Thoughts of home

The week has been fairly quiet. I gave a short presentation on wednesday about the progress of my investigations which went fairly well. I honestly hate these presentations because(as i'm sure you've all discovered by now) in research there will often be long stretches of time where you get no new definitive results are data. Then i'm stuck presenting 10-12 slides of the same basic results from my last presentation. Sadness
Monday was nice. It was Umi No Hi, which roughly translates to Sea Day. From what i've been told, the previous emperor was a marine biologist in his sparetime, so he pushed for the creation of a national holiday honoring the sea. Hey, whatever gets me a day off. I went to a beach in Kobe with a fellow American in my group. Neither of us had been there before so we got lost a couple times along the way, so we had a bit of an adventure. The beach was nice, although insanely crowded. I grew up in Florida, and the beaches i went to were relatively sparsely populated, so it was a bit of a shock to get off the tram and see the entire shoreline crowded with people. The water was nice, though i had a bit of a run-in (literally) with a jellyfish. I was swimming back to the shore and my hand bumped right into it's smooth bell, so i didn't get stung but it was still startling.
I'm starting to get a little homesick. It's odd for me because i've been abroad for long periods of time before, but i never got homesick then. I'm a little PO-ed because i've been looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight for over a year now, but it doesn't come out in Japan until August 9th, and i return on August 13th. I'm just gonna wait till i get home to see it. My brother(who also highly anticapited the movie and has already seen it) is picking me up from my return and had considered taking me straight from the airport to the movie theater. Don't know i'll be up for that, but i can't wait to see it.