Harvest Moon!!!

As I was walking up Lone Mountain, where I am right now, I could not help but notice the huge moon in front of my face. If I wasn't paying attention, I could've mistaken it for another street light. It was so big and low on the horizon I was literally taken aback by its magnificence. Well. . . ok, I wasn't that blown away but I just wanted to point out how much I love looking at the moon. Apparently, last night was the harvest moon but it didn't seem that different to me. Right now it's really clear and not that high in the sky. I'm glad that I can see it from where I will be sitting, trying to catch up on school work. I'm so lame, but everytime I look at the moon I can't help but think about ancient, pre-historic, like super super primitive man staring at the night sky. Before religion, before cave paintings, before anything. Like a dog, just an animal looking at the moon, trying use what little evolutionary brain power it had to try and make sense of this huge white thing in dark sky.

Here is an entry from my Japan log, 8-16.
8/16

Since I don't really go on the internet that much, this log and my blog are very off. I think I just posted the 8/3 or something like that yesterday. I guess for a while when I'm in San Francisco, my blog will still make it seem like I'm in Tokyo.

Woah! Today was sooooo FUN!! FIRST OFF, WHAT THE HELL JAPANESE GET TO BUY BOTTLE ROCKETS FROM FRIGGIN CONVENIENT STORES FOR LESS THAT TWO DOLLARS?!?!?! WHY ARE THEY ILEGAL IN HAWAII!? I'll get back to that later, I just wanted to get it off my chest right now before I forget. Today, Sunday the 16th of August, I spent the whole day in Chiba. No mom, I didn't have classes. One of my good friends that I made here, Minako, lives there so we decided to hang out there on our day off rather than stay in Tokyo. Even though it is in its own prefecture and almost an hour away, it didn't really feel like it I was that far away from Tokyo. I mean the people I saw in Chiba looked like they belonged in Shibuya or Shinkuku.

First me, Minako, Minami and Kekoa, hung out near the station in some department store. I bought some gifts for my sisters and a shirt from a surprisingly well stocked Uniqlo, I guess Chiba-ians are too cool for that place. We ate at First Kitchen for lunch. Japanese like to abbreviate things so what they do for this place is take the "Fa" from the begining of First and the "Ki" from the begining of Kitchen and add a "n" sound at the end and you have the shortened version of First Kitchen, "Fakkin." Chiba is near the water so we took the monorail to some beach. I saw a lot of firsts there. First real wakame, seaweed thing that comes as a salad. First non poisonous jelly fish that you could pick up. Also first time that I saw so little people swimming in the ocean when the weather was soo hot. Actually, no one was even swimming. Some kids were up to their waist but there were no like older than 10 years old past their knees. This made me worry that the water was pollutted or something but Kekoa dived in and was fine. He quickly dived out though, probably like not even 10 seconds after he stared swimming, and complained that the water was too gross. The beach was fun and was a good place to relax. We stayed there for an hour or so and when Kekoa had to leave, we took the monorail back to the station area where obon festivities were taking place.