Leaving School

Wow, it's almost been a year from my last post! That's kind of hard to believe...

Since I got back from Japan, my life has not been all flowers and sunshine, unfortunately. Especially since the start of my last semester at UT. Since last July I've lost several family members. In January, the night before the semester started, my then boyfriend came straight to my apartment from a three day trip with his parents to dump me. I had such a bad physical reaction to the whole ordeal that it left me nauseated for the rest of the week. Needless to say, I had a really hard time getting to sleep the night before the start of classes. Not only that but that same week Calyn's car got broken into TWICE within four days, just sitting outside of our apartment building. And I could not get into the last Japanese class (I thought) I had to take in order to graduate on time.

The next week I started taking medication for an infection that made me nauseated for the rest of the second week of school. And the professor finally added me to his class.

The classes I took last semester were Fundamentals of Acting (which was a blast), Readings in Pre-modern Japanese Stories (a whole bunch of translating), Main Current of American Culture to 1865 (cultural history), and Mexican American Modernism. I also joined the Texas Ballroom club which was so much fun! During the semester, my acting and ballroom classes as well as my roommates and friends were the only things keeping me afloat.

Two weeks after I was dumped my grandmother died; my last grandparent. I was a pallbearer at her funeral that weekend.

During that time my parents also gave me an ultimatum. If I put out five applications a week and made 10 contact in order to secure a job, they would think about letting me stay with them after I graduated. I know my parents were only trying to light a fire beneath my feet so I could have a job lined up, but that on top of classwork and all of the emotional baggage I was carrying around had me drowning.

Thankfully, things were starting to look up near the end of the semester. I was almost done with my classes, due to graduate soon, and my parents had taken back their ultimatum. On the flip side I hadn't found a job yet.

However, everything hit the fan during the last week of classes. I had turned in all of the paperwork for my coursework overseas in November. I was told that it would all get processed by Spring Break, but it didn't. I was told by my academic advisors that I had all of the credits I would need to graduate on time in May. They finally processed all of my credit the Friday before the last week of classes and I was psyched that I could apply to graduate since the deadline for that was the next Friday.

Well, Monday came around and I went up to campus to apply to graduate only to learn that I was missing one hour of upper-division Japanese credit.

one hour

My advisors scrambled around trying to find ways to correct the situation. They tried having some of the courses re-evaluated, they tried appealing to the Dean to waive the one hour requirement. But by Wednesday nothing had worked and I was really starting to worry. The next day I had three finals, acting at 8:00 AM, a four page translation of a Japanese story due at 9:30 AM, class at 2:00, and an eight page paper due in English at 3:30 that next afternoon. At 5:30 that Wednesday I had halfway finished the translation and I was a page and a half shy on my English paper, when I got a call from my academic advisor.

He told me that if I wanted to graduate on time, my last option was to take an upper-division Japanese final the next day for a class I had not taken at UT. At that point I broke down and called my parents in hysterics. In the end I elected to take the final (which cost $82) and gamble my graduation date on the off-chance that I could pass a final exam whose contents I did not know, nor would I have had the time to study for. The next day, I performed for my acting final and got good comments, ran to the library to finish up the translation for the Japanese class, which made me a bit late. And then I spent my lunch break finishing my English paper before going to class at 2:00, turned in my paper at 3:30 and went straight to the testing site, where I spent 2 hours trying to pass the Japanese final.

The next morning I woke up and found that by some miracle I had made a B on the Japanese final and that I would be able to graduate on time.


So I graduated, and am now back at home in Garland, still trying to find a job.

It's hard to believe that it's August. I have been so incredibly busy for the past month that it feels like years have passed between my last post and this one. So let me give you guys an update.

Finals were torture. I had two term papers due (one four pages and one ten pages), 3 final presentations (2 of which had to be in Japanese), and 3 final exams (2 of which were in Japanese). Somehow I managed to get it all done without going TOO crazy. And then immediately after my last exam I went to pick up my dad at the airport. A couple of months earlier my dad decided that he wanted to come visit with me. So we arranged it where he would come visit me for my last week and a half in Japan and we would fly home together. But I'll elaborate more on that later.

We flew back home on August 1st from Tokyo and got home in one piece. Since then I've been trying to get over my jet-lag and get ready to move back down to Austin. We got home from the airport at 12:30 AM on 8/2 and, of course, I couldn't go to sleep until about 3:30 AM. And then I slept until 5:00 PM! So my sleep schedule has been pretty off lately. I caught up on all of my doctor appointments and yesterday I moved into my new apartment in Austin.

こんにちは！これから私は日本語でも書くつもりです。８月１日、テキサスのダラスに着きました。この間荷物を詰めていました。昨日、オーステンに引っ越しました。これからよろしくお願いします！

Meiji Shrine

A couple of weekends ago I went with some friends into Tokyo. Unfortunately, due to the amount of school work I had, I was only able to visit one temple and a museum with them before I had to go back to the house. But here are pictures from the Meiji Shrine.



And there were a couple of couples getting married at said temple. The bride is the one all in white, and the groom is the one in the black and white traditional costume. Cool, huh?



And here are the pictures from the museum and on the way to the museum.



Sorry for taking forever to update. I only have 8 more days of school left with

Flower Festival

My host-mom took us to a flower festival at a nearby park a couple of weekends ago. They had some really interesting plants on display as well as ikebana (flower arranging) and sado (tea ceremony) demonstrations.



Pretty interesting, huh? The tea was bitter, just like everybody says, but I thought it left a rather pleasant after-taste. Oh and the first picture is my host-mom's car.

Enchiladas

So, the other day one of my friends had a get together and he made enchiladas for us. They aren't really the kind that I'm used to, but they made me happy nonetheless. Here are some pictures from the get together with my friends. We all pitched in and helped make tortillas and dice veggies and stuff like that.



I think he'll be throwing another one soon.

Home

I think I have officially reached the stage of being homesick now. I've been here since September 11th of last year, with a little less than a month of a vacation back home in February. I think the main reason is that my schoolwork has reached an alltime high and I'm getting frantic. And I know for a fact that I'm not the only one.

So, one day in class when I found that I could not focus at all on what the teacher was saying, I decided to disctract myself with making a list of things that I've really come to miss since being here. And I thought I'd just share them with you.

Fruit (fruit is so expensive here)
People opening doors for each other (if you're walking behind somebody and they go through a door, they don't bother to care if anybody's walking behind them, and more often than not the door is allowed to shut in your face)
Steak (it's so thin and expensive here)
Baked potatoes with fixings
Sauteed mushrooms
Pie (oh my goodness, they have no pie here, and I'm going crazy. Of course, it doesn't help that people don't usually own ovens. Their cake is great, but it's so light that I can eat a whole cake by myself in one sitting)
Walking around campus (at first, funnily enough, I missed walking around UT than I did home)
Reading English (I really really really regret the fact that I did not have enough room to bring a couple of novels with me, because finding English books here is like trying to find a four-leaf clover)
Going shopping at the mall at home (I miss walking around window shopping for clothes that FIT me, what can I say?)
Going to the theater (I miss movies, and there are so many movies that I wanted to see, but couldn't because I was over here, and the theater is ridiculously expensive here)
Smoothies (strawberry smoothies...mmmmm...)
Freedom (Hah, unexpected, huh? I don't want a curfew anymore, I don't want to have to curb my social life because I have no real space of my own)
Internet (yeah...I'm only allowed one hour a day at my homestay, and the school kicks you off after 3 hours so I can't get any decent research done for my term paper at one time)
Breakfast tacos (the sausage just isn't the same here....)
Pancakes, IHOP (sob, pancakes!)
Waffles
Frasier (I love that show)
Meeting up with friends (and when I say friends, I mean REAL friends, the ones that talk to me and listen to all my complaining, sorry for that, by the way, guys)
Pizza ( a nice greasy, cheese and mushroom pizza with a deep pan crust...oh, yeah, none of this chicken teriyaki, mayonnaise, corn, and seaweed stuff)
Shopping for furniture (not necessarily to buy)
Butter pecan ice cream (ice cream over here is expensive like no other)
Pecan pie (need I say more?)
Wide open spaces (oh, how rare they are in Tokyo)
Singing while I drive (I can't sing to myself here, the walls are so thin everybody would hear)
Going to the office and visiting with everyone (I miss going to lunch with you guys! I'll have to drop in on you guys when I get back)
The farm (I really miss going down there with the family to visit...well, more family. To think all of my second cousins are probably all big now)

I'm sure there's more, but the bell rang, and I didn't have time to finish. And now I return to research on English language education in Japan.

Learning

So here are a couple of things that I've learned from my host-sisters.

In China, if you go to a restaurant it is considered rude to eat everything on the plate. I was very confused about this, but apparently what you don't eat, the people who work at the restaurant will eat once you've left. I found this out one night as we were eating dinner and watching a TV show about restaurants in China. My previous host-sister, Haru-chan, had held several jobs while living in Japan and apparently she had told my host-mom that she was so surprised when nobody left anything on the plates here.

And in Taiwan, women refrain from eating ice cream both the week before and the week of their menstrual cycle, because, apparently it prevents you from getting cramps. Maybe I should test out that theory...