Edo Tokyo Museum and Stuff

The week has been a flurry of activity with all my exams, homework, and hanging out with my new Korean friends. A couple of Koreans from my class invited me and one of the Chinese students last Friday to go to Korea town with them and have what's called "nomihodai" which is all you can drink for a reasonable price and limited time frame. There were 9 of us, and we has 10 bottles of sochu/soju between us. Damn! Those Korean boys can drink. I didn't even bother trying to keep up at all, but it was a hell of a lot of fun. Turns out I'm the youngest student in my class (by quite a bit, actually. Some of the Koreans are nearly or more than 30) so everybody feels the need to be overly protective of me :P The think of me as their "little sister" more or less, which is cute and amusing :) We all sat at the Korean restaurant and talked, drank, and ate. It was actually really amazing to be sitting there, drinking soju, and talking about Japanese, Korean, and Chinese politics and stuff in Japanese with each other. If nothing else, it's insanely good Japanese practice. I'm definitely much more comfortable rambling on in Japanese with friends in a casual setting than I am in class, and I need the practice. I'm taking the extra co-curricular conversation class in the afternoon which is a start, but it's tough to really get into it because I don't yet know the people in there--They're not really friends yet, just acquaintances. Going out with my friends will be excellent practice. This Sunday, in fact, I'm going out with a new friend who's going to show me around the place called "Ikebukuro" which is sort of the nerdy/geeky area for people who like Japanese anime and manga. He's gonna give me a mini tour and show me around since he lives there. (For the record I totally think it's because he's hitting on me, but I'm not going to turn down a friendly tour of an area I already wanted to go to anyway, haha :P)

This Saturday the US culture class students took a trip to the Edo Tokyo Museum, which is one of the biggest in the area. It's at least 6 floors, and I may have overlooked one or two :P Most people know that I've taken a few Japanese history classes, so being able to go to Japan and visit a museum here was absolutely amazing. I'll probably end up going back on my own at some point. I took a slew of pictures (the album with them in it is: http://s1177.photobucket.com/albums/x346/TheJapanTraveler/ it has more than just the pictures from the museum, though) and posted them online. I've not tagged them with explanations yet; because there are so many it will take me a while to do, and I don't really have the time to sit down and do it all. If you have any questions just comment/email/call etc.

For anyone who gets the chance I would definitely recommend/insist you go to visit this museum. It really does help to understand the Japanese psyche by knowing a bit of the flow of history behind Japan in general.

That's a short update, I know, but I've got to get back to studying for my grammar test that's coming up. Now that the whirlwind of activity of the first few weeks is done, I will probably be only updating a couple of times a week as nifty things happen :)