しょがない: can’t be helped

Interesting story on how I learned this phrase, which has become one of my favorites. Koki-kun (I call him うんこうき^_^) was making farting noises with his hands, and I suddenly said “すみません！” (excuse me!) and asked Koki how to say “I can’t help it” and he taught me to say “すみません、しょがない！” (excuse me, it can’t be helped!) and everyone was cracking up, so now everytime there’s a farting noise/smell I say “すみません、しょがない！” But if you think about it, the phrase can be used for more than excusing farting noises, useful, yeah?

1. EVERYTHING here is so cute! The streets, the people, the cars, the food, the stores, even the dog food seems to be cuter than America. But everything seems to be WAY more expensive. I guess cuteness has its price.

2. I finally got to go to a Starbucks! Although there’s one maybe a 5min walk from HSH, I haven’t bought anything from there because drinks sooo expensive. But, I first tried the mango passion fruit frap, which was AWESOME and refreshing. And yesterday I tried the dark mocha coffee frap which was super good too! I think I’m only gonna try drinks that they don’t make in America, unless I’m hard-core craving a stirred caramel macchiato.

3. I’m learning so many random vocab from talking to the buddies, which is awesome, but I have such a bad memory ):

Hopefully I’ll start jotting down random things to talk about in my notebook, so I can remember what to write about later! I always think “oh, that’s super interesting!” but I forget what it is when I try to update my tumblr at the end of the day ): Today we’re going to explore Hayama a little, so that’s exciting!

This is my “family” in Japan (: Sam-chan is our youngest and smallest 留学生, and her buddy Ryokan-kun is the tallest buddy, so he calls Sam his “daughter” and he is her “papa” and because Sam calls me her “mama” and Koki her “おじいちゃん”, we’re all one happy family! (: