Interesting fact:

Diabetics in Japan who need a tasty, refreshing beverage are SOL. That is my conclusion after three days of (Semi) intensive study. It wasn't until I went to the convenience store down the street that I finally found a single, solitary row of diet coke, huddling in the corner of one of the soda coolers. We don't realize how lucky we have it in the United States where you can't swing a Sharps disposal bag without hitting a bottle of diet cola. If you recall all those beverage vending machines I mentioned previously, a couple actually dispensed Coke, but most were all Japanese beverages, none of which, plain water aside, were diet as far as I could tell. This bodes ill for my rate of caffeine consumption. I guess that I'm going to have to carry a little packet of instant coffee with me at all times, and take a snort whenever I feel like my caffination level is starting to slip.

I cooked for the first time today, making dinner for myself (everything I've eaten so far has either come from a restaurant or been of the instant variety, and so doesn't count). Using my omnipresent staples of onion and garlic powder (I couldn't find any cream of mushroom soup or beef broth, so those two standbys got left out) I cooked up some ground beef, then added curry sauce and rice noodles (better known for its pre-cooked use as fiber optic wiring stateside) and came up with something actually quite tasty, although once again I got the nagging feeling that someday I'm going to have to start following a recipe. Improvisational cooking has served me well enough so far, but some day I'm sure instead of another mutant variation on stroganoff, I'm going to end up summoning an elder god in my mushroom broth, or something.

I declined heading in to Kyoto today along with about half the other students. I found the prospect of hitting a big city more or less on my own a bit too intimidating at this place in the space/time continuum to consider. I felt like I needed a day to take a breather and take stock of my situation. I also had a few things to take care of, like seeing the JCMU director to see if I could change my home stay application. Originally I had selected doing a weekend home stay, which I had interpreted as going to live with a host family each weekend. Instead, it meant that one weekend in the middle of June would be all that I spent with a Japanese family, which was nothing at all like what I had in mind. I asked to see if I could change to the short stay (one month) instead. I'm actually pretty nervous about the whole stay-with-a-native-family-thing home stay thing, which is why I signed up for just the weekend in the first place. Maybe I took that whole 'you're an ambassador for your country' bit they handed us at the orientation speech at the beginning a bit too much to heart, but I'm almost mortally terrified of committing some snafu that is going to make everyone hate me forever (a feeling that was not at all been helped by the anecdotes the director gave us about what a bunch of assholes were hiding in the previous groups, who nearly ruined the entire home stay program by alienating the host families). At least off the bat I know I'm not going to do anything as whorish as sticking my nose in the dinner that my host mother carefully prepared for me, announce 'I can't eat this,' and then go sulk in my room, but still, I know better than to under estimate my capability for screwing up in the most spectacular fashion possible…

Some people have been giving me flak for my apparent obsession with girl's ankles. Well, given my fear of making eye contact with girls in general (and here, where a single misplaced glance could cause a raging mob of girls to beat me to the ground with their sneakers, in particular) I spend a lot of time staring at the ground. So I see socks, lots of socks. Maybe I should memorize, "excuse me, may I take a photograph of your ankles?" Then everyone could see and understand when I say how hideous those saggy abominations are, and know that really, I'm not obsessing. Honest. I swear.

English quote of the day (Seen on the window of a car dealership): 'Good deal, Good Partner.'