vacation week

Well we ryugakusei have this week off of school. Even though our semester just started the Japanese student's semester just ended so this week is actual the entrance exam for all of the freshman. So for some reason we aren't allowed on campus even, and we have this week off. I honestly I don't have any plans. Right now its Wednesday and I don't have anything to do besides work on this freaking crazy perfect grade gundam (more on that later) and I don't really have plans for the rest of the week either. I want to do something just so that my host mom doesn't make all these comments about me being a hermit or what not.

Starting off though Tuesday was awesome! Me, Julienne, Courtney, Lela, and Val went to the Setsubun festival in Nagata jinja. Setsubun, or season divide, is a festival that was originally meant to appease the oni so they wouldn't bring misfortune but at some point became a festival of chasing off the oni. I made a video and I'll try and upload it as soon as I can but with my really inconsitent internet connection I don't know when I'll be able to. In a nut shell some people from the community put on 400 year old oni (demon) costumes and perform ritual dances while holding a straw torch. There is also a part where beans are thrown at the oni but we may have missed it. It was raining that day so these poor men dancing without shoes in the cold rain for like an hour. The rain was a mixed blessing kind of because it meant that a lot of people had umbrellas making it harder to see (as you can tell in the video) but that meant that there were a lot less people this year.

The BEST part of the day was going back to Courtney's host family's house and having dinner. Courtney has a 4 year old host brother who is so adorable and all of use spent hours playing with him, we didn't want to leave at 10pm but Lela had to catch the last bus home. Kota (the kid) was just so cute and silly. He would randomly say random English words like out of the blue he just said "stomach!" and other times he says random math like he dad was wrestling with him and he just yells out 49 plus 2! And Courtney's host parents are so nice and sweet and easy to talk to. Its really funny actually Courtney speaks only in English (she knows Japanese she is in my class) and her mom only speaks Japanese (but understands English). A very interesting linguistic situation. I feel so jealous now. I wish I got that host family so badly! Coming home to this place afterwords just kind of felt kind of crappy.

So I started the wing zero custom perfect grade gundam model the other day and wow it really is a challenge. There are so many moving parts and it just takes so much time. And I had a huge problem with the shoulder gear. So the shoulder section sits inside the main body and with like 5 different parts allows the shoulder to move back and forth a little bit. Well they use this spring pins which are really hard to get in so I got it all put together but when I attached the shoulder bit to the core a spring was out too much and was causing it to push up and stress the plastic so I tried to push it in more and I snapped the plastic in half! So I tried to super glue the two halfs back but just a little bit wouldn't work so I used a lot more which caused another moving part to fuse together with something meaning that even if I could some how get the broken peieces back together it wouldn't be able to move anymore. So as I tried to move something into place so that I could have some sort of movement a few tiny bits from an arch piece just fell apart, and soon several pieces did. It was like the plastic was corroding in my hands. I somehow got the pieces back and when I thought I would have again a tiny bit of movement something else broke a tiny bit of the arch off. So as I held it in my hand contemplating what to do, I dropped it on my floor and lost it forever(because my desk is too low to really sit under it for some reason). So ultimately what I ended up doing was taking a bit from the plastic runners glued it over some bits, sanded it down so it all fit then finished up the core. So now one arm has normal movement and the other doesn't but I don't think its too big of a deal.

So Friday the teachers apparently got our evaluations for their class from last semester (before we got our grades back which doesn't seem right to me) and they didn't seem too happy. I've written many times about my opinions of these classes but I think if we really look at it from a "whole is greater then the some of the parts" kind of idea they really aren't that bad. Like my history class for example; I went in there hoping to learn a basic of overall Japanese history and more specifics about bushido, what I got was two field trips to two castles and a bunch of detailed random information about Japanese history. I think the same can be said of my complaints about the program at whole because yes its not perfect and has things that could easily be better the fact that I've seen and done so many things that most people back home will never even dream of really ought to outshine not having many Japanese friends. This semester I started out really dreading the Japanese religion class but its actually really cool because he tells us all of this information about the festivals that we have a chance to go to while in Japan.

Well I guess thats it, I feel like I should get out today but I really don't know what I would do or where I would go.