ShabuShabu - all you can eat pork

Weather: Typhoon
mood: relieved

Today I went with the other co-ops to have some all you can eat Shabushabu in the Daiei outside Shioiri station. Aside from the pork, I really enjoyed the AYCE icecream and drinks. They had a wide variety - milk tea, melon soda, calpis soda, green tea icecream, vanilla, melon, chocolate, strawberry. Of course I couldn't try them all... One thing I was surprised at was females are charged 100 yen less than guys. That is, 1580 yen for girls/women and 1680 for the guys. I really don't have anything to say about this, but it's beneficial for me I guess! haha. I'm gaining a bit of weight for sure though. I've been binge eating all of the different types of Japan junk foods ever since I arrived here. There's just so much variety and I don't really get this type of freedom when I'm at home. It's really difficult to restrain myself when I have to go to the grocery store to buy my vegetables fresh every week!!

As for work, I got up extra early to finish implementing the practice portion of my program for the experiments in the afternoon. I was stressing over it last night wondering if I had enough time to finish it. It turned out great, and the two subjects that showed up (one had a meeting and the other pulled a no-show) came and finished the experiment with no problems. One point that was for sure inevitable was that the task was tedious, repetitive and boring. Haha.. as is with most experiments. My questionnaire was all in english and my subjects spoke mostly Japanese... and my english was probably not the easiest to understand so I was trying to explain it in more simpler terms too. I think if I have time tomorrow, I'll try to translate it into Japanese or something bahah. But then again there's a lot of manual data analyzing and sorting.... I rarely rant about work so there you have it. Not very interesting but I'm going to Wakkani, a city in the most northern tip of Hokkaido in Japan!! I'm really excited but I'll probably be really nervous as well since it'll be my first time presenting to a whole bunch of really smart researchers ( my supervisor told me..)

Getting late, heading to bed, good night!

Garbage, Farewells, Heat, New weekends

Garbage:

It drives me crazy. It's just so much separating the garbage :( and I feel guilty for not doing it properly. Just recently I found the schedule for the types of garbage collected everyday...  Oh well. I don't have much garbage anyways.

Farewells:
There has been big changes in our company this July... change in directors, half the people on our floor moved to different floors... and new people have moved in... currently I'm being very stubborn about it, depressed that my fave co-workers are going to the third floor and I won't be able to talk to them as often as I would have if they were still sitting across from me.. I've only known them for 1 month, but they've been the most enthusiastic, kind people I've ever met! The ones that talked to me the most actually.. Anyways I know it wont be the same anymore but I'm sure the new group members will be great as well... Yesterday, we had a farewell party at a chinese restaurant. One thing I realized about japanese people is that they like their gyoza and fried things. lol.

Heat:
Tsuyu, "raining season" in Japan, apparently from the month of June till mid July, was not what I expected. I barely rained, and it's never cold. Wow lol. Always humid. I was silly to think that Japan rainy season would be the same as vancouver rain. I swear it only rained like... maybe I dont know but never three days in a row or something. It just rained really hard for the whole night and the next day it would be super humid... Right now it's ..  really hot. :S I don't remember feeling such heat in such a long time... my advil and other food things are melting Noooooo...

New weekends:
Sooo, in efforts to reduce energy consumption, we're going to start having our weekends on wednesdays and thursdays instead of Saturday, and sunday. I'm not sure how I will survive this. I'll probably forget one of these days and go to work on wednesday or thur and realize when i get to work.. Fail. This will go on till the end of september gahh.

Tomorrow I'm going for a BBQ party at a park just outside my dormitory, and then a cooking party right after. We're going to make pasta and tiramisu, STOKED!

Ikebukuro, supervisor's place, life. 1 month anniversary in Japan lol

Weather: humid and hot

Well, days are moving along. Really quickly. I don't know where the time goes. I'm wondering if I'm being productive at work... Everything's a blur @_@. After I get back from japanese lessons, work or some event after work, I'm pooped, make dinner, pig out, internet, shower, and that's it! Weekends I go out but they go by really quickly too. :( I've been here for a month now, wahoo, it's my 1 month anniversary with Japan commemorating our first meeting. :)


It's what happens when I leave my blog for a while, I forget what I want to say. It's probably not too interesting anyways. Ikebukuro. Not bad. It's called Sunshine city but unforutnately it was raining that day. Still okay. We went up Sunshine 60, a building that has 60 levels. I loved the elevator ride up to the top floor. It was like we were in some mini planetarium! moving at... 600m/s or something like that @_@ forgot. Walked around, did some sightseeing. We also went to Namjatown, an amusement part in a shopping center. It was amazing. I could spend the whole day there ( i think) There's a lot to see and do especially if you speak japanese, there's all these areas you can go to and solve some puzzle... Saw some people going around to stations and doing other various activities. Went into this haunted house for 600 yen. Not sure if it was worth it but it was a new experience anyhow. Different from the type of haunted houses you see in Fright night. You go around with this scary skull like thing, take pictures at stations and you walk through dark hallways... Things pop up at you.. Much less scarier than the ones at fright night actually. XD There was also this area for desserts and another area with GYOZA tons and tons of gyoza everywhere. Apparently that's where all the top gyoza chefs make their gyoza. haha pretty neat. Both Namjatown and Sunshine 60 is a good place for couples to hang out ;). We went back to sunshine 60 at night to see the night view and there were soo many couples. We even spotted a couple making out on one of the couches with heart pillows... Moving on..
At night we were hungry, the guys wanted to check out an izakaya, found one we wanted to go, waited 40 min but they didn't give us a table (while the other people did, was it because our group was big? but stilll!) We left pissed and found a nice okonmiyaki place nearby. The waitress was kind and we had free vanilla icecream :D.

On sunday I was invited to my supervisor's place. His wife made us some good food and I learned how to play a popular game called Hanafuda. My supervisor remembered how much I loved matcha so he even got matcha warabi for us all to eat. How kind. Too kind. How can I repay him :( Oh good thing i bought that ice wine from the liquor store downtown before I arrived. They really liked the ice wine. The bottle was wayy too small though. There were 6 of us and all of us only had like... two gulps of it. eh.

The end. I feel exhausted. I didn't have a good sleep last night, couldn't fall asleep and slept around 2 ish... woke up at 5:30am thinking it was 5:30PM.. I was like "omg f** I missed a whole days of work" I think this is a symptom of post traumatic stress disorder from sleeping in and being 2 hrs late for work two weeks ago...

I was going to add photos but blogspot wont let me. Oh well. I guess I'll have to live with a chunk of text.