in the month of december... 12:59

* According to one study, tangerines help reduce fat.

* In another study, yawning is said to be caused by our heads overheating. Makes you wonder if you ever yawned in the cold...

* Germany sues Italy for compensating victims of Nazi hate crimes.

* Brazil and France sign an arms deal worth 12 billion dollars which will allow Brazil to modernize its military equipment.

* Korea aims to set Christmas Carol World Record with 30,000 carolers!

* Japan and Vietnam have signed a free trade agreement.

* China bans 'The Dark Knight' citing 'cultural sensitivity' while they aim to build the biggest Santa ever.

* And the Somali pirates give the rest of the world a hard time.

shotoku 04:42

For the past two weeks, I've been writing my final essay for my grad class and I think I've finally got it to where its decent. I'm not all that happy with it but I want to turn it in asap because I've been at this topic for a whole 12 weeks! I'm so tired of rereading this book (I've done it five times now) and rewriting every sentence in my essay. Sadly, it makes me wonder if I can actually continue on to a phD knowing that just 12 weeks will drain all the fun out of a topic I initially enjoyed. Oh the joys of graduate school. 

We were assigned a book and we had to pretty much give a class lecture on it and turn in a book review/essay (the longest book review ever I would add) at the end. I chose to read a book by Michael Como called Shotoku. It pretty much deals with the origins of the Japanese (with at least those in power), nationalism and how it pretty much destroys everything nice about history, and most importantly, a historical/mythological man by the name of Shotoku Taishi. He is pretty much like our founding fathers except he did it all by himself and most of what he did according to Como was fabricated. A book like this would never be written in Japan and if it did, it would not definitely not be a best-seller. A fun read nonetheless for those who can get beyond nationalistic tendencies. 

winter time 20:02

I've been back in L.A. for about 12 weeks now and I honestly forgot that I once had a blog...

A recap of my 12 weeks back in America:

1) Got a free one-week layover in Japan on my Seoul-Los Angeles flight. Got to see my friend Wataru, visited Osaka, Kyoto, and Uji on my own, and met a kind lady in Nara who gave me a full on tour for free. That weekend, I met my friends Brian, Jen, and Angela in Tokyo and went to Nikko. Wataru took us to Tsukiji Sushi house and I had the best sushi of my life there. 

kinkakuji in kyoto

bustling downtown osaka at night

2) Went to Joshua tree with Kaleo the weekend I got back. It was so awesome and refreshing to be a part of the fellowship again. 

3) Started grad school the week after that. My classes included Chinese 1, Japanese Linguistics, and an art history/archaeology class on early Japanese temples. The quarter is now officially over but I'm still writing a paper for the Japanese art/archaeology class. We, as a class, asked our professor about the prompt and he replied, "Do your best!" 

4) For next quarter, I will be taking Chinese 2, Italian 1, Readings in Japanese, and a grad class on ancient city planning in East Asia. And yea, I know Italian seems a little out of place. 

5) I'm kind of on winter break. No classes to go to but my professor for my grad class assigned us nine books and a research project to start on all before his class starts in January. I don't mind reading but when each book is over 600 pages, it is a little overwhelming. As of now, I've read 5 chapters of a book on city walls and started another on the history of China. It's gonna be a looong three weeks.