Writing in 日本語 As part of my internship, every month I write a report, along with the other interns and high school exchange students, sharing about my experiences that month with my host family, at work, and about progress in Japanese.  This month I decided to challenge myself to write it all in Japanese. It took me two full days to complete, and I'm sure it's far from perfect, but I did it! And everyone can even understand what I was trying to say :) A lot of the time I still feel really lost during conversations or presentations in Japanese and I feel like there is so much I can't understand or communicate, but when I look at what I'm able to write four months after arriving in Japan without every having studied the language at all, I realize that I have learned a lot.  Being able to read and write in Japanese is like unlocking a secret code, which is pretty much how it feels like as I'm trying to figure out what different characters ...

What's Your Blood Type? Discovery of the day: It turns out that having a 'type A personality' or 'type B personality' has an entirely different meaning in Japan. The other day while having lunch with some co-workers in the office, the main topic of a half-hour long conversation was blood type. Specifically which people had which blood type. I understand enough Japanese to know that this is what was being discussed but not quite enough to understand everything that was being said, and definitely not enough to understand why this was so funny and amusing to everyone. Someone asked me what my blood type was. "O negative," I replied, which was met with an animated mixed chorus of "Oooooooh," "Mmmmmm" and "Ahhhhh". Well, it is the universal donor type, I thought. I suppose that's relatively impressive? Then they asked what type my family members were. "Uhh...I have no idea." It's not like I've ever had...

Making Mochi in Kagawa After visiting Kyoto we went to Kagawa prefecture, which is on an island (I am aware that in Japan one is always on an island, but this is a separate island, Shikoku) so to get there you drive over this amazing bridge that connects the prefectures. It's called the Great Seto Bridge and is actually comprised of a set of six bridges connecting the smaller islands in between and is collectively almost 6 miles long. It also has two levels with a four lane expressway on top and trains that run on the bottom. Impressive. In Kagawa we visited friends of my host family from Hippo and learned how to make mochi. Mochi is a traditional Japanese food that is a little hard to explain if you've never had it; it's a kind of gummy ball made from pounded rice, and you can eat it in a lot of different ways. A few ways that I have had it are: filled with anko (a sweet bean paste), with Japanese radish, soy sauce and peanut powder, warm and sticky in soup,...