I went to another Urawa Reds game, but this time sat in the 6th row. It was awesome. We were so close to the field! Reds beat their prefecture rival 6-2.

I also saw went to my host brother's game, he scored 2 goals. yay!

Other than watching soccer I spent the weekend writing 15 pages worth of final papers, yay, fun.

One of my Japanese sensei told us some amusing stories about Japanese difficulty with English pronunciation:

While visiting an elementary school in the US, she asked the kids to clap their hands, but it came out "please crap your hands!"

When a friend called her as she sat around her house and what she was doing, she responded: "shitting on the couch."

Amusing.

Kabuki

We had a field trip to see Kabuki yesterday. It was a special program for students to be learn about the traditional form of theater, so it started with an introduction to teach everyone a little bit about Kabuki and it's origins. This also meant that the theater was filled with hundreds of high school kids. We had special receivers to get English explanations in our headphones. After the introduction, they performed a play. It was really cool. The sets and costumes were amazing. The narration was crazy. There are guys that sit in the corner of the stage, some have instruments and some have scripts. The narrators spoke in such a strange, singsongy way that even Japanese people wouldn't understand so there were screens with subtitles in Japanese. I could read some of it along with what they were saying and sometimes one sound would last 5-10 seconds with several pitch changes and flourishes. It reminded me of in Finding Nemo when Dori speaks whale. This was one of my favorite things I've done so far.

I got 146 lines in Tetris. I'm getting much better.

This is a link to our Happyokai film. Our Japanese narration isn't provided but I thought you might want to at least the silent movie part. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFVbHtQ9oAI

JSP is over in 2 weeks! Time flies when you're having fun.

I'll be putting a lot of new pictures up soon, so take a look. Pictures from Asakusa, Yaskuni Shrine, Yokohama and the Ramen Museum.

I stayed up all night to watch the Champions League final last week which turned out to be not as exciting as I'd hoped, but I won $5.

I went to Yokohama again yesterday. This time I went Chinatown and The Ramen Museum.

Chinatown was pretty cool, LOTS of food everywhere. I had a pork bun, which was HUGE and delicious. Otherwise, it was just like the one in LA or San Francisco, but bigger.

The Ramen Museum was pretty much amazing. The museum part was not that interesting, mostly because it was in all Japanese so I got nothing out of it. The food area though, was something completely different. It's a replica of Japan in the 50s (it's the first food amusement park in the world). They went around the country to find famous, long established ramen restuarants and got their recipes and opened 9 little "shops" in this museum. So you can go around and pick which famous ramen you want. Each place has the choice of a regular bowl (which is huge) and a mini bowl (which is still lots of food). I got a mini bowl at the first place I went to which was miso ramen with tons of garlic. It was soooo tasty. Then I split a mini of tonkatsu ramen, (which has a pork broth), that too was soooo tasty, yet completely different. It was so hard to choose which kinds to eat.

It's hard to believe that the semester is only three weeks from ending!