Hey folks,
Well, here's another quick update. Just to let you all know how I'm doing.
Unfortunately, this update has some bad news. As mentioned before, I lost my camera on the train. I simply do not know what happened to it; it's as if it disappeared from the inside of my backpack. And it was such a nice and expensive camera too. This means, no more pictures or videos for the rest of the semester. Ugh..
And if that wasn't enough, my secondhand laptop chose this time to break. It's as if something is slowly exiling me from all electronics...the laptop slid out of my lap (not very far) and the power jack in it got bent. Now it won't charge at all, and to preserve it's precious amount of remaining batter power I have turned it off. I won't use it for the rest of the semester. At least the data's ok - it contains all the pictures I took this semester BEFORE my camera was lost!
So I'm sans pictures and sans computer. It may be no surprise that I will probably not update too often now. But I will sure as heck try to do a little more than I've been doing.
Interesting things in the past/future that I have not yet mentioned:
1. Last week there was an EARTHQUAKE! I was at Haley's homestay house, still in bed about about noon last Sunday. All the sudden, I head this sound like someon turned on the washing machine. But it kept getting louder and my bed sharted shaking! I kid you not, it felt as if someone was shaking my bed.The whole house seemed to be moving. It was totally unreal - to someone who's never experienced an earthquake before, this was unbelievable. To have the very ground undearneth you start moving is an unsettling experience. It only lasted probably thiry seconds. Then Haley and I talked to each other about it, and I looked it up on the internet. Here's the info:
Magnitude
5.4
Date-Time
Sunday, April 15, 2007 at 03:19:30 (UTC) - Coordinated Universal Time
Sunday, April 15, 2007 at 12:19:30 PM local time at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location
34.78N 136.27E
Depth
16 kilometers
Region
WESTERN HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances
25 km (15 miles) WNW of Tsu, Honshu, Japan
70 km (40 miles) SW of Nagoya, Honshu, Japan
70 km (45 miles) E of Osaka, Honshu, Japan
330 km (205 miles) WSW of TOKYO, Japan
Location Uncertainty
Error estimate: horizontal +/- 4.6 km; depth fixed by location program
Parameters
Nst=176, Nph=176, Dmin=262.2 km, Rmss=0.77 sec, Erho=4.6 km, Erzz=0 km, Gp=107.5 degrees
Source
USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Remarks At least 12 people injured and 63 buildings damaged in the Mie-Nara-Shiga area. Recorded (5U JMA) in Mie; (4 JMA) in Nara and Shiga; (3 JMA) in Aichi, Fukui, Gifu, Ishikawa, Kyoto, Nagano, Osaka and Wakayama; (2 JMA) in Hyogo, Shizuoka, Tottori, Toyama, Yamanashi; (1 JMA) in Kagawa, Kanagawa, Kochi, Okayama and Tokushima Prefectures
I'm in Osaka prefecture, btw. Visit here for more info:
http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/neic_beaf.html
Now that I've experienced an earthquake, I'm perfectly happy. It was just enough for me. No more, thank you.
2. This weekend we went to a Zen Buddhist temple as part of an art class field trip. It was really pretty and tranquil, but I get fed up with that kind of stuff after awhile. We saw the Genki Priest! (very energetic old monk guy) and he chanted stuff at us. We saw the famous 500 yr old Zen rock garden. It was full of rocks....our teacher told us that most of the rocks were not original ones from 500 years ago. During the wars, the temples would fight each other and stole each other's rocks! They were apparently quite valuable commodity...the value of the current rocks in the garden is priceless, probably running into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Pics:
-The remaining artifacts from the great Rock Wars between the Buddhist temples...
-the Genki Priest~!
3. Tomorrow, Haley and I are going to see the Shakugan no Shana movie! Yet another otaku-ish event that we are going to do. I'm running out of time to do them all...basically, it's an anime movie that I wanted to see, since I watched the series. I knew it was coming out while I was here, but you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find movie airing times/places etc. Everything's in Japanese, plus anime movies are not advertised that well. It appears that the Shana movie is only showing in a limited number of theaters around the country, and only for a time period of two weeks. It shows that even here, anime is not mainstream. After much hassle and searching, I found the nearest theater and the best time. So, we're going tomorrow! I'll post a report later.
-Pic of Shakugan no Shana.
Well it's all very exciting. I'll post again when I am able!
Dewa~
As always, leave comments/tags plz.
