おばあちゃん

woops. SO I went off to my relatives' house in Hamamatsu for a week, and my vaio is back in my hands now.

First 2 days there I feasted like a queen and went to the gym for 2 hours. My ass had not touched a bike machine since the ARC in July 2008 -___- I thank my mom everyday that she maintained speaking Japanese with me, otherwise it would be torture for my Japanese family here. They are such a blessing, and very well deceive my beliefs of shallow artifical Japanese folks (well, some. i'm sorry) I can't even begin praising my Grandma right now, but that I tear up every time I think of the day I will lose her. Okokenough, (this mariah carey &boys II men playing in the background is not helping) The day after, I went down to Nagoya to spend the day with Hanna from Sweden who was down there visiting her broham too. We ended up walking endlessly around shopping areas and a park...and hella bakeries with good looking buns of breads (both our weaknesses). Oh yea while we were walking, this man on a bike cussed her out when she accidentally walked in front of his way with the nastiest face. 1.) You're a dude, you just dont do that to girls. 2.) You are not superior because we are Half-foreigners. 3.) We're not sorry.
Next day, I headed down to Kyoto to visit my mom's good friend. Kyoto...Kyoto..., its basically everything that Tokyo isn't. or at least to me. One thing I really liked was that everyone didnt HAVE TO PICK THE RIGHT OR LEFT SIDE on the escalator in order for people to walk past them. The Golden Pavilion was mos def breathtaking, and the fewdz were delicious.

So if you didn't know, the title of this blog is "Grandma" in Japanese. It's not just about my gratefulness for my grandma, but I happened to sit next to one in the Shinkansen (bullet train) when I was going to Kyoto. She saw me reading an American novel then asked me in Japanese if I was studying English hard right now. This led to the usual brief explanation of me studying abroad for a year, and that I was originally from L.A. yada yada...so I thought I was going to end my small talk with her within 5 minutes...nah turned out to be 45 minutes. But a really Encouraging 45 minutes. This grandma, she's 85. With so much energy and endurance. She's a doctor and was on her way to speak at a lecture in Kyoto. What 85 year old grandma still has enough passion to share her knowledge to the future??! She couldn't fluently speak English, but she spoke all these difficult terms without any accents...like global warming, a bunch of diseases/sicknesses, political terms. Her hometown was coincidentally the same Japanese hometown as my Japanese family, and her grand-son or something is also currently a Keio University student like me with a dorm in the Yokohama area. Yowza! What really made me warm inside was that she kept telling me that she was so happy that she got to sit next to a young girl like me. Someone who was interested enough to study abroad in Japan, when I came from a big place like Los Angeles, and to successfully speak in a bilingual lingo. (heh) Bottom line, grandmas these days do not make the effort to talk to young people like us because they know we are foolish people still. And Yea, we are. And some of us, Really are. Think about it.

AAANNNDDD...when I came back to my dorm, my Amazon order of 5 novels plus snail mail from Jungle was waiting for me. A very happy face.

Okonomiyaki in Kyoto/Nara...I forgot...


















PSYCH!!