osaka aquarium kaiyukan

today i went to the osaka aquarium. the tank in the picture is supposed to be the largest in the world. it holds a lot of fish including a whale shark and a manta ray. amazing to get to see those creatures!

choose me!

a picture of a notebook i picked up for my study of japanese. it says 'and you will be happy' so how could i not buy it?

being a vegetarian is tough when you can't read japanese and almost everything has fish or some seafood product in it. i'm so used to reading ingredient labels on any food i buy, that not being able to do that here is really tough. so i'm learning kana, which is fairly do-able. but kanji is another story. i noticed some kanji that was on both a package of sesame rice crackers and a package of seaweed i bought, so i decided to look it up. to make a long story short, i looked at 1315 kanji symbols before finding the first one of the compound i wanted to look up, then i looked at another 56 compounds before finding the right one. the mystery words? domestic product. not as exciting as i had hoped.

fishies!

i took this picture in malaysia with my snazzy underwater digital camera. i wish i had gotten to take more underwater pictures.