The First Week of Class

Classes started Monday. Had to drag myself out of bed at 8:30 in the morning, eat breakfast, and get my shit together. Classes start at 9:30 everyday. Classes are different everyday. Sometimes I have 3, sometimes 2. They're an hour and a half long each. I have around 45 minutes for lunch, which is actually not a lot considering how crowded the campus 711 is at that time. It's easier to just buy it in the morning before class, and run into the 711 at lunchtime to heat it up if it needs it.

Our classes are at times painfully simple. I think they might be trying to reach an aggregate between our individual levels of Japanese. I'm not going to post my whole schedule here because that's far too tedious, but for example, the "Japanese things" class was all about the freaking cherry blossoms, while the grammar class is just slightly above our heads where we need it to be. Our writing class is a bit ironic, because while we can all read and understand 90% of the kanji in the book, we cannot write them all (I guess it is writing class), nor do we know all the words formed by them (or at least not the ones they want us to). But, because we said it seemed so simple, they allowed us to try to test to the next book, but as per the aforementioned problem...I don't think we got it. But they do seem to understand and want to challenge us appropriately. I even managed to get our grammar lessons to NOT use English grammar terms by just asking what a couple were called. Aside from the asininity of teaching Japanese in English, it's not exactly fair to the Korean kid who doesn't know English, just because the Australian and the Lithuanian and the American do. So classes are overall...okay. I was expecting to be looking outside the classroom to do any real learning anyway. Just being here a few weeks has taught me a LOT.

I think Wednesday night there was a party for CUPS and exchange students and freshman joining CUPS. Maybe ESS (English as a Second...Something?) too. It was a fun little affair. I got to meet more people. Most interestingly, there were two guys in jumpsuits, one of which was wearing an orange one and whose name was "Stick" (so he said), the other of which was wearing a black jumpsuit and who's name was D.K. (for Donkey Kong).

After this official party held on campus, there was an after party at a bar. There's this amazing thing in Japan called a 飲み放題(nomihoudai), which pretty much literally means "all you can drink". We paid ￥3000 for two hours of this with some food, too. Didn't get as drunk as I'd have liked to, but it was a hell of a good time. Met a number of cool people, and got extremely comfortable holding a conversation in Japanese. In class the next day, a teacher asked us about it and taught us the word for after-party. This whole country is like Morgantown.

The next day (Thursday), I had a date with Chelsea. We just went and hung out around Sakae (I still have to write about that, don't I? Shit!). She's already written about the date here. That restaurant was really cool. I just wish I'd known what it meant when the guy said, "末席" when we came in, instead of looking like a retarded foreigner. Why they never seem to find these things important enough to teach, I'll never know... Makes me want to teach Japanese to save the poor students from whoever else they might be getting it from.

Wonderfully, I have most Fridays off. I only have class on certain occasions for the culture class, such as the tea ceremony and flower arranging. Not too interesting, unfortunately, especially when compared to the culture I do know (swords and fighting!). But, hey, the tea ceremony was popularized by Oda Nobunaga, so that makes it cool right? ...right?

This classless Friday was spent sleeping, paying a class fee, catching up on my flashcards, and sampling the karate club. Their karate is much different than mine. I'm not sure how it's going to conflict with the knowledge and technique I already have. And I also want to try a bunch of other martial arts clubs. So I don't really know what I'm going to do. I could probably spend a week sampling each one, and find something that's really interesting to me. That could take time, though...

But when I went, the guy who basically made me his responsibility had trouble speaking simply enough for me to understand. Not his fault, that's tough. I also think I have trouble expressing the difference between when I don't understand and when I do understand and am listening for you to continue. Something physical like karate is a surprisingly difficult thing to do in a foreign language. Lots of little instructional words like body parts and positioning, types of movement, breathing, time. It didn't help that the kempo club was on the other side of the same room being very loud. I was basically a beginner again because the basic movements are totally different from what I know. Also because they don't know what I know, which is always a frustrating thing.

So that's pretty much my week. I've got to go and shower now. My room is freezing. Idk why, but it feels like the coldest part of the building.

Oh, and for the record, Blogger's post composer/html generator sucks. I would be better off if I just wrote it in html myself. But, tags are tedious...