(Note: written on Saturday, June 22nd)
I guess my apologizing for being late updating the blog is getting a little repetitive. To atone for this, I present the large group family photo from the wedding.
With Dean here last week I spent the time doing things with him and just barely getting time to prepare for my classes and practice shamisen/koto once or twice, but didn’t have time to update the blog.
Suddenly there’s been an onslaught of visiting friends: Dean was here for the week, Nina, my friend Avi’s sister, came for an evening the night before Dean left, then the evening Dean left my old friend Yukie from Tokyo and her husband visited. Now I’m on a train with Sawa’s family coming back from seeing Sawa’s grandmother in Kyushu (she seems to be warming to me!) and tomorrow we’re seeing some final relatives I haven’t yet met in Kobe. Then Monday’s my birthday, Tuesday I go to Wakayama to visit my brother, on Wednesday Sawa’s friend Jennie’s coming to hang out for a week, Friday my friend who just got married in Saitama a month or so ago’s coming for the evening, then I’m going on a camp with the basketball club on Saturday and Sunday! Whew. I should enjoy this chance while I have it, because all the entertaining and visiting and traveling is practically like a full-time job and I’m sure I couldn’t sustain it if I were working a real job!
The rest of the time with Dean we did some touristy things in Kyoto a little, like going to see the Katsura Imperial Villa, Gion, Chionin, biking down the Kamo river, etc.
However, he was more interested in meeting people and speaking in Japanese than generic sightseeing, which I approve of, so I tried to organize a bunch of activities to get him a chance to interact with the students who live nearby. As I said last time, we had movie night and firefly viewing last Thursday, then went to my class and out to a club on Friday. On Sunday morning, Dean came to my first utai performance, and seemd to enjoy seeing it and then the two of us singing along with the chorus in super-bassy voices. However, after the first hour or two he bailed out, which was good, because it went on for over 5 hours! It got pretty boring.
On Monday night we climbed Mt. Daimonji,
Tuesday night we went to karaoke, where Dean sang ridiculously intense Korean songs and we busted out some of our Zumbyes dance moves,
Then on Wednesday we went with Hayao’s seminar classmates on tours of the nearby beer and Suntory whiskey factories.
The train ends up costing about ¥1000 round trip, but in addition to the educational value of seeing the production system, you get lots of high quality alcohol and snacks for free. Sweet deal.
That night, we had another movie night, where we also made takoyaki. The other events were a bit of a struggle to get people to participate (although in the end we managed to get at least two others to come each time), but for movie night there were more than 10 people all hanging out and having a good time. Unfortunately, Dean was being murdered by the mosquitoes, so he had to bail out halfway through. It’s now the middle of the rainy season and definitely into summer mode, including being humid and having lots of evil mosquitoes and all kinds of insects everywhere, including in the dorm. Somehow, though, despite being the rainy season it barely rained once the whole week Dean was here!
Actually, Dean went on the beer factory tour without me in the morning, because I had an appointment to call Professor Steven Brown in Canada about the possibility of doing research with him. The more I find out the cooler it sounds and the less likely it seems that I’ll be able to find anything else very related to the research I want to do. Fortunately, it turns out even if I wanted to do a Ph.D. I would have to start with a two-year Masters, so if I try it and it doesn’t work out quite as well as I’d like I’d be able to leave after two years with a Masters in Psychology. The drawbacks are that it’s in Canada and that I would have to start next September and couldn’t delay until Sep 2010.
All this thinking about graduate school made me realize I still need to do a lot more research about the possibilities and the way the system works, and if I do want to apply for 2009 I’ll have to start taking GREs and getting letters of recommendation pretty soon. Well, good thing I have all this time on my hands.
That’s been mostly all I’ve been doing. I haven’t had a chance to practice any utai since the performance on Sunday, and only fit in a little koto and shamisen practice. Yesterday I had my only shamisen/koto lesson for June, and my teacher gave me a new long piece for both instruments. Now I have about a month and a half to learn them wel enough to perform them at the recital on August 17th, which I think fingers crossed I’ll now have the time to do.
Oh, that performance might cost quite a lot for me to perform in, which reminds me that I looked at my budget a day or two after Dean arrived and realized I’ve been overspending a bit, particularly in the “research/teaching” category.
I think all the little things on top of my lessons added up, like buying sheet music, accessories, having to buy those tickets I couldn’t sell, plus various basketball/choir fees and parties and buying chocolates and renting movies for my class. I technically have plenty of money to keep going, but I had planned to save 10% of the Fellowship and want to try to stick with that, so I think I might try to start picking up some part time jobs or something. Not to mention the fact that I’ll need to think about how I’m going to earn money after the Fellowship officially finishes…
