Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve had time to write one of these. I still have a few weeks left before the new semester starts, so I have a little more free time than usual. Once the semester begins, I expect I will be extremely busy once again.
I guess I should provide a bit of an update first. I’m pleased to report that I survived my first year as a PhD student. My second year will begin this October. So far it’s been really challenging. My second semester was especially brutal. I had a conference to prepare for, two seminars to present, and a paper to write. It would have been fine, but my experiments kept failing, which meant I had no data. I was cramming up until two days before the conference. There were days when I’d just wake up and just cry in bed because I felt so lost and helpless. Sometimes I would even just burst out crying in the middle of my experiment. But thankfully I got a lot of encouragement from the people around me. I would receive messages from them praying for me, which really helped. Of course I spent a lot of time praying too, and with the grace of God I was able to hold on to hope and make it through. I know I’m not even halfway through my PhD journey yet, and I will be facing many more challenges, so I’ve been trying to prepare myself for that.
Currently it’s still summer vacation at the university, although that’s just for bachelor students. Graduate students like me still have to go to the lab everyday and do experiments. But the atmosphere’s much more relaxed so I felt that this was a good chance to catch up on blogging.
Alright, now for the photos
Started the month with a pajama party for the ladies at our church. It was also a farewell party for Ate Jo since her family will be moving to Osaka. At the party I got to play with Ken-chan, my first inaanak here in Japan.
Such a cutie ❤
I was blessed to be asked to be godmother to another baby this month:
This month I experienced my first boodle fight in Japan, thanks to Ate Daisy. She moved to a new house and prepared this for us during her house blessing.
As I mentioned earlier, Ate Jo and Pastor Joseph recently moved to Osaka. This photo was taken after Pastor Joseph’s last Filipino service at church:
So blessed to have been part of this group
This month I had two visitors in Kyoto. The first was Trixie:
The last time we saw each other was 9 years ago, can you believe it.
My second visitor was my kupo, Brinky-doodle. She had just finished her Masters course and this trip was her graduation gift to herself. Ray and I took her to Iga Ueno Castle, where she took this nice photo of us XD
Look are neatly the tea hedges are arranged
Brinks wanted to see sakura but she arrived a bit too early. There were only a few that had bloomed already.
We found this one tree there so we took a few photos
Ray took these pretty close up photos of the few sakura that we saw
Posing by the tulips
We had a blast taking photos at the light tunnel. This is one of the most popular areas in the park, so normally it gets extremely crowded, but because it was raining that night there weren’t a lot of people. This turned out great for us because we pretty much had the place to ourselves and we managed to get a lot of nice shots.
It looked especially beautiful at night because of all the lights
We also watched a light show about Mt. Fuji
Pretty~
The following day I took Brinks to see my university (mostly because I needed to send an email and the files I needed were in the lab :p)
Team plaid! (Ray was wearing plaid too)
One of the most exciting things we did during her visit was that we rented kimonos ❤
I love these shots ❤
I’ll end this entry with my new profile photo which was also taken that day:
If you noticed, most of the photos in this entry were from the end of the month. The first part of March was pretty uneventful for me. I spent most of my time in the lab doing experiments, thus I didn’t really have much to post. But the latter part of the month more than made up for it 😀
As for my IG stories compilation, you can watch it below:
What I have shown you is reality ... 