yikes

when i updated my blogger account to be google account compliant it changed everything to japanese! good thing my sorting through everything being in japanese skills are pretty well honed and i was able to switch everything back to english. whew. too smart for your own good blogger!

Hiroshima

last week i went to hiroshima to see the sights. it was a great trip. gethiroshima.com was very useful for finding restaurants and put out a very useful map that i picked up at the JR station to help me navigate around the city. it was so useful it made me wish kobe had a similar kind of resource. but i guess kobe isn't nearly as touristy so maybe the demand just isn't there.

ehhh

so i moved and didn't have internet at my new apartment. then when i when to renew my domain name the company i went through took my money but didn't renew the domain saying that i had to do it a month before it expired (gimme a break, it's only supposed to take max 48 hours?). so i am once again without a website but thanks to blogger's ease of use i still have my blog.

so uh signing up for internet here in japan was interesting. glad that's behind me.

geeks

a week or two ago the word 'geek' came up in one of my lessons and of course my student asked me what it meant. it's kind of a difficult word to explain really. but she got it and was like 'like in densha otoko?' and i was like 'huh?' so she told me it was a movie. about geeks. apparently. so i finally watched it last night, and it was really cute and i quite liked it. imagine my surprise when today i come accross this book review and find out that densha otoko is more than just a cute movie. it's based on a true story of an exchange in a chatroom and has been made into a movie, tv series, book, and manga, AND translated into english. crazy! so now i'm reading through a version of the original chat logs that have been translated into english. it's actually kind of amusing reading the transcripts knowing that they are to become something of a sensation.

Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge

this bridge is the world's longest suspension bridge. a few weeks ago we went to check it out and were lucky enough to get there as the sun was setting. definitely an impressive sight.

riding stable in japan

we went for a walk in a big park (hittori?) in suita where they had this riding stable. of course i wanted to take a look because i am always curious about how horses are kept in different places. it was so interesting that everyone was wearing breeches and tall boots! even the people just watching the horse being lunged. they had a lot of lungeing rings set up, and i also didn't see any turnout space. makes me wonder if there is a corrolation between the two. unfortunately we didn't walk right into the stables because there were all kinds of signs in red kanji on a gate leading to the stable and i couldn't help but guess it meant no intruders. too bad coz it would have been interesting to see. especially since we could hear that they were playing classical music over speakers in the stable...

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!