Time on Campus

I woke up kind of early though probably around 6:30AM or so and tossed around in bed for about an hour and then got up. My roomie was still asleep (he came back after I was sleeping.) I quietly snuck out and decided to make my way to the 100 yen store / grocery for some breakfast since I was starving. As the Australian guy I met, Adam said, Japanese food is so light, you’re usually hungry again later. I don’t think I’ve been eating all that much, definitely not as much in America yet but this is due to being in a new place.

The store ended up being closed and wouldn’t open until 9:30. I passed an old man urinating into some bushes along the way and thought that if this was America he would be a sex-offender now... Needless to say he didn’t bother me nor did the naked two to three year-old playing in the fountain while his or her Dad watched that I passed on my way to campus yesterday.

I went to go familiarize myself with my grammar dictionary until 9:30 and bought six green plums crackers, two pairs of chopsticks and two cases for them. I could finally eat the soba noodles in my fridge! I was talking with Robert from Alabama (I think) and Christian from Sweden while I ate. Rob and I decided to go to campus to try and register our laptops and ran into Joe, a guy from Missouri who also came along.

We figured out where the east gate to campus was now that it was open, and it cut a good 10 minutes off the walk to the main gate. Buying a bike is looking better, but I don’t think I can weave between people and cars well at all.
When we got to the tech center we found out they only do 40 laptops a day, so tomorrow I’m going to try and come before it opens. I then found the course descriptions in my mail box and attempted to decide what to take. I really don’t know what I want to do, since nothing counts towards anything at Gettysburg. I know none of the Econ classes have a shot in hell, but then I realized I don’t really even enjoy Economics nor do I have any aptitude towards it. My intro class was difficult and my East Asian Economics class was a joke. I ended up choosing Intercultural Bussiness Communication, International Negotiation, Japan China Relations, Spoken Japanese and finally Reading and Writing Japanese. I figure some of these classes might open doors for jobs in the UN or similar fashions, and the Japan / China class will be good if I go through with this idea of learning Chinese. But overall I don’t know what the hell it is I want to do.

The placement tests for the language classes are tomorrow morning at around 10:00. People have been worrying about it and have been talking too much about their own classes at home, their textbooks, etc. There’s always a tendency for people to worry too much about these things. While here though I find it more important to study the physical surroundings than review books... I know I’ll get placed into where I should be and even though I’ve completed 301 and did a not-quite-302-independant-study, so I’m betting on getting into 300 level... I’ll take 400 if they offer it to me, I’d like the challenge.

I went to the banking meeting where it took about an hour to write our names and birthdates on 6 forms due to needing in-depth explainations for everyone. It will take 3 weeks for the accounts to be made and then I finally get my food stipend! That will be nice since I would like to stop paying out of my dwindling savings, especially since I had to take out $260 worth today for fees to pay tomorrow that Gettysburg doesn’t cover...

After that was the language lab introduction in which I was introduced to windows errors in Japanese. Following that I found Adam the Australian and we chatted for a bit and then I went to go hunt down an ATM, which was past the McDonalds where the breakdancing club was practicing in front of. It was pretty cool to watch them and seemed so typical for a Japanese campus. The ATM was hard to get at because they only let in two people into the room at a time somehow, and it is hard to figure out how to get the door to open in the first place...

I was then pretty hungry so I decided to try the cafeteria. I got Japanese Ramen and Curry Rice for about 490 yen total, which was pretty awesome for a lunch. Having ate I met Joe again at the Center for International Education (CEI) and we chatted with this one guy who was excited about the campus McDonalds and showed us pictures of it... He left us then the two of us walked back to Seminar House I. He’s a pretty cool guy; most of the people in our dorm are nice. There’s a guy from Turkey, Omur, that was up one morning playing a flute, and it sounded really cool. There are a lot of interesting people here.

I still haven’t heard from my speaking partner though. I emailed her yesterday and no response. I wonder if she’s just too busy with clubs or something, hopefully she is okay. I haven’t seen my roomie much either but he’s been hanging out with large groups of Japanese girls so I think he’s doing fine if you know what I mean.
Back at the dorm in the lounge a bunch of us just sat around watching weird cartoons and talking. My favorite was the samurai with a wind-up top-knot who battled the upside-down-ice-cream-man who would throw icecream into people’s mouths that would give them a brain-freeze that would make them estranged from their lover. The wind-up samurai then threw dumplings at the people and made them fall back in love. It’s weirder than it sounds. Joe and I then went to see if a store was open and found that it wasn’t, but it was a good walk. A german girl was going to come with us but stopped short since I suppose we weren’t interesting.

But that’s about it. Placement test tomorrow and some kind of meeting in the seminar house. And probably something else. I signed up for a trip to Kyoto too, and hopefully I learn more about the Japanese transit system. I really want to get my laptop working so I can call a certain girl on Skype... and say hello to my family. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow. Also once I get my laptop on the network I should have pictures of everything on here, sorry to keep you all waiting on that.