Sept. 14th 2011

Ohaiyogozaimasu! (good morning!)


Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I've been super busy this weekend and week school events, making new friends, exploring, etc. A lot has happened, so I'll try to remember as much as I can (^^;)

So, start with school activities. Yesterday we registered with Suita-Shi (Suita City) for our legal alien registration, so we took the local bound train to town hall and register. It was pretty easy and straight forward and I got to impress people with my translation skills. Oh, and in the sample form that they gave us the fake address was Brooklyn st. Arlington, VA, which to those of you who don't know is my mother's home town where most of my mom's immediate family still lives. Small word, right? We also signed up for the national health insurance plan. Soooo awesome. Basically you pay $18 a month and it covers 70% of all medical costs; meds, doctor visits, dentist visits, etc. Very awesome, wish we had that in America.
Then we had lunch at the cafeteria. Still super delicious than any cafeteria I've ever been to. And after words we had a guided tour. This actually sucked. extremely. It was incredibly hot outside, and we had to walk all over campus. I sweated so much my entire shirt was drenched. Disgusting. I kept asking "Where's the pool?!?!" I have to say that several times I thought about how easy it would be to sneak away, but kept remembering that all the guides were volunteering to do this (some of them have as much as an hour long commute to campus), so I just sucked it up. Afterwords we returned home I took a long shower, and I took a long naked nap with the Air Con on full blast.

Oh, speaking of showers, I used the community bath in my dorm for the first time. Thus far I think I'm the only one of the Americans who have used it yet. You have to be naked in front of everyone, and there is a bit of etiquette to it. But mission accomplished and it was awesome. Very relaxing, and I was really proud of myself.

Lets see all of that was yesterday... so before that we had basic orientation. We took the JLPT which I guess I told you guys about on facebook. It was horrible. We only had 30 seconds to read the directions, read the question, and read all the answers, select which one, and then click the next button. So a lot of the time it wasn't that I didn't understand what was going on, but I couldnt answer quick enough so a lot of my questions were left blank D: I got a really bad score. Everyone did in fact. Nobody feels it reflects their true Japanese language skills knowledge. Oh, and we (a lot of the gaijins) have been frequenting this one bar GBs a lot. Its an American restaurant with Japanese American type food, and lots of drink specials. The staff who all work there are a bunch of Japanese punk types and are super nice and funny. I promised the manager that I would make him a mix CD of punk, metal, and rock ^_^ We met the Kansai University basketball team and they taught us a bunch of Japanese drinking games. Incredibly awesome! Made sooooo many friends.

Well, I'm being yelled at to go. I didn't cover nearly as much as I wanted to, but I'll update again probably later today or tomorrow.