Only posting because Neal bugged me

Last time I left off, I was about to go to the welcome party for my lab. Our entire lab met at the Disney Store at around 7pm on friday. I was suprised when I got there because my prof for Comp. Engineering was there too, but his lab went to eat at a different place. We all walked to an "Italian" restaurant. Now I say "Italian" instead of Italian because despite the very Italian ambience, none of the food we got was Italian. It ended up being random dishes from around the world, but it was decent enough. This place also had a Nomi-hodai, but only 3 out of the 20 people in my lab ended up taking full of advantage of it. My sempai (the undergrad that acts as my advisor), another 3rd year student, and one of the profs got completely smashed. Pictures of such festivities can be viewed in the album. After leaving the restaurant, the professors all left, and the students (us) went to a bowling alley. Unfortunately, there weren't any open lanes for another hour, so we went to play pool instead. I totally schooled the guys at my table, due to my ridiculous luck *cough* skill, I mean skill...yea... I think that I totally raised my respect with these guys, because they are even nicer than before. There is still this one guy in my lab that looks like he's going to snap at any moment. It's like a Japanese version of Milton (Office Space for the uncultured, j/k).

In SB, I was busy like crazy on the weekdays, and totally free to do nothing on the weekends. It seems to be the opposite here. I have nothing to do on the weekdays, and my weekends are completely filled with club stuff, events, the need to explore, etc. Last weekend, though, I had some free time to sleep. After the @home meeting on sat., I slept and watched Japanese TV pretty much the rest of the day. On Sunday, I went walking/exploring with Albert and Na-yon (from Korea). The highlight of that walk was that I found pepsi that comes with classes Super Mario Bros. figurines. Even though I hate Pepsi, I had to get those Mario toys. Japan is dangerous for someone who likes video games to an obsessive degree. Good thing the toys were in a 99cent store. My next task is to try and to get a tour of Nintendo in Kyoto. Hiroko-san from the student exchange division gave me her "broken" Gamecube. She said that if I fixed it, I could keep it for a couple of weeks. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited as all I play is Halo and StarWars:KOTOR II.

The week was pretty fun, as I met a bunch of new people (Anton, Mikiko, and Tuan, all from Sweden, Taiga from Japan, and Dave from Yorba Linda, CA) and got to see the cherry blossoms bloom. Even though it rained on wednesday, the sakura trees are still amazing.

This weekend is going to be soo busy, all with fun things. Saturday is the @home meeting, followed by setup for a giant welcome party at the dorms. The party is hosted by the foreign students association on campus, and is supposed to have hundreds of people show up. The next day is Hana-mi for @home, so I'm going to be busy all day setting up. Also, I got volunteered to be one of the MCs for the event (One announcing in English, one in Japanese). The event is going to be pretty big, as 140 people already pre-ordered tickets. For the people that don't know (prolly everyone), Hana-mi means cherry blossom viewing. The cherry blossoms only bloom once a year, and fall down within a week, so this is an important time for Japanese people. I'm not quite sure what the event is going to entail, as I only really understood half of what people are saying. All I know is that there is going to be food (which is ironically the same reason why I get *cough* suckered *cough* into going to INDUS events). I'll hopefully have a better idea soon, as I kind of need to know to MC.

Btw: Go see/download Intolerable Cruelty, it's actually a hilarious movie despite looking stupid in the previews.