Busy Little Bee: Retroactive Post

I've been pretty busy lately. Earlier in the week, I rode the gidensha *bicycle to the Nagoya City Museum. I didn't really take pictures while I was there, but they have a really large regular exhibition. I followed it chronologically from the prehistoric period, to the development of a rice-harvesting society all the way to the development of Nagoya itself, and through World War II. Here are some pics from the outside garden:

Nagoya Castle and its famous Golden Fish symbol:

A couple of days ago, I met with one of the girls that I might be helping with their English while I'm here. Her name's Chika, and she's my age. She's been to the US before, studying film, and wants to go back for her second semester of film school, so that's why she wants to improve her English. We hung around Sakae for the afternoon. While we were in one of the many department stores, we stopped at this little shop with all sorts of useless-seeming knickknacks. What caught our eye was Elmo. But, for some reason, some Japanese person decided that Elmo is better in different colors, so:

Yesterday, I went to the Nagoya Aquarium with my aunt. Check my album to see what it was like: The Aquarium. One of the cool things there, which I unfortunately couldn't take a picture of, were all of these computer graphics displays depicting different things, like how whales evolved from being four-legged land creatures to water-living mammals, and what their skeletons look like. There was even a large-scale animatronic killer whale with a projector screen set behind it, and when they lit it up a certain way, you could see it's skeleton. It was a really long walk through all of the exhibitions in the two buildings.

Following that however, we decided to walk to the nearby Villagio Italia, even though it was raining. Unfortunately, I couldn't take any pics of it because my camera had no more memory space and my battery had run out. But I'll definitely go back there again, and I promise pictures in the future. It was very cute and most of it was pretty authentic, though like the rest of Japan, as I'm finding, inundated with tons of shops.

Today, I met Risa, another girl looking for English help. She's 28, and actually lived in Vancouver for about a year, as well as living in Puerto Rico and visiting other places in the US. We met up with her friend John, who has recently moved to Japan from Vancouver, and mostly chatted. They gave me a bunch of tips regarding where to apply for teaching jobs, as well as what to be wary of and more of what to expect while living in Japan. For now, I'm sleepy, so oyasumi nasai! *good night!