13 May 2009

I woke-up this morning and took advantage of the complimentary breakfast at the Toyoko Inn. They had a larger variety of nigiri, but that was about it. I ate two salmon nigiri with miso soup and takuan. Checkout was at 10am, as always, so we packed up and left by that time. Luckily, it wasn’t raining, so that was a very pleasant surprise. It was still very hazy and extremely humid, but the temperature wasn’t too extremely hot. To get back to the NOMYC, we took three different train lines and transferred twice. It was over an hour of traveling by train and subway. We got back to the NOMYC around noon, which allowed us enough time to work on our design project until 2pm when we had to present. Norio, Derrick, Seth, and I were able to get a decent amount of work done in the two hours before class, so it was nice to feel productive. Since our class is split into two groups again, my session went from 2pm-3:30pm, and the second session went from 3:30pm-5pm. During my break, I went to Matsuya with Seth and Norio to get a late lunch. I’ve recently been craving curry a lot, so I once again got curry with a side salad for 440 yen. It was delicious!
At 5pm, we met back with Don in our classroom at the NOMYC and went as a group to get the keys to our rooms. We were in the same building but on a different floor. Since the building is C-shaped, the rooms on the exterior face off the C are much larger than the ones on the inner face of the C. Last time I had a small, narrow room, so I was really excited to find out that I had a substantially larger room on the outside of the C this time. Besides that, everything else is about the same. For some reason, the internet has also been free ever since we arrived. Jeff plugged-in the wireless router, and everyone has been able to access it since we moved in. No one knows how long it will last, but for the time being, everyone is taking full advantage of the free internet, including myself.
The rest of the night was very chill and uneventful. Since I wasn’t able to use the internet at the Toyoko Inn we stayed at in Yokohama, I took the time to catch-up on uploading photos and writing some papers that I continue to put off. Today Don announced that he is additionally reducing the number of papers that we have to write since he realizes how busy we are, and he is even more behind on reading the papers than we are with writing them. Either way, I’m glad the workload will hopefully lighten a bit. After I caught up on my blog and photos once again, I grabbed a late dinner around 10:30pm with Derrick, Seth, and Shae. We went to the Himalayan curry restaurant again and got take-out. I ordered the mild chicken curry with nan for 680 yen. It was so good! Including the four of us, I think at least seven of us got curry for dinner today. It is that good I guess. Haha. Late tonight, Zach came and told us there was a sumo competition going on from now until May 24. A group of my classmates are planning on going to watch tomorrow afternoon after class, so we were all invited to go. It costs 2,100 yen. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I figure it’ll be really cool to see sumo wrestling on my birthday. It sounds like a pretty unique and special experience to me, so I might as well watch it once while I’m here. Zach, Scot, and Trent will go try to buy tickets around 7am tomorrow morning, so hopefully they can get some. Tomorrow night, I would still like to go to Ginza to photograph the buildings at night, so we’ll see if I can squeeze that in as well.