A couple of cool things have happened in the past few days.  Well, actually, the things I’m thinking of took place on Tuesday.

First, I had my first practicum class, which was calligraphy.  Calligraphy is hard.  You think “oh man, that’s probably really easy,” but no, it’s extremely difficult, because you have to really know what you’re doing with the brush to make it look good.  It’s fun though, just a bit difficult, and ink tends to get on your fingers pretty easily.

The second cool thing that happened on Tuesday was that I went to the Budo Center to ask about Iaido and Kyuudo lessons.  Iaido is a martial art which is focused on the art of attacking when you draw your sword.  I’m probably getting it wrong, but I think it has something to do with that.  Kyuudo is Japanese archery.  For various reasons we didn’t get too much info on how to do Iaido (I say we because I went with a friend) but we did catch the end of a kyuudo lesson and we were able to talk to the sensei, who was very nice and told us about how we could go about taking lessons, and invited us to attend Friday’s lesson, so I’m going to go to a kyuudo lesson on Friday, and see if I can take lessons or not.  The sensei said I could rent equipment, but I’m not sure about clothes…

We got to watch some people practicing kyuudo and it’s really cool.  Every action you take is very formalized, and the coolest part is probably that you’re firing arrows from a bow that’s bigger than you are, no joke.  I’m a little scared that I won’t be able to rent clothes and I’ll make an ass out of myself, but hey, comes with the gaijin territory, right?  That’s all for now.

~Shimon