#12: Celebrating My 21st Birthday and the Halfway Point of the Trip! (July 1)

Monday marked the halfway point of my trip, and also was my 21st birthday! I really enjoyed treating myself and celebrating throughout the day and thinking about all I’m grateful for. 

One of my favorite things to do with birthday cakes and other cakes is eat them with my breakfast. A breakfast of peanut butter toast, waffles, or bagels combined with a small piece of cake is one of my favorites, and gives me a convenient time to enjoy cake other than the evening. So the day before I bought two slices of cake—one chocolate and one French crepe—and had the French crepe one with a peanut butter waffle before heading to class.

After class I got dinner at KFC, and then back at my dorm had more cake and watched a new movie I’d been recently interested in: The Way of the Dragon (1972) featuring Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris. This is the fifth straight birthday where I picked and watched a movie that day. I also got a card from home Amazon-shipped that arrived that morning, which lit up and played music and was a pretty impressive birthday card, and of course I got a flood of happy birthday texts from all my friends and family.

One of the best parts of the day was reflecting on a whole year’s worth of blessings and things I’m thankful for, and writing down a list of 100 from the past year in my journal. Many of them were from this Japan trip, and it brought back a lot of great memories from a very great year of being 20.

Now there’s more behind us than in front of us in Japan and I’m greatly looking forward to what we have left to finish it out! This week we’ll be in Tokyo Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and the week after start getting ready for final projects in our classes. Excited for the month of July!

Cake for Breakfast



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#10: Yokohama Tire Factory and Some Good Food (June 24-27)

Image
On Tuesday we loaded up on a bus for the Yokohama Rubber Company's Shinshiro plant, which is their main production facility for their tires. They make tires for passenger cars, trucks, buses, tractors, off-road vehicles, and almost anything else with four wheels. We were given a tour of the plant and saw every step of the tire manufacturing process, from mixing globs of rubber into sticky slabs to putting the treads on and preparing them for shipping. For someone who spent the five months before this trip working at a wheel manufacturing plant, touring a tire manufacturing plant was a blast. There were a bunch of similarities in layout, machinery, color schemes, sounds, etc. that reminded me of home. We weren't allowed to take any pictures, so all I have is the front sign. One of my favorite parts of the program schedule so far.  Not much else to report on this week, it's mostly been classes and day-to-day life in Japan, but I've had some fun lunches and dinners. Cafes ...
Read more

#8: Baseball at the Nagoya Dome! (June 21)

Image
On Friday night five of my classmates and I went to see the Chunichi Dragons (Nagoya's pro team) host the Hiroshima Carp in a Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) game inside the Nagoya Dome. It was a great way to end the first week of classes, and was even a victory for the underdog Dragons! We all had a great time and it was a really neat experience.  The Dragons' pitcher, Hiroto Takahashi, pitched seven shutout innings, their centerfielder Orlando Calixite hit an exciting solo-shot home run just over the wall into the Carp fan section in the 3rd inning for the game's winning run, and their closer Raidel Martinez got his league-leading 21st save completing the shutout. It was very cool seeing the home run: from what I've heard home runs are far less common in Japanese baseball, as they play a lot more small-ball strategies rather than power hitting. We were all quite surprised they won: they were last in their division heading into the game and the Carp were first in th...
Read more