The great thing about the weather here is that even if its super crappy one day, it never seems to last, and true to form, today was an absolutely gorgeous day. Bright, sunny, and pretty warm at about 10C. Venus and I took advantage of the sun and headed out for a run. I think we probably only went about 2km or so, so really not very long at all, but by the end she was DRAGGING! Silly girl! I think she's really just not that into organised jogging, as when she got to go off leash at the dog park, she went absolutely nuts and expended waaay more energy than my little run. Anyway, Peter wants her to get out, so I'll continue to drag her out and maybe we'll get into shape together ;).


I headed to the library after that and accidentally broke my rule of not getting hard cover books, and got ALL HC trade books, which weigh way too much and take up way too much room-there's a reason I made that rule a few trips ago! Anyway, better luck next time. I had my second language exchange today, which went pretty well. The guy, whose English was really pretty good, was very patient and helpful, and actually told me that he'd met with someone whose Japanese is worse than mine! Since I didn't think that was possible, I was pretty chuffed to hear that. I guess the bits and pieces of studying have crammed one or two extra words in there somewhere. If he'll put up with my terrible language skills, I'd definitely meet up with this guy again-he spoke really slowly and clearly, and was pretty encouraging. For those keeping count in the 'does a language exchange = a date' question, he's happily married.

(we met in Shinjuku since its nice and central...Krispy Kreme was as crazy as Saturday when I walked past, but at least its staying lighter later! These were taken at about five minutes to six)

At one stage he was trying to teach me some of the different varieties of counting (numbers are freaking complicated here) and on the way home, I was thinking 'hey, English is way easier in this case; we only have cardinal and ordinal numbers'. But then I started counting to myself '1ST, 2ND, 3RD, 4TH', OK, yea, that is kinda complicated! Languages I tell ya!

I also made a completely inane comment when he asked me if I found anything interesting about Japan, and I was like 'yea definitely!' but when it came time to specifics, the first/only thing I could think of at the moment were the automatic shoesers at the bowling alley! Good god, out of all the crazy, fascinating, different, interesting things in this city, I come up with shoe vending machines! We did manage to salvage the topic a little bit when I brought up the differences in how people look at personal space here and at home, but I felt like a bit of an idiot!


(and by personal space here, I mean it just doesn't really exist here on trains and stuff in rush hour! photo shamelessly stolen from Jordon's flickr page; I'm usually too jostled to get a camera going while on a Yamanote Train at rush hour!)


Came home around 8:30 and made burritos for dinner, and then watched The Apprentice:LA on TiVo while putting together a query for NOW Magazine (an alternative weekly I used to read all the time in Toronto) about Shimo Kitazawa. Speaking of which, I was poking around their site, and came across this ad, which is hilarious - you have to give the guy points for originality in bartering though! (rated PG-13)

Bed earlyish with a book me thinks - have to be up pretty early for work tomorrow...
Night!
D.