This weekend was parents weekend, so I got to do the following things:

1. practice speaking Japanese
2. eat Japanese food for free
3. go to Kinokuniya
4. get help with my Japanese homework

These are all good things.

きんようび、とも (Broadway & 110th) でばんごはんをたべました。I had never been there before. すしをたべました, including the "Tomo Roll" which was wrapped not in nori but in paper thin slices of cucumber which was just crazy. It tasted very clean. I also had spicy tuna with avocado (おいしい) and yellowtail scallion (あまりおいしくない). But overall the food was decent - definitely on par with Swish if you are looking for Japanese in the immediate area.

きょ、ははときのくにやへいきました. I like looking at all the Japanese products, like calendars and pencils and that kind of thing. Japanese crap is so much more fun than American crap. Of course, the books there are very nice too, though most of them I can't read. There are some very beautiful picture books though. My mom likes to get those to give to people. I ended up buying one book (http://www.hnabooks.com/product/show/6816), although I have no idea why they were selling it in Kinokuniya since it is not in Japanese, by a Japanese person, nor related to Japan in any way.

cool stuff

So it turns out that some pretty cool Japan-related events happen at Columbia.
It all started a few weeks ago when I saw a poster for a movie called "Doubles: Japan and America's Intercultural Children" that was being shown at Barnard. I didn't know anything about it, but I gathered from the poster that it was about the children of mixed marriages between Japanese and Americans, and that naturally interested me so I decided to go. The movie was about an hour long, and turned out to be pretty interesting as well as moving. It focused quite a bit on children who were born during the American occupation of Japan following WWII, although there were also modern day children featured (well, modern being 1995). All in all, pretty interesting.
Then, after leaving the movie I went onto the website for the Donald Keene Center, which had shown the movie. Turns out that the Donald Keene Center is a Japanese cultural institute here at Columbia. I looked around their website and promptly became very excited because I saw that they are having Gary Snyder speak on October 24th! For those of you who don't know, Gary Snyder is a beat era poet - he hung around with Ginsberg and Kerouac and all of them. He also was interested in Buddhism and lived in Japan for many years. A lot of his poetry is about nature, but Japan plays a pretty big role in some of it. He's one of my favorite poets so I'm going to go hear him and I'm extremely excited!
It's pretty nice that such cool stuff goes on here.

weekend

きんようび、うちへかえりました　（Vermontからきまして）。　ひとりでバスでいきました。　Vermontはけれいなでした！