Almost 2 Months

Almost two months have passed now since I arrived in Japan at the beginning of April. Some mornings I wake up and still have to remind myself that I am here. The sports festival here in Japan is beginning for the Junior High School students, so they have been busy practicing for the upcoming tournaments. On Saturday and Sunday, each sports team plays in a tournament against other schools around the city. On these days, I get paid to go around the city and watch them play and cheer them on. I plan on going to watch tennis, table tennis, judo, and soccer.

Also on Saturday, I am supposed to receive my first paycheck, with which I will be purchasing a new camera. The weekend after the sports festival I am travelling to Tokyo for the first time. I will be taking the night bus down Friday night, because it is cheaper than the shinkansen and allows you to avoid paying for a hotel. The trip to Tokyo is 6 hours by bus from Sendai, where I will be catching the bus.

In other news, I ate at my first sushi restaurant and tried sushi for the first time. I was more than a bit skeptical at first, but I thought I should at least give it a try. There are types of sushi restaurants here called kaitan sushi which serve sushi on conveyor belts that run around the store. You sit in a booth and take what you want from the conveyor belt as it passes by. You can also order specific things from a touch screen at the booths and they will send it to you on a miniature shinkansen that runs above the conveyor belt. It was a great experience and I tried the shrimp and salmon sushi. Both were delicious.

I have also finished learning hiragana and katakana, although I will still need plenty of practice with them. Today I started learning kanji, but I fear that it could be a lifelong endeavor.