So I went out yesterday and did something rather foolish that centered around purchasing an extremely heavy, 12-volume set of my favorite Japanese author's complete works while stark naked except for a pair of very flashy stiletto heels. I had been wanting to do so for some time (the books, not the nudity. Well, okay, both), and had even briefly considered paying exorbitant amounts of money to get one shipped to me from a used book store in Tokyo where I had seen it, but then by chance happened to stumble into a bookstore in Hiroshima that led me right to a copy. Even better, it ended up being scandalously cheap and in excellent condition. Of course, the biggest problem at this point is that his works are ordinarily just at the level I can read with heavy dictionary help, but this collection is a little bit older and thus is full of old, complicated characters that I've never seen before and may or may not even be in my dictionary. Regardless, I'm thrilled with the purchase and can write it off as potentially vital to my thesis for this next year. At this point, however, I can officially purchase nothing heavier than a feather until I go home, as I've been buying books and the like as fast as my greedy little paws could grab them on the basis that I could just take home two suitcases of books in May. This is still quite true, but I believe that twelve massive hardbound volumes in addition to all the paperback books and manga I have ended up with may just push not just my baggage, but the entire weight limit of my plane home right over the edge.
In other news, although it may be hard to believe that I would get a break so stupidly short, I start school again on Monday. I've spent several hours the past few days looking through the course books they gave me searching for classes that were not so miserably boring that taking them would cause my brain to implode, creating a mini black hole that would slowly tear apart the fabric of space and time. This task has been surprisingly difficult - after any number of hours, I managed to come up with a total of fourteen hours of interesting classes, and that was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Seriously, this university is a total disaster for anyone other than exchange students, and it even pushes our limits pretty far. As a result, I'll be taking exciting classes like "Japanese Film," a course all about analyzing Miyazaki movies, which might be interesting if I hadn't already seen them all ten thousand times. Other than that, just for the sake of filling up credit hours, I'll be starting Korean. I don't particularly intend to continue with it, but at the very least I should learn how to read the Korean script, which would be neat.
On that note, here is a picture taken in Korea by my friend Andrew R., who will be supplying most of our Engrish for the next week or so of posts.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN
