Aftermath of Kyoto

I’d like to be writing this as a blog entry, and when you see it I’m sure it will be, but for the moment my internet is not working and I don’t know why.  The password I’ve been using for the last couple of months has become unusable.  I wonder if my internet service has stopped.  I also plan to release a blog entry for every day of my Kyoto trip, but I don’t know if that will happen. I had intended to write these entries over the course of the trip, but that was a ludicrous idea, and I was barely able to make brief lists of topics to cover in each.  My hope is to write them sometime though.  We took lots of pictures, so maybe they will help jog my memory.

I’m pretty depressed at the moment.  Most of the time I can’t muster up the drive necessary to study Japanese independently, including reading manga in Japanese, and today when I finally do my internet goes down and the school computers are unavailable.  When that happens, I tend to fall back to recent dependencies that I’ve developed:  caffeine, alcohol and ice cream, none of which are particularly inexpensive, although I suppose it could be worse.

Moreover, Tina is sick and hope she gets better very soon.  In my absence of things to do I don’t mind taking care of her as best I can, but I hate to see her feeling unwell, especially because she’s the only human being I frequently interact with.  On that note, I feel like my Japanese is getting worse, and of course I don’t really think that’s true, but my lack of study really does make me feel like my learning has stagnated.  Hence my finally working up the drive to end my spell of nonstudy.  And when I can’t study, I play an arcade drum game and eat the shredded cheese that I found in a specialty store in Kyoto.  Apparently.

Over here I’ve developed a strong liking for lemon based alcoholic beverages, of which there are quite a variety that all put Mike’s Hard Lemonade to shame.  Not only that, but each and every one lists it’s alcohol and juice content by percentage.  It’s amazing.  One of my favorites is called Strong Zero (I believe it has zero calories), and due to my being such a lightweight, one can at 100 yen can get me as tipsy as I ever really want to be.  Hence the creepy person in Kyoto that twice approached us asking, “Do you wanna drink all you want?” carries no appeal, as an all you can drink special of any kind would surely be far more expensive.

I appear to have run out of things to say.