So, how about an update from Indiana? Sorry I never got the rest of the China pictures put up. It kept giving me problems, and I had to switch focus towards other activities, and then I completely forgot about it. I never even made my "food" post from China, did I? I'll just make a few quick lists right now:

What I really liked:
--the little black mushrooms
--just about any kind of mushrooms
--balls of minced shrimp cooked in hot pots
--any jiaozi--duh! (dumpling/gyoza)
--meat baozi (steamed buns)
--food from street vendors
--lots of different vegetable dishes
--mangosteen fruit
--the tri-colored rice
--some kind of rice dish which looked like scalloped potatos
--anything with bamboo!

What I didn't mind:
--the whole little octopi
--fish eyes
--Beijing Duck
--roasted pieces of garlic
--skewered lamb
--snails
--dragon's eyes fruit
--lots of tea
--watermelon juice
--Ritz crackers with very sweet cream
--bull's lungs
--kidneys
--the airplane food served domestically

What I didn't like:
--the one-inch chili pepper
--duck tongues
--all duck except Beijing Duck
--vegetable baozi (they were bitter)
--the noodles at the ABC restaurant (they were small and seasoned weird)

What I passed on trying:
--stinky tofu
--chicken feet

That's all I can remember at the moment. We ate many, many, many different kinds of dishes at almost every meal, I really can't remember them all. These are just the ones which stick out most in my memory. Certainly, a lot of the foods listed here were from fancy restaurants, but a lot of the foods I really enjoyed were very cheap. In China, I know I could eat on less than $1 a day if I needed to.

So, continuing the update from here in Indiana, it's finally looking a bit more like spring. I haven't been taking my coat with me everywhere the last few days (who knows how long that will last?). The campus smells pretty, because the thousands of hundreds of daffodils by the chapel are easy to smell when the wind is right, and the magnolia trees are in full bloom.

Tonight I met a raccoon right outside my dorm. I had never seen one on campus, much less seen one so close up (I didn't notice it until I was about ten feet away). It was cute, and much bigger than the usual squirrels or rabbits.

I've also taken the time to write e-mails to almost all of my pen pals (e-pals?) in China and Japan. I'm in contact with a few students I talked to while doing research in China, and we mostly use English, but I've started using more Chinese in them. Pretty much all of my e-mails to Japanese friends are in Japanese (this includes women from Aichi, Gaidai friends, friends the Japanese high school I attended for a week in 2007, and my host mother. Ack, I should send a message to Chikaoka-san, too!). I still have not sent anything to Yoh-san, but I've been wanting to do that.

Trying to keep up contact with a bunch of people, especially when most of the e-mails can only be written from either my computer or computers in the language lab, can be time consuming. This reminds me why I fell through my lang-8 practice, or my kanji flash cards. My goal for this summer is to keep up my old kanji-learning (and reviewing!) practices... I'm still in that first book of Jouyou kanji I started using to learn hiragana almost five years ago! I've already learned a lot of the later characters from Yookoso or Gaidai or wherever else, but I'm only on #479 out of 778 in this book. I have the second book as well, which has the other 1,167 commonly used characters. I figured I've still got several years of kanji ahead of me.

I've also been watching Condor Hero in Mandarin all semester hoping that it would improve my listening comprehension or help me to think more in Chinese. It's been surprisingly effective! So the question is, right now would I rather watch another episode of Condor Hero or study more kanji? Hmmm...

The last of the three basic "what I did" entries. After this I'll have a couple entries about random stuff I noticed. I've been having trouble uploading photos for the last few days so I went ahead and just posted this without them, but they'll be up at some point.

( It's just text this time. Lots of it. )

I shall still continue updating with a few more entries, so as to post the photos meant to be in this entry, and mention some random things I noticed and to talk a bit more about the food.

I think this entry will have more pictures than any other China-entry.

( 36, in fact. )

We got back to Hangzhou and went back to Xizi Hotel. And since it's already taken me a couple hours to type up this entry, I'll stop there for today's entry.

So I guess I'll start with just going over the itinerary for the first few days (Feb. 28-Mar. 3).

( Pictures included! )

The following day was when we left for our three-day trip to Nanjing and Changchun, which I'll talk about in the next entry.

Yes, I'm alive and well, and back from China. I didn't post anything there because there was a Great Fire Wall to deal with, and I didn't have much computer time to begin with. You can expected some updates very soon, since it was very interesting ten day trip. Yes, photos will be included.

But first, I have things to say about Japan. Random, huh? Being in China just went to show (even more) how attached I am to Japan. During the first several days, I kept finding myself saying things "in Japan, they do it like this" or "hmm, this is bigger than it is in Japan" or "this is so much easier in Japan!" or the like. Given that it's the only other Asian country I've been to it was to be expected that I would make comparisons, though it's really much easier to contrast the two places. Not that I was expecting it to be much like Japan in the first place, I know better than that.

The last couple days really seemed to swing more towards my interest in Japan, though. I had been asking Chinese students questions about China and Japan's relationship the whole time and had some students try out some very basic Japanese with me, but it wasn't until I went to the night market on my last night in Hangzhou (the second to last night of the entire trip) that I wound up using so much of it. I spent more of my time embracing the China experience and using Chinese instead of dwelling on Japan. The night market experience will probably be worth an entire entry on its own, but what I'll note here is that a couple of the younger girls I bought some jewelry from were very eager to ask me some questions about myself after we finished bargaining. Out of no where, one announced that she and her sister spoke Japanese.

As you can imagine, the three of us got very excited when I replied in Japanese that I also spoke Japanese and that I had been studying there. They immediately motioned for me to crawl under the table to sit and talk for a while. Instead of shopping like I intended to, I spent about forty minutes talking in non-stop Japanese with Yoh-san (to use her Japanese name, with romanization which should look appropriate to non-Japanese speakers). We hit it off so well, in fact, that we spent several hours the next morning together, speaking mostly Japanese, except for a couple English and Chinese phrases here and there. We talked about ourselves, our families, America and China, but mostly about Japan. We even share an affinity for the Heian era and classical Asian culture.

Yoh-san has not been to Japan, but her Japanese was better than mine. Or rather, I'd like to think that my Japanese was that good a couple months ago. I already feel like I've lost a lot in just these two months since I've returned to America, and it's scary. We were discussing social issues in Japan, and it was so vexing to not remember how to say things like "aging population". I remember using those words so many times in my class discussions just last October, but the words were gone! I was even having trouble staying in masu-tai... it's just so startling to suddenly watch my speaking ability disappear. Just a short time ago, I had such better grammar and vocabulary.

It did feel really good to spend a few hours in Japanese, though. It felt really good. I'll probably post more about Yoh-san later; I'm very happy that I met her. We hope to meet up again some day (in Japan, of course). I was energized by this, so I was thrilled when Prof. Lin told us that the last group of college students we'd be talking to was full of Chinese and Japanese language majors, so I should introduce myself in Japanese. As it turned out, I was only able to stay for ten minutes or so conducting a survey in Japanese with one of the Japanese majors (a few of us had to leave early to go to the last high school), but I was still eager to keep using Japanese.

When we fly to China, we went up through Canada, a part of the Arctic Circle, and then down through Siberia, but on the way back (the day after using so much Japanese), we spent about an hour and a half flying over Japan, from about Kyuushuu to Tokyo. I was pretty much glued to the window with a big smile that whole time. I had been to so many of those cities! It was at night, but I'll bet that I would have had a good view of Fuji-san if it had been during the day.

So, yes, I enjoyed China a lot, but Japan is still where more of my heart is. The following entries will be more so about China.

I will be leaving for my 10-day China trip on February 28. A little more than two months after coming home from Japan (and having some really bad reentry shock, which I'm thankfully mostly recovered from), I will heading back to Asia, and it sounds wonderful!

...Except that I don't have much of an itinerary yet, so, I'm not exactly sure what to expect. For now I know that I will be flying into Shanghai, sleeping in Hangzhou, visiting Nanjing at some point, and spending most of my time giving surveys at colleges. Because this is a research trip, the goal of the trip has to be kept a priority. My partner and I will be interviewing people about the relationship between China and Japan, although Mingan might have to do more of the speaking. Still, he's teaching me helpful phrases to use while interviewing Chinese people, and I'll make sure to use them.

Whatever time I will have for sightseeing, though, you can bet I'll use it and take lots of pictures! Hangzhou has a lot of historic architecture around West Lake, and Nanjing has the museum for the old imperial examinations... am I too much of a dork for feeling really excited to have the chance to learn more about people slaving away taking exams for days on end?

I was told we would have internet access from the hotel, so I will make an effort to post if I have time. I will have to spent most of my time on the computer typing up observations and notes for my research, and I might need to leave more of the trip summaries and photo-posting for after I get back to the United States. Like I said, I don't know the schedule of the trip yet.

I don't even know what season it will be in Shanghai at that time! Will anything be blooming? I don't know, it might be too early still.

I apologize for not detailing my trip to Tokyo until so late. It was a month ago, but now that I've had time to settle back into America and, more importantly, Valpo, it's time I go back and add this. There was some harsh reentry shock, but I think I'm pretty much over it now.

I'll start this by just copying and pasting what I wrote from the hostel on December 19, 2008:

This is post to let you all know I'm safely in Tokyo. I finished my finals yesterday, went straight from those to Kuzuha station to meet Reize and Okaasan for dinner and then say good bye (Reize had no problem whatsoever saying goodbye, which surprised me), then I hung out at a fancy coffee shop at the mall a friend of mine works at until my bus came. I road the bus all night and slept minimally, then got off at Shinjuku station around 6 in the morning and spent two hours carrying three very heavy bags and navigating my way to the hostel. This was all while coughing my guts out.

Yeah, that cough was pretty bad. I would venture to say that it was one of the only really bad things about my trip to Tokyo. I had an amazing amount of fun that day. I thought it would be lonely or even scary all on my, but that was part of what made it nice. I did whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, and I got to be as big of a dork as I wanted, and I got to spend as much time being a dork as I wanted.

Allow me to expand on that a bit. I am an anime fan, if you aren't already aware of that, and over the years my Japanese has improved immensely by actively watching it (as in not just relying on subtitles!). There were many people from Kansai Gaidai who traveled to Tokyo earlier in the semester to go to a giant video game convention, but I wasn't interested in that. Instead, I wanted to visit the places where a few of my old favorites took place. Therefore, the only two places I really wanted to go (having been to some major districts in Tokyo when my aunt and uncle took me to Japan in 2007) were Odaiba and Tokyo Tower. I was already feeling very tired from being sick and having just finished finals and packing, so that's really all I did. And I loved it.

When I got Sakura Hostel (which was very comforting to see, after carrying my things for two hours and then spotting the big pink building) it was too early to check in, but they did allow me to leave my things in storage with my suitcases which had already arrived via takkyubin. I took only my purse and whatever I needed in it, and then went out to find breakfast. I was feeling rather sick at the time, since I was exhausted and was still getting over some side effects from the cough medicine I had been taking earlier in the week. I walked around Asakusa looking for the one thing that sounded good: toast.

( It was then that I started taking pictures. )

On that note, I'm busy back here again Valpo, including staying very busy with Japanese-related activities. I hope not to lose a lot of the Japanese I picked up, but I'm also switching my main focus back to Chinese again, since my Chinese abilities are hardly comparable to my Japanese abilities! It sounds like Prof. Lin will have us very busy on that spring break trip, so I can't say anything certain about being able to post to this journal from China. I will probably post pictures after I return in mid-March.

Besides the surprise chanceto make washi craft and wear a pretty red kimono at Narita airport, it will suffice to say that my long trip home (which got longer and longer and longer and one of my suitcases still is not here) was terrible, and I am currently feeling quite sick.

But I am home safe in Colorado, and I might eventually find a chanceto upload photos from Tokyo and such. I forget to add in that previously very rushed entry that I tried out the fish which eat the dead skin off your feet. Of all places, I found them at an arcade in Odaiba instead of at an onsen.

Also since this is a short entry I will announce that my adventures in Japan might be over for the time being (of course I shall someday go back, I just don't know when), but my adventures in Asia aren't over yet: in March I will spend spring break in China!

This is post to let you all know I'm safely in Tokyo. I finished my finals yesterday, went straight from those to Kuzuha station to meet Reize and Okaasan for dinner and then say good bye (Reize had no problem whatsoever saying goodbye, which surprised me), then I hung out at a fancy coffee shop at the mall a friend of mine works at until my bus came. I road the bus all night and slept minimally, then got off at Shinjuku station around 6 in the morning and spent two hours carrying three very heavy bags and navigating my way to the hostel. This was all while coughing my guts out.

That being said, though, I had a wonderfully satisfying final day here in Tokyo. Once it was just me and my purse I felt much more relaxed and enjoyed Tokyo at my own pace. I settled my stomach down at a nice little coffee shop, then road a nifty boat through Tokyo down to Odaiba (and strangely, met an aquaintance from Hirakata Kyoukai on that boat), then enjoyed myself at the Fuji TV station which had escalators which were not only littered with Meiji chocolate advertisements but also smelled like chocolate, and I was excited because I could see the scenes where Digimon took place. From there I went to Palette Town, which had a little indoor version of Venice and what used to be the world's largest ferris wheel, which I road.

Then I went to Tokyo Tower just in time to see the sun setting and to see the tip of Mt. Fuji (finally!) and I am running out of time on the internet I paid for! Bye!

My calendar Trying to keep it cheerful

Maki and Saki

Okaasan and Reize