After so long 1

I have never realized that a number of friends and family do follow my blog. I do apologize for not posting for such a long time again. :( I decided rather that have another looong post, I'd rather post per event. Part of the reason I wasn't able to post recently was the three back-to-back conferences I attended two months ago. Actually I applied for the conference so that I would have an excuse to meet up with Toad. We went out a bit, but jet lag got the best of me. The first picture are some rose-shaped pastries I got from Yokohama which I gave to Toad as a gift. The second picture was a Zagu we bought from Hawaii. Toad always wanted to try one in Hawaii, so we bought to accompany one of our lunches. The main difference was how it was made. Sorry for the hasty generalization, but Americans can be so wasteful. The Zagu clerk actually did not estimate the size of our orders and made too much. The mixer was still half full yet, she threw the remaining blended stuff in the sink. The final one is...Toad will kill me for forgetting the name, because we kept eating it, as it was his favorite. It is basically siopao with a filling of black sugar. What was interesting was the flavor. It tasted like mongo-pastry...but different.

The second conference was a Philippine studies conference held in Hiroshima. Me and my sempai, Siao took a 12-hour bus ride from Tokyo to Hiroshima, since it was cheaper. It wasn't that bad, especially for "always going to the bathroom" Karl. Every two hours, there was a pit stop. Perfect. I was fortunate enough to go around the Hiroshima memorial park at dusk, which gave an eerie, haunting feeling, as opposed to going around it in the morning. Another memorable, yet disturbing place was the memorial museum which has exhibits, such as pictures of people after the explosion was well as hair and nail clippings affected by the radiation.































































The third conference was just in Tokyo. But "writing" three different papers for the three conferences, plus class requirements was exhausting. Fun but exhausting. After the third conference, me, Cheska and Dina went to this year's Tokyo International Book Fair. I didn't take much pictures of the event, but after going around, we ate lunch at a seafood restaurant called "Mexico" which specialized in crab cuisine...(take note the odd things from that statement). Anyway, Toad would be shocked to find out my choice was a very uncreative surf and turf dish. Wasn't in the mood to eat crab during that time and thought that the servings would be smaller for the dish I ordered. I was DEAD wrong. I had fun with the girls and bought a lot of books.