My best meal this week was definitely the first meal at my homestay. My host mother runs a cooking blog, and every meal came with multiple courses. For my first meal, she made tonkatsu, a type of fried pork cutlet. Here's a fun fact: the "katsu" in "tonkatsu" is short for "katsuretsu", which is just the Japanese pronunciation of the English word "cutlet"! However, "katsu" also means "win" in Japanese, so tonkatsu is often eaten during celebratory occasions, which is why it was my first meal at my homestay!
I made a playlist to get me through the plane ride to Tokyo, and I ended up listening to it all of the time while exploring my neighborhood. One song that I couldn't get out of my head was "I Miss That Feeling" by Tennis.
Exploring Tokyo, of course! This week was mostly filled with orientation sessions from my study abroad program, and I took every opportunity to walk around the city once I had free time. It was incredible to walk through places that I had only seen in movies and to learn more about the different neighborhoods of Tokyo.
Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki. The protagonist is a boy around my age named Sanshirō, who moves to Tokyo from the Japanese countryside to attend college. The novel was written in 1909, and it was so interesting to read about someone having a similar experience to me, 100 years prior to my own journey!
