Pottery and BS Television

Last Saturday I returned with my host mom, Daisuke and his coworker, and Nick to the pottery place to finish what we started last time (Mackenzie was going somewhere that day so she went on Sunday). Our pottery had since been cooked (or whatever it's called) and was now a white color. We painted blue "anti-paint" on the bottoms and then dunked the whole thing in a paint color of our choice. The "anti-paint", as I call it, kept the normal paint off of the bottoms. And that's about all we did there. Today I returned and picked up all of our pottery which was now shiny and fabulous. Mine wasn't quite the perfect circular shape that we all dream of, but with the paint it still looks pretty spiffy.



Of no relation to that, last night my host dad printed out instructions for how to play shogi, a Japanese board game that resembles chess. The instructions were in Japanese but he did a good job of explaining the basics to me too, though of course his explanations were also mostly in Japanese.



Also, tonight I finally asked him to explain more about how Japanese TV worked. I had learned that on the remote you could get to more channels by switching between "[something something]D" and BS, and there was also a CS button next to them. If I understood correctly, the one with the D in it is digital channels, BS is like an analog broadcast sort of thing, and CS is extra channels that you have to pay for. Both digital and BS had seven free channels that all seemed to come in perfectly clear. I explained to him how American TV worked (how most people pay for extra channels and we just have digital now) and also why having a news program called "BS News" was amusing in English.

In class we're having a bunch of tests most of this week again which means less homework at last. Also, rumor has it that from now on there will be less kanji to memorize for each quiz, which is very good news for me since I've been barely keeping my head above water with that (actually, by most people's standards, I wasn't even doing that). So if that's the case, I'll mostly just have to worry about the speech at the end of the semester and having bad days that coincide with large amounts of homework.