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2 Days Indoors
Sunday was spent with Hiroya and Mr. Fujimoto again. With Hiroya, I played Halo 3, and tried to watch the movie Red Cliff in Chinese with English subtitles (Red Cliff is presently playing in Japanese movie theaters, but apparently Hiroya was borrowing the movie from someone who got it early in China). It turned out that the English subtitles were almost impossible for even ME to read (because of problems with size, speed, and the frequency that the characters wore white clothing, interfering with the white subtitles), and when the movie mysteriously and abruptly returned to the main menu before the climax, we decided we didn’t need to see the end.
Hiroya’s mom was also at home on Sunday. At Hiroya’s request (I’ve played and lost once while playing with Hiroya, and he wanted to compare me with others, I guess), she played a game of chess with me, but lost. She also made lunch, which was “shabushabu”, which is “a hot-pot dish of thinly sliced beef cooked at the table in boiling broth” (according to my Wordtank). It was really good, especially with the sesame dip for the meat.
In late afternoon, I went to Mr. Fujimoto’s shop, and where we had decided to have dinner. There was a wide variety of foods there, including rice, miso soup, sushi rolls, fish, ham, and gyouza (Chinese dumplings). I went with Mr. Fujimoto to get the take-out gyouza from a Chinese restaurant called “Kyouto Oushou”. After dinner, Mr. Fujimoto and I watched National Treasure: Book of Secrets in English with Japanese subtitles (even though I suggested that Japanese with English subtitles would make more sense), and I ended up getting back to the Nomuras’ at about 9:30p.m.
Today was the fourth day of testing. It was particularly difficult:
1 -- General Japanese. I was only really paying attention to this class (which contains a lot of Japanese, as the course name shows) for the last few weeks, the rest of the time studying on my own in the classroom. As a result, I didn’t do very well (10-15 points?), although the test may have been impossibly difficult anyway. The test involved answering questions (Kanji readings and writings, short-answer, and a couple multiple-choice) about tankas (31-syllable Japanese poems) and Haikus (17-syllable Japanese poems). There were also a couple of questions about the authors of the poems, which I hadn’t even looked at.
2 – Math A. This was by far the hardest math test this year for me, which was disappointing. There were some probability questions, some questions about the average amount of money that one could win in a lottery, interior and exterior division, finding angles and lengths of sides of figures, and proofs in Japanese. While the week I wasn’t at school wasn’t a problem material-wise, I found that I couldn’t understand some of the Japanese questions, and only answered a little more than half of the questions. Other people seemed to think the test was difficult, too.
After testing, I went to Brass Band, and found that I had an hour to eat lunch before practice. I hadn’t brought anything, so I decided to try the school cafeteria for the first time, trying out the “omuraisu”, which is fried rice with egg on top. I’ve only eaten “omusairu” a few times before, so I don’t have much to compare it to, but I thought it was pretty good.
Brass Band was individual practice from 12:00 to 1:30, with the ‘leaving time’ at 2:00. After getting home today, I stayed inside, writing, among other things.
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