The first week of classes.

Alright, so it's technically just Thursday, but we don't have classes tomorrow, so the first week is officially over. The Japanese course itself is pretty busy...we've had 10 95-min sessions so far, and it's been moving at a pretty impressive pace. Japanese C (the highest level they're offering) started at a much more intermediate level than I was expecting, but hey...it means I'm a bit ahead of the curve, and I can re-learn some old stuff, and newer things that the Genki textbooks cover that my old ones never taught me.

One interesting thing about Japanese C is that, out of the 30+ people who are in the Summer Gateway Program...6 of us are in C <___<;; Also, while the other 2 classes seem to have a rotation of like...5 teachers, we get 2. Suga-sensei, who we started with, is pretty cool, definitely the more relaxed of the two...and actually happens to be a year younger than me >__>; (there's only one guy who's older than me, and he's a grad student at UNC-W). Yamamoto-sensei...people who have her for A or B say she's funny and animated...which at first we weren't seeing at all, but as the week's progressed and we're all loosening up and improving our Japanese, she's...thawed seems too harsh a term, but along similar lines.

Mondays and Thursdays we have the 2 sessions in the morning (8:45am » 12:10pm), a 2 hour break for lunch (since we don't have anything 3rd period), and another session from 2:15 » 3:50. For a select few of us, there are additional classes (they're taught in English, thankfully) to be had above and beyond the Japanese course. There's various reasons we're all putting ourselves through the torture of more work: I quite simply need the extra credit hours for transfer, Jason needs the hours for the scholarship, the others...well, iunno really. One of my other classes is the Legal Framework of Tourism...the first class of which had everyone sitting in there for about 10min with no teacher; someone finally went up to the computer at the front, checked the portal, and found out that, oh hey...the teacher's not in the area for the rest of the week...fun!

Thus set free on Monday, I went upstairs to a group study session with some of the APU buddies for further help for people, or a place to do homework and get needed assistance with it. The 2 sessions they had of that this week were fun; in addition to having the homework-doing, there were icebreakers to introduce everyone and practice some basic Japanese, and games meant to speed up your reading and association. All in all, very neat.

Since the little spring break thing that happened pretty well as we got here ended, the cafeteria opened up again. Now, I for one have only ever eaten once at a college cafeteria (NCSU's during my orientation), and I certainly was not fussed. Here? Ho-lee shazbot. This food is several degrees of awesome. There's about 7 different stations for food options, from "Japanese Food," "Western," to the noodle stations and "Ethnic Food." It's all delightfully inexpensive as well, I can grab a decent amount of dishes to experiment with and still come in at about $5/meal.
Boneless super-sized fried chicken nugget hunk things, bowl'o'rice, miso soup, a bread with some kind of salami-like meat with mayo (not a repeater), and of course, pineapple slices.

We all have the same timetable for the mornings, to lunches find us converging on a few tables to eat, talk about how classes are going, and wonder what the hell it is that the other person grabbed, and is it tasty? One day, Connor (he'll eat anything once), decided he was going to try the (in)famous Natto (fermented soybeans). Now, before I ever saw this...food...in person, I'd oft described it to the unknowing as "like a cross between baked beans and rice crispy treats." Such a description does not adequately explain the...experience that is natto. First, it has a rather unpleasant medicinal smell. Second, rice crispy treats aren't nearly as stringy, or persistent in their stringiness. We're pretty sure you could take a thing of natto, throw it on a ceiling, watch it stick...and slowly parts would drop down to the floor, with a clearly noticeable, spider-web-like strand extending back to the originating mass. *hurgk*

Unappetizing options aside, they have some real good curry; even the regular has a little bit of heat to it. While it's very tasty and quite inexpensive, I'll have to limit my intake of it as, well...I like it, it doesn't like me. So far my favorite has to have been the ramen I got. There's a metric crap-ton of options for ramen; a multitude of meats and flavors to further prove just how much better the real ramen is than the 11/$1 pouches of maruchan and top ramen one can find stateside. I need to try the soba and udon next. Mmmm, tasty.

Tuesday, I and about a half-dozen other Summer Gateway people all have Politics & Economics of the Asia Pacific. I'll say that already, I'm not a fan of these rows of seats. They've perhaps 3/4 the distance between rows as I'm used to, and your ass falls asleep but quick on the fold-down cheap plastic chair. The first meeting was the orientation and a discussion on globalization (which my junior seminar spent a semester going over, so I kinda knew all that good stuff already...). Our teacher is a Japanese national who apparently did 4 years of undergrad in a university in Kentucky...seemed an odd place to me, but hey, if it worked. The only problem I have so far with this professor is that he's so...well...pessimistic. People would still be talking, he'd say things more to the effect of self-deprecation instead of trying to get the talker's attention, though when watching the video talks about globalization, he did tell some people to leave the class because they were talking too much...*shrug*
I don't see that class as being too bad...it's just that 3 hours in those chairs isn't exactly my idea of a good time.

Wednesday, a group of us got together after the morning classes and lunch, and headed down to town to wander, shop a bit, and basically just get off campus for awhile. We catch the bus down to the same station we got off at on the group shopping expedition, and started walking down the main thoroughfare again. I stand corrected on what I thought was a Sega store...instead, it's a Sega arcade. Hell yes. We go in and spend perhaps close to an hour playing various games and seeing the different awesome game machines available.

• Initial D Stage 5, which I promptly spent a good while on...
• The row of cabinets down on the right of the shot were all retro game cabinets, featuring the likes of the original Super Mario, old-school Tetris, and a lot of other little peculiar games I'd never seen before
• Pachinko machines aplenty; Connor seems to already be an aged pachinko-addict-in-training
• Videogame horse racing, where you're essentially sitting in a nice padded chair betting on virtual horse races...
• Interesting card-based RTS machines with a full-on sensor mat you play the cards on...

And a frigging Gundam simulator. I swear, if it wasn't 500yen a play, I so would've had several rounds on that badass-looking thing. 6 separate simulator machines, possibly all linked for competitive/coop play, I don't know really.

Time killed, we head out of the arcade, and down the street some more. I make a stop in the Heartland store (see earlier post), to pick up a bottle of Suntory Old Whisky. When I'm not sick, I'll definitely be enjoying some quality "Suntory Time."

We gradually work our way down to the post office/bank where some people needed to change money, and continue past the beach to Youme town again. As I mentioned earlier, immediately upon entry there's a KFC, and this time, unfettered by a ginormous mass of people, Jessica wanted a photo. Yep...a statue of Col. Ojisan ("Old Man Col." more or less) himself. We go back to the same kaitenzushi place as before, eat a bit on the cheap, then split up a bit to shop around. Matt, Connor, and myself meander over to the grocery side of the establishment, where much to my pleasant surprise, I find some peanut butter. Grab a little jar of strawberry jam next to it, and now I've stuff to smear on the bread I bought from the co-op. Happy times~

The 3 of us then go upstairs with the aim of finding some hilarious Engrish shirts. Well...it certainly didn't take us long. One store had a 500yen bin of Engrish shirts, one of which proclaimed itself to be "Claft Made." Who doesn't like that? Matt and I looked a bit more through that 'store' (it's hard to say really, as there's not much in the way of walls to differentiate what's what), then find that Connor has struck gold. I think out of the 5 he and Matt bought between them, the Mr. Elephant shirt's our favorite. Though honestly, Telephone's simplicity has something going for it, and being a Life Human Being who is "Now Making Effort" have their own charms.

Tomorrow's the scavenger hunt in Beppu, and we're going to an Izakaya (or nomihoudai, as some might recognize it) on Saturday, so I'll undoubtedly have more entertaining stuff after that.