culture culture culture

I never know how to start a blog post, and today I'm feeling uninspired, so I'm just going to jump straight to the describing-what-I've-been-doing part.

Last Wednesday I went to go see kabuki! Kabuki is one type of traditional Japanese theater; one distinct feature is that all the actors are men, even for female characters (though apparently nowadays some kabuki theaters do have female actors). Ironically, kabuki was initially created and performed by women, but first women then young men were banned from kabuki for being too erotic (or something like that). Anyway, the CJS office at Nanzan gave international students the chance to see a performance for only 3000 yen (a little more than $30), which is really cheap for kabuki, so it was a great opportunity. Before going, we had to attend a lecture given by Watanabe-sensei, who I believe is the theater director at Misono-za, the theater we went to. Apparently even Japanese people need extra background knowledge before seeing kabuki; it's not something you just buy a ticket and go see.

The stage! After this I found out cameras are forbidden.

We met in front of the theater at 3:45 and didn't leave until almost 9:30 (we brought our own dinners and ate them in the theater during the breaks); there were four different acts (unrelated to each other) in the evening, and we watched them all. The theater was very impressive, and also filled with lots of places to buy omiyage (souvenirs, usually food), in true Japanese fashion. We went in and found our seats, which were pretty high up but still had a good view of the stage. The shows were very long and basically unintelligible, speech-wise (there were headsets for rent that explained what was happening in Japanese), and I fell asleep in every one (big surprise), but I still enjoyed the experience a lot. The costumes were very pretty and we had also received (poorly written) English explanations of each of the acts beforehand, so we weren't completely clueless as to what was going on. One thing that surprised me during the show was the people yelling out the names of the actors; after the show Watanabe-sensei explained that this is also a traditional part of kabuki. We also got to go underneath the stage (we weren't actually allowed backstage) with Watanabe-sensei, which was really cool and really nice of him to do - none of us were expecting it. All in all I think it was a very worthwhile experience, though I don't know if I would necessarily go see it again.

On Thursday, five of us went to my friend Evan's house for dinner, which was great. We met his host parents (I'd met his host dad once but not his mom) and chatted and spent some time looking at pictures of their grandson and of the houses his host dad had designed/built (he built the house they live in too), but the real highlight was dinner. There was a wood stove and a fire pit in the house that they used to cook, which I thought was pretty cool. We had aiyu, a type of fish, potato salad, potatoes, sweet potatoes, boiled eggs, pork, and sesame-rice-things-on-a-stick (they have a real name, but I forgot it), all of which was delicious. When we were all done eating and ridiculously full, they brought out dessert: yogurt jelly with mulberries on top and candied chestnuts - needless to say, they were fantastic. And then after that there were pears! Good food, good times. :) I envy Evan his host mom's cooking and the view from his room (he has a giant window that looks out over the city), but not the giant spiders that live in his house (luckily I didn't see any while I was there). :P

Anna and the origami!

And then on Friday, my friend Anna from Carleton came from Hirakata, Osaka to stay for the weekend! It was really really awesome to see her again and hear about life at Kansai Gaidai. :D She got to Nagoya on Friday night, so we ate dinner (after much searching for a restaurant; I don't know where anything is) and then met some of my friends at an izakaya. Unfortunately we missed the last bus to my house (which is at 11), so I had to get my host mom to come pick us up at the station and bring us home (and I still feel bad about it, even though she says her sons did it all the time). On Saturday, we went to Oasis 21 and wandered around the COP 10 station there, which was themed 'the lives that are connected by water'. I made a fortune teller to stick on the wall-o'-origami and held a tiny turtle! We also watched a performance by a Mongolian musician (which reminded me of my friend Helen, who is doing her Fulbright in Mongolia!), which was pretty awesome - at one point he did this amazing thing involving overtones, which I tried to catch on video. After that we wandered around the Sakae area and looked at all the stalls set up for the Nagoya festival! There were a lot of stages and performances and lots and lots of food vendors, but we had to ge home in time for dinner so we didn't buy anything.

A puppet on the dashi, staring right at me.

The next morning, we met up with some of my friends to stake out spots for the parade! We were about two hours early and the parade was late, so there was a lot of just waiting, but in the end we got perfect spots: we were sitting on a tarp on the corner of the intersection where performances happened and had a great view. The parade was pretty cool, but there were lots of gaps in between groups (probably to let traffic through periodically) and it was kind of slow-paced. But we got to see some traditional dashi (shrine-float-things) with puppets on them, which were pulled along by groups of men - they were really heavy so turning them around was a big deal. It was pretty impressive to watch. We also saw lots of little children and the floats they made, Nana-chan, the giant doll that stands by Nagoya Station (only minus her legs and arms, which was kind of weird), a lot of marching bands, and some ninjas, to name some highlights. Eventually we decided we would rather eat food than watch the rest of the parade (it was way behind schedule and past 2:00), so we made our way to the food stalls we saw yesterday and got food! I ate a tornado potato, which was basically a fried whole curly potato on a stick, a stick of yakitori (actually I suspect it was chicken intestines but don't really want to know), and tamasen, or a fried egg sandwiched between shrimp senbei crackers. Like festival food in America, it was a little expensive and probably bad for my health, but worth the experience. :) Then we went to the Higashiyama Zoo because they had free admission (thanks to the festival), but we only had about 30 minutes before it closed and it was also really depressing - unlike American zoos, there was much less space and most of the animals we saw were basically just in cages. This could have been because it was about to close and so they put them in cages for the night, but still. After that, we headed to the Higashiyama Sky Tower, which gave us a lovely view of the sunset around the city. And then Anna had to go home, which was sad, but I hope to go visit her and the other Carleton folks at Kansai Gaidai sometime!

My tornado potato!

That concludes the adventures of this week; thank you for reading. :)

festivals and ferris wheels

So it's been a veerry long time since my last post, but in my defense I seemed to have caught a stomach bug last week and really didn't feel like doing anything but sleeping. Also it appears my last post was as boring as I predicted (judging by the lack of comments), so sorry! This one should be slightly more exciting. :)

As mentioned, I did spend one night in the dorm, but as I didn't venture from my room to explore at all, I can't really compare it to the ones in America. I stayed in a very nice little single with my own bathroom (tiny bathtub and everything) and a little veranda even (I think it may be for hanging laundry). One difference I can say is that apparently you're not allowed to have friends in your room; they're allowed in the common room until 11 but not after that! Which is a little crazy when I think about how much time I spend in other people's rooms/in the lounges at Carleton. The front door was also locked like the dorms at Carleton, but instead of a OneCard you use your room key and a code, which was kind of fun to do. Anyway, I think I may be heading back to the dorm for a few nights later this month, so maybe I'll have more to say then.

Me with Sakura Panda! Also a little bit of my friend Evan.

Last weekend was a pretty exciting one. As I think I've said before (or maybe I forgot), this year is Nagoya's 400th anniversary of becoming a city! As a result, there are lots of celebrations happening - autumn is also the season for festivals, so there is lots of excitement. Anyway, last weekend Nagoya had a yuru-kyara festival, which I went to with some friends. Yuru-kyara, or yuru-character,  basically means 'mascot', as in the kind where people wear giant costumes! I think it was mainly targeted for little kids, but I actually enjoyed myself immensely. There were characters from all over Japan (and even some of the audience were from places as far as Hokkaido), and we ran around taking pictures of/with them and buying character goods. My favorite was Negiccho, who is basically a giant green onion. :D We also watched a performance of some people dressed up as famous historical characters like Togukawa Ieyasu (the shogunate, who lived in Nagoya), which was fun. They also danced with a few characters, which I thought was hilarious.

The next day, because I had no homework (for once), my host mom took me to a little amusement center in the middle of nowhere called something Oasis (for some reason oases are popular here). The main reason we went was to ride the ferris wheel, because I told her about how I really like them (I've already been on two since coming to Japan and have plans to ride at least one more), but we also tasted senbei crackers at a senbei store, watched a drum performance, and watched somebody carve feathers out of wood with chainsaws.

Since then life has been pretty tame- yesterday was the first Saturday I didn't go explore somewhere with friends, mostly because they were all off somewhere else, but I did have a nice day visiting a fabric store with my host mom and exploring Tokyu Hands, the 'creative life store'. We also rented a movie (Public Enemy), which was fun. Anyway, I think the newness of Japan is wearing off and my schedule is becoming routine. Not that it isn't fun anymore, but now it's starting to feel like regular life instead of every day being an adventure - which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Next weekend, though, my friend Anna from Carleton is coming to Nagoya, just in time for the Nagoya Festival, which I am ridiculously excited for! :D There are only 10 Saturdays left before I leave Nagoya, so I'll keep trying to make the most of them. :)

nanzan vs carleton

Nothing particularly interesting has happened in the past couple of days (other than having Thursday off for the equinox and going shopping then and Saturday, plus a phone call from my parents), but in the aforementioned phone call my parents said I should update more often, so here's an effort to do that. Also it's a good excuse for procrastinating on my schoolwork. :)

Since I've discovered that college in Japan is pretty different from college in the US, I thought I'd compare the two in this post (though that might be long and boring, sorry), though really I'll just be comparing Nanzan and Carleton specifically, since I probably can't generalize too broadly with my experiences. I'm currently in a homestay, as I'm sure you know, but actually this Wednesday I'll be spending the night in a dorm, because my host parents are going to Hokkaido and didn't want to leave me all alone in the house (or something like that). That should be pretty interesting and also probably pretty different from Carleton dorms, so I'll probably post again after that. Today I'll stick to campus and all that.

I'll start with some background for the two schools, which are pretty different even on a basic level. Nanzan is actually a 'school corporation' (or that's what it says in the brochure), including university, junior college (middle school), junior and high schools, and a primary school. Nanzan University has about 9500 undergrads plus around 500 graduate students, coming to a total of roughly 10000 students, while Carleton is only undergrad and has about 2000 students. Nanzan is also a Catholic institution (which actually I didn't realize until I got here, but I don't feel like it makes much difference in day-to-day life), while Carleton is non-denominational. Carleton is a liberal arts school, whereas Nanzan students can focus on things like law or engineering. I should note that I'm actually a student of the Center for Japanese Studies, which is separate from the normal undergraduate program; we have a required Japanese course and several CJS-only classes, though we do have the chance to take a limited number of 'open' courses with Japanese students.

Speaking of classes: the required Japanese course for CJS students is 8 credits per semester, while all of the other classes we can take are 2-3 credits each - you can tell how important Japanese is by the fact that it's worth 4 times as much as our other classes. We're supposed to register for 14-18 credits each, including Japanese, which I think is great because this semester I'm taking 5 different courses, instead of the usual 3 (or 4) at Carleton. Registration was a paper process, which surprised me, and the way they decided who could stay in classes of limited enrollment was by literally drawing names out of a bucket. I think I prefer the online-by-randomized-registration-number method, if only because it's easy to tell right away whether or not I made it into a class.

Moving on to the schedule. As a CJS student, I have Japanese class all morning and then all my other classes in the afternoon. Every class that isn't Japanese only meets once a week, for from an hour and a half to two hours and fifteen minutes at a time, depending on the class. As far as I can tell, there's a campus-wide lunch break with no classes from 12:35-1:30, which means everwhere is ridiculously crowded, and everybody also gets Wednesday afternoons off, which is quite nice. Granted, at Carleton it's possible to have afternoons or whole days off depending on the classes you take, but it's nice knowing that everybody is free at the same time. Nanzan is also weird and sometimes makes us have class on national holidays; I was told that the reason behind this is the fact that we get several days off for the university festival, so it balances out. Also I should mention that this is Nanzan's second semester; in Japan the school year starts a lot earlier, so the international students that are here for a year are really getting the last and first halves of two different school years.

Another thing: internet here is very bureaucratic and complicated; this may be a Japanese thing because internet access is (surprisingly) not as easily available or as cheap as it is in the US. Before using the computers we had to endure a long and boring orientation where we got our usernames and had to pick passwords that were exactly 8 characters in length and didn't use any words that could be found in an English dictionary (which was surprisingly hard to do, because even combinations of words in Japanese sometimes amount to English dictionary entries). We also had to agree to only use the computers for educational purposes (which I'm pretty sure nobody follows), and as far as I know nobody has figured out how to check our Nanzan emails yet, because apparently it can only be done from one building on campus. I also went through another orientation to be able to bring my laptop and connect it to the school's lan by cable (wireless is a different orientation entirely); I had to bring in my laptop and have them check it carefully to make sure I had anti-virus software and the latest versions of Firefox, IE, and Google Chrome. -.-'

The biggest difference that I can tell, though, is campus life. It seems like most Japanese college students are commuters, so they live with their parents but spend anywhere from an hour to two hours or more going to/from school every day (my commute is about an hour). Even the dorms aren't on campus; from my understanding they're not really Nanzan's dorms, but rather privately-run residences that are close to Nanzan - CJS arranges housing in dorms for their students, but I think for normal Japanese students living in dorms, they just had to find them themselves. As a result, nobody really lives on campus, which means there really isn't campus life. There are lots of clubs and always club activities going on, but big campus events like Carleton's Halloween concert or Mid-Winter Ball practically non-existent (I think); the closest thing is probably the university festival. This also means that on weekends campus is pretty much deserted, except for people doing club activities. I came to campus yesterday for a group meeting and all the dining halls were closed, the campus convenience store was closed, and even the library was closed. I guess if nobody lives on campus, there's no reason to have anything open on the weekends. But I still think it's weird.

Anyway, that's most of what I find different between Nanzan and Carleton, institution-wise. This ended up being a very long and boring post, so I apologize in advance to anybody who skips reading it just because it's too intimidating. Hopefully in the next post I'll have some insight into Japanese dorms, and maybe it'll be more exciting than this one. :)

this post is made of lists

Fun things I've done since my last post:
- went to a tiny club with friends and met some new Japanese people
- went to Nagoya Harbor and rode a giant Ferris wheel! It's probably my new favorite place in Nagoya (not that I really had a favorite place before...maybe it was Jusco, a department-store-ish place)
- started collecting stickers to trade in for a really cute Rirakkuma bowl! This means that for lunch I've been buying bread and hamburgers that have the stickers on them, which may be a bad thing, but I only need 30 stickers and I already have 6, so hopefully I can get the bowl soon! It's really really adorable. :D
- participated in a photoshoot for the admissions brochures at Nanzan! It was very staged and the pictures will probably all be very cheesy, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly and met some new people in the process, so that was fun. I'll probably be back in the US before I can see the results, though. :/
- handed out snacks to the tsukimi dorobou! This is a tradition that apparently only happens in my area (I asked some other Japanese students and they didn't know what it was), which is kind of like Halloween in America. Tonight is a full moon and tomorrow is the autumnal equinox (and a national holiday!), so this is the time where people go out for tsukimi, or moon-watching. Apparently on this day every year, little kids in the area run around to people's houses and get treats. 'Dorobou' means thief, so 'tsukimi dorobou' is something like 'moon-watching thieves'. I think before people would leave out plates of dango (round sweet dumpling-things on sticks) and the kids would take them, so that's where the thief part comes in, though nowadays they just get snacks (my mom handed out packets of mini Oreos).

Nagoya Harbor!

Cool things that have happened recently:
- my first real conversation (sort of) with my host dad! He goes out on business trips a lot and even when he's home he comes back from work really late, so I don't see him much. Also for some reason whenever he wanted to know something about me he would ask my host mom, even if I was there, so we had some sort of weird relay system going on. I think maybe he's just not used to having a girl in the house (both of their kids are boys), especially a foreigner, so maybe that's why? Anyway, yesterday we actually talked for the first time, so that was nice, considering I've been living here for almost a month now. :P
- realizing that in three days, I'll have been in Japan for a month! It really doesn't feel like it at all. I bet the next three months will fly by, too.
- getting bonus points on my first Japanese test! Or rather, half a bonus point, since it was +0.5, but still! It didn't really change my grade much, but I've never gotten bonus points on a test that didn't come from a bonus question before. Also, this was the test to make sure we really belong in IJ600, so I'm glad that I did well.

Really little things that are different in Japan:
- the paper size. They do have paper the same size as what we use in the US, but most of our handouts for class are printed out on giant sheets that we have to fold in half to carry around. In the end it's the same size as a packet of two double-sided sheets in the US, but it's still kind of weird
- the napkins. For some reason all the paper napkins I've used in restaurants feel kind of weird, like they have some really thin plastic layer above the paper. This is totally insignificant but I noticed it, so I felt like sharing. :)
- paper towels. Or lack thereof - most bathrooms don't have paper towels, and only some of them have dryers, so everybody carries around little towels of their own to use. It's actually very green, if you think about it, and also better than China, where toilet paper is not always guaranteed either. Plus I bought a very cute Totoro towel while in Tokyo and I get to use it all the time.
- vibrate mode on cell phones. It's called 'manner mode' instead of 'vibrate', which I think is very Japanese (in the sense that you're being polite to others by turning off the sound) and also amusing.

and so it begins

I can't believe I've only been in Nagoya for two weeks (and two days) - looking back on my last post, everything there seems like it happened ages and ages ago. I guess it's a good thing, since it means I've done lots of fun/interesting things since then.

Classes have been going on since Thursday, which is almost exactly a week now, although it's only been the international students so far; Japanese students start tomorrow! I'm very happy with my schedule; I've been able to stay in all the classes I registered for, and they all seem pretty fun. Japanese class is actually probably my hardest class (which is definitely the opposite of what it's like at Carleton), because 600 level is really no joke. Most of the people in the class have been taking Japanese for around 4 years, so coming in from only 2 years worth of experience makes class kind of overwhelming, especially since all the other students are so good at Japanese. We have three teachers, one of whom is very nice but also really scary/strict; the other two seem pretty energetic and fun. Japanese class is also five days a week, for roughly 3 hours a day - they're not kidding when they call the classes Intensive Japanese! It's certainly a change being at the bottom of my class, but I'm sure by December my Japanese will have improved tremendously. My other classes all seem really interesting. Japanese linguistics is actually phonology, which I've never studied before, and it's a class with Japanese students so I'm looking forward to it (the first real class is tomorrow), and Japanese culture has a very friendly teacher and some really interesting topics, like women's language and the concept of uchi/soto (inside/outside) in Japanese culture. I also really enjoyed my first calligraphy class; we learned the names of/how to use the instruments and spent the rest of class writing the character for 'moon' over and over again. It sounds boring, but it actually takes a lot of concentration and is hard to get right. Still, it's great to be taking an art class again. Observation and analysis of Japanese activities will probably be the most interesting class; it's an open class with Japanese students and basically we'll be interacting with each other and other Japanese people and analyzing those interactions. The professor is really funny and laid-back, and he also knows my Japanese teacher from Carleton! It's a small world.

As for fun stuff I've done in the past week, there's plenty of that, too. As I mentioned in my last post, I went to Sakae with some international students and some Japanese students; Sakae seems to be the hot spot for young people and I'll probably go there a lot - although unfortunately it's not on my commuter pass (next month I'll make sure it is). I was again there today for karaoke, too, which was fun. On Wednesday, the CJS office organized a field trip for the international students - we went to the Tokugawa Museum and Nagoya Castle, both of which were really interesting and beautiful. My favorite part of the museum was all the maps of Nagoya, which were huge and really detailed; another odd thing is that they were apparently drawn from all different directions (the labels were all oriented on different sides of the maps). The best part of Nagoya Castle was definitely the view from the top; you can see Nagoya spreading out in all directions, and it's breathtaking. On Friday I went to a party hosted by some other international students; they offered to let us spend the night so I did instead of leaving early to catch the last bus (which is at 11). It was a fun party and sometime in the middle of the night we left to go karaoke (I've only been in Nagoya two weeks but I've gone to karaoke 4 times already), which was again very exciting. On Saturday I went to Osu Kannon with my host mother to resume our mission of finding me a yukata, and this time we were successful! It's yellow with little bunnies on it, and I also bought a white obi to go with it, which was already premade into a bow so all I have to do is slip it on. :)

I also had what I guess was my first experience with culture shock yesterday - I haven't really had any trouble adjusting to life in Japan, but I guess there's always something. Up until now I'd been trying to spend lots of time downstairs with my host family, since I wanted to interact with them and not just stay holed up in my room. I also didn't want to leave my host mother all alone all the time, since my host father doesn't get home until late. Yesterday, though, she basically asked me to spend more time in my room. Apparently her sons (and most other Japanese students, apparently) would always just go straight to their rooms after dinner to study, so she was worried about my doing homework in the living room with the TV and everything, and also she wanted some time alone/time to talk with my host dad. It's very reasonable and also probably better for my studies (honestly I think I need the quiet/alone time too), but I just thought it was funny that my concern was for spending lots of time with the family, while hers was having time alone.

Anyway, I haven't started my homework for tomorrow (bad), so I'll end here. I'll try to update more often, but life is already starting to be crazy so we'll see how things turn out. :D

nagoya, week one!

I'm updating right now from an internet cafe, on probably the oldest and slowest computer they have (which explains why nobody was using it when we came in). From now on if I come here I'll bring my own laptop, though carrying it all the way here on the bus/train will probably be a pain. Also please excuse the lack of pictures, since I am on a public computer and don't have a flash drive or anything with me. :/

Anyway, the past few days have been pretty fun - we've had more orientation and today we registered for classes. It was a paper process, though, and apparently there's no way to know how much space is in classes with limited registration until we actually go to the classes, so my schedule may change. If I can stay in everything I registered for, though, that'll be great: Japanese Linguistics II, Japanese culture (which is really more like sociolinguistics, as its full name is Japanese Culture: Language and Society in Japan), Observation and Analysis of Japanese Language Activities (which is an open class with Japanese students), and calligraphy. This is in addition to the Japanese language class, which is every day for three hours a day (I'm probably going to have issues staying awake). I tested into Japanese 600, which is one level higher than I expected and also the hardest Japanese class offered this semester. I'm kind of scared to take it, since it seems really hard, but on the other hand I want to stay in it, since it'll probably be great for improving my Japanese. On the first day of classes (two days from now!) everybody takes another, probably more detailed test to see if they were put in the right class, so I'll be studying hard to try and learn all the Japanese 500 material before then. It's not as bad as it sounds, since we actually did a lot of the grammar, but that's 200 new kanji that I'm supposed to know, which could be bad. Anyway, we'll see. :)

So on Saturday I went to Sakae with a few other international students. Sakae is a pretty big station (and unfortunately not on my commuter pass) and has lots of shops and things to admire. First we wandered into a Maruzen bookstore, then decided to get lunch. We settled on (basically) the first one we saw, and then realized that we couldn't read the menu, because useful kanji like food names is not what we study at school. So we ordered by pointing, and I think I was one of the few people who actually knew what I was ordering (gyouza), so it was an interesting lunch. Then we walked through this underground mall to find the Oasis 21 center, which is a very strange-looking building with shops underneath. We went up to the top, which was pretty cool - it had a very shallow pond with a glass bottom, so you could see down below (and from the bottom it made cool ripple shadows), then wandered around some more shops. After that we wanted to go up the TV tower, but it cost 600 yen and we decided to just walk around instead, because there was some sort of festival going on. I still don't really know what it was for, but we sat and watched lots of Japanese kids dance hip-hop (it was a dance school and every class did a dance). It was pretty awesome, and also amusing because I'm sure they had no idea what the lyrics to the songs meant. There were some really little kids (maybe 6 or 7) who were really adorable (and good dancers).

On Sunday I went on a yukata hunt with my host mom, but apparently they are no longer selling them. :( On the flip side, I did get a skirt and leggings for 190 yen each, plus I tried takoyaki for the first time, which was pretty good. And then yesterday after orientation I met some new people and joined them for karaoke (actually I was only there for about 10 minutes) and then wandered around Yagoto station, which was pretty fun. Today we had a campus tour and welcome party, where I actually met and talked to some Japanese students, which was nice. We also made plans to go to Sakae later tonight, so that should be fun, too! It looks like it's shaping up to be a good semester, with interesting classes and fun people, so I'm excited! :)

destination: nagoya!

Auugghh I just spent the last half hour writing up a post and then it failed to publish, and somehow Blogger's auto-saving of drafts didn't work! I am very unhappy. :( I will try to recreate what I just wrote, but it will not be the same and I may not be as enthusiastic or detailed this time around, sorry!

So, having safely arrived in Nagoya via shinkansen (where I wanted to get a free Pokemon notebook by paying with Suica, but was unable to do; at least I had ice cream), I am updating from my host family's house! Up until now I haven't wanted to use their computer too much, but I won't be able to use the internet at school for a few days, so I wanted to update now while I could. Also I just showed my host mother Twitter and Facebook, which she seemed to think were pretty cool!

So far my host family has been great, although when I say 'host family' I really mean my host mother - my host father has been gone on business (actually he just got home) and my host brothers are living away at college, and even the dog (Silver, because she is black and white) stays outside all the time, so it's really just been the two of us. But she is really really nice, so it's been great - we talk a lot, mostly in Japanese, though her English is good enough that whenever there's something I don't understand, she usually knows the English for it (and then if not we use the electronic dictionary). We've gone grocery shopping a few times together - the first one we went to was huge and almost like a department store - the second story had clothes and toys and everything. Yesterday she took me to Nanzan via bus/subway so I knew how to get there (25-minute bus ride, then 3 subway stops, a transfer, then one more stop over, plus a short walk to campus), then we went to the local ward office to register me as an alien (a foreigner) and get insurance, and then I got a cell phone! Now I can send emails to people from my phone, because in Japan every cell phone has its own email address, so you just send emails from phone to phone like text messages. It's cool because I can also email normal addresses without needing internet, and if you guys email my cell phone I can read/respond like a text message. Or so I think; if you want to help me test it let me know and I'll send you my address!

My host house is also very nice - it's pretty big, I think, for a Japanese house, and I have my own room. It's pretty roomy (bigger than a Watson single, I think) and has a bed/desk/dresser/bookshelves. There's an air conditioner in my room, but I only turn it on in the evenings to conserve energy.

So this morning was the first day of orientation! I successfully made it to Nanzan by myself, then got ready for the placement test. I was worried about it (I'd never taken a language placement test so I didn't know what to expect) and spent last night studying kanji, but it was not bad at all. Hopefully I'll get into the level I want. After that was lunch (ramen with miso and lettuce), which I had with Stephen (the other Carleton student in the program), and then orientation. There are 143 international students total, from over 25 countries. I met a few of them already, but I should probably try and meet more and not rely on Stephen, who I already know. I did meet a girl who rides the same bus (and subway) as me, and this afternoon we talked while trying to figure out where her stop was (luckily she recognized the surroundings and hopefully got home safe), and also a boy whose host mother is a friend of my host mother. Actually it was funny because I knew what he was wearing today, due to my questions of what to wear for the entrance ceremony and our host mothers' communication, so when I saw him in the subway I asked if it was him and it was! Hopefully he wasn't too creeped out.

Anyway, tomorrow is academic orientation, which is exciting. I have high hopes for classes and want them to start already! I still haven't decided what to take, but I am excited nonetheless. And now I will stop here, and hopefully it will post correctly this time!