I am Still Alive, and to Prove it, here's a Ridiculously Long Post About Life

SORRY! I have not abandoned all of you fine people at home. I do indeed remember that I need to write things and post them in order for people to know what's going on! My deepest and humblest apologies.
Now, back to talking about what's interesting:

Halloween passed with little fanfare here in Japan. There was one girl who came in all week in a witch hat, and some people had candy on the 31st, but there was no trick-or-treating or jack o'lanturns. I was rather sad about that. The ECR (English Conversation Room), which is run by the three non-Japanese English teachers had a little "party" which I went to:

There were games like sticking your hand into a box and feeling "eyeballs" and "brains" and "dirty diapers" (which were diapers with melted chocolate in them...surprisingly gross feeling; memory; mystery food and the like. And that pretty much sums up the Halloween festivities...or lack thereof.

So on Sunday I went to Shinjuku, one of the shopping and nightlife (not that we went for that, of course) districts of Tokyo, which is only an hour away by the humble train. I went with another AFS exchange student that I met at orientation, the illustrious Troy Stade (and if you want to see what's going on in HIS life, I highly recommend you check out his blog, HERE! (THIS IS A LINK ^^))

We walked about this large park-thing, went into some stores (I bought a birthday present for one of the friends I made here) ate some crepes, took purikura, took pictures of buildings. It was refreshing to finally get to play the unabashed tourist.

You'd better be scared of us!

Tuesday was a half day of school, because in the afternoon the entire student body was going to see some cultural demonstraion of traditional Chinese, Korean and Mongolian dance and music. But in the morning, something hilarious happened (some of you might already have read this on facebook, but anyhow).

One of my English teachers had the class introduce something (school, themselves, Japan, food etc.) as an English writing assignment. Then during class while everyone was working on these exercises she gave me the stack to read. Grammar...questionable, but ultimately I understood everyone. However, here are the three pages that one girl wrote (you should be able to read them if you click on them to make them bigger). I hope you laugh as much as I did:

Page 1, all normal

Page 2, getting funny here...

Page 3, SMOSTH MOVEMENT! "It is smooth that I have a movement..."

I just sat there silently laughing and finally the teacher came up and asked me if I was ok. Aparently it looked like I was having a seizure.

So we had a three-class period day (easy for me: English-Japanese-English) and then we ate lunch before walking with our obnoxiously heavy bags for 20 minutes to get to the auditorium where the event would be held. I actually really like traditional music, so here's a small sampling (and ignore the video quality, I was in the very last row)

Mongolian music.

Korean fan dance.

After the event was over, I then had a 45 minute walk from the theater to the train station...fun times.

Then today I missed school because I had to go get my blood drawn for my 3-month labs. So my host mom drove me the 1.5 hours to the hospital, got my blood drawn, met with a doctor (everything is good, I'm healthy) and then drove back. We ate lunch at this restaurant:

Which is named after one of the men who was at the air base that's 10 minutes from my house. (Yes, it's annoyingly loud...you'll just be sitting and then an airplane goes by. And supposedly there's an air show tomorrow so our area is going to be obnoxiously crowded.) I ate a "Johnson burger" which was delicious, and then some cake. I'm very full now.

I hope this has reassured you that I'm still alive and haven't forgotten about you guys! Now that this is done, I'm going to go fold the laundry and then write some more of my Nanowrimo story...day 2/30!