real desire for mankind. But religion here just seems like philosophy mixed with traditions which my religion is so much more to me.
Its kind of a little silly but while I'm building my Gundams I've been listening to the book of mormon on mp3 and I started in heleman (because I always give up on reading it once I get to alma, I get so lost in the so and so reign of the judges this war happened part) and after I finished it I moved on to the doctrine and covenants. I can't believe that I went my entire life without ever actually looking at the contents of the doctrine and covenants. As I'm going through it it is blowing my mind that in relatively recent times God gave very direct distinct directions to the leaders of the young church. Its like I can feel the power and authority of Heavenly Father's words as I listen. I didn't expect to really have my testimony grow so much here but it really has. Many times I've very grudgingly went to church but now I find myself looking forward to it and I really honestly want to become a good Mormon now.
Aside from all of that um I sat around my room a lot. I hung out with Jay, Nohea, and Courtney a lot and we went back to the temple one time and I got a fortune. I didn't tie it on the tree because I wanted to know what it said and I wanted to keep it as a souvenir. School finally started and I'm really glad. Japanese class might be a little on the tough side this semester (but its my LAST Japanese class). We are reading books now and there are SOOOOO many words we have to look up because this author is being incredibly descriptive of everything. I am taking three other classes this semester; education in Japan which is taught by a seems to be really cool teacher and we are going to have a field trip to a Japanese high school, Japanese religion which is taught by a terrible teacher. This teacher just gave us a packet with key points not filled in and he just stands there and reads the piece of paper while we fill it in. Its like freaking crap that is NOT teaching, I know its slim pickings on teachers who can speak English but the teachers in this program seem like they have never been a student before. The last class is Japanese cinema, which after the first meeting I have high hopes for.
On Friday in Japanese class we did some really fun word games. We broke up into two teams and each team had a leader. The first game the teacher wrote a word on the board so the leader couldn't see it and three of us had to each write a part of a haiku to describe that word. My team had nintendo DS so it was , everyone holds it, has 2 screens, also wireless (doesn't fit the rules in English). The second game the captain would know the word and give tiny hints as to what it was and the three of us at the same time had to say the same answer. Each time we got it wrong we were docked points. I think this one would work in English too. The third one was really interesting, the teacher wrote a word in katakana (the alphabet for foreign words) and we had to make a 4 kanji word that would describe it. So we had bargin (ba-gen) and I wrote dai-an-kin-sho which was big-cheap-money-little and he guessed sale (se-ru) but it wasn't close enough.
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