梅雨の時雨が降らない？ (Rainy season without rain?)

The yearly rainy season started officially last week Tuesday. There was a little rain on a couple of days but that is all for now. I have been thinking "what kind of rain season it is when it is not even raining?" but I heard this summer has been unusual. And they say it starts to rain more next week. But anyway, I think I should be grateful when the temperature stays on a bearable zone before it will rise up when the rainy season ends.

The only rainy day for now had a heavy shower though...

Since my Tuesdays are free (no lessons), I have sometimes joined a Japanese language plaza at the university. Each day of the week there is a language plaza for different languages like German, Chinese and Korean. This semester they also started a Japanese plaza for foreigners to practice their Japanese. Last week I joined them for a while and one nice game we played was a drawing game where the next player needs to figure out the word for the picture and come up with a word that starts with the same syllabus than the previous ended. (For example in the picture below: sa-i-ko-ro -> rō-ru-kē-ki -> ki -> ki-no-ko...)

Last Saturday was full of program for me. In the morning I was able to join the volunteer Japanese class with my friend after a long break. They had a theme day and everyone was doing ikebana. It was my second time I get to arrange flowers like that and like on the first time, we were able to receive our flowers at the end and bring them home.

My flowers after the teachers fixed them a bit.

My flowers at home, arranged by my friend.

After the Japanese class, we decided to eat the lunch outside and my friend noticed an okonomiyaki restaurant nearby. That was more than fine for me because going to eat okonomiyaki was still on my list to do in Japan. The place was quite small and we got nice seats right next to the chef's working area in the empty restaurant. I ordered negi-yaki (okonomiyaki made with spring onion) and that is really what I got. I had never seen that much of spring onion in one dish. At least 70% of my dish must have been negi.

When my friend returned back to the dormitory with our ikebana flowers, I went to meet another friend of mine who had concert tickets for us to listen to the philharmnic orchestra of Kyushu University. That was maybe my sixth time in a classical music concert in Japan. I have never been to concerts this often in my life. Afterwards we also went to a Starbucks (which is a rare place for me since I don't drink coffee) to chat for a while. My day got a nice ending too because I decided to make most of my one-day ticket for the subways and headed to dance after a longer pause. It is so nice to go to dance now that I can also talk with people. I was remembering my first party here on my first week in Fukuoka when I could not have proper conversations in Japanese. There are still many occasions I don't understand something but now I can ask what they mean and get them to explain it with other words.

On Monday we had double training for our dance circle. We have our first show (and my only show) coming on the becoming Friday so the whole circle had rehearsals at school in the evening. In addition to that, the locking group had its third night training, this time starting at 1:30. I was lucky to be able to borrow a bicycle from my friend so I was not dependent on the subways and trains this time. It really saved time when I could leeave after the last trains and return before the first trains of the morning. Besides, it was a really nice feeling to cycle on the quite and empty streets. The distance was closer to 7 km, I had never been on those areas before and my friend's bike was too low for me but still I didn't feel uncomfortable at all.

Coming back home when the sun starts to shine..

One more important thing that has happened to me, is that I finally know when I am returning back to Finland. It was rather hard to buy the ticket, when I couldn't find simple information from the air company's website, when the support help didn't know the correct answers to my questions, when I needed to contact also my bank etc etc. But finally after all the troubles I have an e-ticket in my mail box. Yay, I am really going home again!

Some delicious fruits I got from my friend.
I had not eaten these kind of fruits before.