Its taken me a bit of time, but I’m finally getting to write about the homestay I did this weekend (Sept. 23-25) in Shiga-cho. On Friday, we left JCMU at 10am and took off for a 2 hour trip via bus to Shiga-cho (Shiga Town). Once we got to Shiga-cho, we stopped the [...]

Buying food in Japan is a fairly arduous task, since there is nothing here that resembles American food, and even if I find something, reading what it is in Japanese is a difficult task. So when I do find food that I want to buy, I always bring it home and open it up [...]

So maybe you’re wondering, what does my room look like? Well, here it is:
(Notice the very high-tech clothes drying device, a standard of all Japanese households, as well as the ‘air conditioner’ aka a fan.)
((And here is a close-up of my two Sirotan pillows. <3 ))

The rest of the apartment:
(Isn’t [...]

Here’s a view of what JCMU (Japan Center for Michigan Studies) looks like from the outside:

Here’s the street in front of JCMU:

The lobby of the dorm building:

The lobby of the academic building:

A nice little sitting area to the back of the stairs in the academic building lobby. [...]

The World Expo, which is held every 5 years, was this year in Aichi, Japan, which is near Nagoya. It opened on March 25, and will be closing on September 25. They are expecting 15 million people to visit the expo during the 180 days that it is open, and so far (as [...]

Just thought I’d share a quick picture of the view everyday from my classroom. The weather today was especially nice, and I saw lots of wind surfers and boaters while I should have been paying attention in class…

You’d be distracted everyday too if this is what you saw….

On Saturday I’ll be heading to Aichi, Japan to go to the World Expo! I’m not exactly sure what we will be doing there since the thing is so massive and there are so many different pavilions and expo centers that we’ll just have to wait until we get there. One thing we [...]

Well the day trip to Kyoto was a nice change of scenery from that of JCMU. It took us about 45 minutes to get there once we reached Hikone station (by bike), and once we got there we ended up wandering around Kyoto station (the second largest train station in Japan, and also one [...]

Well, just for the day. We don’t have anything really planned, we just want to wander around and see what we can find. Just three of us going for right now, I couldn’t round up anyone else who wanted to go. The only place I have to go to is a store [...]

Here are a couple of pictures from the JCMU opening ceremony today. We were introduced to such people as the president of the University of Shiga Prefecture, the vice president of Shiga University, as well as many businessmen and women. After that we got some awesome food!!

Who looks the worst? Yeah….me…

Check out that [...]