Eureka! I'm back on the blog, peeps!!

Wooooohooooooooo it's been a long time and I'm very sorry.... Japan is just so cool and I'm so busy all the time that I've neglected this blog. Well, it's been that and my sometimes spotty internet connection at night. I just uploaded a TON of pics. I've been all over the place. There are night pics of Shinjuku, pics of my snow-covered part of Tokyo, pics all over Tokyo such as Ginza, Tsukiji, Kokkaigijido(governmental area), Imperial Palace, etc.. I'll have some Yokohama Chuukagai(Chinatown) pics as soon as my friend sends them to me, since my camera batteries died that night and I forgot to bring more with me. I can't believe I didn't run into my friends at japanyears.blogspot.com because I saw in one of their pictures that I was at that very same spot. Oh well...

Things are going great here in Japan right now. I've become accustomed to it now and will probably be in a bad mood when I get home, lol. There are so many things that are really nice here such as the cleanliness, niceness of people, customer service, convenience, safety, cheap restaurants, and HEATED TOILET SEATS! Even a lot of public toilets have heated toilet seats, it's crazy! I've got friends I only speak Japanese with here('cause they're not American, of course, DUH) which is great fun and practice. Class is going well at the moment I think. I'm taking extra conversational concentration classes as well. I'll definitely be practicing Japanese with my Japanese friends back home when I get there so that I continue to get better now that I've gotten into it hardcore. I'd hate to lose the progress I'm making here. I'm learning like at least 6 new kanji(Chinese characters) every day on top of all this. I'm up to like 500 or 600 or so. These are the MOST useful ones of course, so I'm getting around pretty well on them at the moment. There are still times when I want to order something that has a lot of kanji in it and no pictures, and I just have to ask them what it is sometimes. The goal now is to become fluent at Japanese. I'm definitely coming back here and at least doing something like teaching English for a while just to keep studying the language and experiencing Japan until I'm excellent at it and get a bilingual job. This will be even more motivation to work to finally get out of that hellhole, I mean LSU. By hellhole, I just mean 'cause I'm sick of college and well, there are cool people there but I hate the classes at LSU.

Enough ranting about that.... I've been to Akihabara now a few times, 'cause it's cool and everyone wants to go there. I got this laptop there in fact. I'm going there again Sunday with a friend because she wants to get a better camera and well... that's the place to get anything that runs on any electricity, in the whole world. I'll get some pics this time of the girls dressed up in the skimpy anime costumes and the street bands and such to show ya'll. Saturday, I'll meet some people at the theme park I went to last time and then go where ever... I don't know yet. Friday(I'm going backwards...) I have class at a shrine in Ochanomizu and have to write a stinkin' paper on it, but it should be fun. Next week, I plan to go to Kamakura and check out all the feudal stuff there, like the Daibutsu(even though the biggest one is in Nara). I also need to get down to Harajuku and hit up the XBox cafe. I just have too many things to do here!! They're great though! The Americans in the school have an overnight bus trip to Aizu, in the more northern Touhoku Region, up in the mountains in March. My class itself will be going to some "Japan's Hawaii" thing with an indoor waterpark and an onsen sometime in February or March as well.

The pic you see above isn't on my friend's pic server 'cause it doesn't fit into any of the categories I've got on there at the moment, but it's a pic from going out with someone else's class in Shin-Okubo, or what is really known as Korean Town. All of the people in the picture besides us obvious Americans, are Korean except for the two sensei there. On either side of the American on the left, the one close to the camera is Tanaka-san, who is the English-speaking guy that gets things done for us, like translating in business transactions, or paper-work, or anything else we need. The lady on the other side of the American is Kagesawa-sensei, who is one of the teachers for the beginner classes, and also is my teacher in my morning conversation session. The American guy there is Liam, who lives across the hall from me and is well... actually Canadian, so I don't know why I was saying American. The American girl on the right near the back, is Kasi from Maine. I think she is staying in Yokohama. All of those students are in the beginning class, so speaking with them was well... painful, since they're all Korean. One guy spoke English, but he was taking this pic, so he's not in the picture. This is from like 2 weeks ago I think. I need to get a pic of my class soon. I'm sure I will as we do lots of stuff together in the future.

Here is a rundown of pics and the corresponding links....
Here are some pics from my building and out of my window here in Nishi-Kokubunji.

More pics of my place, but with SNOW!

The area my school is in, Shinjuku, at night.

This is Kokkaigijido, or the area where the Imperial Palace and Governmental Buildings are.

Here's some of Ginza, where the old downtown of Tokyo used to be before the place expanded.
You'll see the GHQ building in there that I took several pics of, where MacArthur had his American occupation office after World War II. It was the ONLY building like that left standing after the bombardment, except for the Emperor's castle.

Tsukiji area, where the fish market supplies the world's largest city with fish every day.

I made a few videos during the snow, but dangit if I still am having video upload problems... Hopefully that will get fixed in due time. Anywho, have fun with that and it's late, so I'll head to bed and start putting info and new pics as I get them from now on. PEACE OUT!