Long time

I just realized it's been a month and a little bit since there was last any blogging up here. Which is not terribly surprising since we've been busy. Lots of samba stuff couple with an uptick in general activities. In addition to music and language activities, it seems like we've had lots of little paperwork related activities to deal with (or at least Rachel has). For myself I've been writing quite a bit for the dissertation - I tried to set myself a general goal of getting a good draft of two of my chapters done by the time we return to the US. In any event, it seems like we are just too distractable or just plain mentally tired when the blogging part of the day arrives. (I've tried to blog a few times, but I ended up deciding I was being too pretentious and caught up in the my own words...)

We also took a small trip up to Tokyo at the beginning of June, which was pretty cool. We ende up at the National Diet Library for a large block of time on each of two days. Rachel had the most to do there, of course, but I also managed to find some good material on French theater.

Anyway, I'll try to run down the basics of the last month.

梅雨（tsuyu= rainy season)
This year's rainy season actually started with a week or so of annoyingly humid and hot weather as a typhoon passed to the south of Japan. It actually reminded me of some summers in Madison, where for some reason the rains often pass to either the north or south but drag through all the moist air in their wake. The last couple of weeks have been nice and cool and rainy, so we've had a few extra days of wearing spring clothing and not hurting when we go outside.

Training (=more heat)
So in a little over a month we will be climbing Mt. Fuji. We may not make it to the summit, but we will be on it. We've been trying to train over the last few months with bigger hikes throughout the area and have made some progress, but now we really have to focus on keeping moving everyday in some way. Essentially, we want to make sure we are "in shape" and have some endurance, because climbing Fuji is more about endurance and only partly about the actual hiking.
We have, however, run into an interesting experience during this training. We've been trying to get down to the pool a few times a week, which is pretty awesome, but it is damn hot in there. At first I thought it was just psychological, but then I looked at the wall and they liste the temperature of the air and the water, which average 33ºC and 31ºC, respectively. I understand that we don't want to keep the water too cold, especially with the pool largely filled with retired and elderly swimmers, many of whom are actually learning to swim and therefore aren't generating much of their own heat. But seriously.

NHK
I almost forgot about this. We (might) be on TV. A local camera crew from NHK came to film our most recent samba rehearsal. Once Japan made it into next year's world cup (which, in cased you haven't seen any of the crazy news coming out of there, is in Brazil) and so everyone is obsessed with Brazilian things. Anyway, they didn't interview us specifically, but there was a big shot of the group doing a cheer, so we might be in that.

So I guess that's all for now - I was gonna write the other day some stuff about language and my continuing/evolving sense of Japanese and how that has influenced my social interactions. I still might write it, but I won't make any promises.