Questionnaire...

I got tagged... LoL - not that I usually actually copy&paste these weird questionnaires but since I have some time to spend....

1. Do you think people will judge you by the answers to this questionnaire?
- Does that matter? If you own the right to judge me then I'd try to appeal myself more, but as it is... If you do judge me after reading just this, then you're just not the kind of person I might want to hang out with.

2. What is your favourite brand for bags?
- No particular brand, but I've been into shoulder bags recently...

3. What’s your favourite thing to do?
- Watching reruns while reading a book. Yes. It's true.

4. What are your phobia(s)?
- Heights, open water, losing my phone...

5. How do you vent anger or stress?
- Go out for karaoke, work out at the gym and take a long warm bath afterwards... or visiting the zoo?

6. Do you believe you can survive without money?
- Probably not. I don't think I'd survive without electricity either.

7. What are you afraid to lose the most?
- The place that I can return too... as in, the place I can call 'home'.

8. If you win $1 million, what would you do?
- Buy land! Build a house with solar panels and.. and... do something ecological...?

9. If you are asked to do one house chore, which would you choose to do?
- Sweeping? Outside? Does that count as a house chore?

10. List out 3 good points of the person who tagged you?
- Sweet!

11. What skill do you wish you have?
- Bug-swapping. I hate cockroaches and centipedes.

12. What type of person do you hate the most?
- People who actually "stab you in the back" in your face!

13. What is your ambition?
- I want to work on something that'll one day give my life some meaning. Heck I'm in my 20s and I'm talking like someone more than twice my age.

14. What did you regret doing?
- Not being more focused when it mattered the most... on a number of occasions.

15. What do you think is the most important thing in your life?
- My phone... I felt so lost without it when I left it at home the other day, I couldn't contact anyone!!

16. If you were a car/bike what would it be?
- I would definitely be a bike. Like the BMW '92 versions...

17. If you have a chance which part of your character would you like to change?
- I would want to be less concerned of other people's behaviour and focus a little bit more on myself.

18. What music have you been listening to recently?
- I found a cd a friend burnt for me of some music by Arash, I don't know if he's Indian or Persian but it's really great danceable stuff.

19. What is your least favourite animal?
- Centipedes. I seriously -hate- centipedes.

20. What is your ultimate addiction?
- Manga. Seriously, more than anime I like the manga.

Well. To those that want to spend the last 15 minutes the same way I just did, consider yourself tagged!! ^^

Shirahama@Wakayama

I was supposed to leave at 8.20 by bus (which was all payed for) yesterday morning but I was 5 minutes late and didn't make the bus at all! Great start to the day, huh? I missed the bus because I was at the wrong terminal. Why are there 3 bus terminals in Kobe anyway?? If I had known I would've... ... ... gah. It was my mistake anyway ... which made the fact that I missed the bus even worse.

The trip to Wakayama was supposed to take about 3 and a half hours so imagine my shock when I heard that the next bus from Kobe was at 11.20am! Add in the 3 and a half hours and the fact that my return ticket was for 5.48pm the same day? Not enough hours! The ticket-lady was so kind as to tell me that I could try and run for the next bus in Osaka which would be at 9.50am. Okay, so what the heck right? I paid for the ticket and practically -flew- to Umeda. The 30min train ride felt agonizingly longer than usual. When I arrived at about 9am in Umeda and practically ran for it! It turned out that the Umeda bus terminal was closer and, yes!, I found the right terminal and I was 30 mins early! Since I left the apartment without breakfast, I started hunting for the nearest convenience store, got a sandwich, yoghurt and juice.

So I finally -actually- got on the 9.50am bus and was on my way. Then! Just an hour before the ETA, there was a sudden announcement about bad traffic. I ended up only actually arriving around 2pm. *sigh* Just my luck right? Well, I called up my friends when I arrived and ducked in nearest convenience store to buy lunch... which was just 2 onigiris. After all the mishaps, I wasn't feeling particularly hungry too.

Anyway!All that disappeared when I saw the beach! I don't have a particularly good picture of it but here are some from my phone!

We helped Wakki get comfy with the sand! ^^




The one sleeping on the left is a senior and the 2nd from the right is our professor. Apparently they just came back from a 4 hour hike and were just totally exhausted!





On our way back from the onsen:

That's pretty much it. My friends are supposed to upload their pictures soon, so I might post some more if there are any good ones!

It's hothothot

My exams have finished and I only have 2 reports left to do! Woopee~~

Everything was going crazy until this Wednesday (when I had an exam for the first period and no more classes after that... which means that I went up to Uni that early in the morning just for one exam that finished at 10am and for nothing else........) After that exam I realised that, I have no more classes!! Two more reports and I am -done- for this semester.

Can't believe how time just flies so fast. This semester has been so crazy... I was basically busy and all laid out with plans from Autumn last year and now! Well, I'm not exactly without plans but it's -really- time to kick back and relax ^^ I'll be at home for most of next week doing reports and, really, just whatever, enjoying not needing to go up to Uni and then I start work... a lot of work at that English tuition place from the week after next!

I put in Koto practise in for all the Tuesdays next month too! Which doesn't really give me that much time between work and leisure (work -might- be from Wednesdays thru Saturdays but I'm not entirely sure? I think I must have misheard it... anyway I think I might need the extra money for Brunei T_T) I can't wait to go back! heeee


Oh... and I also decided last minute to go to that trip with my classmates! They left today (probably already) to Shirahama, in Wakayama for a one-night stay by the beach. It's the last time I'll be seeing some of them so I really wanted to go. I decided to leave tomorrow morning... and I'll only be there about 5 or so hours but I haven't seen the beach there yet. .... .... ... ... beach. volleyball. sand castles. yikes.

On strange dreams again

I slept 10 hours last night... and am very grateful for that but I woke up at 8am when I was supposed to at 7.30, since I was supposed to leave for classes at 8.30, I was in a complete rush - I thought I would be about 15 mins late for class. But then I realised as I entered the class - that there was no class! Haha ... the joke was on me. Class today was cancelled so we could prepare for the exam that's on Thursday... in 2 days. Well. Not that there was anything bad about being up at Uni so early, I still have to prepare for this last-minute presentation I volunteered for yesterday on ethnic conflict in Nigeria. It's not going to be polished up at all, but it's better than nothing. We were looking into the successes and failures of ethnic conflict management and we only had success examples so I just took up Nigeria as a quick example of a not-so-successful example.

Anyway! I was going to continue on strange dreams again today. There was something nagging me at the back of my head yesterday because I couldn't fully remember my dreams when it hit me late last night that there was something else I had forgotten. I dreamt that I was just completing my exams here in July one day, I slept one night and the next thing that happened was that I was waking up in Brunei - completely disoriented and it was already September. All these weird things started happening until everybody finally realised that I had amnesia and I completely lost all my memory of August. I didn't even know whether or not I sat for my exams - which amazingly enough was my prime fear in that dream. I think this was probably the first time I ever dreamt of having amnesia.

Well, I probably have to get started on that presentation again - I still have to convert it to Japanese and I have class in another hour... 2 more weeks... and then it's holidays!!

On strange dreams

I had the weirdest dream last night. So weird that I incorporated my alarm song into it several times and couldn't really 'wake up' for some time. I can barely remember what it was about though. All I can think about is the Zelda Phantom Hourglass game that I just jammed last night and the Ethnic Conflict book I was flipping just before I slept. Insert Buffy tVS that I've been watching recently... and you have my really, really weird dream.

I think there was civil war... or just war in 'my country'. I was following around a group of... military-like people. The whole dream was dark. I think we were near a port, because I vaguely remember seeing a ship.(That's Zelda for you) But we were in an alternate dimension where something that was supposed to exist was missing. (That's probably from Buffy). We were looking around for something really really special and there was fighting... there were theme songs LoL (I'm pretty sure that those songs came from my alarm clock). I basically had a whole movie/game in my head. It was really really weird. Right towards the end, I felt as if I was suffocating when I realised my nose was blocked (in reality) and that's how I woke up. Not really a nice way to wake up but I did. I'm kinda glad I did. Who knows what else I might have seen in that dream.

Friday to Monday

The Joint Seminar has ended! ...Hahaha I was and am still dead tired.

Friday

Everything basically started on Friday. I woke up around 10 so I could go up to Uni for lunch just to pop in the computer room where everybody was working on their presentations (there were 2 groups working on it). After a while I went off to the Foreign Students Centre to see if I could bump into Hasanah. And I did! It was so nice seeing her again. I couldn't stay for so long because I had to run off to work around 2.30pm.

Work finished around 8pm, so I just grabbed a quick dinner and took the bus back up to Uni. It was 9pm by the time I arrived and what I saw at the computer room was amazing! There were more than 20 people there hustling and bustling over the computers practising their speeches, working on their notes and powerpoint and stuff. Around midnight our professor, Sakai-sensei, just popped his head in to lend us his photocopy cards (since we had to make about 170 copies for the actual thing), and he was kind enough to comment on our work here and there. He was really surprised to see all of us camping in the computer room and couldn't stop laughing about it. He left shortly after. Our numbers started dwindling at that point.

Saturday

The other group finished their work, went off to make copies, came back and actually left around 2.30am. Our group was practically half asleep tweaking little semantic problems on the powerpoint and speeches but we managed to somehow finish the handouts we made and off we went to photocopy. After that they all (5 of us) just sat down to start working on the speech. I was all thumbs. Hahahaha. I couldn't help them with the speech because it was in Japanese and I couldn't really understand the subtle nuances, so I told them I was taking half the handouts with me and would deal with them at home. So I left at 3.30am.

Arrived home at 4am. Took a shower and then started stapling the handouts, finished that in an hour, had an early breakfast and then after preparing everything to make sure I could leave immediately, I slept at 6am. The alarm rang a little after 7am and after a dizzy start, I left for Uni. We were to begin preparations from 7.50am.

The actual Joint Seminar began around 9am and until then we were all running around here and there stapling the rest of the handouts, some other handouts and then just making ourselves comfortable inside the hall. I suppose that there were at least 150 people who came. The Seminar was really fun! We had topics like Prostitution and Outer Space, Guns and Hunger and etc etc. I mentioned before that my group's presentation was on World Heritage Sites.

We finished the actual seminar a little after 6pm and after that was another huge rush since we had to clean up. The after party started at 7.15pm and we all just barely made it. The after-after party was from 9.30pm to 12 and some of us made that too. We were still high and excited about the whole thing so Asami, Wakki and I went to Wakki's place to just talk about... stuff. Hahaha. I fell into this really rough sleep (kept waking up every 10 or so minutes) around 3.30am.

Sunday

Then we had to leave Wakki's place around 5am so Asami could take the first train back. I arrived back here around 6am and just slept straight through to 12 noon.

I went off shopping with a friend to this outlet out at Tarumi from 3pm, shopped for clothes, had a Korean dinner and came back (around 9pm). I could barely keep my eyes open at this point so I just gave up doing anything and slept at 10pm.

Monday

And here I am, I woke up at 9am and I think that that was only because it was too hot in my room to do anything else, so I escaped to the living room and turned on the AC. I'm so glad I did because shortly after my nose started bleeding again. It's stopped already.

past midnight.

It's 12.30am. As in past midnight and I'm still at Uni!!!


There's a big presentation that my seminar'll be doing tomorrow (for the 6-Uni IR Joint Seminar). And we're still working on it! We don't seem to be doing as bad off as this other group which is still researching - we're just tweaking our powerpoint and technical word-usage. I had no idea that we were so... picky about details. But then looking back at how our seminars have been held... at one point or another we always end up arguing about how to use certain words from inside the texts.

It doesn't look like we'll be moving from this spot anytime soon. We started with about 25 people around 9pm and .... we're still about 20 people strong at this point. Only 6 of us are from my seminar... a pretty small group considering there are 22 of us originally. In any case. It feels like a camp.

I worked till 11pm at Uni last night. My head's still spinning from the powerpoint slides.

There's this Kansai Joint Seminar for International Relations going on this Saturday and my seminar-class has been working on our presentation (which'll be on World Heritage Sites). I haven't been able to help so much lately because of my weekly presentations and reports. But, since my next presentation (scheduled for today) was postponed, I had time to spend with them instead. I only had classes from 9-12noon yesterday. But we all felt so pressured to finish the presentation (since we only have 2 days left!) - we started from lunch with 11 people (out of the 22 total from our seminar) and slowly dwindled to 5 around 6pm. We were pretty solid until about 10pm when 3 of them had to go back and it was just Koyuki and me working on the powerpoint. We finally quit at 11pm because Koyuki had to take the last train back. Which means? I actually worked hard for 11 hours straight yesterday! hahaha... I feel like I've paid back for at least half of my absences from the weekly meetings up to this point. In any case! I hope everything goes well on Saturday.

I found some more pictures from DisneyLand!






above: the sleeping beauty castle


above: wall from the castle


cute kid wearing a pirate costume. we saw her just before the teacup ride. she was soooo cute!!