stuff

so here's the deal - my mom and sister were out here over the summer and someone has requested a blog about that.  therefore, i feel like i can't write about anything more recent until i get that finished.

Which isn't to say that stuff hasn't been happening.  We're almost halfway through the semester (seriously, brought stuff home so i can make exams this weekend), and so far it's been pretty nice.  Last weekend was our school festival, which was FUN as always.  My second years totally had the best dance of any class :)  Since I was new last year and feeling pretty shy, I didn't do very much, but this year I did ALL the games and things (didn't get to all the food, cause some of them ran out), forced students to speak English with me, and basically had a crazy awesome time.

The second day of the festival we had a typhoon and the festival was cancelled, which was good because I had an awful cold and didn't want to do anything other than sleep and eat chicken noodle soup.  That typhoon was the worst I've experienced.  (I mean, I even went to the movies one time when there was a typhoon).  I was even a little nervous when the winds got really bad and the house started shaking.  It was so noisy I couldn't sleep anymore like I wanted to.


Also, Oktoberfest happened recently.  Yummy food.

There's a holiday on Monday, so I get a three day weekend.  Today I'm going hiking with some friends, then visiting Harborland, where there is an Indian Festival all weekend long!  Woot!  Sunday I'll probably spend more time at the festival after church, and monday I'm planning to head to Nara where they are going to cut the antlers off the deer.  (Mother believes that I'm finding enjoyment in this activity as a revenge for them biting me when I went with Dad...)

This morning I'm cleaning a rocking out to Kansas. 

Also, going home in less than 3 months.

Also, "The Raven" came out in theaters yesterday, so i think I'm going to see that.  I didn't think it was a big enough film to come out in Japan.  Pretty happy about it though.

I'm going to clean now.  ttyl

るろうに剣心

Here we have my favorite manga of all time:


Here we have the movie based on my favorite manga of all time:



Which I of course went to see last week.

It was AWESOME!!!  I love it, the fight scenes were amazing (particularly impressed with the opening sequence.  wow)  the sets were great, apparently all the stunts were done live(!!!)  Also, music was great.

The End





Unless you're interested in spoilers / me ranting about plotline and releasing the English major.




So!  Here's the deal: the movie contains at least 4 different plotlines (as I counted them) and characters from a 5th.  Overall, they did a fairly decent job weaving all of it together, but there was the occasional, ah, blips.  I shall now discuss these blips in terms of character development (sort of).

Last chance for now spoilers.


Still here?  Alrighty then, here we go!

The Awesome People

First up Kenshin himself.  Actually, nothing to say here.  He was awesome.  End of story.  Although, they could have worked in the part where he stopped a bullet with his sword.  That would have been cool.

 

Kaoru and Megumi.  Basically, I thought they were both pretty dumbed down.  Especially Megumi.  She's this awesome, tough, been through a lot of things cool chick, but in the movie, what?  Basically, they take away her best scene, where she decides she would rather die than produce illegal drugs that are killing people.  Yeah, she spends that entire scene tied up waiting to be saved by the big bad boys.  Bah.

 

Sanosuke.  Good: got the attitude, got the crazy, got the tough.  Epic Kenshin/Sanosuke battle  Bad: (This is me being picky but...) the actor is seriously pushing the limits of people-who-can-pretend-to-be-19

Hajime Saito.  Is every bit as cool and awesome as he's supposed to be.  BUT!  he only got to do THIS:

  once during the movie.  And then, he didn't even accomplish anything with it, cause all of a sudden Kenshin's on the stupid Gatling gun and it didn't matter.  How did Kenshin get on the gun?  Saito was totally the one jumping through the air heading straight at it.  I HAVE NOT UNDERSTANDING OF THIS!!!  Also, he manages to come late every time anything happens.  Which is pretty funny.

The Villains (who should be awesome, but aren't)

 

Kanryu Takeda.  Very nice.  Very bit as crazy as expected.  Has awesomely creepy theme music.  Really weird thing: there were these three clones in white that could apparently communicate with him telepathically and do his every bidding while not really contributing to the movie. 

Udo Jin.  Instead of free lancing, he is now in cahoots with Kanryu, though of course always with his own agenda in mind. 

Final thing about characters.  APPARENTLY, in the movie THIS

Awesome sauce fighters, have morals, are cool, trying to survive in a society that doesn't need fighters.  Leader is principled. disciplined and thoughtful.

  

EQUALS THIS

Bunch of losers (seriously, all want revenge on Kenshin because he beat them in a fight sometime in the past), aided by gimmicks (cause they know they would lose otherwise).  Leader is spoiled brat with a grudge who is afraid to take on Kenshi one-on-one.

Seriously?  What's even the point? The only reason they had anyone from the "6 comrades" (not even the leader) was so Kenshin and Sanosuke would have someone to fight when they were rescuing Megumi, which was what the oniwabanshu were doing in the first place!

Also, by cutting out oniwabanshu, they got rid of the only character in the ENTIRE series who actually grows as a person.  Look at Kenshin.  He has stuff in his past, but has mostly moved on, choosing a new way of live.  The only thing that happens to him is having to defend the NEW way of life from the OLD way of life (enemies he made in the past) that come back to haunt him.  

Aoshi (leader of the oniwabanshu), on the other hand, goes from being a mercenary, to a personal journey to become stronger, to super crazy and turning against his own friends, to finding peace within (or something).  He's interesting because you never know what he's going to do next.  Everyone else is pretty constant.  (Megumi will taunt Kaoru, Saito will taunt Sanosuke, Sanosuke will get in fights...)

PLUS!  the manga was super moving, with loyalty and stuff, because when Aoshi was about to go down to the Gatling gun, the oniwabanshu all sacrificed themselves to save him, and in the end the gun ran out of bullets, so their loyalty and love for their leader defeated the Gatling gun and showed how great they were and it was wonderful and beautiful.  

Did anything like that happen in the movie?  No, they were just like, 'we can run faster then the bullets.  look at us running'.  Which was kind of boring because they had been doing that sort of thing during the entire movie.

So that's basically my one big hang up with the movie.   Actually, I think there were other things, but I saw the movie a week ago and I don't remember them now.  

Also, I do not know enough Japanese to follow, like, anything they said in that movie, so I probably missed some interesting parts.  But if you know who all the people are and the basic story line, it's not a big deal

gr

Hokkaido dreamin'

I AM SO SORRY, HAVEN'T POSTED IN AGES!!! I will do better, I promise.

I'm currently at Merican Park, by the harbor. There's festival (find of), with music and food. It's been atrociously hot, but the humidity has let up a bit the past couple days. Actually, since the sun has set, I would venture to say that it's a perfect summer evening.

Some of you know that I went to Hokkaido for a week this summer, visiting one of my friends from college who is also an English teacher. If yo don't know, Hokkaido is the northern most island, famous for cool temps, snow low population, and farms.

I felt like I spent the entire trip listing all the awesome things Hokkaido has.  I felt a bit bad, I really couldn't help myself.  Mostly cause all the stuff reminded me of home.  It went something like this:

-they have queen Anne's lace!
-and clover!
-not hot!
-so flat!
-straight roads!
-real gardens!
-botanical gardens, complete with rustling leaves!
-the weather is amazing!
-gianthuge bookstore!
-super fun people!
-farms that grow real food!  (real= deliciousness like corn and carrots and NOT boring bland rice)
-uncrowded trains!
-parking lots! (instead of garages)
-giant takoyaki!
-huge park, straight through the middle of downtown!

Then I felt really guilty, because of course there are many things that I appreciate about Kobe/Osaka.  So I made a counter list:

-trains every 5-10 minutes
-China Town
-largest bookstore in western Japan (it's not as convenient to the station as the one in Hokkaido, but possibly has a larger selection of English books)
-Merican Park, of course.  I have not spent enough time here recently
-My friends, who are awesome
-okonomiyaki
-takoyaki
-delicious food in general (Kobe has a rather large foreign population, so we get all kinds of ethnic restaurants.  Indian food is particularly prevalent.  Not that I'm complaining)

So that's basically Hokkaido in a nutshell.  I'm planning on posting more, but school starts on Saturday, so we'll see how that goes. I'm going in to school today to work, but currently waiting on a download... slow computer.

what to do at 5:30 on a saturday?

write a blog, of course!

first of all, apparently the rainy season is over!  Hard to tell really.  I only know because one of my coworkers told me.  Of course, we still had thunderstorms yesterday and today...  What can I say? Weather in Japan is weird, man.

Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for it to get properly hot.  Last week we got to the point where I had to turn on my AC a couple times at night, but the heat broke a couple nights ago and it's really nice now. I do admit that if I wasn't in the AC at school all day, I might be more tempted to turn it on at home.

I finally got a library card, and for the past couple months I've been making regular trips.  Lucky for me, the library is right down the street :)　　I'm working through the Little House books, but the library doesn't have all of them :(  Mom and my sister are coming out next week, so they're going to bring me the missing book.  When I finish all of those, I'm starting on Harry Potter.

As school has been winding down, I've also been entertaining myself with movies.  This week the video rental place had a special- 5 movies for $5.  So I have some of my favorites like the Mask of Zorro and Step Up.  ALSO, just watched 3 Musketeers.  Oh my goodness, totally awesome!  (As long as you don't expect it to be too close to the book).  I mean, there's airships, dueling on the roof of Notre Dame and Orlando Bloom is the most hilarious bad guy ever.  What more do you really need?

At home, I didn't go to the movie theater very often, but I was looking at upcoming releases and found out that for each month through the end of the year, there is one movie I want to see.  The schedule is something like this:
July-Brave
Aug- Kenshin
Sept- Mirror Mirror
Oct- The Lorax
Nov- Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
Dec- (Of course) THE HOBBIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (fangirl squee!!!!)

I suppose instead of rambling about movies, I should actually tell you something about my life.  Well, this month was exams and special classes.  Have I ever told you about special classes?  They're random half days of classes where the things you teach aren't graded  or on exams or anything.  Apparently we're all in it for extra kicks.  Anyway, in my classes we do fun things like watch movies and play games.  Then, the kids get to go home and we teachers stay and go to meetings.

I didn't realize how stressed I was until I got a chance to relax.  As I've hinted at before, this term has been super busy and I often didn't leave school until really late, plus different things kept me busy on the weekends (bike trip, Japanese lessons, getting my computer replaced...), so I didn't get much down time.  One of my classes is leaving to do study abroad in various places, so I should have more time next term.  At the very least, I hope I can leave school at a reasonable hour.

I'm growing a bunch of herbs to use in my cooking.  Not that I ever get a chance to cook...

This one time I went with some friends rafting down a river

And another time I wore my first yukata  

That's about all I can think of for now.  Maybe there will be more tomorrow.