Good god, I totally fail at updating this blog. One big reason is that I don't have internet at my home, and when I'm at school I'm usually too busy or too tired to write...

So what's new? Last weekend I went to Tokyo Disneyland and met up with Amy, Abel, Scott, Joyce, and Monica again (WashU/Jet peeps I met up with when I visited Amy in Minakami before KCJS), and I got to meet Michelle and Glenn. It was tons of fun, of course. It was Abel's first trip to Disney, so we hit up all of the major rides. I've been to Disney once before, but I went with my mom, who hates rides and waiting in line, which means I didn't exactly get to do a whole lot. So a lot of this was new to me too. It was *ridiculously* crowded though. Most of the lines were at least an hour long, so by the end of the weekend I was pretty thoroughly exhausted. I probably should have taken pictures, but Amy brought along her fancy high-tech camera, so basically any pictures I took were easily surpassed by hers. It was really nice to see everyone again though. Much as I'm enjoying KCJS, I do miss my WashU friends a lot.

This past week was midterms, which wasn't too bad, just kind of a lot of work. For Japanese class, we first had an oral exam, then we had to do a group presentation on interviews we had conducted with Japanese students. I'm not sure about how the presentation went - basically, all we had to do was memorize what we had written on our essay, but I'm pretty bad at reciting blocks of text from memory. It's probably less work and less stress than generating responses, but overall I think I actually do better when I have to come up with my own answers...

Lastly, we had the written final yesterday, and I'm really not sure how that went. It did make me realize that I'm *terrible* at kanji. I managed to forget some very basic stuff - I forgot the "sei" of 男性 and 女性 which means I lost points both, and it took me waaaay too long to remember the kanji for 作る. It was pretty damn "special," especially because these are all first-year, maybe second-year kanji. I always knew I was weak at kanji, so the summer before KCJS that was all I studied. By the end of the summer, I had learned/reviewed 500 characters, which I'm convinced was what got me into the C-level class - a lot of the kanji that appeared on the placement test were kanji that I'd studied over the summer. But of course, now I've gone and forgotten practically all of what I learned. Go me!!!

Right now though, it's fall break, which means I have a week off from school! And despite the fact that practically all of KCJS has gone to Tokyo/Okinawa, I'm going to be staying in Kyoto the whole week (for a lot of reasons, which I won't go into because I'm tired of having to explain my decision :-P). All the same, I actually think fall break will be fun. But as lame as it sounds, I think I *really* need to at least review some kanji. It's pretty incredible that I forgot such basic stuff...