Happy Super Belated St. Patrick's Day

Soo, on Sunday I went with Brian and Stephen to the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Harajuku, and it was pretty fun, though not terribly exciting. It was a very small, informal parade. People kept running out into the middle of the parader to get pictures taken of them with the paraders.
Here's the start of the parade.

Japanese Bagpipers! ^____^ Much cooler than the old Shriners. *dies*

Shamrock Ladies! Hahaha they were so cute.

The little Irish girl (though her accent wasn't as noticeable as her dad's) you can hear in the background of this next video got really excited about the "Harry Potter" Irish Setter, and I thought it was funny how she made sure her dad got a picture of that one. Later on (not in the video), when an Irish Wolfhound went by with a mini tiara on its head, she pointed it out really excitedly to her dad, and he replied in a very bored voice, "Oh, how nice," but quickly took the obligatory picture without being asked. XD They were an interesting family. Three little over excitable girls, two of which were huge troublemakers, and kept pulling on the flags of paraders.

Lots of dogs in the parade and in the audience. Japanese love their tiny dogs. ^_^ I thought this picture was cute because the little dog is looking down on the huge Wolfhound. At one point, a tiny little...some kind of dog (sorry, identifying them is not my strong point) touched noses with that same Wolfhound, and it was soooo cute...but the picture didn't come out very well because my camera focused on the butt of some person who was between me and the dogs. -_-' No, camera, I was not trying to take a picture of that person's butt. Geez.

Wow, there's Brownies in Japan, too!

Guinness floats, haha.

Um...I think this was supposed to be a leprechaun...be he kind of looked like Ozzy to me.

Here's the coolest-looking bag piper ever. He wasn't fantastic on the pipes, but he was okay enough.


After the parade ended, the three of us went for stone bowl ramen at a really, really good place (that I don't know the name of) near Kiddy Land. We always go to the stone bowl ramen place when we go for ramen in Harajuku, lol. This time, though, I was so proud of myself because I actually finished the whole bowl! The only thing left was a third of the broth. I burnt my tongue really badly (so badly that it only stopped hurting today), but luckily it didn't ruin the taste like that normally does.

Once we left the ramen place, Brian and Stephen went to Gotanda to check on the reservations at a hotel for Brian's parents, while I stayed behind and happily attempted to go into every single shop on Takeshita Street. The way I was going about it was stay on one side and go into each shop on that side, and then when I got to the end, I was going to turn around and do the other side on the way back to the station. However, I only got as far as the "Store My Ducks" shop before Brittany arrived in Harajuku and I went to meet up with her (I'll explain later). I found some really cool places that way. I discovered a little shop upstairs and back in a building that had some really cheap stuff in addition to the normal priced stuff. I bought a zipper hoodie for 104 yen and a light sweater for 699 yen. Then in the CocaCola shop (I can't remember its name, but it has lots of CocaCola stuff), I bought an obentou box! It's uber adorable. It is yellow with a clear top that has a picture of a banana and a sheep/cat/dog? eating onigiri and an egg over rice. The obentou box has two levels and comes with a pair of chopsticks.

Anyway, so earlier, Brittany had been with Brian, Stephen and I, but she left to meet up with her Mom, brother, and her mom's friend...but apparently there were some time confusions, so she ended up waiting outside the hotel for an hour without them showing up, and she got pissed off, started texting me, and so I called her, told her to give up, come back and join me, and email her mom once she got back. She did just that, except that her mom finally called her from a payphone (haha, her cell said "payphone" for the caller's identity), and they argued for a bit before Brittany hung up and we went to eat at the sushi conveyor belt place. OH and this time they had unagi! I was able to eat something! It wasn't nearly as good as Jiyugaoka's sushi place, but it did have fantastic dessert choices. I had a slice of some kind of cake that was super light and fluffy and delicious.

On our way back to the station to go home, we got side tracked because as we walked across the crossbridge, we saw DJ Buo's light sabers suddenly light up and start flashing around over on the sidewalk area where all of the cosplayers hang out. We went over to say hi, and ended up staying much longer than intended. We met two young women who are here as English teachers just out of college, and I talked with them for a while when Brittany was sword fighting with Buo.

Here's a picture of Brittany wearing Buo's mask. He'd gone off to have a sword fight with some super blond Japanese guy, and left us in charge of his mask and fake gun...though some Japanese guy (who had fought Buo earlier) was fiddling with it the whole time, so we just sat next to him. The mask changes your voice, haha, so it was really funny when Brittany laughed with it on her head.


On school news...I'm starting to actually recognize kanji and write it, and that makes me immensely happy. I was telling Yumika today that I wished my friends and I spoke more Japanese to each other, because I feel like the only time I really speak in Japanese is to her, and I really want to get better at speaking. Luckily she's gotten past the stage of only complimenting me on my "suge" Japanese (absolutely not true, but that's what Japanese do when foreigners speak in Japanese), and actually gives me constructive input. XD She said that my pronunciation is good, and that she can understand everything I say, and then she asked me how much I understand when Japanese speak to me. I told her that I understand more when they speak slowly to me, and she said that was still good, though. She's been really helpful to me so far, and today I think I spoke in Japanese for half of the hour we met (off and on, not straight-through), which is much better than usual. I also used new words I'd learned, and at one point she said something that had a word I had just read last night, so I was so happy that I understood her.

I'm really looking forward to the weekend. It sucks not having a spring break after midterms, so my brain has pretty much started to melt, and I have no attention span for my classes. I have to drag myself to them every day. Even my drawing class, which I normally enjoy, was dreadfully boring on Monday, because I basically finished drawing the model after 25 minutes and had to spend the rest of the class slowly making the drawing better. I got really discouraged when my teacher was talking to me about "putting part of me" into the drawing, because I don't know how to do that, and when I think about it too much, then I feel like I just consciously start making the drawing look weird, and it's not me at all.

This is why I don't want to become an artist. I always get really pissed off when people talk about those kind of things, and I feel like it's always fake when I try to think about what I'm doing. For me, the only time I can put my own style into the drawing is when I turn my brain off and just draw. I was also telling her that a big problem for me is that usually my style comes out when I draw clothing on people, but with nude models, I don't get a chance to do that. I don't mind drawing nude models, but I just find it amazingly boring. Or maybe I'm just getting bored with everything school-related lately. The only thing keeping me going (and not skipping a single class) is my conscience. That's it. I absolutely hate school. When have I ever liked school? Never? Granted, I enjoy certain classes occasionally. But for the greater part, I've always hated school and anything related to it. I only go because I have to. To be honest, if I could take only Japanese language classes and Japanese culture classes, I would be the happiest person in the world. Everything else means nothing to me, and I have the problem that if I don't see the use in what I'm learning, I have a really difficult time retaining the information. (That's why in high school my math grades started dropping as soon as we hit all of the useless junk that you only need to know if you're going to be some kind of engineer or whatever.)