Out on the Town!

Hi Evedi bahdi,

I haven't been feeling so well lately, so I've been sleeping instead of blogging. Now whatever I have has reduced to merely a bad cough, so hopefully I won't be getting dizzy like I was almost every day this past week. This post will be like a catchup of everything that's happened.

On Wednesday I gave Mrs. Bing a tour of Doshisha. Philippe, 3 Japanese students (Atsushi, Ami, and Mariko), and I were briefed about an hour before starting and given even less time to learn actual stuff about the school. We went online and looked up facts about the places we would show Mrs. Bing. I started to feel dizzy and really tired then, but I made it through the tour okay, and afterwards I fell asleep right in the middle of everybody in the SCTI library.

On Thursday I was doing okay until the afternoon, when I got dizzy again, so I left school early, skipping my Modernizing Women in Japan class.

On Friday I felt really crabby and stressed because being sick had gotten me behind in school and life, I had been out of touch w/ my family, and my computer failed me when I needed to send videos to my Disney project partner, so my sanity snapped in electronics class and I started crying in front of everyone. Really embarrassing, but I finally got to de-stress after classes were over. Melinda, Amita, Xue, and I went to Kyoto Station, which is gigantic and very megatropolitan-looking:



We went to a huge multistory electronics store called Bic Camera, which was like heaven for us since we shared a Bic points card, which gave us major discounts on super-cool stuff you can't get in America.

Also on Friday, I found out that I made the DISNEY IMAGINATIONS FINALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!



For those of you who don't know, I've been working on my contest entry with my partner Kay (who's also my cousin's cousin's cousin), since last summer. It's been a lot of work, and a lot of school-sacrificing, so it's great to know that it's paying off somewhat! As a finalist, I get to spend 10 days at the Imagineering headquarters in Glendale, where we'll present our idea, and I'm so excited to go! This will be happening in early June, and I'll have to miss a lot of classes to do it, but I've cleared it with our program director, so it should work out okay.

On Saturday I went shopping in Tera-machi for shoes and found that all the shoes in Japan are too small for me =(, which sucks because I like the shoes here a lot more than the ones in the U.S. My feet are like 8.5-9.5 in the U.S, so I was really surprised. After failing at shopping, I ate Kansai-style okonomiyaki (Japanese pizza-pancakes) with Myles.


Today (Sunday), my host mom took me to Chikurin Bamboo Park, which is like a garden/park where almost every plant is a type of bamboo. I didn't even know there were different types of bamboo! Like in this photo...

All that stuff that looks like green bushes and grass are actually small bamboo. Here's another interesting type I've never seen before...

...And according to the museum exhibit, Edison's first working lightbulb was made from the filament of a Japanese bamboo species!

We also went shopping for food, where I made a fool of myself by dropping a bread loaf from a tray onto the floor and couldn't remember how to apologize quickly enough. My host mom told them I was American...I wonder if that's an accepted explanation of stupidity? =(