...and with a brand new MacBook! (Though I would have much rather just kept my old one. I was way more used to it.) Anyway, let's recap what's been going on...
On the 21st, I went to Sunshine City in Higashi-Ikebukuro for the first time. It's basically just a ton of shopping, but I did find a really good grocery specialty store. They have those truffles they sell at Trader Joe's and a bunch of interesting imported foods. I also found a Lupicia! Lupicia is my favorite tea company. They have a ton of stores in Japan, but only one in the U.S., in San Francisco. So after getting some Sirocco tea, nougat, and dried veggies, I was quite pleased. =)
Since my computer was broken, I spent a lot of time (finally) doing some non-school related reading. I finished "What is the What" by Dave Eggers. Highly recommended. I couldn't put it down after I got back into it. I also read "Out" by Natsuo Kirino (in 2 days!). That is one of the most disturbing books I've probably ever read, with the exception of a few scenes in Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" and a story called "Red Hair" by another Japanese author. I don't know what it is about Japanese authors. They write a lot of perverse stuff. Anyway, I'm looking to start "Survivor" by Chuck Palahniuk. After that, I'm out of English books.
The 25th was a fun day. Hank came in from Kyoto, so I met up with him and Vinodh in Harajuku where we did a bunch of shopping (Above: Harajuku Uniqlo UT Store) and ended out the evening with an hour of karaoke. That, however, was not the end of the night. So-ky and Busby were throwing a Thanksgiving dinner since we all missed it. So I bought a pudding-cake-fruit-dessert and made my way back to good ol' Kameido. Anjee had also come in from Kyoto, so it was nice to see her. I must say, for a bunch of exchange students, we put together a pretty good dinner. Salad, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie (that was amazing, none of us expected pumpkin pie), chicken, stir fried veggies, mac and cheese, Japanese fried chicken, apples, mini-cheesecakes, fruit-pudding-cake-desert, and two other kinds of tarts. (Basically, every girl brought or made a dessert. haha.) Are you impressed? I was impressed.
Besides that, I've been running back and forth from here to Ginza to get my new computer. Ginza is kind of like New York. The department store next to the Apple Store was basically made into a big Louis Vuitton box, and it has the nicest Dotour Cafe I've seen yet. (Dotour Cafe's are everywhere.) Anyway, the Apple Store. It was crazy that they had so many bilingual people. According to one employee, about 1/3 of the people that work there are bilingual. (It really threw me off when the one white employee came up to me and was like, "keigo keigo keigo".) I was thinking that if I had been more into computers, it would have been kind of fun to work in that store. There's these two automatic glass elevators that just look neat.
As far as school goes, I'm mid-midterms. And I got an 82 on my Japanese midterm. Boo. I'm no good at particles and remembering verb tenses in grammar patterns.
