Week 5 - Hardly any adventures at all!

Well, I had a pretty boring week this week. My internet at home was broken from Saturday until Wednesday, which really stank. Also, I have officially been here for one month. It feels much longer. I miss the cats :( It's a good thing I google hangout with them pretty often. Here is a screencap from one of our many conversations (my Jim pictures never work out).

You didn't REALLY think that being 9,000 km away would keep me from posting pictures of the cats, did you?

To get through the internet drought I read a bunch. I brought a ton of e-books with me to Japan but I am really whipping through them; I've only been here for a month but I've been reading a book a week, which isn't going to be sustainable unless I start digging into either public domain books or every single Star Wars book ever published. I really enjoyed Star Wars books when I was twelve, but I gave them a shot this week and. Well. Nostalgia was not enough to get me through more than about a chapter. 

I should really work on my Japanese again. To be honest I've barely looked at Remembering the Kanji since I got here (unless you count being immersed in Japanese every day). To keep myself accountable, I'm going to put a counter up on this blargh, so that I might start to feel at least mildly embarrassed if I don't start working on things again. 

To address both my lack of Japanese AND my lack of reading material, I got a nifty book today: bilingual Peanuts!

A friend of mine suggested buying some children's books as a good way to learn to read, but I think this is a good alternative :) I considered buying one of these instead, but I wasn't sure I was brave enough to be seen carrying them around.

Sure, everyone needs a book about poo, but how could I choose??

My work is starting to pick up. I had a really productive meeting on Saturday and I finally have some direction in my work. My meeting ran really late so I went for lunch with my prof and two other lab people at a Chinese place close to the lab. Because Chinese food in Canada is pretty non-authentic, I was curious to see what Japanese-style Chinese food would be like, but to be honest, at least my dish was the same as food I've had in Canada. It was good and I enjoyed it; it just wasn't very different. My coworkers' meals were ENORMOUS and were served as several small independent dishes, which is probably more authentically Chinese but is also similar to the way that Japanese meals are served, so there you go. 

On Sunday I went on a quest to find a health food store because I really wanted to find either some flaxseeds or some xanthan gum to bake with (as egg replacer). I considered going on an amazing 16 km bike adventure to find a store that is pretty far from any subway stations, but is also close to a library that has an English section (as a prevention against a future book crisis), but it has been raining for a week solid and today was no exception so I decided not to brave the trip. Instead I went to find a store in Susukino, which is a nightlife district in the downtown area. My favourite thing in Susukino is this:

There's a ferris wheel on top of a department store!! Very Jet Set Radio.

Sadly, either I have gone blind or the store was closed because I couldn't find it anywhere! :( So I was forced to make cookies with starch as an egg replacer. It seems to have worked out ok. By the way, it is VERY ANNOYING to make cookies when you can only fit six cookies per tray in your little oven!