Today it is beautiful out, as it has been more and more recently. I finally moved some of my recent photos from my camera to my computer, so here are some that I took at Sakura Sunday (Philadelphia cherry blossom festival) a few weeks ago. They are of the garden of a Japanese house we visited, the dancers with a taiko group, and the cherry blossoms themselves. Overall the event was so-so, but it was worth going just to see all the cherry blossom trees in Fairmount Park.

shofuso, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

( Read more... )

Supposedly, Ben and I will both be learning some Turkish before we go there in September. We will be on a tour so it may not be that necessary, but I think it's good to know anyways and it would be nice to be able to interact with people there on our own, at least for basic things. But before I started with Turkish I wanted to brush up the rudimentary Italian that I know, which I learned for our summer 2006 trip. So I spent a lot of today reviewing that, remembering the vocab that was starting to slip. It's nothing ground-breaking but I really enjoy language; I wish I had the time to take a real language class. Maybe I will once all my coursework requirements for my Ph.D. are done. What is nice too is that I learned Italian with a Pimsleur-like course, though one that has a lot more vocabulary, so reviewing it today was something I could do while cleaning the kitchen and making a key lime pie. It feels both productive and mentally stimulating.

My French, which I actually received a lot of instruction in, I keep up by listening to French news podcasts. They are short and have too many soccer results, but they maintain my listening comprehension. I'm sure, though, that if I actually tried to speak with someone in French I would have a hard time making the words come out of my own mouth. I wish I had time to learn some crazy new language, like any of the Asian languages. I really ought to know Spanish but it's not as exciting to learn Romance languages because they are all like French but with different pronunciation.