Anime Adventures: Fruits Basket

I consider Fruits Basket to be my first anime. Unless of course you want to count Avatar the Last Airbender. But that's more a cartoon than an anime. Anyway, Fruits Basket is kind of just adorable fluff for the most part, but it does have its dark moments.

The protagonist Tohru Honda moves in with three men when she has no where else to go. Two of these guys are her classmates, Yuki and Kyo Souma. The owner of the house is Shigure Souma. All of them are related, but they aren't immediate family. More like cousins. The problem is, the Souma family has a curse. When someone hugs them of the opposite gender, they turn into their Chinese zodiac animal! Fruits Basket is just about Tohru's daily life and adventures living with the Souma's and other members of the zodiac are introduced throughout the show.

Yuki and Kyo butt heads a lot, while Shigure can be a bit of an air head at times. Meanwhile, Tohru just keeps on smiling. Tohru is not really a tsundere like other animes, but she's more like a sweet little angel. And of course there's a partial love triangle between Tohru, Kyo and Yuki, but no romantic relationship ever evolves. (However, if you read the manga, Tohru will eventually find true love! Go read it, it was good too!)

I really enjoyed this anime. It's cute, fluffy, but also has those inspirational deep moments as well. I recommend it to anyone new to anime or they want something short and sweet to watch, as its only one season.

Product Review: Meiji KINOKO NO YAMA Mushroom Shaped Cookies

I'm taking a Japanese class (finally), and I participated in helping advanced students, by pairing up with one of these students, and having them watch me study and participate in class. They only had to watch me study once and they came to my class a few times. These advanced students are learning how to be Japanese teachers, so by studying beginners, they have a better understanding of what beginner students do, and not to get too frustrated with them when they don't know the answer.

Anyway, I participated in this, and at the end, the student who had been my partner gave me these mushroom shaped biscuit and chocolate candy as a thank you. It was such a nice gesture, and I was super excited to try them. I had seen them my mom with them, but I had never bought them before.

They were so delicious. The chocolate was obviously my favorite part. These mushrooms were similar to pocky because they had the same wafer stick, only the mushroom ones were thicker and shorter than pocky. and the chocolate was thicker too. I think I decided I liked them better than pocky just because you could get more of a chocolate taste than pocky.

If you like pocky, you'll like this too, and if you're just looking for a crunchy chocolate snack, this is it. They are so delicious!