Day 15 (T)

After class we had a class meeting, where they made count of how many people planning to go on the Kyoto excursion this weekend. After the meeting Azuma-sensei tried to help Ani out with her hip stuff, tried calling the insurance company (but their Japan number was NO GOOD!), took her to the clinic where they told her basically to wait and see if it gets worse. Whoopee do. She’ll try not to walk much.

After that, we had our Shodo lesson! Shodo is Japanese calligraphy, literally (書道) ‘the way of writing’. We got our own writing area at a desk covered with a felt-like cover for spills (shitajiki), many sheets of nice paper (hanshi), a weight for the paper (bunchin), a fude (brush), a suzuri (inkstone), and a stick of pretty black ink (sumi). 

The Shodo teacher (whose name I unfortunately can’t remember) showed us stroke order and gave examples, showing us calligraphy. He had us draw some simple kanji, gave us suggestions, then we drew whatever we wanted. Not that we learned much, but it was a lot of fun trying to draw the kanji in a nice calligraphic way. 

After the lesson (or playtime) he gave us neat-looking calligraphy/picture pieces. 

The next thing we did was to go to an English club meeting. There were roughly 11 Japanese students + Beniko-sensei, then us 3 and Dwight went to talk with them. First we did basic introductions, then we played ‘Who Am I?’ (which we taught to them). They were very shy and most didn’t speak at all, but it was fun and we were welcomed to come next week (which we shall!). So we are finally socializing :)

A day too busy to eat, we finally were rewarded after we went to the store and bought makings for curry & rice. The curry was delicious. Eggplant + daikon (radish) + carrots + meat = yummy curry. The rice is expensive but really yummy.

Also we found the choco-cone things. We ate from both ends at once :)