Lazy Thursday

It's been a while since I updated!
Last weekend, my two new tomodachi (friends), Taichi and Kiyota, and I went into Osaka for the night. They took me to a big department store in Umeda - one of the "younger" neighborhoods - called HEP.

Five floors of six floors of shopping with a seventh full of restaurants. With a giant ferris wheel on top. We wandered around the building for a couple hours, popping in and out of stores, buying nothing. Eventually we hit the top floor for dinner. I wanted a change from what I'd been eating the past few weeks, so we went for Italian. $10 for a plate of spaghetti alfredo with salmon and spinach is an awesome, awesome deal. After that, we decided to ride the ferris wheel. I was all kinds of terrified, since heights and I are not friends. The view was amazing! Unfortunately, I don't have pictures, since the plastic walls of our little gondola warped all the photos. But you can have horrible self-taken group photos:

Kiyota got cut off.

And now you can't see Taichi.

Unfortunately, the boys have really busy school schedules, so I'm not sure when we'll hang out next. But we've been texting back and forth...hopefully we'll set something up. There's some talk about helping them study for the TOEFL.

I met this kitten on the way home.

I made a new tomodachi yesterday, named Kazuki. He speaks English very well, which is actually nice for a change. I'm all for speaking Japanese with native Japanese speakers, but having a friend who can help me out in my language is incredibly helpful! We borrowed gloves from the campus gym today and tossed around a baseball for the better part of an hour. It was so great to do something active. He lives only a couple minutes away from campus, so maybe I can hang at his place after classes one day. I'm also friends with a girl named Mai; we want to visit Chinatown in Osaka together. And I'm also tutoring a girl in my Popular Culture course, since she has a little trouble understanding our professor.

Classes have been going well. The fact that I'm actually at a school is just setting in, due to the sudden influx of tests and papers.