Just Another Day

For the first time in a while I managed to get up fairly early today. The plan was to take Shiela to the Kinokunya bookstore in Shinjuku, so she could get an English-Japanese dictionary. This bookstore is AMAZING! It really makes me wish I could read Japanese. Luckily, at least one of the eight floors that make up this monolithic Barnes & Noble dwarfer is dedicated to foriegn language books. Most English language books are pretty pricey, making it generally a better deal to buy them on Amazon and have them shipped (even express international shipping is cheaper). But, if you just want to pick up something that's not very expensive to begin with (e.g. dictionary), then Kinokunya is the place to go.

The plan was to follow that up with a local English language yoga class, that I found through an ad on Facebook (apparently I'm the first to respond to that ad that displayed a month ago). As it turned out, the bookstore didn't open until 10am, and the yoga class started at 11am, so we decided to save the bookstore for another day. I still got up at 8:30am, despite getting to sleep at 5am.

The yoga class was ok. I think I had much higher expectations because this guru spent five years studying with BKS Iyengar, whose books on the subject of yoga are some of the most highly regarded. I'm used to doing a broader selection of poses than we did today. The interesting thing is that I enjoy doing the most challenging poses, because the discomfort helps me to mentally detach, and spiritually focus. On the other hand, we only practiced very rudimentary poses today, but I discovered that I still stand to improve greatly on those. This discovery created a kind of discomfort of the ego, which ultimately had a very similar effect. In any case, I'm sure I'll try it again next week.

Afterward, Hampton and I found a neat little cafe that provided Japanese style seating. It's sort of sitting on the floor, except the 'floor' is actually an elevated platform. Shoes are left on the real floor, and you sit however suits your comfort, in front of what is essentially a coffee table. As always, the food was great.

Aside from all that, I've been working on a 'flash card' web application to help me accelerate my Japanese language study. I already built the basic functionality when I first got here. Now I have an enormous list of words that I want to be able to upload into the database via a CSV file. As always, it's just one cryptic error message after another. I'm thinking about dropping Rails and going to PHP. Probably won't though.

Anywho, I think this all might be a bit mundane for a blog entry, but sometimes even Arian's Adventures are mundane.