Mostly quiet on the Eastern Front

I've skipped a couple days' worth of posts due to school and other occurences, but this also has the effect of allowing me to make a full post. Hoorah!

Tuesday, I woke up early to go to the bank, withdraw money, and then pay my rent and class fees before the 10:30 am rent deadline. During mild rain I set out on my creaky bike. I got halfway between the first and second lights after Ninna-ji, standing and mashing the pedals as usual since the bike is too small, when suddenly the left pedal (which had more of a grinding feel anyway) starting feeling wobbly. I sat down immediately and looked down at my foot while pedaling. Within one more pedal revolution, the left crankarm of the bike fell off. Great... either the nut that holds the arm on wasn't properly torqued and I pedalled hard enough to loosen it, or it wasn't there in the first place and I finally managed to break the rust. Anyway, I got to do some extra walking, but still wound up getting everything done before the rent deadline. Although it's been established that there's nothing that happens if you don't pay on time, I wanted to get it done on time anyway.

After classes, I got the bike fixed at a nearby shop for a pittance. The bike no longer creaks with every pedal stroke. I got the third and last of my textbooks, the one for my conversation class, which brings my total textbook expense for the semester to 6210円, or about $59.14 at the current rate. After five semesters of buying textbooks for UNM, this is astounding to me.

Wednesday I had only one class session, and the weather was fantastic, so I went to Kinkaku-ji. While I didn't have the mental energy to make a blog post afterwards, I did do a pretty decent job of captioning my gallery of it. Here's a direct link to the gallery.

Anyway, I have now been to every class at least once. Out of ten 90-minute class sessions per week, one is taught in English. My language class teachers have demonstrated that they can speak English just fine, but without actually saying it they've conveyed that we should only bail out and cheat when we absolutely can't think of how to ask something in Japanese. So far the workload is low. I did one assignment during the week, and I did about half of my weekend's homework today in about an hour. This means I should be able to get a good amount of kanji study in over the weekend. For this semester's kanji, I already know 140 out of 252 of them reasonably well; over the weekend I could get to where I know all of them reasonably well, and if I review them enough I could know them all permanently by the end of the month. Because learning this amount of kanji sounds relatively easy to me, I'm going to up the ante and study the B class's kanji as well. I think it's worth the effort for me to try to bump up to A next semester instead of going to B like normal.

In other news, today, I got a friendly simultaneous reminder that it's good to be in Japan, and that it's also still a good idea to pay attention instead of being a retard. After my classes and buying a composition notebook for the weekend's homework, I noticed my keys were not in my pocket. After a moment of panic, I decided the most likely cause of this was that I left my keys sitting in the bike lock. I got to my bike, and sure enough, it was there, locked, with the key sitting in the lock, untouched. I wouldn't ever expect to see my bike again if I did that at UNM, but then, at UNM they don't have multiple bike parking lots like this:
The second floor.
The first floor.
A constant line of people going in to the 2nd floor - the first floor is closed and full. Since my shot of the first floor has an admittedly crappy exposure, to put this into proper perspective, there's parking room for approximately 6000 bikes on the first floor alone. There's another bike lot the same size as this one at the south gate, and a 2nd-floor-only lot that's not quite as big at the north gate. There are lot attendants almost always on duty making sure that the bikes are packed in nice and tight. The traffic, the attendants, and the fact that it's Japan probably all deserve credit for my bike still being there.

Admittedly, if my bike had vanished, I wouldn't have been terribly upset. But, I would have been disgruntled that my room key and helmet were gone. It would cost me at least 50% more to replace the helmet than to buy another bike of that caliber.