long time, no see

2010/02/10 at 13:54 · Filed under tkd, 日本語

夕べの練習の後。

突然久しぶりの顔を見た。

仲間さん。

Nakama-san, of “went drinking with us and came to practice once and disappeared again” fame, came by the newly-renovated dojang last night and announced that he would be coming to practice next week. He seemed disappointed that Ouchan has (also) been skipping for the past couple of months, but I guess if I were the only guy at the dojang who’s hit puberty (and not Sensei), I would be kind of sad too. He’s a red belt and decent at sparring, so I wonder if I’ll get to spar him (preexisting hand injuries notwithstanding).

Speaking of injuries, I did the “land wrong on my ankle and have to sit out for a while” thing on Friday, only it was landing the back leg of a fast kick, which is a pretty ridiculous way to injure oneself, temporary or not. I assumed that since I haven’t had any mishaps with my ankles recently, that they were fine on their own. However, with a tournament looming, maybe it’s time to get more serious about strengthening my ankles. Sigh.

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flashback! boston

2010/02/07 at 19:46 · Filed under boston, nerdy analogy time, tkd, travel

Being in Boston was rather fun, in a manic-depressive way. I don’t want to bore the internetz with my mundane emotional issues more than I have already, so let’s focus on the fun parts!

As expected, the best parts of being in Boston were getting to hang out with people who are normally very far away and doing tkd. I’m normally rather bad about communicating with people who are far away, for whatever reasons, so it was nice to engage in some low-work social interactions. Especially with people who are still in school (which is… most of them), it seems like people I know are always busy, so I don’t really want to bother them unless I have some ulterior motive to contact them. (that sounds so ominous… hahaha)

Of course, since about 90% of my friends in Boston are Chinese, I ate a ton of Chinese food while in Boston. It was amazing. I hadn’t realized how much I missed Chinese food until there was so much in so little time. There was other food in my life, of course, like Miracle of Science with Risu-san and Longhorn Steakhouse (I know, right? I didn’t realize they existed in the north) with the MIT-Tsukuba contingent and California rolls with Carrington. And Anna’s. And boba! (which, I know, is Chinese) It exists in Japan too, I realized recently (mostly in Tokyo), but it’s usually more expensive for maybe half the volume compared to Boston.

On a side note, it was good to see that the Carrington variable in class snix_exes has been set to the pre-dating value. I guess the awkward_ex state can only be populated by up to one person at a time. Maybe this means that the snix_relationship_karma value has been set to zero. /end nerdy analogy

As for tkd… wow. A month of not working out (due to holidays + dojang renovations) left me unprepared for a week of tkd in Boston. It was good, though. I left with a good idea of where I am right now and some thoughts of things to work on. (and some new, painful ab workouts. thanks, master harb. :) <- only half-sarcastic) Here they are, in bullet format:

  • my long off-the-line turning kick is too slow for real-life sparring situations (so i need to work on throwing multiple shorter kicks)
  • i don’t motion unless i’m about to kick (i’m better about this in japan, actually. haha. i just need to keep motioning in the corner of my mind at all times while sparring)
  • i back up too much – usually when i’m thinking about throwing counters (this ties back to the second point)

I also learned that 15 minute sparring sessions with a person of similar level is probably more immediately beneficial for me, personally, than lots of matches with a number of people. Not that the latter isn’t useful. In the former, there’s enough time to experiment and really hammer out one or two moves and get them real-life-sparring-ready. I kinda wish that, in class someday (here or Boston), someone would announce “pair up with someone of a similar level, and for the next 10 minutes, just experiment and have fun in your match with them.” Especially since I don’t have access to the people – well, person – I would do this with, given the chance.

One last thing I took from Boston. At the end of my last class in Boston, on Friday, Master Chuang was addressing the club, especially the new people, and he said something that really stuck with me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something to the extent of: “if you stick with taekwondo, and you work hard, you will improve. this isn’t the case with everything else in your life, but it’s true here.” It reminded me of why I joined the club in the first place. At MIT, it’s so easy to get caught up in the psets and exams and feel like, even if you work hard, you could still fail the next exam. Especially when you’re majoring in something that doesn’t come easily to you, like physics and me (before I stopped taking physics classes). Even I could start tkd, with my slow reflexes and my inability to think on my feet, and become decent at it. I’m continually humbled by my peers, and my senpai, and elementary school kids, but I’ve come a long way since I started 3 years ago. Taekwondo has truly kept me sane these past years, and my life would be completely different – and probably the lesser – without it.

Next part: Tokyo is freaking awesome and so are anime musicals~

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sorry, sudden emotional revelation

2010/02/06 at 13:13 · Filed under eww feelings

The only reason why our relationship lasted as long as it did is because we existed in a self-created vacuum for the best part of it, and spent the rest of it wondering why the long-distance thing wasn’t working. Thus, the fact that we even made it a year was a fluke, rather than a reflection of the ability of some of its members to sustain a serious relationship (and, for once, I don’t mean me). Well, said member was probably never interested in a serious relationship anyway, so that was my fault for making assumptions that contradicted reality (again).

Posts with actual content coming sometime soon, as my life has actually been pretty interesting recently. Besides the whole finals week thing. Which I’m pretending is over at the moment.

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boston, part 1

2010/01/23 at 17:28 · Filed under boston, japan, tkd, travel

It started with a million hour trip across the world because I misestimated the amount of pain involved in a 12-hour flight with a multi-hour bus ride on each side. Actually, I missed the bus from Sendai to Tokyo, because I was waiting at the wrong part of the bus stop (apparently “Sendai station, east exit” is bigger than one might think). I ended up taking a more expensive bus run by JR that left around the same time, went to the same place, and was waiting at the part of the bus stop that I was. With the help of my “confused gaijin face,” the bus driver was convinced to try to call the bus company of the bus I was supposed to take, but to no avail. I’m not really sure what that was supposed to accomplish.

I had to chill out in Shinjuku broke for a while because the bus arrived before the station opened, and I’d spent all of my emergency money on another bus ticket (and the ATMs didn’t start working for my bank until 7:30 am). With the 300 yen I had left, I bought a train ticket to Tokyo, and secretly traveled to Funabashi, where I could transfer to the line that would take me to Narita Airport. I begged the attendant in the station to let me go find an ATM, since I couldn’t use the one in the station (region-specific banks = fail). I ran over to the closest convenience store, and bam! 7:30 am. I took out some money and made it to Narita Airport with no further trouble.

At the airport, I was patted down near the terminal at a security point made especially for flights to the US. It went by surprisingly quick and painlessly.

The plane ride was about as nice as could have been expected for a ~$500 ticket. ANA flights are pretty good, though, as far as travel to/from Japan goes. The plane I was on had four sections of varying quality, and of course, I was in the cheapest section, in the back, middle seat. At least I had a personal TV, and the bathrooms were big enough to stretch in when sitting became too painful. In addition, there was free Japanese beer – always a plus.

Once I arrived in New York, I BSed the subway to Penn Station, where I caught a bus to Boston that had internet that was incompatible with my laptop. :( Then, I was happily in Boston!

More later.

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new year’s resolution 1

2010/01/10 at 01:00 · Filed under personal goals

I usually don’t bother with New Year’s resolutions, to be honest. A new year is just another day that we’ve decided is important because some people a long time ago decided how they wanted to mark the passing of time, after all. Still, after finding this blog, I was inspired.

My first goal is to create some sort of morning ritual. I’m actually more productive when I wake up early, though the activation energy to getting out of bed is pretty high. I’m still kinda fuzzy about the details, but, most importantly, I want to be able to get out of bed on command.

There are several reasons why this is difficult for me: I don’t have a set bedtime, I often stay up late for a variety of reasons, and my room is always cold. Even if I go to bed early, I still end up waking up after 10 am on days when I don’t have an early class. Even if I set my heater to come on before I wake up – even if I left my heater on all the time – my room would still be cold.

These are some of the micro goals I’d like to set:

  • going to bed early: From the research I’ve done on my sleep habits, I think I need 9 hours of sleep a night. This is a ridiculous amount of sleep, but it’s what my body thinks I need. The only way I’m going to accomplish this is if I go to bed ridiculously early. I’m going to aim for closing the laptop at 11 pm and going to sleep by 12 am.
  • creating a bedtime routine: I want to use the time between 11-12 to prep for bed. I’m not sure if I should include showering in this time, because it takes me a ridiculously long amount of time to shower, and showering tends to keep me awake, but I don’t want to move my shower to the mornings either. I think this time should include things like brushing teeth, reading/doing sudoku, and maybe some writing.
  • waking up when my alarm goes off: I need something to get me out of bed in the mornings that’s compelling enough that I’ll do it even when it’s cold and miserable. Preferably, I’d like to train myself to get out of bed without hitting the snooze button on the alarm. The best idea I’ve had thus far is to do some sort of abs workout while I’m in bed that will wake me up.
  • creating a morning exercise routine: This isn’t necessary to make me into a more responsible adult, but in the past months, I haven’t been doing any upper body exercise. I’ve been doing tons of biking and a fair amount of tkd, but this has only been working out my legs. In addition, due to dojang renovations and the holidays, there’s no tkd between Christmas and my departure for Boston. This has led to me eating more (and unhealthier) and cut out about 7 hours of exercising a week (about 3.5 hours of tkd + 30 km of biking of varying intensity). Anyway, I’d like to have some basic, 10-15 min. workout in the mornings to wake me up and keep my body fitness more well-rounded. Right now, I’m thinking crunches, push-ups, plank, stretches, kick stretches, and maybe some light kicking.

The thing is, the method outlined in the blog calls for incremental change over the course of two months, but I honestly can’t see pulling this out in that many steps. Sure, it’d be nice if I could ease into a new schedule, but there are days when I actually need to wake up early, much earlier than even my schedule requires.

As a compromise, I’ll break it down into the sections I’ve outlined, once a week, after I get back from Boston. Right now, my sleep cycle is set such that I wake up without fail after 10 am (except for early class days), and whatever plans I might make will be ruined by the Boston trip anyway. I plan on using the interruption brought about by jet lag to make it easier to ease into my new schedule.

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…and i fail at updating again

2010/01/10 at 00:10 · Filed under food, japan, tkd

Here’s what I’ve been doing that I would have posted about separately if I had more motivation:

  • tkd trip:
    • Near the end of November, the Sendai and Iwate-ken branches of Aihara Dojo had a bonding trip (really, I can’t think of a better way to describe this) in Iwate-ken (the prefecture north of Miyagi-ken, where Sendai is located). Highlights:
      • Working out in a space < 6×6 mats. Really, this was amazing – cold wooden floor aside. There was fairly intense paddle drills, followed by touch sparring (turning, as touch sparring tends to do, into “light” contact), followed by full contact sparring. I touch-sparred Aihara-sensei – and sparred with Minako-sensei, a sensei from Tokyo – who’s my height! – and Erina-san, who was a lot shorter than me (45 kg?), but sparred like a guy.
      • Dinner. There was amazingly delicious food and beer and senseis performing takedowns on unsuspecting victims.
      • Onsen. We stayed overnight in a Japanese hotel with multiple baths, including an outdoor unisex bath, and we made the rounds. Fujita-san (one of the Iwate-ken guys) met us in the outdoor bath and tried to be all sketchy, but Yuka-chan and I prevailed in the end.
      • More drinking. The nijikai (二次会 – second party – an afterparty of sorts) is a time-honored tradition in Japan, so after onsen, we regrouped and socialized and ate snacks and drank. At first, the gatherings were gender-segregated, but eventually, we girls crashed the boy party.
      • Bowling. There was bowling the next morning. I was failing pretty badly, but managed to pull ahead of Ouchan in the last frames and avoid being in last place.
      • Wanko soba. After bowling, we went for soba. Yuka-chan and I overslept and didn’t eat breakfast, so we were pretty freaking hungry at this point. Wanko soba consists of tracking the number of small (2-3 bites per serving) bowls of soba you eat, and the winner… wins. I got off to a slow start, because I was doing things like adding seasonings to the soba – and Japanese people eat really fast – but near the end, there was an epic showoff between Yuka-chan and me, though I lost in the end. As for the guys, Satou-san? (another Iwate-ken guy) won with some unbelievable amount of soba.
      • There are some pictures here under the pictures of cute kids in Thailand, including the typical “snix pretending to eat something tasty” picture.
  • Christmas
    • I went to lab, then tkd, because Christmas isn’t so much of a holiday in Japan. Practice was lots of fun, though, since most of the adults came (even Ouchan! who’s been skipping to look for a job or some other nonsense ;) ), as well as a few kids. That said, it was pretty crowded and not so intense.
    • After tkd, I convinced Ouchan to go out for dinner, and we ate mediocre Western food. Conversation was surprisingly not awkward for two introverted people talking in a language other than their native language. (that said, Ouchan’s Japanese is a lot better than mine, having lived in Japan for a long time; I just fail at speaking)
    • I did cook up some fake Christmas dinner at some point though. Dishes included: some tasty shrimp recipe I found online, ghetto green bean casserole cooked in a small pot, and cheesecake that became waterlogged in an attempt to cook it on the stove, and ended up being cooked in a frying pan. Also eggnog that I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to keep as long as I did if I didn’t live alone.
  • New Year’s
    • After spending about a week in my room doing nothing, I went out late on New Year’s Eve to see if there was anything going on in Sendai. There wasn’t. I stopped by Rinnoji (輪王寺) on the way back because I heard a giant bell ringing. It was cold and snowing lightly, and the temple had a fire and amazake (甘酒) (warm, sweet, and apparently free of alcohol, despite the name), and it was rather nice.
    • On New Year’s Day, I ate a bento of foods traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day in Japan, since I wasn’t about to try either making it on my own or looking in vain for collard greens and black-eyed peas. Then, I went to Osaki Hachimangu (大崎八幡宮) for my beginning-of-year shrine visit (hatsumoude – 初詣). At the shrine, I bought an omikuji and ate tasty food at food stalls contained in the shrine. My favorite item was the bakudanyaki (爆弾焼き) – okonomiyaki in a ball shape. Why “bakudanyaki” – bomb okonomiyaki -  I don’t know.
  • Hatsuuri (初売り)
    • Jan. 2 is technically part of the New Year’s holiday, but in Sendai, the days after Jan. 1 mean epic sales everywhere. One of the (only) features of Sendai is the shopping district, which consists of large shopping arcades throughout the city. And all of these places had sales and bags filled with secret items (fukubukuro – 福袋 – literally “lucky bag”) on Jan. 2. My most epic purchase was a pair of boots and a pair of black formal-ish shoes for 2000 yen. Total.
  • cafe nerding
    • Ironically, after leaving MIT, I’m starting to discovering habits that make me productive. The past week, I’ve spent multiple days in coffee shops for as long as my laptop will allow, doing things that I feel like need to be done without the distraction of internet access and with the motivation of coffee and snacks. According to my Mister Donut point card, I’ve spent at 1400 yen the past week on coffee and donuts. That’s not including my experiments with other coffee shops (Starbucks: even more expensive than in the US. Another coffee shop I tried had leather couches but was also fairly expensive and didn’t have as many snacks.)
    • Mister Donut is awesome for multiple reasons. One, the donuts are pretty tasty. Two, I have a point card, so I can theoretically get a free item eventually. Three, and most importantly, they give out free coffee refills, going so far as to make the rounds every hour or so with fresh coffee. I also learned accidentally that if you bring your cup to the counter, they’ll also refill your cup on demand. Mister Donut is the sole reason my coffee intake has soared to physiologically unhealthy levels recently (my peak was 6 cups in a 24 hour period, at the point that I noticed withdrawal symptoms the next day).
    • This amount of coffee, on occasion, actually increases my productivity. I chugged through rewriting my resume, then the textbook for my grammar class in two 3-4 hour sessions without experiencing burnout or distractibility, practically unheard of for me normally. I’m planning to chug through the textbook for my technical reading class next, then handouts for classes that I haven’t reviewed. I also have two presentations coming up that I should write scripts for because I fail at public speaking, especially in Japanese.
  • I’m going to be in Boston in a little over a week!
  • After that, the dojang here will be moved into a bigger area, bringing happiness to taekwondoists everywhere in Sendai.

Well, that was an incredibly long post. Perhaps I’ll be able to return to a more moderate posting routine now.

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ovenless thanksgiving

2009/12/03 at 23:25 · Filed under food, japan

The Friday before Thanksgiving was my first payday in Japan, so I decided to attempt a Thanksgiving dinner on my own. This my first attempt at cooking bulk Western food while in Japan, with its unique challenges, such as expensive meat, cooking materials that I can’t always read, and difficulty finding American staples. In addition, being Japan, the only cooking appliance I have access to is a two-burner stovetop – Japanese kitchens seem to not come equipped with ovens naturally, and I haven’t bought so much as a rice cooker or microwave yet. With this in mind, I decided that making my own Thanksgiving dinner in this environment was a worthy intellectual challenge.

Right away, I figured I probably wasn’t having a whole bird or a turkey. Still, since the oven seems to be a staple of Thanksgiving cooking, I consulted the best source for making up stuff as I go along – Google. I found some sites that had suggestions for crockpot cooking, and I ultimately decided on variations of recipes from this post because of the sheer number of recipes offered.

I was pleasantly surprised to find boneless chicken breasts for a decent price – around 500 yen for about 2 lbs. I slow cooked the chicken breasts layered in stuffing  in a giant wok I picked up in a 100 yen shop for about 500 yen while I cooked the rest of the dishes. The stuffing was improvised with substitutions such as croutons for toasted bread pieces (yeah, they’re about the same, but it felt sketchy) and the mixture was cooked in yuzu wine. I may have used a little too much yuzu-chu, because yuzu is a pretty strong flavor, and everything tasted citrusy. I let this cook for a couple of hours, which was apparently too long, because afterwards the bottom of the pot had charred food stuck to it.

As the chicken/stuffing cooked, I made the rest of the side dishes. I made deviled eggs with some wasabi snuck into the usual deviled egg stuffing. I made mashed potatoes and used the extra sauce from the chicken as gravy. I also cooked some eggplant and onions. (Yes, there are both bulb onions and scallions in there. I had extras.) There was also a recipe for hot chocolate for which I used milk, hot chocolate mix, sugar, and some vanilla extract.

thanksgiving 09 all

It was surprisingly good, with the exception of the mashed potatoes, which were kinda bland. The hot chocolate, vegetables, and deviled eggs were especially tasty. The chicken didn’t dry out with future servings, which was nice, but the yuzu was a little strong and could have probably been diluted more for the sake of people who don’t like the taste of yuzu (I was starting to get sick of it by the end of the week, myself).

My Thanksgiving meal (celebrated the Sunday before Thanksgiving):

thanksgiving 09 serving

Once the starches ran out, I started eating chicken and stuffing over white rice. Good times.

In hindsight, I wish I would have invited some tkd people over for Thanksgiving (or, more likely, crashed someone else’s place with food; the dorm isn’t the best place to entertain others), but at the same time, the challenge of making this dinner was fun enough so that I don’t regret it too much.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! :)

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curry rice and card games

2009/11/22 at 00:42 · Filed under food, japan, tkd

Last night after tkd, Sensei invited me up to have dinner with the kids in the senshu course (the kids who train to compete at tournaments). It turned out the kids were having a sleepover at Sensei’s house, so that they could leave early the next morning to watch a tournament in Tokyo. Those of us who went to the 8 pm practice ate curry while the other kids were in the other room. Some of the kids came in and out periodically, doing homework at the table as we ate. One of the kids kept getting distracted by the TV playing in the background, and at one point, Yuka put her hands on the sides of his face like blinders, focusing him on his homework.

Sensei told Gentarou to ask me questions about English in preparation for his English test on Tuesday/Wednesday (yes, it’s apparently a two-day test) in exchange for having him hold paddles for me at practice. We did end up having a couple of discussions on words in English. For example, apparently the word “trump” has a different meaning in Japanese, but I couldn’t tell you what it was; at another point, Sensei was talking about doing tkd in English since he’s making a trip to San Francisco next year (excuse for me to make another trip to CA?), so they asked what turning kick was in English.

After dinner, kids started trickling in, and we started to play card games. First, we played BS with jokers, with the extra rule that if you didn’t say the correct number in English, it was an automatic BS. As more people joined, we played Old Maid with the punishment for the loser being a flick on the forehead from everyone else playing. I got caught in the endgame a couple of times, but never lost, but then I felt bad because the boy who I always ended up being against lost twice in a row. :\

Once it started getting late, the kids went into the next room, two tatami rooms with a sliding door separating them. There were blankets and pillows and more blankets laid out. It kinda reminded me of sleeping over at Cornell, but this was probably cozier (but still cold).

At one point, I was asked about what I do on non-tkd days, but I didn’t want to sound lame and say that I don’t really have any friends, but they took my hesitation to mean that I was dating someone here. I clarified that I was dating someone in Boston in a very gender-neutral way (surprisingly hard to do; about the only time gender is specified in Japanese is in asking whether someone has a boyfriend/girlfriend). If I were to explain to anyone in Japan about my dating situation, it would be these guys, but I wanted to avoid potentially awkward situations in front of the kids (I also want to avoid potentially awkward situations in general).

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bulk cooking

2009/11/15 at 17:01 · Filed under food, japan

Because my first paycheck is this Friday (despite doing almost two months of work), I had to figure out ways to save money while staying alive. The ways I’ve saved the most money are by riding my bike everywhere and bulk cooking; I’ve managed to (mostly) live on 5000 yen/week since coming to Sendai. (This doesn’t include bills for rent/utilities, initial purchases of things like pots for cooking, and freak payments like textbooks and bike issues.)

Whenever I mentioned my bulk cooking practices to people in Japanese, however, they’re really surprised. It might be because my Japanese is still awkward when it comes to describing things like bulk cooking (lit: I cook once a week and eat a little bit every day). Last week, I got the same response two days in a row (Ouchan and Imai-sensei, one of the professors in my lab): isn’t it boring eating the same thing every day?

To be honest, it’s much more convenient for me to cook once a week, freeze most of the remains, and eat that for the week, especially since I like cooking and most recipes (yeah, I know, I’m not that hardcore) and food servings come in packets of families, not individual people. On the other hand, I look forward to the day I can grab some Mos Burger or Sukiya after tkd. I’m usually really hungry after workout in the first place, then I have to wait 45 min. while I bike home, then another hour to get settled in and the food warm, so I usually end up eating dinner at 11 pm on tkd nights.

In case anyone is curious about the sorts of things I’ve been cooking, it’s actually not that exciting. I’ve been resorting to instant sauces (curry, nabe, mapo tofu), adding tofu and vegetables (because tofu is so much cheaper than meat – it’s unbelievable), and letting it simmer while I cook rice (without a rice cooker; I also look forward to the day I can buy and use a rice cooker), like I am right now. Starting next week, I’m thinking of expanding my horizons to things that aren’t on sale at the grocery store, so maybe I’ll start browsing some food blogs for ideas on things to cook.

I’ve also been drinking hot tea (and sometimes hot chocolate) like mad, since the temperature regulation is similar to living in Bexley with a non-working heater (read: pretty miserable). Sometimes I sneak in some milk, to get in extra protein and calcium and that sort of good stuff.

This week’s special is mapo tofu sauce with tofu, ground beef, scallions, carrot, eggplant, and mushrooms. The fresh batch is pretty tasty. :)

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lab progress + more tkd

2009/11/11 at 23:45 · Filed under lab, tkd

Today, it was raining, and according to the internet, it was supposed to rain all day, so I sucked up my frugality and spent a crapload of money on public transportation. To be honest, it was nice having time to read while traveling, instead of coming into lab hot and exhausted from biking. On the other hand, I was pretty miserably cold walking from the bus stop to the dojang at night.

Since I slept late (because of a fire alarm at 7 am), it was raining (lack of motivation to go outside) and I took the horribly inefficient bus (takes about an hour for distance I can cover in 30 min by biking/walking), I didn’t get to lab until around 2 pm, then went for a late lunch with the Iranian chick in my lab.

In lab, I learned how to visualize my data. First, let’s backtrack to what I’m actually researching. Background: the lab is researching the mechanical properties of malaria-infected red blood cells via simulation. I’ve been assigned the task of breaking the iRBCs and seeing what happens. It’s taken me until now to figure out the code, program something that is probably about right, and run the code to get some potentially interesting data. Since the code takes a long time to run, I cut down the number of iterations, but cut it down too much, so the data wasn’t actually that interesting. Tomorrow I’ll increase the interval time and rerun the code and maybe I’ll know something interesting by next week.

After I skipped out of lab early, I took a bus that conveniently went from campus to the part of Sendai where the dojang is located. Actually, I was surprised because, in general, Sendai buses are not actually that convenient; usually, they all travel to Sendai station. Plus, campus is on a mountain, in the middle of nowhere (comparatively speaking).

At workout, there was a new guy who’d studied tkd in Korea for a little while (I think). His kicks were pretty strong, and he picked up new kicks pretty quickly. (Seriously. He threw a couple of decent doubles. I wish I could’ve thrown doubles like that as a blue belt, even.) There was “sibling” bonding time between Ou-chan and Gentarou, the oldest boy of the group of awesome kids. They even look like brothers because they have similar hairstyles. めっちゃかわいい。

Near the end of practice, Yuka and I worked on clinch/back kick drills, which was pretty interesting because, well, who thinks of throwing back kick coming out of the clinch? My back kick has been dandan improving since I got here, so I was actually landing a lot of the back kicks, though they still don’t have a lot of power yet.

On the way home, there was bonding with Ou-chan about sparring pains (look at the bruises on my legs! ow, my hip hurts.) and stereotypes about America. (no, it’s not true that everyone has guns. if you try to hold up a store with a gun, the store owner will not pull out a bigger gun and run you away. well, it’s possible. it depends, i suppose.)

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