Sketch Blog #1 – Taking Requests!

Merry Leap Year, everybody!

I don’t know why, but I love the number 4, and things being split into quarters. So I love how every four years we account for the fact the earth completes an orbit around the sun in 365.25 days by creating an extra little pocket of time. Well, not CREATING time, but taking four quarters and joining them together into a secret little time nugget.

I like to imagine a future when humans have spread out among the stars and started forming intergalactic relations, possibly with aliens, possibly our descendants who migrated to other planets. Well anyway, I like to imagine them taking a tour trip to Earth, and having the ‘leap year’ explained to them as part of ‘Earth culture’. Or ‘Earth geography’, whatever. Then they’d explain old rituals and customs and how time was measured thousands of years ago, and  celebrating Equinox and the Solstice and the like (splitting the year into four equal parts, thank you Pagans).

I also like the number 21. It’s my age, and it’s also the date when Winter/Summer Solstice and Spring/Autumn Equinox are celebrated. It’s also half of the number 42, which we all know is the answer to life, the universe and everything.

The number 4 is unlucky in Chinese and Japanese culture, though. It’s read like ‘shi’, which sounds similar to the pronunciation of ‘death’.

ANYWAY. I didn’t come here to talk about Pagans and the number 4.

____________________

I’ve started drawing again. Just as a hobby, and to experiment with new techniques, and to kind of keep the creative juices flowing. So I’m going to start posting a monthly sketch blog on here (maybe even bimonthly, if I draw a lot), of all the little doodles, sketches and drawings I compile over time.

Don’t expect anything of amazingly high quality, because as I say, these are just sketches. Mainly done on MS Paint (boy, that takes me back). Basically I don’t have very good drawing software (I use Adobe Flash and it can be a pain in the arse) and MS Paint simply feels the closest to doodling in pencil/biro like I would on my school notebooks. Maybe I’ll post some of those doodles too, hehe.

Because my imagination feels so dead these days I’ve decided to take requests too, or even just idea suggestions.

If you want me to sketch you something, leave a comment on this blog, tweet me (@naiveinnippon), or a message me on Facebook (Naïve In Nippon).

And without further ado, here are this month’s sketches (posted in no particular order):

Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, A Series of Unfortunate Events, sans faces for added mystery >:3

A little boy looking over the edge of a ship/tall building as his parents fight in the background.

Request for CS: ‘Draw me’. So I did. 🙂 Another possible request was to draw the MHS gang updated but I’m getting a haircut in a few days so at that point it wouldn’t look very updated anymore, ahaha.

A little tribute to CL in her ‘Baddest Female’ (나쁜 기집애) music video. She is a queen and I worship her. 

Rena and Czarina. Two original characters from this idea I had for a manga a few years ago, and might still one day draw. 

Request for RM: ‘What about something Star Wars? Or Harry Potter, lol’. So I combined the two. I hope you like it, haha. xD

A woman in the shower. I, um, don’t really know why I drew this. I think it was to practice drawing the female form in a flattering manner and also to practice drawing wet hair. Yeah, that sounds about right. Did I succeed? Probably not.

A girl crouching. A little CL-inspired with the spiky eyeliner and urban attire.

A kiss. It’s really hard to draw people kissing but this one turned out okay I think.

Some dude. I’m pretty bad at drawing guys. I need more practice.

A lil non-starter of a cute little superhero type. Looks a bit like Hit Girl, doesn’t she?

Another little abandoned doodle of a girl in a cap.

The beginning sketch of an original character I created when I was 15, called ‘Mono’, drawn in Flash. Since then I layered it up and it became my cover photo on Facebook.

The above sketch, layered up and completed. Still looks kinda shit, though I can’t entirely blame Flash, I think it’s mainly because I’m lazy.

This came outta nowhere. She’s a cutie. Any ideas for names? So far all I can think of is ‘Anna’, because she reminds me a bit of the Japanese singer Anna Tsuchiya. 

Moody lil cutie.

‘Queen Qwerty’, a character I came up with on the spot. This was an attempt to come away from manga style and create something more simple. Looks a bit like a cross between The Powerpuff Girls and South Park.

A cute little princess character I came up with, originally based on a genderbent drawing of a friend. 

The next three drawings were requests, and they are somewhat, ahem, NSFW (aka a teensy bit porny), but I really like how they turned out, so I decided to post them to this blog after all. Look at them if you will, or not, up to you. The requests were of something Marvel/superhero girly/a cute butt. So in tribute to the new DP movie I draw Lady Deadpool, also Smash Girl from the YT animation ‘Power Trip’, and R.Mika and Cammy from Street Fighter.

Last but not least, I had Tchaikovsky’s ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ in my head and so came up with this while listening to it. Lovely piece of classical music.

 

So there you have it! These are all works from the past month of sketching. The simplest, most incomplete doodles maybe took 5 minutes or less, and the one that took the longest was the final NSFW pic of the SF girls, but that still only took 1.5 hours. The not-a-sketch but complete-work-of-art which was the Mono Facebook cover took forever, between 5-10 hours, I think. Though I definitely procrastinated which probably added to the total time.

That’s all, folks! If you have a request, or a suggestion on something to draw, leave a comment on this blog, my Twitter, or my Facebook page. See ya!

 

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Day 157: Shout out to Michael Mando 木曜日・2015年2月19日

Sapporo’s a similar size to Brussels, Belgium, apparently. I think I can handle that. It looks like a really nice place. Snow is probably too much to hope for this late in February, though. One last full day to sort out everything I’m going to do and every place I need to be, then I’ll be off on Saturday.

I can’t really remember what I did today; it all sort of disappeared in a blur. It’s not like I wasted it watching videos, no. I still haven’t cracked. But it’s all a blur of Word documents, travel sites, so on and so forth.

I watched the latest episode of Better Call Saul. Only three episodes out so far. It’s super frustrating, as I’m used to watching TV shows in one big binge session. Especially if it’s a good show. I can usually marathon an entire season in one go. Well, I probably wouldn’t bother with it if it was bad, anyway. But Better Call Saul is great, so far. And to make up for the lack of episodes, I started rewatching Breaking Bad, casually. This all sounds contradictory to my previous statement that I didn’t waste all day watching videos. That part was true. I waited until the evening after I’d made my spaghetti bolognaise to watch any videos. I just meant to watch it casually, but because the show’s so addictive, I wonder if I’ll end up rewatching all five seasons. Well, it was either watch Breaking Bad while I was eating dinner, or watch Silence of the Lambs, so out of those two, I thought Breaking Bad would be easier to watch whilst eating.

Apart from that, I’m just really nervous that I’ve missed something out, concerning plane tickets, or hotel bookings, or anything. It would suck if I got to Kansai Airport and discovered I forgot to do something so the tickets were rendered invalid. I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything that needs to be done. It’s just that Peach Airlines wouldn’t recognise my bank card details so I had to pay for the tickets in a convenience store, which I’ve never done before, and I hope I did it right. Never had to do that in the UK. I also didn’t pick any seats, as that costs extra, but I’m worried in case it’s something mandatory (I don’t think it is), and then for that stupid reason they might not let me board. Or at least, not let me on the plane until everyone else was sitting down. That would suck. Not as much as being told I couldn’t go to Hokkaido, though.

Still. I’m looking forward to getting out in that fresh air. Looks like the weather will be good for flying on Saturday.

It’s a pity I didn’t think to stay overnight near Lake Toya, as there’s a famous hot spring near there. Such a shame. Well, seeing as this hopefully won’t be my last visit to Sapporo (as I still have the Snow Festival to see to at some point in my life), maybe I can do it some other time. This trip will mainly be about Hakodate, as it’s quite a way away from Sapporo, and I may not get another chance to go there.

Oh, hang on. For some reason, the image of the South Park version of Matthew McConaughey being sucked into a vortex just popped up in my mind. I guess because I only just realized that was an Interstellar reference. That happens to me, sometimes. I have unexpected epiphanies about certain actors in certain movies.

Well, that last thought probably made no sense to you whatsoever, unless you watched episode 4 of South Park season 18. “Handicar”, it was called.

Oh! That reminds me, I had another epiphany today. I saw Michael Mando in Better Call Saul. Not sure this is really a spoiler, he just plays some token bad guy, but I recognized his name in the credits, and I was like, where do I know that guy from? So I Googled him, and I remembered that I’ve actually met the guy. He was at Manchester MCM Expo 2013, signing video game posters. He’s the voice of Vaas Montenegro in Far Cry 3. I queued up for an hour and a half to meet him, dressed as Roxy Richter from Scott Pilgrim vs The World. He was really sweet, and we had our photo taken together. He signed a poster for me. Well. Not for me. It was for my then-boyfriend’s sake.

I know my cosplay is super half-assed. And that I look really fat. Shuddup.

I’d tried playing Far Cry 3 on agh, what’s the word… not campaign mode, the other one… co-op mode? Ugh no, the one where you just do all the shooting practice… I think Call of Duty has it as well… freeplay mode? Fuck, it’s been so long since I was near a gaming console. I’ve forgotten all the gaming terminology. Wow, now I really feel like playing video games… but anyway, back to the point. Yeah, I tried to play it, but because it’s FPS (first-person-shooter), and I absolutely suck at shooting games (I never completed Half Life because of it), I gave up. I was at my then-boyfriend’s house, and he rolled his eyes at me after I gave up after camping behind a fence for like 30 seconds.

I think we also tried playing Resident Evil on the same day, but I gave up 3 minutes into a freeplay co-op game, because if you didn’t already know, I am scared shitless by zombies, and I would freak out every time they came sprinting in my direction. Then some of them snuck up behind me and I was like NOPE NOPE NOPE and quit. Speaking of Resident Evil, its name is Biohazard in Japan. I think there’s a Biohazard ride in Universal Studios Japan. I’ve gotta go there.

Unfortunately the trip to Hokkaido will also be a reminder of my ex, because in the anime Lovely Complex (set in Osaka, by the way), they all go on a school trip to Hokkaido, and Otani and Koizumi go to Hakodate for the day. I told him to watch Lovely Complex because it was one of the funniest (yet emotionally feel-worthy) anime I’d ever seen. Still is. I haven’t watched a lot of anime since, so it still comes out on top.

On the subject of video games, my younger brother will also tell you that I get so absorbed by video games (probably due to the interactivity), that I have huge physical reactions every time something scary happens, which really annoys him. When he was playing Bioshock and I was watching him, and those people come running out of the darkness, I would jump out of my skin, and he’d be all like, “it’s only a game! It’s not real!” I’d do the same whenever I was trying to leap from platform to platform in Portal 2, and I’d lean back really far and then extend my body forward as if I was actually attempting a jump, and make faces as I do so, and noises. My heart would actually beat faster out of nervousness. If the TV monitor with the game footage hadn’t been there for context, I’d probably have looked like a madman. No wonder my brother hated it.

The same for whenever I was too scared to move from my spot in Tomb Raider, the rebooted version, in case a guard found me and strangled me. I took an age for me to complete Tomb Raider on easy mode. Kind of embarrassing. Again, more of a shooting game than a puzzle game. I suffered due to bad maneuvering. Portal and Portal 2 were alright, though. You can take your time to solve the puzzles. The only problem comes when you have a time limit.

Anyway. Enough about video games. Time for bed.

Day 121: English humour vs Japanese humour 水曜日・2015年1月14日

Today was maybe my favourite Linguistics lesson of all time… until next week, of course. because we’ve been promised something amazing (for me, anyway).

We were looking at linguistics used in jokes and humour, so it turned out to be a very funny lesson. Mainly comparing English (or American, looking at the standard style) humour to Japanese humour. As the only native English speaker in the room, I feel I had a harder time suppressing my laughter.

We were presented with a typical stand-up joke, with a set-up and a punchline.

My girl is great. She’s smart, she’s beautiful, and her third feature is most prominent of all.
She has a protruding Adam’s Apple.

That wasn’t exactly the way the joke was told… I think my version here is less funny. I laughed when I saw it projected on the board.

However, Vincent told us that in Japanese humour, the joke would appear incomplete.

In Osaka-style humour in particular, rather than just one person, you have two people, a boke and a tsukkomi, and they bounce off each other, and usually what’s funny is the reaction.

So, to adapt the Western style joke into something the Japanese would find funny, you’d make it something like this:

A: My girl is great. She’s smart, she’s beautiful, and her third feature is most prominent of all.
She has a protruding Adam’s Apple.
B: It’s a man! D:<

But if I’d seen that version of the joke without knowing the context (altered for Japanese humour), I wouldn’t have found it funny at all. English jokes seem to rely a lot on the unsaid, and the element of surprise. We were told a couple more “typical” English-style jokes:

—

A woman goes into a store, and asks the shop assistant, “Can I try on that dress in the window?”
“Sure,” the shop assistant replies, “but wouldn’t you rather try it on in the changing room?”

—

“Is the doctor home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper.
“No,” the doctor’s wife whispered back. “Come right in.”

—

A man was playing golf by the side of the road, when a funeral procession led by a black Herse passed slowly by, and he stopped to take his hat off and bow in respect.
“Wow, that was considerate of you,” his friend praised him.
The man smiled, and replied,
“Well, it is my wife’s funeral, after all.”

—

I have to admit, that last one, I found REALLY funny.

But I actually quite like Japanese humour too. You just have to be watching it in its context, and understand certain things about the culture and language and word play and so on. They say once you’re able to laugh at jokes in another language, then you’ve mastered that language.

Mind you, I’ve been unconsciously laughing at Japanese humour for years, without even realizing what it was. Classic examples being the boke and tsukkomi, a duo where the tsukkomi bounces off and reacts to everything the boke says, but also there’s the “playing along” when something is obviously wrong, and then suddenly going, “nani, kore?!” or “chigau yo!” (“What is this?!” “Wrong!”)

I experienced that only recently when I rewatched The Melancholy of Haruhi-chan Suzumiya, the little chibi cartoon spinoff series. I feel like such an otaku right now. But it genuinely was very funny. Achakura would keep playing along with Yuki and then suddenly going, “WRONG!” or “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU!”

I feel like these are better explained by watching a couple of clips from the anime “Work, Work, Watching!” which shows Japanese humour performed in English. As you’d expect, the result is very strange. The English actors are self-aware and go, “is this supposed to be funny?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK0mI2YHXp4

So hopefully now you’ve seen that and have an idea of how Japanese humour works, if you understand Japanese, you might find the next couple of clips quite funny.

The first one is of a robot acting as the boke, though his role is supposed to be the tsukkomi, the one who bounces back with funny reactions, but the skit is very self-aware and talks about the inner workings of comedy, and the robot “malfunctions” as part of the act. It’s very cute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6mHdd8cEBA

The second one is the example with the “playing-along-then-funny-reaction”. It’s a social experiment where a TV company approaches people in both Osaka and Tokyo and hands them something wrong, like a brush instead of a microphone. People from Osaka play along a lot better than people from Tokyo, almost like it’s a second nature, which doesn’t help with perpetuating the stereotype that people from Tokyo are cold. I found this pretty funny, but one of the Chinese girls watching this was properly laughing her head off. I wonder if Chinese and Japanese humour are similar at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WGH_NZVpns

And then we watched another clip of “Work Work Watching” for the lulz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lst2l5PFkHM

Hahahahahahaaaa.

And then of course I was asked the question every British person wants to hear: their opinion on American humour, and how American humour and British humour are different.

I wasn’t quite so cryptic in my answer as one would expect me to be. People tend to be a little too proud/protective of their own humour, and so it’s irritated me in the past seeing British shows being remade in America to suit the audience, as it takes away everything I found funny in the first place. But I’m calm. Okay, yeah, British people enjoy the use of irony/sarcasm/black humour more, and it can be quite dry, which is why it’s hard for people in America to laugh at, perhaps. I think British people find what’s unsaid to be the funniest, but there tends to be more of an explanation in American humour, and to me, that ruins it. It feels like it’s being spelled out for me. (I hasten to add, not ALL American humour. Just some. *cough* Adam Sandler. *cough*)

I think a lot of people feel the same way, which is why British people can be kind of snobby about their humour. But to be honest, now I think about it, we’re not so different. I mean yes, trying to recreate The Inbetweeners to suit an American audience was a hideous crime in the eyes of British fans, but looking at the setup/punchline structure of stand-up, we have that over in the UK too. And when I think about shows like Mock The Week, I’ve seen they’ve had American contestants on before, as do many UK comedy programs, and everyone’s able to get along and bounce off each other. Not without a few transatlantic jokes being snuck in, of course.

Whose Line on UK television was the best. It started off being all-British but by the last season before the show was permanently moved over to the US, there would quite often be shows where almost all if not all the contestants on that night’s show were American, or Canadian. Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie were made regulars, as they were the funniest duo ever, and then you’d add in people like Greg Proops (who is incredibly witty by the way, and has been on a lot of UK comedy shows) and Brad Sherwood, or whoever. My favourite mashups were Ryan and Colin with a couple of British people though, to keep the balance.

Anyway, back to the point, I think.

Next week we’re going to be watching South Park in Japanese!!! Eeeeee!!

I’ve actually already seen a few clips of South Park in Japanese. There’s not that many on YouTube, well, they’re hard to find, anyway. It’s not that well heard of in Japan.

But yeah, anyway, the aim is to see what they’ve done to alter/translate the humour. I already know it’s been translated into Kansai-ben (Kansai dialect), as that’s what most Japanese comedy uses. It’s funny language. I’m living in Osaka, hometown of 90% of Japanese comedians.

After that lesson, we started a new text in reading class, which is about Osaka dialect, again. And relating to superheroes.

I managed to meet Rika for lunch!!! For the first time in two months!!! Hooray!!!

We had a nice catch-up, even if it was only for 50 minutes. I hope we get to meet up again soon. She just needs to finish off a few more application procedures and then she should be free. (She got accepted into UCLA, hoorah!)

My tutor session with Yuko was also quite productive. I feel like I learned a lot, and picked up new phrases very quickly. I have a lot of notes.

Some useful phrases I learned today:

それは筋が通った提案だ。
Sore wa suji ga totta teian da.
(That’s a reasonable explanation.)

久しぶりに雪見大福を食べた。
Hisashiburi ni yukimidaifuku o tabeta.
(It’s been a while since I ate icecream wrapped in mochi rice flour.)

一人当たりの茶消費量が最も多い国はイギリスです。
Hitori atari no cha-shouhiryou ga mottomo ooi kuni wa igirisu desu.
(England is the country where the most tea is consumed per capita.)

なんて臭い芝居だろう！
Nante kusai shibai darou!
(What a cheesy performance!)

…I always know how to learn the most useful phrases.

I know how to say “Industrial Revolution” (産業革命 sangyou kakumei) but I don’t know how to say “brown”. Probably due to the fact I rushed through the GCSE/A-Level so fast and skipped over the really simple vocab to be able to talk about complicated topics. I got to N4 Level Japanese within less than two years.

I just looked up “brown”. Apparently it’s chairo, spelt 茶色, meaning the “colour of tea”. But they drink green tea. They call all other tea “koucha” 紅茶, literally “red tea”. Make up your mind, Japan.

Learning about humour is so interesting.

Not sure what’s on the agenda for tomorrow. I might be going to see The Hobbit with Aiko-san, but she’s not contacted me all week. Hmm.

Ah, oh well, a day in bed wouldn’t be the worst thing. It’s now a healthy 9:30pm, and even if I don’t set my alarm I doubt I will drastically oversleep.

Night night!

Day 71: Japanese puns! (だじゃれ) 火曜日・2014年11月25日

Tomorrow I may or may not update my daily blog – which would be for the first time in 72 days. This is because I’m going on a school trip that lasts from now until Thursday, and I don’t know if I’ll have internet access tomorrow night. If I do manage to type one out on my phone (bless smartphones) it’d take an age as the navigation for both the Roman/ Japanese alphabet is so damn complicated.

ANYWAY. The first lesson today was Modern Literature with Fukuoka-sensei. It was pouring with rain this morning, and I was actually pretty happy. It was the lovely rain just heavy enough to need an umbrella – not so heavy you’re soaked after travelling five metres, but not so light and drizzly that you decide against an umbrella, then it makes your hair frizzy and your glasses steam up. Nope, this rain was perfect. And the perfect temperature. Just like England on a rainy day at any set time of the year, not too cold (for me, anyway).

I love rain, and there’s plenty of it in Manchester, but we also get plenty of slugs, which are not welcome. Fun fact, I’m scared of slugs, and have been since I was five years old. I was in the back garden of our old house back in the Oxford suburbs; I was playing, Dad was reading a newspaper, stretched out on the deckchair. Dad dropped a page and it blew away down to the bottom of the garden. He asked me to fetch it for him and so I ran after it, and I don’t know how, but once I picked it up, I noticed there was a slug the size of a two-penny coin, just as fat and round, crawling up my arm. I screamed and cried, and Dad plucked it off and stamped on it. I haven’t been able to stand slugs since. Even now I seize up when I see one. I do feel sorry for the slug in that little escapade, though. Imagine just chilling in the grass one day, minding your own business, when a clumsy five-year-old scrapes against you and you cling on for dear life, only for them to scream and for you to meet your doom fifteen seconds later.

I’ve not seen a slug here so far. (Touch wood.) So Imma be happy and sing in the rain until then.

Fukuoka-sensei turned up half an hour late. It’s lucky I stuck around that long; both the Polish girls left fifteen minutes prior. You’re allowed to go if your teacher is forty minutes late and there’s been no notice on the bulletin board announcing whether class is cancelled or not. But I waited, reasoning it was probably because of the heavy rain, and she’s quite often late anyway.

It was a good lesson, actually, albeit a little disconcerting. She showed as an anime version of Kokoro by Natsume Souseki, which is what we’re reading together right now, and I suddenly realized how little I understood of it.

I had no idea up until that lesson that it was an erotic novel. Completely didn’t see that coming. I think I got the gist that there was something between K-san and O-Jou-san, but to what nature I didn’t know. There were no English subtitles of course, but a picture speaks a thousands words. You’re able to understand just from watching, whereas something like Bleach would be torture to watch as they mainly stand around talking rather than doing. To a non-Japanese speaker, you wouldn’t be able to tell just from watching the animation what they were doing or why they were doing it. To be honest, Bleach is a torture to watch even when you understand what they’re saying. No wonder I got bored of it so quickly.

If you’re interested in which animation I’m talking about and want to see it, just type “kokoro natsume souseki” into YouTube, and there should be an “Aoi Bungaku” (青い文学) part one and two with Italian subs. We watched both parts in class. It doesn’t matter if you can’t find subs in your language, though of course I’d say that as I speak Japanese. But I’m not fluent and I didn’t understand much of what they were saying, so even for a non-Japanese speaker I think it’d be okay to watch and understand what I’m talking about. There are only four characters, the fourth of whom only plays a small part: Sensei, a young writer with glasses who really strongly resembles Light Yagami; O-Jou-san, who is the household maid and who Sensei clearly has feelings for; K-San, Sensei’s friend; and Oku-san, the old lady with grey hair.

The style of storytelling is similar to In A Bamboo Grove by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, though of course that was written years after Natsume. I won’t say too much in case of spoilers, as this came as a surprise to me, but the narrative and perspectives play a huge part in their similarity.

One of the impressions I got is, “if the second part is true, then it perfectly describes men who call themselves ‘nice guys'”.

The lesson after that was Tea Ceremony. Today we smelled and felt the consistency of lots of different types of tea, and next week we’re actually going to go to a Japanese-style room, which I’m really looking forward to.

After that I tidied up my room because I was expecting to have my fridge delivered in the afternoon. Two guys came to help me, one of them carrying the fridge all by himself. Either I’m weaker than I thought, or I just felt I wasn’t permitted to test my full strength in the second hand shop, or he definitely lifts.

Either way, I have a working fridge in my room. Hooray! It’d probably be overkill to get a microwave as well, haha. Right now I have an extra-large box of “All-Bran” perched on top of it. I’ve moved my table slightly to make room for it, though I needn’t have – it’s just so I can access the plug outlet easier.

The fridge is bigger than I needed it to be, but that just means there’s plenty of room for things like fruit, water, etc, even milk. If I had a sink and a microwave in here I’d never even have to leave this room.

I then went to my tutoring session with Yuko, who let me know what I’d need to include on a Japanese CV (only difference to British ones I think is that they include emergency contacts rather than references).

She also taught me a couple of Japanese puns that made me laugh.

In example:

Tangerine on top of an aluminium can

アルミ缶の上にあるミカン　Arumi-kan no ue ni aru mikan.
(Arumi-kan = aluminium can, aru = to exist, mikan = tangerine)

There are two birds in my garden.

庭には二羽とりがいる。Niwa ni wa niwa tori ga iru.
(Niwa庭 = garden, ni waには = in, niwa二羽 = two)

Taking a bath in New York.

ニューヨークで入浴 Nyuu yooku de nyuuyoku.
(Nyuu yooku = New York, nyuuyoku = to enter the bath)

I REALLY wanted to tell her the polar bear joke. Most British puns I know of come in the form of jokes, rather than free standing. If you know any good ones that don’t require joke context, let me know in the comments.

After tutoring I went to the supermarket to pick up some cereal as it’s the only way I’m going to eat breakfast, otherwise. The idea of getting up and making food makes me want to go back to sleep.

I was going to make spaghetti bolognaise tonight but I was too tired in the end and opted for microwaveable soba noodles. Lazy, lazy.

But all in all, an okay day I think!

I also took this snazzy picture.

See you tomorrow, maybe. This time tomorrow I’ll most likely already be asleep in a hostel, or a ryoukan (inn) somewhere. Not too far away – the Hyogo prefecture and Shikoku, I think.