Jeshua's Life

Well, today I officially graduated from UW-Madison. I'm now done with school for the foreseeable future. To celebrate my family took me out to a Japanese restaurant here called "Ginza of Tokyo." There's a place on campus called "Wasabi" which is supposed to be the best Japanese restaurant in town, but when I went there last semester I was fairly disappointed (not Japanese enough for me, and a very small menu that only had 1 item I saw in Japan - other than sushi). Ginza turned out to be "acceptably" close to the real thing for me. I ended up getting the vegetable tempura appetizer and the tonkatsu entre. The tempura was fairly good, but not as good as I remember tempura being. The tonkatsu, on the other hand, was just about indistinguishable from the ones that I got at the Aobayama cafeteria. The miso soup I got with it was also quite close to what I remember my host family feeding me many times. :) The only thing I would have changed about the meal is the sauce. Ginza had a strange dipping sauce, whereas Aobayama had a choice of a tomato sauce or some sort of white sauce. I didn't like Ginza's sauce (it tasted like barbecue sauce), and kept wishing I had my tomato sauce. Other than that it was a fairly good trip back to last year :)

Oh, and instead of costing ¥1,000 (about $10) or so like it would have at the cafeteria, it cost my family about $25 just for my meal. It was fun, but I can't imagine doing this much.

Our graduation speaker today was Wisconsin Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin. She's quite the Democrat, and since this campus is overrun with rabid Democrats I'm not at all surprised that she was asked to speak. Interestingly enough, the graduation speaker at the college my sister goes to is George Bush. I can't even imagine the reaction we would get here if he was our speaker :)