This week seemed like an exercise in things not happening quite how I thought they would, which was frustrating. That being said, things seemed like they progressed somewhat in a bunch of different areas, which is always good.

The week started off with the thank you speeches from my graduating sempais in the lab, and then a party after that. Sadly for me, the thank you speeches (seminars, really) were pretty much all in Japanese, so I understood very little, even though I knew enough to know I wanted to know what was going on. Somewhat hilariously, one of my sempais’ advice was to keep a diary/journal. That’s the same advice my grandfather gave to everyone at his 70th birthday, actually. So it has somewhat inspired me to keep working on this journal of mine, make sure that I record my life and thoughts as I go along. I’m bound to forget a lot of it later, and it provides me with a good tool to review things. Anyway! The seminars were fun despite my not understanding a whole lot, and the afterparty was also a lot of fun. Some of the previous graduates of the lab had come along as well, and I got to chat a bit to Abe-san, who works for Google Japan. Neat stuff! I tried some interesting drinks (I can’t say that I really recommend yuzu-shu) and generally had some laughs with everyone, particularly with Tatsuya, my tutor, who doesn’t speak that much English… yeah, figure that one out. After the party, about half of us headed down the road to another little bar to have a couple more drinks and some more conversation. It was great just sitting back and chatting to people, even though at times my Japanese seemed to fail me. Luckily most people there spoke fair English and could fill me in! Tatsuya at some point decided he wanted a middle name – his suggestions were “Sparkling” and “Premium” and as hilarious as they were, I couldn’t come up with a different one that would be appropriate for him.

This week’s “personal projects” day was actually Tuesday, and felt really good. I picked up some free shelving from a guy off of craigslist, did some washing and worked on my own website. The front page of my site now siphons a preview of the latest journal entry and has a little list of the things I’ve got going on. While this may sound small, it was a bit of a pain to get working properly! I also updated some of the text on some of the other pages and generally felt good about having something on my site updated, given how much I neglect it. I watched a few interesting things as well – an episode of a new anime that I like, Koukaku no Regios, the final for Battlestar Galactica (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and the trailer for the live-action adaption of Blood: The Last Vampire, which I am really, really looking forward to.

I went to my first basketball practice since I left for New Zealand this week… my legs were not thanking me in the days that followed. Still, I had a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to going again this coming week. Unfortunately I didn’t know they were going out drinking afterwards, and couldn’t go with them, I needed to haul myself back across town and get to bed. It was around 1am when I sat down to have some dinner that night. Something else happened that I thought was hilarious on the way back – I got mistaken for a model. When I was passing through the Komaba area (where there are a few photography studios), I randomly started walking with and talking to a photographer from Columbia named Eri (I hope I spelled that right), who mistook me for a model heading home from a shoot. Hilarious! Anyway, we chatted for a while since we were headed in the same direction and on the same train, and agreed to meet up on the weekend. As it turns out, that didn’t pan out, but hopefully I’ll see him next weekend. Always good to have a new friend.

Things with my research this week have been slow. I’ve made a few more changes to my survey system and put it up online so my Dad can have a look at it and hopefully help put together the initial batch of survey questions, although I know he’s busy over in the UK so I don’t know how much he’s going to be able to do. Again, this week was a lot of busy-work, which was a bit frustrating. But I did make some progress, which was good.

This week also saw the first round of me trying to pay my bills and figure out next month’s. Had to deal with the busiest I have ever seen the bank – at one point it was 22 people in line ahead of whoever next wanted to see someone… yeesh. Rent, electricity, insurance for the new city ward, gas… actually I still haven’t paid the gas yet, I was mistaken about what I got in the mail. Apparently they send you out a little receipt-thing first, then the bill later. Oops. In any case, I’ve been trying to talk to who I need to in order to get the right paperwork to do everything automatically, since I really don’t want to have to fumble through paying these every month if I don’t have to. Hopefully someone will be nice enough to help me read and fill out the application forms when I get them. Oh, on top of that, I confirmed with my department office that I get my next scholarship payment on the 30th of April, which is after I need the money to pay my rent. Looks like I’m going to have to be very careful about my food and not get as much furniture as I thought I was going to, so my place is going to remain fairly stark for a while yet. I guess I’ll need to really solidly work out if the groceries I’m getting is helping offset my meal costs as much I thought it would. A little hard to say, since I know the biggest savings is going to come when I get my gas range and can cook proper meals.

I didn’t get to speak to Anastasia much this week, which was a bit of a shame. She’s been busy with exams and helping out with her sorority and so on, so we haven’t had a lot of time to talk. I did manage to talk to her a little bit during the weekend, which was great. Hopefully next week we’ll be able to connect a bit more, it’s been a bit rough lately dealing with the distance thing, and having more regular/lengthy communication can certainly help with that.

This weekend was also supposed to be my first hanami, or cherry-blossom watching party. It’s a big deal here in Japan, people get together under the cherry blossoms and have drinks and good times. It’s such a short period of time that they have a blossom-watch on the news to let you know which parts of the country have the blossoms for the few days that they do. Unfortunately for me, the blossoms haven’t quite come in yet, so the people I was going with cancelled… well, postponed until next week, in any case. Only problem is that I don’t know if everyone is going to be able to get together next week, but I guess we’ll see. I moped about this for a while – my plans for the weekend just all kind of came undone. Other than a little bit of work on my money management tool (I added proper currency switching, for those that care), I did manage one thing this weekend – I got some furniture. I got a cheap sofa, some plastic drawers for the closet, a CD drawer thing (which I suspect I won’t use for CDs at all) and a little chair. All of it needs a bit of cleaning, but it’s more stuff that I need. Now instead of looking empty, it just looks like I haven’t set up properly yet… but hey, it’s progress!