Sue Donym and DeNymrods

I'm afraid this may be something of a dull entry, as au have seen fit to make me pay to have my photos transferred conveniently between phone and computer, and so I must now attempt the arduous process of putting each file onto the SD card and taking them across myself. I have never successfully done this before: it takes several hours for each file.

Wonders of modern technology, what a joke.

Plus I'm ill.

Where did we leave off? No matter, I'll just start with the earliest interesting thing I can think of.

On Saturday, being full of the spirit of TGIF, Mark, Angela, Ben, Stephanie and I all met up in distant Mukaijima for a cook-off. Everyone made a dish whilst there; Angela made a salad, Stephanie a spagetti dish, Mark cooked some fish and Ben was late and so didn't make anything. Can't blame him, though, he was on a noble quest to get his friend a preordered ticket for the Nanoha movie.

I made mash.

But what mash it was!

It had vegetables in it and everything.

We were whiling away the hours at Mukaijima for quite some time, for it was a very nice place. Pity it's so far away, really. Also played a couple of games of Gundam War against Mark and Ben. Mark was finally able to defeat the forces of Zeon, as I knew he would some day, yet was defeated by Ben, who was then put in his place by me, and thus the cycle continued.

There was a lot of interesting stuff happening, so I'm sorry if I miss some stuff out.

Sunday was Aaren's visit to sunny Kyoto. Hah, 'sunny' Kyoto. That makes me laugh even now. It rained the whole time. Stupid, stupid climate! Regardless, Aaren took us Fushimi Inari, which he had visited some years back, which was really interesting. It's the shrine with the 1,000 gates, for those that know it, and we walked most of it. There are some great pictures, honest... There were also some very cute cats, but in Japanese tradition were all very shy. Except this one cat, and that was somehow worse, as I actually felt bad about stroking it in its apathy. After that it was off to Teramachi (that blessed covered shopping street) where we had lunch at First Kitchen.

Never been there before, but I'll be going back. The fish burger was easily a dreary third behind the mighty Mos Burger andMcDonalds, but the chips!

Oh, the chips!

50 different flavours to choose from, no joke. The cheese chips were spec-flipping-tacular, as were Mark and Aaren's BBQ chips, and that was easily enough to dry our spirits.

Next was SofMap, where I decided I needed to get a new iPod at some point to replace the senile figure of my current Shuffle. In the however-many years I've had him, his capacity has dropped from an astronomical 520MB to a frankly microscopic 485MB, and it does show. No, it really does. Plus, he forgets which songs in the playlist he's already played so will loop certain songs indefiniately until you put him out of his misery. Got my eyes on a nano, going for 14,500 yen, the same price as a PS2 (Doshisha Eve fast approaches), but there's no rush.

Namco Wonder tower next, where I was pretty much forced to play Gundam: Kizuna*. And I'm glad I did! 6 suits taken out over the course of the two games, and not one death. That was enough to not only double my overall score, earn me 2 new titles and a Rick Dom, but also pushed me into the A-Rank weight category, where I am sure to be blasted to pieces more times that I care to think about. Then we had a Tekken 6 spurt, where I met the wrath of a girl with pink hair who turned out to be a robot with rocket wings and chainsaw hands and explosive limbs.

(*This is a lie.)

Phew.

Now for Tuesday, which was Culture Day and so a day off. The cook-off crew decided to go to not-too-distant Nara, a cultural place if ever there was one, famous for giant wooden temples and deer. And what a place! Despite getting lost on the way to the park (which covers almost half the city...) we saw deer enough to last a lifetime. And the funny things would eat right of your hand! Again, there are pictures. They're simply everywhere, and not that fussed about getting stroked. Also, and I'm not sure how this came about, a lot of them have learnt to bow to accept food. They were bowing! It was fantastic!

Oh, and Todaiji was quite good too, even though we missed the opening times and couldn't see the inside. But Steph and Angela bought a Dragonball for my birthday, so all was well. But seriously, so tired after that.

Probably a precursor for today's disease, that fatigue. Also, today came with a nasty surprise: they'd switched the order of the next kanji and grammar tests, which meant the grammar test I'd spent ages revising for is now on Monday, and the kanji test I frankly neglected is tomorrow. Load. of. rubbish.

Also forgot to but the washing in.

Urgh.

And on that note, Letter Corner.

Today's letter comes from Weezy back in Leicester, who asks: "What happened to the Japanese translations of your posts?"

Yeah, thanks for reminding me.

I'm pretty sure I covered this in a previous post, but writing in Japanese is by no means easy, and by the time I've thought up everything I've lost the inclination to write it all again. It takes forever. But just for you, I've decided to add a short bit of Japanese at the end of each post from now on, something I didn't mention before, so you have something to practise your reading on.

Hope that's sufficient, it's all you're getting.

Thanks for reading.

***

高田先生、聞こえるか？テストの日を変えることは楽しいか？サープライズテストも好きか？
じゃ、教えさせて：
留学生はこのものが大嫌いだ！！
それも、お前が大嫌い！！
高田先生、アホウ！！
以上！


Actually, I quite enjoyed that.