Day 25: Judo

Breakfast:

It seems like the best way to eat a sunny side up egg with chopsticks is to separate the yolk from the whites, then either eat the whole thing at once or make a neat cut down the middle with one of the chopsticks to split it in two. Otherwise, you end up with a gooey mess all over your plate that you can't really scoop up like you could with a fork.

I painted my nails yellow with that 7-11 nail polish and am actually really impressed with the gold:

Also, according to my fit bit I'm a lot more stressed than I was last month, so that's cool.

Unfortunate situations involving roommates and cake:

枝豆（えだまめ）（edamame = soy bean） covered onigiri #16:

I also tried this cute bread-thing. Each sweet bun has a different filling: cream filling, chocolate pudding, and red bean paste. It was fun and yummy.

For lunch today I went to the super market and got a sushi tray I'd been wanting to get for a while:

The sushi was all good and I liked the variety.

I also got this coffee milk drink which was pretty good:

And this tuna mayo onigiri for later:

(Onigiri #17)

Me waiting at HIF until it was time to leave for Judo:

The Judo trial was another high school. My host parents told me that this is where they went to school:

It was pretty huge. A lot of the high schools here seem massive. Also, almost every time we go to an after school event you can hear several instrumental groups all practicing/tuning their instruments from outside the building which is kind of neat.

I arrived at the high school about fifteen minutes early, so I looked around a little bit and got this cold milk cocoa from a vending machine. I didn't want to drink it right before judo, and then unfortunately forgot about it until the next day, so it sort of just tasted like chocolate milk in a can.

I also went into this little shop across the street from the school. There was an older woman sitting at a table near the back and there wasn't much inside other than a few cheap snacks, so I bet most of the people that come here are hungry high school students.

I got some more interesting candy:

Judo uniform:

We started out by warming up, then learned how to roll a little bit. It was sort of difficult to figure out how to do just by watching. Apparently when you start doing judo, all you really do for the first few months is learn how to fall and roll. After that, the HIF students paired up and we learned how to do a few moves. It was a lot of fun, but also pretty difficult because you had to have your hands and feet in really specific spots or else nothing would work the way it was supposed to.
Judo uses your opponent's own weight/momentum against them as you try to knock them to the floor, so there is a lot of grabbing people's sleeves/collars and rolling people over you.

Judo pictures of me and Emma from PeiYu:

This one was my favorite. You would both step sideways a few times, then you would kick the other person's foot out from under them and pull on their collar to twist them off balance. It reminded me of that thing where someone kicks another person's foot sideways behind the other one as their walking.

At the end, we asked the students questions. I didn't understand/don't remember a lot of the answers, but I asked them why they chose judo and one guy answered that he chose judo because he saw it during the Olympics on TV as a kid which I thought was pretty neat.

On the way to the bus stop there was a huge rose bush:

And also this cat:

I really enjoyed having my nails long (I don't know how it happened, they usually start to break pretty early and I have to cut them), but they were finally starting to interfere with my actually doing things. I got these nail clippers at 7-11 because mine are awful.

I also got this little white cake-thing which was good, but didn't have a ton of flavor. I think I prefer the dorayaki filled with red bean paste.

I got home too late to eat with everyone else, but my host mom saved me dinner. She also gave my omelet a cute face which was really sweet of her.

I haven't actually figured out how to evenly cut my nails to any length other than "as short as possible," and keep meaning to invest in a high quality nail file but haven't yet, so no more long nails: