yesterday was quite a fun day. I met up with some nova people and watched a really cool dance perfomance in namba station. they all looked so happy to have foreigners taking pictures of them. In japan, we are the japanese tourists. there is so much to take pictures of, i felt like one of the hordes of japanese tourists in banff!. i will never make fun of them again. then me and a girl from t-dot (linzi) went to Kurumon market. a huge fresh market by our apartment to pick up some veggies. we haven't had veggies of fruit since last week. Note: japanese veggies are huge a clove of garlic was just a little smaller than my fist. odd!

me and shiv spent the afternoon indoors watching crazy japanese tv. it will madden you if you watch it long enough. people on tv get so excited about every thing. On one show every one was going NUTS over shark fin soup. like,fanatical. then the host brought out a bowl of shark fin soup for every one. and the whole place went mad....for soup? its great to watch.

we have skype. shivs name is osakashiv, so try that.

last night we met up with some other teachers and went to watch a break dancing extravaganza. at namba station. very good, and walked along the lit up arcades till we came across a restaurant with alot of plasic food dispalys out front. super tasty and very reasonable. i had this idea of japan as being very expensive, but its not! will post pics soon.

Happy b day tabs!

Arcades and Okonomyaki

These are some pics of the last two days. I'll be writing more about these pics later tonight.

Osaka at a first glance

hi every one. its october the 27th here, but it is october the 26th in edmonton. The past few days have felt like a game to us, walking around seeing the sites. In the morning we have certain tasks to do. For eg. get towels, dish soap and tweezer. For us to complete those tasks, it was alot of fun, alot of searching, and alot of talking slowly with our hands trying to communicate in japanese. it is so weird to be in a place where there is so little english. This is indeed a great adventure for me and shiv because we are really out in the world on our own. It is a great lesson in patience and independence. yesterday i went to the corner store my our house all by myself and got us food for breakfast. It may not seem like a big feat but it was really interesting and hard to communciate. But it was a great experience. Today we did an ever bigger adventure. We had to navigate the osaka sub way and get to the chou ward (city hall type place) to register as aliens ( foreigners in japan). we found a hundred yen store and got some food and clipboards. so much fun making our way around this new land. We are cleaning the apt right now, packing our stuff away and making lunch. OH! by the way we got our 1st encounter with a eastern toilet today. It was in a japanese office building. and it was on the floor. So you squat down and go pee. so nutty, but awkwardly efficient!!!

love jan and shiv!

T Minus just a few more ..

so its about 1 month till we leave. and we are getting very very excited. this blog stuff is sort off odd. i will try to make it my new hobby.