Random information

There are just a few things that I wanted to share today. First apparently we were invited to play soccer last Wednesday, but our contact did not have her phone on, so we missed that day, not sure if they want to play today, I might go out and join the basketball club when my shoes get here since they're not so competitive and serious.
Also, I took this picture from our house (which I hope to get around to posting pictures of the house and my host family this weekend if we don't end up busy unexpectedly). It shows the Cocowalk Ferris wheel, and yes we are above it, which gives you an idea of how far above the valley area we are.

The other thing that was interesting today was finding a takoyaki Halloween special at one of the store in the Coccowalk food court, a huge box of 24 takoyaki for 1480 yen. Apparently it was meant for 3 people, but I managed to finish it, but I definitely have had my fill of takoyaki for a while, say at least a week or two.

School is going well and I think after a month I am finally settling into a routine. I feel less need to explore and am also starting to realize that I still have time to do things and do not need to cram it all into my first few months. I have also decided I need to be spending more of my free time absorbing and learning the language. It makes me sad every time a Japanese person at a store or food counter has to explain something in English because I don't understand it. Also my first Japanese test is coming up, but I will also be tested on things for the first 8 chapters of the book that were covered in Japanese 1, this means I need to go back and make sure I know all the words and sentence structures used that I did not learn elsewhere. This means I will be studying quite a bit this weekend, but since it it supposed to be raining this suits me. The weather has been real up and down, today it got up to 27 C even though it is still getting into the mid-teens at night. I'm hoping for a colder and more steady November. Like I said above though, I've adjusted, this is Japan, this is home, this is all normal. I haven't seen anything unusual in the last two weeks, I've just come to expect that things are the way that they are, and it's how I like them.