Thursday May 6: Gold Leaf

Thursday I was a little sick (nothing like stomach pains to dampen ones day) and Im still a little sick, so Ill try to relay everything, though I dont recall too much

For Thursdays cultural activity my class made gold leaf designs on chopsticks. Turns out this is a very difficult thing to do. For one, you first cut tape into the shapes of the areas you dont want to cover in gold and put them on the chopsticks, meaning you have to translate a 2-d design onto a 3-d surface. Then you had to very delicately cover the chopsticks in rosin, then carefully roll it in the gold leaf, then tear the tape off. For those of us with terrible dexterity, this was a hard activity, but I am happy with the design

After class I met up with my host parents, who had just picked up the host moms Hawaiian massage instructor. Hes way cooler than I could ever be, and I think he finds me a bit terrible to look at because of my awful posture (made worse by the stomach pain). We had good ramen for dinner, which was delicious though Im looking forward to American food.