Reflections on... Montage?

Today's Japanese Word of the Day:
テレビゲーム
Terebi geemu
(Noun: Video Game)

Hi, everybody! So, we had a pretty full day today, and since it's now 11:00 at night, I think that this post is going to be short, sweet, and without pictures. There's just a couple of things that I wanted to put out there that I didn't have any other reason to blog about, so I guess this is a Reflections post on a... montage?

The first thing is that on July 4th, it rained and the budding plans to go and do fireworks two hours out of town were completely abolished. I wasn't planning on going anyway because it was so far away and a "bring your own booze" event, but it left a few people with nothing to do.

So, the three of us (Courtney, Stacey, and me) were sitting in the living room, watching anime and all that, when someone knocked on the door. We went and answered it, and two of the guys (Christian and Jake) were standing there with some bags, and they said, "Do you want some pizza?" Turns out they had gone out and bought a pizza (cheese, because they weren't sure what we were allergic to and one of the guys in the program just recovered from food poisoning) and brought it to our dorm specifically to eat it with us. Aren't they so sweet?

We turned off the anime movie we were watching and instead went to a channel that was showing this really awful Japanese-dubbed English movie. It was, like, "Assassin's Point of No Return" or something like that. It was really funny to see the actors' lips move so wrong compared to what the voices were saying, and the fashion and acting itself wasn't that great to begin with. Christian ended up going home with a carton of mugicha (barley tea) that Courtney gave him in return for the pizza.

The second thing I wanted to get out there was that I found out my DS is not region locked, like the Playstation is. This means that I can play Japanese games on my American DS. I wasted no time in picking up a couple of games, which I have been playing and loving to death. I'm picking up a lot of new vocabulary this way, although granted I might not always need words like keikenchi (experience points) in normal, every day conversation.

The games I picked up were "Pokémon: White 2" and a Harvest Moon game that I haven't quite deciphered the title of yet. Something about sparkling sun and friends. Since Pokémon is primarily geared toward children, I was able to choose a setting that edited out all of the kanji characters and replaced them with the much more easily read hiragana characters. ("Kanji" are Chinese characters borrowed into Japanese, and "hiragana" is a fabulous and far more forgiving alphabet.) Harvest Moon is a bit more difficult to translate, because there is no "I can't read kanji" setting. That's probably good in the long run; even though it takes me a whole lot longer to read, I'm picking up kanji as well as vocabulary (such as 若, which means "young," and 牧場, which means "farm").

Alright, that's it. I promise, there WILL be a picture-ful post up tomorrow. There might even be two. I can think of a couple of things that I have to blog about.

~Amanda