Another Long Weekend of Fun

So, I didn't have very many plans for the weekend, but it ended up being really fun. Saturday was the only planned day. I met up with Kolla, Aiko, and one of Aiko's friends, Mizuki, at Hirakatashi station. We preceded to take a couple of trains into Osaka's Korean towns. There's actually two, one that's sort of grew up near a train station and is home to many resident Koreans, and another that was made by the city to be a tourist attraction. We went to both.

First we went to the original. The second we walked out of the station, we were in a maze of streets, with shops crowded on both sides. There were clothing stores mostly, both modern, westerized clothing, and shops with traditional Korean dress. There were also lots and lots of small shops devoted to K-pop paraphernalia, similar to the ones I visited with Victoria and Kolla in Harajuku. Aiko and Mizuki are also big fans of K-pop, and we spent quite a bit of time purusing several of the shops. The funniest product I found? Definitely the oven mitts printed with your favorite K-pop star's face!

One very interesting thing, which all four of us ended up buying, was a text/practice book teaching you Korean and hangul (Korean writing system). Of course, they were adorned with all sorts of K-pop stars, and we all got different ones. :) I'm going to enjoy using it, and it'll help me with my Japanese as much as Korean, as it's geared to teaching Korean to Japanese fans, and there's not a bit of English in the whole thing!

After we finished swooning over all things K-pop, we headed to the other Korean town for food, as Aiko said the restaurants there were cheaper. It was after 1pm, which is rush hour down there apparently, but we finally found a place with seats for four. Aiko, Kolla, and I ordered bim-bim-bap, which is one of the few Korean dishes that is devode of spice. I unfortunately don't have a lot of tolerance for spicy foods, which rules out most Korean food. Mizuki had something that almost had my tongue burning from across the table. When we were done eating, we wandered up and down the one street of this town. We found another K-pop shop, and this one had a TV showing clips from a recent concert, so we stayed there for a while, watching. We bought hoddeok and ate them as we walked back to the train station. Hoddeok is a sort of street pancake thing. It's made of dough, and filled with nuts and honey. It tasted almost like an elephant ear or funnel cake at an American fair.

On Sunday I spent 6 hours in a Karaoke room with Okaasan and Kayoko. It was very entertaining, and I almost didn't notice the hours passing. I butchered several Japanese songs, due to the lyrics being all in hiragana and kanji, and my inability to read them fast enough. I did manage to get all the way through the theme song to My Neighbor Totoro, one of Hayao Miyazaki's famous movies, without messing up! I mostly sang a bunch of the English songs, some of which Kayoko or Okaasan recognized.

Monday was less fun filled because I had a headache throughout the day. It was National Sports and Health Day, so thankfully I didn't have to deal with going to school. Instead, I went to the family to drop of Kayoko. She spent the day with friends doing more Kareoke, man that girl likes to sing! Then Otoosan, Okaasan, and I went grocery shopping and out to eat. We went to this german looking restaurant. It had advertisements for Oktoberfest (as it was spelled) and lots of beer selections. Unfortunately, due to my headache, I didn't get to sample any of that beer.

Tuesday dawned, and I woke up with a massive headache and nausea. Ugh. I got up anyway, and ate a piece of toast for breakfast and was going to head to school anyway. My body had other plans though, and before I got my backpack completely packed, I was downstairs and in front of the toliet. Okaasan called the school and told them I wouldn't be in to class. Then she had to go to work. She kept apologizing for leaving me, and she said if I wasn't better when she came back from work we'd go to the hospital. I thought that a bit extreme for an upset stomach, but when a CIE representative called later that day, she also encouraged me to go to the hospital if I was sick, even if I wouldn't normaly at home. Thankfully, that was not necessary. After my stomach was empty of my meager breakfast, I wandered upstairs, changed back to pjs, and slept for several hours. I was out like the dead and had some pretty strange dreams, which I fully blame on the headache. When I woke up the again, it was around 2pm and I was feeling much better.

It must have been some weird bug that's going around. I was fine when I woke up today (Wednesday) and came to school and everything. When I went to Professor Hanagan's office (I missed his class on Tuesday and wanted to find out what they had gone over) his wife, who is also a teacher here, said she had heard of four other students with similar symptoms in the last couple of days. I think Okaasan will feel better when she hears that. She was really worried yesterday about what had caused my sickness. At least it's over now, and hopefully that will be the only illness I have while I'm here.

It is ironic that I got sick when I did. My vocab quiz last week was mostly words about different illnesses: to have a stomache-ache (onaka ga itai), to have a headache (atama ga itai), to catch a cold (kaze ga hiku), to have a fever (netsu ga aru), etc. And my kanji quiz today included the kanji for both hospital (byooin,　びょういん、病院) and illness (byooki, びょうき、病気)。I didn't particularily want to put them into practice so soon, but I'm glad I knew how to tell Okaasan what was wrong.