about an, and life in general

This post is dedicated to the stuff you see in the above picture. It's called an (for once, a Japanese word that's not difficult to memorize...), and it's a sweet paste made from azuki beans. It's a key ingredient in most of the baked goods and sweets they make here, for example the famous anpan, a sweet pastry that even has a comic book hero named after it. Tried that for the first time last weekend, too, and it was pretty damn good! Anyway, about an - at first I was a bit weirded out by the fact that it's just a bunch of beans that's supposed to be enjoyed as a dessert, but as you can see, now I'm buying ice cream and shit just to have something to put it on.

Actually it was kind of an accident that I bought the stuff in the first place. There was a big can of it on sale, and by the look of it anyone would've thought it's just basic baked beans, of a red variety. I even thought, delusional as I am, that I completely understood the name of the product, which was yudeazuki. I was like, yeah, yuderu means boil in water, and azuki - well, it's azuki beans, right? And I guess that interpretation was partially correct... however, in addition, they're sweetened and made into a paste, which wasn't obvious from the label. But after the initial disappointment of not having beans on my rice (although I'm pretty sure that a dessert combining rice and red bean paste also exists), I realized that I had A HUGE CAN OF RED BEAN PASTE, which is not something to be disappointed about. So now I'm just coming up with all kinds of stuff to have it with. Last night, I had a peanut-butter-jelly-sandwich with bean paste instead of jelly, and it was quite delicious. And just now I tried it with vanilla ice cream - a match made in heaven.

Anyway, aside from occasional dessert experiments, my life here has been pretty uneventful for the past few weeks, since the school started. I'm buried in homework, tests and writing tasks. Mondays are the worst; school starts at 9am and I'm back home by 5pm. Then I have a couple of hours to do homework, which isn't nearly enough to complete the homework for the 4 classes I have that day, especially if, for just one of the classes, you need to write a mini-essay, fill in two pages of exercises, and do two listening tasks. But luckily the rest of the week isn't as bad, and I have plenty of time to do Monday's homework later during the week... Admittedly, though, this is exhausting!

But I get a strong feeling that I'm learning the language quite fast, so in the end I feel very lucky to be here. Today was a fun day, and the weather was so nice as I was biking home that I just couldn't help but smile to myself when I realized that I'm actually in Japan, studying Japanese. Since I was about 15, I've wanted to go on a student exchange - to live the life of an American high school kid, what would be better than that? Just like in the movies... Oh, wait, nevermind. Now that I'm an adult, though, the main reason I came here was to become fluent enough in Japanese, so that I would be able to utilize it in my future career as a language teacher. But today, as I biked through the Imperial Garden, passing a bunch of tourists, I thought, hey, I actually live and study here, which is the coolest thing ever. And before coming here, I didn't really speak Japanese at all, but now I'm starting to! Learning by doing, yay!

Although a lot of the times I just get so frustrated when I still cannot communicate well enough to express myself fully, and I still have to ask people to repeat something a dozen times, and even then I might not always understand what they're saying. But every time I'm meeting up with Koami, she says that I've improved a lot, and today I even managed to ask for a student's loyalty card at the supermarket! So just need to be patient, I guess...

So that's all for now, just wanted to let everybody know that I'm still alive. And every time you're wondering what's going on with me since I havent' been posting for a while, it's probably just this: