First Day of Classes!

Let's start off first with the amazing fact that this morning, I woke up at 7:00 a.m. I can't even manage to wake up that early at Stanford and here I managed to do so easily (I did go to bed at around 9:30 p.m.), get ready, have breakfast at 8:30 and then head out to the subway. Granted, I didn't have class till 10:45 but I wanted to make sure I navigated the subway. Generally, I take teh tozai line to the Karasuma-Oike station and transfer to the Karasuma Line, where I take that subway to the Imadegawa Stop, get off, and walk to the university. And I actually managed to take teh subway without any mishaps! It felt so legit. The only trouble I ran into was getting to the subway station from my house. I mean, I got there, I just had to remember how to get there (which I did by using the 7 Eleven as my landmark). So I jammed to my ipod as I traveled to the university.

Japanese Class at 10:45 a.m. So there are five people in my class: me, Austen, Matt, Anya and Devin. We have two teachers; today Ueda-sensei led class. She gave us a packet of stuff, informed us we had a quiz on Wednesday (AAAAHHHH), and then proceeded to start our activity, which was interviewing each other (she did this so she could get to know us). However, since we have an odd number of people within the class, I got to do the exercise with her (of course). I managed to stumble through the activity with her, though I forgot what one of the questions was asking and we had a bit of a "lost in translation" moment when she finally had to tell me "shumi" meant hobby. Fail Saroya, Fail. Anyway, shortly after the interview exercise, we did a listening exercise, of which we all understood very little. Turns out that the dialogue itself was mostly in 'kansai-ben' Japanese. PAUSE. I don't believe I've mentioned this before, but the area that Kyoto is in is called "Kansai". It includes Oasaka, Nara, and two other cities that I can't remember right now. And they have a separate dialect of Japanese called "kansai-ben". So let's rewind for a moment: I am already struggling with Japanese and now I have to identify things in another dialect...? Awesome.

Then we had lunch and following that, we had "Student hours", which we have from 1:15-2:45 each Monday. It's kind of like a general meeting, announcements etc. In this period, we were doing our group presentations (this was the presentation we were doing on Sanjusangendo -- the buddha temple). Naturally, nobody had prepared. Luckily, we were going third, and so I just continued re-reading the wikipedia article on the temple (because I read it last night). David said he could hook up his computer and show some of the pictures he took at the temple of the grounds and it worked.

Quotes from other Presentations:

"This is one of the rocks" - Abe

They went to a Zen Buddhist garden and so they were showing pictures. I almost died of laughter.

Kenny: "finally we saw these...maikon? Maiko"

Referring to the Maiko, which are the "geisha in traning". I almost died of laughter again.

I also had Political Economy of Japan today, and I'm sorry to say but it was a complete bore. The Professor talks about a mile an hour, which is the primary reason why it is hard to concentrate. The subject matter itself is very interesting; how it's delivered makes it very very difficult to focus. The second half of the class though (it's 3 HOURS, though only once a week) is usually a guest speaker. Today...he was a little dry. Hopefully the guest speakers in the future will be more engaging. Grading for the class itself is going to be a bummer though: 50% is from the final exam (meaning our professor's lectures...ARG) and 50% is from a 10 page paper (length isn't so bad; the fact that it can be about anything makes me nervous). At least Nancy is in the class with me; we can be study buddies!

That's mostly it from me today. Tomorrow I just have Japanese, which is nice. Probably do some exploring of the city or something. I think Nancy, Ben and I are planning to go get our JR passes for Golden Week right after lunch. Apparently a bunch of students have already gone and gotten them, meaning we should be able to get them too! Exciting!

It's hard to believe that it's already April. I keep thinking back to this time last year, which was election season. It's so strange to think that an entire year has gone by since then. Part of me is just fairly glad I don't have to be surrounded by that stress again (though part of me thrives on the campaigning high). And since it's already April, I realize I'm going to be a senior very very soon, and that frightens me (as it would any almost college graduate who hasn't a clue as to what she is doing upon graduation). But those dilemmas are for another day (or to be put off till the summer when I arrive back in the States).

For now I'll just focus on my life here. :)