Calligraphy

The last lecture in the Japanese Culture series for this semester was devoted to the art of Calligraphy....as the word indicates..writing in a beautiful manner. In Japanese it is called shodó 書道 (the way of writing) and the two ways of writing are gyósho 行書, semi cursive style and the more artistic sósho 叢書, cursive style , also known as grass writing.
The elementary utensils used are the black mat, shitakiji下記事 to put the paper on, the paperweight, bunchin文鎮 to hold the paper, hanshi 半紙 in place, the brushes, fude筆, the inkstone, suzuri硯 and ofcourse the ink, sumi墨 (comes in a stick normally) but we used ink in a bottle.
At first we practiced the numbers one through ten but after that we could try our hand at more complex charachters.
The end result wasn't that fab so I got my teacher, sensei 先生 to write my own charachters 'Karyuudo' 狩人 and one thing is sure I certainly couldn't have achieved this degree of perfection in a hundred years.

Today we celebrated Wei's birthday, one of the Taiwanese girls here, by going to an italian restaurant with about 25 people and enjoying each other's company. It's quite funny that you speak japanese, German and English with all kinds of different people...but mostly Japanese since that's the language we all have in common. Had pasta with clams and a small beer (unlike me actually..the small beer that is) but did have still some homework to do so couldn't get too tipsy.......

P.S
For those who like to see more of 'Hadogei' videos, check out this website with several episodes.......
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=razor+ramon