Street festivals! Also, naps!

Hello, everyone. I think I figured out what was making me feel like crud yesterday, 'cause today the exact same thing happened around noon. Unfortunately, I had to sit through an hour and a half lecture by a Japanese lawyer (who was actually pretty interesting, and made me never want to get arrested in Japan, not that I wanted to before) in the afternoon, so by the time I got home I felt like death warmed over. So I collapsed into bed and slept for almost three hours, and now I feel fine. So most likely I was suffering from sleep deprivation. YAY.

Anyway, yesterday's weird kanji story:

So for my individual project, I've been studying bushu, or the radicals that make up kanji. For example, the kanji 明 (bright) is made up of the components 日 (sun) and 月 (moon). Anyway, one of the bushu I learned this week is the right hand side of 誰 and 難. Apparently it means "bird." However, 難 means difficult. So asked my sensei what made birds difficult. He didn't know, so he went to get his huuuuge kanji dictionary (I swear, it's bigger than Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) and looked it up. And it turns out that the meaning of 難 is actually "the feeling a bird has while it's being roasted over a fire." Which I assume would be a difficult feeling.

Oh, kanji. You amuse me so much.

[/nerd out about kanji]

In other news, after dinner this evening, my host mom and my little host brother and I went over to the festival that they're having on the street right next to ours. It's a festival to celebrate Tanabata (even though that was Wednesday), and it was SO COOL. There was a group of volunteers from the local library telling the Tanabata story to a bunch of little kids (a lot like the story times we have at our local library), except they had an awesome scroll which they used to illustrate the story! And I got to try goldfish scooping! My first time I failed so badly that it wasn't even funny, but then my little host brother taught me a trick to getting them, and the second time I tried, I managed to scoop four fish (four really big fish) before my scooper broke.* (I probably wouldn't have got that many if my little host brother wasn't standing over my shoulder, making sure that I didn't tip the fish I had already caught back into the water. He kept grabbing the bowl when I stopped concentrating on it and going, "Careful, careful!") In any case, for some reason that was really impressive (I'm not sure if catching four was really that impressive or if it was just impressive because I'm a foreigner, but I suspect it was a little bit of both), 'cause the woman at the stand kept saying, "Wow! You're really good at this!"

My bigger host brother (who was apparently too cool to come with us, so he went by himself) was not quite so lucky, and so my host mom started teasing him, saying that he should get me to teach him how to do it properly. He got embarrassed and ran away.

In any case, my little host brother caught a bunch too, and all the fish are currently swimming around in a basin sitting at the top of our steps. (You can tell which fish are mine, 'cause they are the ones that are kind of ugly in a cute way, with huge, bugged out eyes.)

Anyway, my host mom ran into a neighbor and so she was talking to her. And it was kind of weird, because when the neighbor wanted to ask me a question, she'd ask my host mom. And I wasn't sure whether to be amused or slightly offended, because, really, I DO UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE SAYING. You'd think that people would realize that since I'm able to respond to their questions, I really do understand Japanese, but I guess not. Oh well.

In other news, my little host brother's ear has been pronounced cured. YAY!

Alright, sleeping time for me. G'night!

*The scoops are essentially hoops with paper in the center. So if you scoop too quickly, the paper will break, and after a while, it breaks anyway.