Today: More orientation

Today was the welcome ceremony for the Study in Kyoto program, which we were all dreading as it sounded like it would be painfully boring. We were pleasantly surprised when the day's schedule was passed out, and the ceremony itself only took up half an hour of it. It was survivable.

Directly after the ceremony was a crime and safety presentation, which was an hour. Again, we were all instantly dreading it, because it sounded like it would be an utterly boring bit about how to avoid getting your stuff snatched and getting told the laws for biking around and whatnot. That's actually exactly what it was, but some women from a volunteer group took the majority of the time up on the first part, modelling different ways of being dumb and smart for us. It was a presentation fit for a kindergarten class, except it was presented very enthusiastically, and I think seriously. I was having a very hard time keeping a straight face through it, but I was doing ok. Then I realized that sitting between two Irish people is a bad thing when you need to keep a straight face; John on my right lost it and keeled over laughing, hiding his face and shaking with laughter. That was all it took to push me over, and I wound up laughing enough to cry. Even through the police address on bike theft and safety I was still trying to stifle my laughter. We all agreed afterwards that it was an hour well-spent, generally described by the UK students as "brilliant."

Next on the agenda was lunch. The cafeteria once again exceeded all expectations I could possibly have for a cafeteria, let alone at a school. I had two types of fish, some potato-cake-like thing, soup, and a bowl of rice with a little bit of flavoring ingredients thrown in. It was all superb, with one of the fish items standing out as spectacularly good. I really need to learn the names of all the dishes.

After lunch, we met back up for the earthquake simulator. This is a truck belonging to the Kyoto fire department, which opens up and has a little kitchen setup and seating for four. After a bit of talk, they had us go in in groups and get a simulation of an earthquake of the same magnitude as the one that hit Kobe in the 90s and killed over six thousand people. All I can say is holy crap. The simulator itself was incredibly cool and impressive, but thinking about that kind of movement from the earth itself is mind-boggling and frightening.

Then, the orientation stuff was over, and for me and a lot of other students, it was off to the ward office to pick up the certificate proven we started the alien registration process, which we need to open bank accounts and register with the immigration bureau to work part-time. From there, I went on about a six-mile detour with Pernilla to a kendo store. She's a self-proclaimed kendo nerd, and had ordered some stuff which was ready to pick up. She's in the Japan World Perspectives course and can only speak and understand a small sliver of Japanese, so she wanted me to come along in case she needed language assistance. One of the staff members there was much better at English than I am with Japanese, so thankfully I didn't have to do too much--past saying she was there to pick up her stuff, all the dialog would have been way beyond my vocabulary level. I looked around and got an idea of how much material cost would be involved in starting with kendo; expensive, but not horrific.

Then it was homeward bound once more, and the end of the day. I've spent my time since playing with pictures. Unfortunately, Windows Vista has sinned once more, and this time instead of just annoying me with crappy performance or crippled and bloated interfaces it has made me furious. It decided to go screwball on my SD card when I deleted some of yesterday's pictures off of it, before I had pulled today's off. The files that I told it to delete remained with a file size of zero, so I pulled and reseated the card and ran scandisk on it to repair the file system. This had the effect of deleting everything on the card. I had pictures of the ceremony, the presentations, the cafeteria and its food, pictures and video of the earthquake simulator, and pictures of stuff in the Kendo store. All gone. I'm changing operating systems as soon as I can get some external storage to back up my stuff.