First Day of Classes

This morning I woke up to find the laundry I had hung about the room was still wet. Last night I made the mistake of doing laundry. 200 yen to wash it all, and I spent 400 yen and close to 3 hours drying it in the dryer which did nothing. So it was hung about the room. Anyway, I took it up to the roof at about 9:00 and hung it all up and it was done in an hour. So from now on, laundry is a morning chore, not a nightly one anymore.

I only had two classes: Intercultural Communication and Japan / China Relations. Intercultural Communication is basically about fitting into a new culture and how cultures communicate, and it'll mostly be in the context of a group of foreigners from various other cultures coming together to adapt to Japanese life and what we can learn from that and where we can apply that knowledge in the future. The Professor is nice and there's a good bit of non-Americans so it should be fun. There's a French guy with Bertrand as his first name... Awkward.

Japan /China Relations is taught by an in-your-face Professor who claims (probably rightly so) that no one in Academia or Politics really knows the future of Asia and are just being ignorant when they do, but I wonder if he almost professes to know himself. At any rate he's a very interesting guy who has spent half his life in Asia and speaks Chinese as well as Japanese. He also seems quite biased towards his own ideals but he has an amazing wealth of knowledge of history, something which I do not know much of regrettably, albeit I'm trying to make it up now by reading Guns, Germs, and Steel. We will go on trips to Hiroshima to hear some of the last survivors whom are willing to speak (I will be recording it) and the Osaka Peace Museum, and at some point we will visit Meiji's Tomb, even though most Japanese have no clue where it is apparently.

That's about it though. Other interesting things include almost stepping on a weasel on my way to the grocery store tonight, and I had okonomiyaki for the first time at the place next door. I want to try to converse with the two ladies who own the place to practice Japanese and get to know them since I plan on eating there often. However, there was some Japanese local there who was all gruff and whom I didn't want to talk to since I could barely understand his accent and then 8 foreigners came in and started being noisy... Oh well. Next time.

Tomorrow is just one Language class then I plan on getting my Alien Registration done and I'll look into getting a cellphone.