Long Days and Peaceful Nights

Well, it's been almost a week since my last post. That's a good measure of how busy I've been, I guess. Sorry for the delay, I'll do my best to make this one five times as interesting as the others.

Okay, so term is now well underway. Each day goes like so:

• Japanese language classes start at 9. We've been divided into ability groups, as I mentioned before, yet Level 3 is fairly big so is split again into classes 51 and 52. Rumours are circulating that 52 are the more skilled of Level 3, but as a member of Class 51 I adamantly deny that. I have a pretty good group, I'd say, made up of people at around my skill level which leads me to believe that I have been well-placed here.
  Each weekday we get a different teacher. This keeps things interesting but, well, the communication between teachers could be improved a bit. I mean, they all seem to know which page of the textbook we're on, but we had to explain the daily checkup tests to one of them. I mean, they're all fairly good teachers, but the differences between them are almost too great. That's not to say I don't enjoy myself...
  Anyway, moving on. We're working from 'Wakatta tsukaeru Nihon-go', a green and a yellow book that together should lead us through the semester. Work is pretty easy so far, though the pace is really picking up now that the end of the week has come.

• What follows differs between days:
  Mondays we have Intercultural Communication after lunch. In this we have thirty minutes of lecture on a certain topic to do with the course name, followed by an hour of discussion of that topic in small groups. This can get pretty complicated, especially when four of your six members don't speak English and only fragmented Japanese, and we're doing the topic of 'What does you culture mean to you?'. Homework for each week is a page of essay on the topic we discussed, which comes together to form a journal that becomes our full semester's assessment. Except this week. We got 2. Thanks, Professor...

• Tuesdays and Thursdays there's nothing after Japanese, which leaves me free to go home at the end of lunch! It's a good feeling.

• Wednesdays give us a loooong break of 3 hours between lunch and our last lecture of Japanese Society. Can't really say much about bit at this point, as this week saw us give a lesson-long self-introduction. Not to say it wasn't fun at all, our teacher's almost diabolically easy-going. Word on the street is that its a lesson of field trips and topic tangents. Sounds like a good lesson to me.

• Today is Friday, the last day. Unfortunately, I do have a lecture; Japanese Language Seminar B. This is something of a Japanese Plus course that prepares Levels 3 through 5 for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test - Level 2, a highly recognised certificate that we have been recommeded to get by the Edinburgh staff as well as people like the JET team. Pretty intense stuff, I can tell you, for today we learnt 7 brand new, highly complex (at least to our feeble minds) sentence structures, and over the course of the... course we will learn 100, and then be tested on them. Good, solid, meaty chunks of Japanese.

And now it's the weekend! Yeah!

Anyway, Doshisha life has a bunch of other aspects besides education. Lunch, for example. Lunch is very odd here. You grab a tray and head to one of 4 queues based on what you want to eat. There's a noodle queue, a curry queue, a salady queue and a posher food queue. One and three are my current favourites for the kitsune udon and spicy potato wedges respectively. You grab whatever you want and take it to the till and then pay. It's just the range of food that boggles the mind: whole fish on a plate, bowls of rice as big as your head, a veritable catalogue of parfaits all the colours of the rainbow! It's staggering sometimes. Average lunch for me comes to between 200 and 400 yen, that's £1 to £2, which I think is a pretty good deal.

Now, what else is there.

Oh yeah...

The bureacracy.

Every day we have to go to the tiny, crowded International Office and sign in, something I didn't realise until 3 days in... It's okay, I think I've been forgiven. On top of that, we have a pigeon hole each which is filled every so often with things like forms, forms, or if we're really lucky...

...money. I kid you not. They will refund you part of any taxi receipt you care to hand over, which kind of makes up for the bills they put in there as well. Rent bills, you see, as we do live in University accomodation.

Got a very scary note in mine today 'My. Swan, the bank called with something to say. Please call Mr. Amaza on this number.' Now, I'm not all that good at Japanese, so I hope you can imagine how terrifying it felt to be forced into discussing my finances, the means of my living here, in a language I don't understand.

I'm just thankful I've watched enough anime to understand the sentence constructions used when selling one's soul.

Anyway, turns out all they wanted to say was that the money transfer from home can't go through until Monday, as it's now the weekend and so everybody involved in that sort of thing is having a well-earned nap. Fine by me.

Phew.

So here I am, sitting at my desk, trying to tempt Ho-oh into staying in the Ultra Ball (actually called a Hyper Ball in Japanese, don't you know). Difficult stuff, let me tell you. I learnt from Diamond to not use up Master Balls (still called Master Balls in Japanese) so readily, so it's a long, bitter fight to claiming by giant flaming bird Pokemon. I'm just glad it doesn't have any recoil moves like Kyogre did...

And on that subject, tomorrow is Pikachu Day! Or so it shall be called in my diary from now on. Plan is to head to the Kyoto Cross Media Experience in Uzumasa with Polly and Mark...

2 shakes that time. Cheeky thing.

...where Nintendo will be dishing out the Pikachus to whoever has a DS with a Japanese version of Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold or SoulSilver. 'Pikachu?', I hear you say, 'He was in the original 150! He's no big prize!' Maybe not, but...

Argh! So close!!

...this is a proper Event Pikachu we're talking about! It may as well have come from the hands of Mr. Miyamoto himself! And besides, this one has the super-secret, never-before-given-to-a-Pikachu TM of Last Resort, an ultimate base attack Technique that can only be used once the Pokemon has used each of its other attacks at least once. Sounds pretty cool to me, though I would have prefered a Volt Tackle.

Have to preorder movie tickets for that one.

Is there anything else? I can't think of anything. Currently also paused in the middle of the anime film Sword of the Stranger, which is alright but not as good as I'd heard people say it was. Oh, I made myself yakisoba tonight, and it was nice. I made an okinomiyaki the other day, and that was nice too. Google them, if you're interested.

Well, thanks again for reading. Sorry for the no pictures, there's not really been anything else to photograph. I shall try my utmost to get ace pictures of Pokemon tomorrow. Oooh, it'll be just like Pokemon Snap!

Anyway, thanks very much for reading!