Shopping!

So this Tuesday Willard and I happened to have the day off due to coming in on one of our days off for Follow Up Training. Our friends Joe & Tiff had the day off and were coming down to our neck of Kansai to take their friend Brooke to Himeji castle so they asked if we wanted to join them and we said of course! Willard went with Joe & Brooke to Himeji and Tiff and I went shopping in Kobe.

Tiff and I made a stop at MAC to get her a new fall lipstick. She ended up going with "O", a very nice plum color with a little gold shimmer. I got Midimauve, which has been on my list of lipsticks to get for awhile. It is a great neutral color with a bit of lustre to it and it is my new favorite color! I also got a great new eyeshadow from the Blue Storm collection called Stormwatch. It is described as a "deep teal" and it is super cool!

As a follow up to my last MAC posting, I am very much enjoying my new Smoke Signals quad and the 209 brush is perfect for the fluidlines!

Heres a nice pic of Tiff and I with the MA who helped Tiff pick out her lipstick.


Next we went walked around Nankinmachi, which is Kobe's Chinatown. We saw some people dressed up for some reason, we're not sure why, but they were fun to look at!

We then went to the huge Uniqlo store near the port. Uniqlo is a very cool store that I describe as a cross between H&M and The Gap. They have really cool clothes and they are very reasonably priced. I have only bought a pair of shorts there because I'm trying to not spend money on clothes right now. The only downside to Uniqlo is that I am the largest size they have! That is a bit trippy and kind of depressing, but oh well.




Here's a picture of some stuff in the store.



















Click here for all the picks from the evening.

Yay! Another package!

I just got an awesome package from my aunt Lugene! She sent me two books AND homemade caramels! Lug makes the best caramels ever and we are always excited to get them. I thought I would have to go a year without them but now I don't! Num!

Also she sent me Zorro and The Queens Fool which I am very excited to read!

Thanks Lug!

More Books...

Sorry it's been a long time since my last post! Nothing interesting enough has gone on for awhile, but now there's lots to report! So my first topic is what I've read recently...

Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life: Loved this book! It is the memoirs of Queen Noor of Jordan. Queen Noor grew up in the states and met King Hussein of Jordan while she was traveling after graduating from Princeton. It is a great look into middle east politics from the mid 70's until 2000. I would definitely recommend it! Here's a mini synopsis:

"Born in 1951 to a distinguished Arab-American family, Lisa Najeeb Halaby became the fourth wife of King Hussein at age 27. With her husband being not only Jordan's monarch but the spiritual leader of all Muslims, Lisa was unsure what her role would be. This moving memoir provides a timely look at one woman's story against a backdrop of 30 turbulent years: the displacement of over 1 million Palestinians by the creation of Israel, King Hussein's frustrated efforts for peace, and the effect of Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War on Jordan and the royal family. Queen Noor offers intimate new glimpses of King Hussein, Saddam Hussein, Queen Elizabeth, Arafat, and many other world leaders. "

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd. What a great book! Tiffany lent me this one and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is the fictional journal of women who lived with the Cheyenne Indians in the late 1800's. The idea of the book is real. According to the author in 1854 at a peace conference a Cheyenne chief asked the US Government to give the Cheyenne 1000 white women as brides for Cheyenne warriors. The author says "because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world - a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them."

In real life the US Government missunderstood this request and immediately denied it. This book pretends that it happened and women who volunteered to be Cheyenne brides were sent to live with them. It was very interesting and a quick read, it kept me interested the whole time!

What are you reading right now?

My Students are Funny!

A few funny things from my students this week...

Hiroomi (pronounced Heeroh-ohmee) was wearing a t-shirt with the following phrases on it in a nice cursive font. "What oneself should do. Meaning of knowing it." What?! What is that? We actually see a lot of people wearing shirts with bizarre English phrases on them that make no sense. Pretty much like all the shirts that Americans wear with Chinese or Japanese characters on them and have no idea what they mean.

Saki, one of my favorite students, is at my school to take classes about 3-4 days a week. She is 20 and lots of fun to have in class. She thinks a lot of the things I say are funny, even if I don't mean them to be. We were doing a lesson on talking about lifestyles (reclusive, lavish, cosmopolitan) and I asked them to tell me how their lifestyles are different from 5 years ago. Saki started by saying that her lifestyle is better now because she just turned 20 this year and so she can drink. (In Japan the legal drinking age is 20) She then says "yes, drinking, it is fun for me!" Yes, I guess that is one way of putting it. :-)

Then today another student of mine, Yongho, had me almost rolling on the floor. To set the scene, it is Yongho (about 40 ish), Yu (17), and Mana (16). I was doing a lesson on describing appearances. I asked them to think of their favorite movie star and to describe how they look and then the others try and guess who it is.

Yongho: "He is short. He has brown hair. He is about 40."
Emma: "How would you describe his build? Is he big, skinny..."
Yongho: "He is tight."
Emma: "Ok, we don't usually use 'tight' to describe how you look...unless you are a rapper. How about 'fit' or 'toned'?"
Yongho: "Yes, yes, fit"
Emma: "Ok Yu, Mana, do you know who Yongho is describing?"
Mana: "Johnny Depp?"
Yu: "I don't know."
Yongho: "No...........Michael J. Fox."
Emma: Bursts out laughing along with Yu and Mana.
Yongho: "What?? He is handsome and my favorite!"
Emma: "No, nothing wrong at all! That was just the LAST person I was expecting you to say. I was expecting some Japanese star that I didn't know."

How hilarious is that? So then Yongho talked about how Back to the Future is her favorite movie and I agreed that it was awesome. What was then depressing is that Yu and Mana did not know who he was because they were born AFTER Back to the Future came out. Wow that makes me feel old!

Hi, my name is Emma and I'm a MAC Addict...

Take a deep breath, this is going to be a long post...

Today was a very special day for me...I finally got to go to see my beloved MAC! Oh yes, there are MAC's in Japan, EVEN one just a 15 minute train ride to Kobe + a 10 minute walk to Daimaru department store away. (I looked up all the MAC stores in Japan on MAC's Website)

So what did I get you ask? Well, my intention was to see the collections that I've missed: Flashtronic, Painterly, Blue Storm, and Smoke Signals and to get an eyeliner brush for my growing fluidline collection (as of now I have 'waveline' thanks to Erin, 'blacktrack' thanks to Brady and 'macroviolet' thanks to mom). I have been using my 266 angle brush in the mean time but it doesn't give as precise a line as I want.

I managed to ask the Japanese MAC artist which eyeliner brush would work best with fluidline using a combination of short English sentences and gestures while pointing at the fluidline display. She spoke some English and told me that the 209 brush would be best, so mission accomplished for task 1!

As I was checking out the Smoke Signals display (my MAC ladies - if you haven't gone to see this one yet, get yourself over to a MAC store now!) I fell in love with the Smoking Eyes quad and asked the MA (MAC Artist) to try it on me. It is a great combo of smoky fall colors so I decided to treat myself and get that as well! There is another quad with this collection that is more gunmetal greys with midnight blues that looks sweet online but it was sold out in the store, oh well.
As I paid for my two things she signed me up for a MAC frequent customer card - awesome! How come they don't have these in the states? I would have worked up a million points by now! AND she gave me the cards for both Smoke Signals and Blue Storm AND the cutest mini bottle of Studiofix Fluid foundation ever! I've never seen mini MAC products before, I wonder if they're just at the Asian stores...

Another thing that is awesome about Japanese MAC is that they have a collection called Lightful geared towards women with pale skin who actually want to have pale skin. Score! In Asia women value pale porcelain skin and focus on keeping it that way. In the summer most women carry parasols when walking around to keep the sun off their faces and there are a ton of commercials for lotions with large SPF numbers of 50 or more. So basically the complete opposite of the US where everyone wants to be as tan as possible. I didn't get any of it on this trip but I am planning on trying it out while I'm here.

Phew, that's it. I'm very excited to try all my new stuff out, yay!

P.S. If any of you get MAC postcards for various collections this year and don't want them for yourselves, will you keep them for me?

Running with Scissors

Very, very good book although disturbing...

It read really quickly and the whole time I was thinking, man, I can't believe someone had to grow up this way! Such a dirty house...weird people...and parents who didn't care at all. It was sad and funny in some parts too.

I think I'm going to download the movie that came out last year to see if it is any good.

Kris - which part are you at?

Let's talk books!

Ok, so one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog is so I could chat about books. Once you're reading a book of mine let me know and I'll start a topic about it and we can all comment back and forth until our heart's content.

Here we go....