The Slightly Longer Way - Day 16

Tuesday, May 23 2023 (Day 16)

Random Notes

It's a little bit more than I promised yesterday, but I'm going to attach all my dreams thus far on the trip, from May 05 to May 22 2023, in a special Dreams section at the end of this post. I can't wait until I find time to fully upload my dream diary. It's so interesting that I need a couple of weeks to get used to a place, but then after that, bam, the dream floodgates open again.

Last night was very weird, since I had homework to do and a quiz to study for after writing my blog. Just like the night before my last quiz, my sleep schedule was awfully... awful, I think I pretty much fell asleep at 9 or 10 pm, halfway through my worksheet, got up at about 2am to write down a dream, fell back asleep, woke at 4am to write down another dream, then finished what was left of my worksheet, then studied with whatever leftover time I had after that before meeting Zian at the usual bus stop at 7:45 am.

But it was surprisingly fine, especially since I had also interspersed a bit of study time all through my evening between other things. I did get a couple things wrong on the quiz but I will probably end up somewhere around 70-80%, near what I got on my first quiz (which was exactly 80%). The homework sheet was fine. The presentation, or what little I had of it, was more than any of the others had anyway, which was reassuring in an odd way. It looks like the actual presentation is next Friday, so it's coming up really quickly. And heck, RSJP ends one week after that so the ending of the program is also sneaking up rapidly!

We were a little later than usual getting to school because a traffic light didn't mesh with a bus arrival time, so we ended up just getting some bread from the local Ritsumeikan co-op convenience store and brought our victims to our class to chew on. I had what they called a Yakisoba Roll:

Class swam by without much incident. Lunch was this:

My main dish was the one in the top left, Honkaki Mapo Don. I had two tofu dishes, the first one the mapo tofu in the main bowl, and the second one the same side dish I had yesterday, the one in the top right, affectionally called "Stamina Tofu" on the receipt. It's tofu with chicken and onion or something like that mixed in, the tray it was on had a more descriptive name but I don't remember it. Yum, though.

I did take a picture of this week's menu, although I noted that one of the items above the top row is cut off. There were other free spots they could have put that menu item into...

The one I had yesterday with all the bean sprouts was the Gyu Siodare Yasaiitame in the top left and it was amazing.

Because we had no activity this afternoon, Zian and I were the only ones out of our cohort again that actually went for lunch at the cafeteria. Five of the others went to meet some Buddy or something and skipped the general Buddy interaction time to head off somewhere to eat together. Neither Zian nor I seemed to be invited nor had any idea where they were going, it seemed to be preplanned outside of the group Instagram chat. The 6th member of the cohort didn't even come to class today -- he was in the other class though, and their quiz is tomorrow instead of today. He's the only one of us eight to have missed any classes and he's missed two classes now, apparently because he's a VERY heavy sleeper.

Again though, beacuse there are all these other groups in the classroom we used to exclusively share with the Buddies for lunch now, that room was super busy and rather noisy anyway.

After lunch, Zian and I headed to the Ritsumeikan library, where we both spent around three quiet hours studying and perhaps napping a little. She did a bunch of studying for her quiz tomorrow, while I just about finished prep work for all the remaining chapters/tests in our book -- for me, prep work involves inscribing the vocabulary (and some grammar) lists into my notebook, and also underlining and writing down vocabulary definitions on the main essay that comes at the start of all the chapters. I finished doing this for Chapter 6, our current chapter (that we just ended, but that I hadn't transcribed into my notebook yet), and also our next two chapters, 7 and 8, which will take us to the end of the RSJP. We also exchanged notebooks and textbooks and peered at each other's work. Her notebooks are gloriously well-detailed and neat.

The air-conditioner in the library was a little bit cold, at least I think I was sitting right under a vent, but the temperature change was insidious and wasn't really obvious until near the end when I got up to walk around and headed to the bathroom and felt the difference in temperature in the rest of the library.

Anyway, at this point, it was around 5 pm and we wanted to try something interesting, so Zian suggested a nearby sushi place that Mr Tanaka had recommended, and I heartily agreed. Another one of those things where I'm not sure if I'd ever have worked up the courage and/or energy to try it if not for Zian pushing me.

This sushi restaurant, Hama Sushi, was a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. We went to their Kinkaku-ji branch, just south of that famous temple and just east of Ritsumeikan.  We puzzled through how to order the various dishes, and spent just over an hour here sampling their various dishes. We ordered via a digital screen located by our table, although the only picture I have of it turned out to not have captured the screen itself in good focus at all. Oh well.

It was cool overall watching dishes go by us to various other tables, although unlike what conveyor belt sushi are supposed to have, there were no random sushi dishes making the rounds on the conveyor belt, only little sushi bowls and other snacks that were ordered by and headed to a specific table.

It was lots of fun. We ended up spending just over 2,000 yen in total after tax, and we split the bill, so it wasn't expensive at all. I wasn't really particularly full at this time either, but I had reached a satisfactory hunger level without overeating, and it would have made it more difficult to split the bill if one of us had significantly more than the other. We're likely going to try another nearby sushi restaurant at some point.

Zian and I then headed home, and caught a couple more evening pictures by Nishioji Shijo as we went along. We've been here so many times that the intersection feels so oddly nostalgic and familiar now.

And Mars was dancing alongside the moon in the sky this evening.

I wrote this blog post, and then rewarded myself for all the earlier studying with a little bit of Persona 5 on the Steam Deck before falling asleep.

Dreams

Here's an assorted dreams entry for my dreams so far on the trip, from May 06 to May 23. I'd specifically like to draw attention to the dreams on May 21 and 22, which are both at least 9/10 Highlight dreams, although some of the others are no slouches too. Also note how many times Zian has already appeared in my dreams. Even Lauren has appeared once already as well, and I only hung out with her for one afternoon thus far!

My dream worlds are amazing!

May 2026 edit: They may be amazing, but I'm trying to reduce duplication of dreams because eventually I'm going to delete all the dream chunks and move them into my Dream Diary. The less repeated dream copypastes I have, the less I have to fix when I inevitably find typoes and grammar issues. For now, what was here has been merged into and can be found in My Diary #097.