Clangy

(The Kinks - "Sunny Afternoon")

Today's a beautiful day.

I went to my most rural school's principal's house for lunch today. It was really great. He lives way up in the mountains in this awesome, small complex of a residence with his parents and wife. We talked about what I should do when I got back to the U.S., his travels around Eastern Europe and the U.S., and a blog and webpage he's working on. He told me about how he thought it would be better if there were tours for tourists in Japan that covered nature walks and stuff in the inaka (countryside). He said people come to Japan and just see big cities like Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, which is nice, but that they don't really get a sense for what normal, everyday life is like for the rest of the country. In the same way, he said, Japanese people who travel to Los Angeles, go see Universal Studios, Hollywood, and Santa Monica, ride around in a bus full of other Japanese people, then go fly back home to Japan don't really know what it's like to live in the city. They need to go to other places, like Downtown and Chinatown. For his vacation to California, he rented a car with his family and drove down the coast from San Francisco to L.A., then all around the city on his own. It was really cool to hear about. It's just really inspiring to hear the stories of, and be around, people who don't fit in exactly with the rest of society.

I ended up exchanging blog addresses with him, too! 今日はありがとうございます、藤原先生！

I came home and made my signature tofu dish again. I'm getting it done in record time now, somewhere around 25 minutes. I mixed in the sauce-thickening powder (? 片栗粉) today really well today, too, and didn't have any clumps! It was a nice, circular, quick yet graceful stirring motion! I also added some chopped up ginger, which was a good idea. I'm just working on the details now, like how to make the green onions look more apetitizing (add them in later so they're still bright green when everything's finished). Yes!

I'm ending this post on the same song on which I began it.