15 good things about today.

1. I can eat tomatoes with ease!  At first, getting tomato slices from the plate to my mouth with chopsticks was always... an adventure, but now it is just eating.  
2. I can wake up at 7:27 and get out of bed and dressed and pack my school bag and be downstairs for breakfast at 7:30.
3. School doesn't start till 8:50.
4. Art class
5. Got to skip swimming class
6. Remembered the word for "put away" -- surprisingly, it came up twice today.  I had only heard it once before.  Usually I need to hear words a few times before I remember them, but maybe my language-learning skills are improving!
7. Read 68 pages of The Fellowship of the Ring
8. Got a 90% on an English test.  Half of the test is spelling English words correctly when the teacher reads them aloud [super easy for me...they're words like "develop" and "maybe"], but the other half is writing down the meaning in Japanese, which is hard.  So I feel like this is an accomplishment.
9. Lots of fun with friends in school... laughed more than I have since I've been here!
10. Going with friends to get Ramen on Sunday!
11. I have to go to Shoudo right now!  I'll finish this later, because there is more. 
12. Talking to a woman [in a kimono.. I don't know why she was wearing it, but it was pretty] in Japanese about why I came to Japan and when I started school and my favorite foods in Japan and NH and making friends and general things like that. 
13. 200 year old library filled with 200 year old books with a 200 year old mural on the ceiling and a 200 year old key to the door [I wouldn't have known what the key was! Very strange looking] and 200 year old book smell and a 200 year old statue of the text god.  All of the books came by horse from Kyoto.  The books are long and skinny and accordion folded.  
14. This library is in a tiny little building next to my house.
15. All of these things happened in the same day... the giggling with girls who have hot pink phones that they check obsessively and the art-drenched old book-room seem completely unrelated, but they are both part of life here.  They are both the output of this country's culture.