On Saturday, I went on an adventure! My friend Jiayan
and I caught the Pioneer Express downtown, which is the bus that is
specifically for Lewis and Clark students and runs every hour to downtown
Portland and to the grocery store Fred Meyer. Then we took the MAX tram to Beaverton, which is pretty cheap and took about fifteen or twenty minutes. Our destination was Uwajimaya, a
grocery store specializing in Asian cuisine. But as we found out, Uwajimaya was
kind of a long walk from the Beaverton Transit Center, and there happened to be
another Asian grocery store right next to us. So we went to that one instead!
It was a lot of fun. I honestly wanted to try
everything, but Jiayan helped me narrow it down. He knows a lot about the multitude of Asian cuisines. I got mochi,
ramen, matcha Kit Kats, Pocky, pork and mushroom dumplings, congee cereal, and wakame
salad. Mmmmm!
Strolling the aisles...
Dragon fruit!
My haul.
Besides that, I've been working on my English papers, which I mentioned last time. I chose the poem I'm going to write about for my first paper - Keats' "Sonnet to Sleep." I also finalized my other paper topic. I'm comparing the role of education in Thomas Elyot's A Book Named the Governor and Roger Ascham's The Schoolmaster to that Thomas More's Utopia. I want to focus on room for creativity and the arts in the classroom (or the lack thereof). I am really excited about it because it works really nicely with my love of education! One of the things I love about going to a liberal arts college is how many connections I get to make between subjects - whether it's between education and literature, or between poetry and anthropology, or astronomy and philosophy. Meanwhile, in my Education class, we're hosting a speaker from Teach for America to hopefully have some interesting discussions, and we're currently reading about the role of male teachers in education. Did you know that something like only 16% of American middle and elementary school teachers are male? And in Japanese we're learning short form, which is the speech patterns normally used in conversation between friends.
Anyway, I have to go now. I can't believe it's Sunday night already. Time for a long and busy week. If you have any questions, email me at jessicakostka@lclark.edu.
Jess