Shopping

I did the traditional Japanese sport of shopping this weekend,I really needed to get some stuff for my apartment. Visualize the most Asian looking flowery curtains you can conjure, tatami mats, and a ratty brown and orange futon- this is my apartment. I love it, but it does need some work. I went to the mall a few blocks away and found some great stuff at this big department store called Daimeru, the 100 yen shop, and the Japanese version of Walmart known as Nishimuta. Shopping is probably my favorite thing to do right now because everything is totally unusual. I knocked over a big stack off air fresheners at one store today and the lady apologized to me for ME knocking them over. Japanese people are really apologetic, as soon as you walk into any store they welcome you and then apologize. When I was at Nishimuta earlier some lady apologized to me just because I walked by her and made eye contact. It has been a pretty quiet week so far. Yesterday our school took all of our kids to a waterfall and gorge about a half hour out of town in the mountains. It was really beautiful out there but I had to carry around my student Bunta who was crying the whole time. Its a good thing I love him. They kids picked acorns, ate tons of sugar, then we had to leave because it started raining.I think I am going to suck it up and buy a nice bike so I can bike to places like the gorge on the weekend. I finally got around to joining the gym here yesterday. I went running for the first time in three weeks or so and it felt amazing. The only thing that concerns me is that the gym doesn't have air conditioning and it can get really hot here in the summer. I'll deal with it somehow. Get an eyeful of what 15 dollar grapes look like on my flickr page. Click on it to the left. AND, while I'm on the topic of complaining I would like to confront the Japanese with the ridiculousness of their whole counting methodology. A few years back I learned how to count in Japanese numbers 1-100. This was difficult enough and took me quite awhile to learn, and then as soon as I learned it- I quickly forgot it. Now being in Japan, I am reminded that in addition to the standard 1-100 numbers they also have different words to count people, small animals, big animals, inanimate objects, long thin objects etc. This is a bunch of crap. Check it out for yourself: http://www.learn-japanese.info/Counters.html