クリスマス体験

I visited my uncle's friend for Christmas and joined her family's Christmas lunch in Oxford. Snow still remained a lot there, so it was white Christmas!



ほとんど家を建て替えず、古い家を改装して住み続ける習慣があるせいか、暖炉と煙突の残っている家が多い。わたしの家も例外ではなくコモンルームにその名残がある。しかし最近はどこもセントラルヒーティングで暖房しているので、飾りと化していたり、煙突の穴に蓋をしてしまっていたりするようだ。
ところがオックスフォードの知人の親戚宅に遊びに行ったら、まだ暖炉に現役で火が灯っていた。家の中で裸火を見る。いかにも冬らしい光景だ。



Christmas pudding
ブランデーをふりかけて着火。一瞬、炎の包まれるプディング。



イギリスのクラッカーは大きなキャンディーのような形をしている。クラッカーを間に挟んでみんなで輪を作り、同時にバン！っと両端を自分のほうに引っ張り合って、クラッカーの中身を取り合う。わたしは運良く両側とも中身がついてきた！　



中身はなにやらおもちゃと、ジョークの書かれた紙と・・・



そして紙の冠。おじさんもおばあさんも、クリスマスの食事中はみんなしっかり頭にのせている。
Thank you very much for nice Christmas!

Moorhen animation

One of the visitors of this blog made this animation out of my previous post! It's fun.

Merry Christmas

This year I may have a white Christmas for the first time in my life.
Snow from a few days ago still remains in Cambridge.



St. Paul's Cathedral in London right after the heavy snow on the 18th.

A story of Moorhens

Since our studio closes from Christmas to the day before our hand in day, I started working hard on my sequential images instead of writing essays so that I can scan and print A3-size images by the deadline...even though my mother is visiting me...

writing essays

When you write something in English, you should try to think in English from the beginning instead of making sentences in Japanese and translating them into English. This is what I've been told.
It is possible when I know exactly what I want to say.



But to start writing essays, which I haven't decided what to write, I found it too difficult.

I always feel that when I'm writing texts, my brain is thinking about what to say faster than my hand can write it down or type it in as actual sentences...even in Japanese. The problem is that my brain can only keep the idea just for a few seconds. In fact this is the reason why I always write and type so fast in such a messy way.
So it becomes harder when I have to catch the instant and temporary idea in my brain with my poor English. I wonder how people are tackling with this.

It started snowing again in Cambridge!

12月の三日月

Tomorrow is the last day of this semester. I can't believe that I've already been here for more than three months. And one year has passed since I decided to come here.



浅間山にいでし月かも
今年も、そしてイギリスにも、同じ月が昇る。
みんな、元気？

My Moorhens

Since I sketched so many moorhens for my first project, I decided to make a sequential image of them for the second module.



Although I became good at catching their shapes and movements from observation, it is still difficult to draw the poses that I want them to do in the story. Making a series of images is something completely different from painting one nice picture.