Photos from Japan.

I've put together a collection of photos from the first week. These are mainly random shots of things I found beautiful, amusing, or intriguing during my walks and commutes. There are a number of images from the trip to Shinjuku Park that the school took us on yesterday, including shots of me and other classmates participating in Egg Races. There are also some shots of my room and of my little brother, Jeffrey.

Check it out here. FYI: Click on the first photo in the set to scroll through individual photos and read my explanations. If you watch them as a slideshow the descriptions don't show up.

In other news, I found out the other day that the Goto Art Museum, which owns some of the 12th century Tale of Genji Scrolls, will be showing those scrolls - as it does once a year - during a single week in late April. So I am very excited about the prospect of seeing these astonishing works. Seeing these scrolls, as slides in my art history course on Japanese art, is what made me want to devote myself to the study of this culture in the first place. Seeing them in real life will be like living a fantasy.

Walking in Yamato.

Woke up around six this morning, after sleeping very poorly. There were wind and rain storms all the night, the like of which I have rarely seen. But the storms played themselves out in the night and by wake up time it was a beautiful day. I chatted with my mother and spent time going over vocabulary words from the previous week's classes. There's a ton of vocabulary that I just do not have. I guess my university program focused on grammar and left most of the vocabulary out. I regularly encounter words that never, ever came up as a topic of discussion in class or on any of the tests I took. [shrug]. That's my bad luck. I'm making it up as best as I can.

Around noon I went downstairs to join the family, where Fujiko-san was making pancakes for breakfast. I wolfed a small meal and headed out the door, determined to see a bit of the city on such a lovely afternoon. Coming out to the main drag, I turned away from the train station and started walking. Pretty soon I began to see signs for a park, so I followed those and quickly found myself at Hikichidai Park - a largish green space in the north part of the city.

It was quite gorgeous there, lots of pines, maples, cherry trees, and hundreds upon hundreds of pansies planted about in ranged plots. There were blues, yellows, magentas... every color under the rainbow. My Grammy loved pansies. She would have loved this park. Sitting there, among them, I was able to think of her fondly - which was very comforting. It felt as though some of the poison was draining out of me at last.

I spent perhaps an hour in the park, and then ran over to the local supermarket to pick up some sundries. I needed essay paper and some razors (which I had forgotten to pack of all things), both of which I found. Then I wandered the aisles, getting a sense of what was the same and what was different. At the end of my trip I picked up a package of sushi for lunch - nine tekka maki rolls for $2.25 US. And it was way yummy and fresh. How unbelievably cool is that? There was an amusing wasabi warning on the package that I took a snapshot of. I guess Americans aren't the only ones who underestimate the powerful paste.