So far, so good–I’m mukade-free, for now, at least; none have fallen on me in the middle of the night and chewed up my face. I was positive there would be something skulking around in the pile on my floor consisting of my suit and winter jacket, which I want to take in this week to be dry-cleaned (especially since I need the suit next week, for Friday’s opening ceremony–strange that the summer’s already over), but thankfully, there was nothing at all.
NHK aired The Parent Trap–the Lindsay Lohan/Dennis Quaid/Natasha Richardson remake–tonight. It’s one of those cute, sweet movies that makes me laugh and tear up without fail, and it was in English with Japanese subtitles! That was a pleasant surprise. I was in the other room throwing together okonomiyaki (it came out surprisingly well, though I made way too much–I included corn and chick peas, along with the requisite egg/cabbage/batter) when I heard it come on. Pretty cool.
As of today, I’ve scheduled my driving test, and it’s indeed happening this coming Monday afternoon. My boss lent me her Japanese-language book of driving rules, which’ll mainly just help with the 10-question written test. There’s no possible way I can translate everything, but I can at least skim, I guess.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time planning out the logistics of my trip to Kyushu–transportation will be the most expensive part of this trip, especially if I can use last year’s Tatami Timeshare to secure housing with other JETs at least part of the time. There’s no really logical way to visit everything I want to see without looping back on myself at least twice, because it’s not set up to facilitate my making a circle easily, which I’d hoped to do. Still, though, I don’t mind lots of train travel. I really need to come up with contingency plans in case weather prevents me from hiking/sightseeing around the volcanoes, or in case a typhoon hits or something.
Oh! Thanks to Ethan, I’ve figured out VirtualDub, which let me resize and compress my video files just the way I wanted them. As a result, I’ve re-uploaded all my video files, and then some…there should be a lot more now, including quite a few from this year’s Awa Odori here in Ikeda, and they’re all much smaller than their former gargantuan incarnations. Don’t direct-link them, only post a link to the directory, yadda-yadda.
All my Awa Odori photos (or rather, the selected, non-blurry ones) are up at Flickr as well. Click the image thumbnail to the left to check them out.