Meeting people, eating sushi, and climbing mountains

We had a special session of class today, which wound up being one of the most difficult class periods I can remember, including any number of tests. Our teachers got some volunteer Japanese students to come into class and talk with us. We were to interview them about recommendations for improving at various aspects of learning the Japanese language, both in groups of four and one-on-one. I did get some good ideas out of this, but it's still quite hard to ask these sorts of questions, and frequently it's hard for me to understand the answers as well.

After going through the relevant class items, we could talk with them about whatever we wanted, as long as it wasn't in English--this part of it was much more fun, and quite a bit easier. I asked everyone for recommendations on books to read, and one of them is going to let me borrow books. In talking with her, I also found out this student spent a year studying abroad in Boulder, Colorado at the same time that I lived in Castle Rock, Colorado. Interesting.

In a little while tonight, I will be going out with a bunch of the students for sushi. While a couple of the students prepared sashimi for the potluck party a couple of weekends ago, I haven't gone out for sushi since I got here. This is actually the longest I've gone this calender year without having sushi. Clearly this must (and will) be fixed.

Meanwhile, probably due to my reduced level of activity compared to the summer, I've been having problems getting to sleep for the last week. In order to fix this, on Sunday I'm going to go climb a mountain.
The visible high point is 愛宕山 (Atago-yama, or Mount Atago), which is the highest point in this ward and the highest of the mountains immediately surrounding Kyoto. At 924m elevation (3031ft) vs my dorm's 71m (234ft), 7.08km or 4.4 miles away in a straight line, it should make for a decently tiring and scenic but short excursion. Unless I bring along slow people. Which I'll try to do because they'll whine and I'll think it's funny.

Exchange rates and a big breakfast

The exciting news for the day comes from a tip from a Earl. He's in all but one of my class sessions and lives three doors down the hall in my dorm, but was also here last semester. Last night he asked a bunch of us newbies if we wanted to go for breakfast on campus with him today, saying it's pretty cheap. This sounded good because it meant something different to eat. I've still been being pretty uncreative with what ingredients I'm buying.

So this morning we went to cafeteria in the Ikagakukan in the southeast corner of the campus. Every school day, from seven to nine in the morning, it's a buffet-style breakfast, all-you-can-eat style. You get one plate, one bowl of miso soup, one bowl of rice, and as much tea (hot, cold, or both) as you want for 260 yen. You can fit an awful lot of food on one plate if you've had practice.

I should note that the breakfast options are not the typical ones. There is more fresh fruit than there is at lunch, but the rest of the options have more meat in them than the lunch buffet. I've had chicken for breakfast more times than I can count, and I've been a big fan of it, but after having octopus and squid for breakfast I think my preferences may have changed. Octopus feels amazingly substantial in the morning.

Tomorrow I'm going to repeat this, except this time I'm going to bring a container along to stash save half of the monster breakfast for lunch.

Now, the annoying bit for the day: since the US economy is taking a nose-dive due to the panic bill, while this breakfast would have been $2.47 a week ago, it's now at about $2.60. Almost a 5% in change in a week, after the dollar and the yen were pretty much in lockstep for at least a year. That's not a good sign...

Lazy Sunday

I woke up this morning and eagerly checked my mailbox for news of my new toy, not really expecting anything since we're not supposed to have a manager in on Sundays. But, the manager was here, as was a note saying that I had a package waiting for me in the office.

My first internet order in Japan! Somehow that makes it seem more exciting.

There it is, the ultimate quick reference for learning a foreign language. A writing pad for characters, variable speed text-to-speech, and tons of other useful things will make it a worthy replacement for the two dictionaries I've been toting around.

The only snag is that the interface is entirely in Japanese. This is Japan, after all; these toys are made for the Japanese to more easily learn and understand English, Chinese, Korean, etc. Still, it contains all the information I need to know, it's just slightly more difficult to learn how to use it.

With that in hand, I finally felt some motivation to do some homework. Even with the help of my new gadget, it's slow-going and difficult. There are a couple of new grammar items in there, and trying to figure them out with the usual English narration I'm used to was difficult. The guided compositions are also significantly harder than what I've been doing in Albuquerque, requiring a lot more creativity to do without sounding completely amateur. I have been surprised and pleased to run into and be able to use a lot of the new kanji I learned last weekend. Being able to remember them was also surprising, since I haven't been reviewing like I should since last Monday. I think that says a lot about the spaced approach Anki uses.

I took a break from my homework due to hunger, and fixed up some curry and rice. As an experiment, I sautéed an onion and added it to the beef curry sauce, then decided to throw in a healthy portion of crushed red pepper to give it some kick. The idea was sound, but the execution was flawed... I cooked way too much rice, and added way too much pepper. I really need to get these basic cooking things down so I can move on to learning how to make awesome Japanese things.

In other news, Typhoon Jangmi's position as of about 2 hours and 20 minutes before this post was about 100 miles southeast of Taipei, moving NNW at just shy of 14 mph--the eye is going to hit within a few hours of now, and the storm is already over the island. It's been 17 days since Typhoon Sinlaku hit Taiwan as a much weaker category 2, and caused massive flooding, moodslides, and agricultural damage from over 5 feet of rain. I doubt they've recovered from that one yet. This one is expected to hit as a category 4 and currently has waves around 30 feet. This is not going to be good.

Potluck party and first day of class

Last night after the whole orientation and registration stuff, we residents of the I-House II had a potluck dinner party. I was looking forward to it as soon as I heard about it; we have students from something like 14 different countries here, and it seems like all but a few of us US students know how to cook pretty well. It took quite a while for everyone to get ready, as there are quite a few more of us than there are stove surfaces, and some people's dishes needed two or more burners at a time. We wound up started an hour and a half later than the proposed time, so by the time we could start digging in, I was starving. Generally speaking the food was amazing. I didn't get seconds on anything or even try everything... there were just too many choices, and I got full before I could try it all. The green chile stew I made turned out to be quite a hit.

A lot of us wound up staying up pretty late playing cards and chatting, which of course was completely stupid since today was the first day of class. I managed to drag myself out of bed in time, but not in time for such niceties as breakfast. Opening my curtains revealed it was pooring rain. I grabbed my rain jacket and headed off for class in style. I wasn't the only one to ride in the rain, but I was the only one (that I saw) doing it at normal speed instead of slowly with an umbrella. I got to the right building, changed, and then made it into class about one minute late because I was looking for the classroom on the wrong floor. Room 730 is on the 3rd floor, apparently indicated by the three. I have no idea what the seven signifies.

I attended the Japanese Economy and North-South relations classes. I'll keep the Japanese Economy class, but the other didn't spark my interest. After North-South relations, it was lunch time. I had already eaten, but Ritsumeikan uses a block schedule, and there simply are no classes from 12:10 to 13:00. After so many times running through UNM's student union trying to grab a meal in the 15 minutes I had between classes, or having to change what classes I was going to take for a semester because their times overlapped by 15 minutes, I have to say that this school got it right. Also during this time, the campus PA system got switched over to the college radio station. Relaxation time with music provided is cool.

After that, it was the class I came here for: Japanese language. As I entered the room I thought I was in the wrong place. The classroom was three rows of chairs deep and about 20 or so chairs wide, but at first I saw only empty desks, as my five classmates were sitting in the center of the room. A class of six! That's wonderful for a language class.

During class, not a single word of English was spoken. The only English words in or on our textbook are part of the publisher's mark.

We had to take another placement test just to make sure they got the first placement right. Between the test and the entirely Japanese dialog, I walked out feeling wiped out and pretty intimidated. I had been wondering before whether or not this program would be intensive enough for my liking. With a name like "Intensive Language Track" it seemed like it should be, but the general description of Japanese college difficulty tends toward "really easy," so I wasn't sure. Based on the program information during the application process, I certainly wasn't expecting that the classes would have a non-English basis, so I wondered how intensive it could actually be. Now I can worry about keeping my head above the water instead.

One thing our teacher said (and put on the syllabus) was that since there are no definitions in the book, just vocab lists, we should always have a dictionary with us. I was the only one in there who did not have an electronic dictionary. After seeing enough models of them, particularly the new ones the other I-House students have been getting, I decided I needed to get one. The feature that sold me, which I hadn't seen previously, is a writing pad and stylus so you can just write a kanji or word and get the meaning and pronunciation. If I'm going to have to look things up even to understand the class itself, I certainly need something faster than a standard paper kanji dictionary.

So tonight I went onto Amazon and started shopping for one. I had a baseline: most of the students were paying between $300 and $400. I ordered a Sharp Papyrus PW-AT770, which has all the features that I wanted or even thought were minorly nifty, with expedited shipping so it'll get here Sunday, for $167.43. The shipping was $3.23. The best part is that I was able to just use my Visa, which I can pay off directly from my bank account online, instead of dealing with cash or any complicated stuff. I'm excited... it should help with my homework that's due Monday. :)

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.

Yesterday: 東本願寺 and 京都駅

Yesterday was a national holiday (Fall Equinox), so there were no school-related activities to be done, and everybody made plans to go out and about. I was initially going to go to the Kyoto National Museum, but after talking with a bunch of people decided to go along with Aoife, Alysson, Bob, and Pernilla on a bike trip to Fushimi-inari-taisha, a shrine in the southern part of Kyoto photographically famous for its hall of gates.

The original plan got changed when Alysson's rear tire decided that holding on to air was too high of a demand. We started asking people if they knew where any bike shops are, but had no luck. Since it was a national holiday, all the bike shops, as far as everyone knew, were closed. So eventually we got to a service station (with Alysson pushing her bike almost the entire time), and got some air shot into the thing... which did no good at all.

So, we modified the plans to fit the situation, and went to nearby Higashi Honganji, another of the big, famous temples. This one is specifically famous for being big: the Founder's Hall is one of many buildings that is claimed to be the biggest wooden structure in the world (there are other temples in Japan even that claim the same thing). But my typical luck seems to have followed me across the Pacific; we managed to pick the one temple in Kyoto that's under restoration construction work. The Founder's Hall was wrapped in a gargantuan temporary metal building to protect it during the restoration effort, and will remain as such until some time in 2011. Because of this, the Founder's Hall was closed, although we could still go on the rest of the normal tour. It was still interesting and impressive, but of course I felt that it would be quite a lot nicer without scaffolding and orange cones.

After the temple, we started going to Kyoto Station, but got distracted by a restaurant and stopped for lunch. It looked like a perfectly average noodle shop, and had a food bar on the ground floor, but since there were five of us we got seated upstairs at a traditional table. I decided I would order something I've never had, and went with ジンギスカン (jingisukan) - mutton, or, as the menu put it, barbequed ram. It was amazingly good. I neglected to take any pictures of the food, but some of the others thought of it, and I may append the day's album later.

Stomachs full, we started once again toward Kyoto Station, which is the biggest building in Kyoto and the second biggest train station in Japan. It has things like department stores, a movie theater, an amphitheatre, a bunch of restaurants, and who knows what else, in addition to being the city's central bus and train hub. I didn't know about the size of the place ahead of time, and it took me a while to figure out that the train station wasn't near what looked like a row of really big buildings, it was what looked like a row of really big buildings. It has about the same volume as Ritsumeikan's Kinugasa campus. We made the long ascent to the roof, passing alongside an amphitheatre with about 11 floors of seating, which was mostly full of people watching a high school band exhibition or competition of some sort. The roof offered pretty good views of Kyoto in most directions; after a bit of orientation I was able to pick out the school campus in the distance. The bulk of the building was also open-air. I'd like to see it in rain or snow.

After that, it was homeward bound. Alysson left her bike at the station unlocked, hoping someone will steal it before she goes back to retrieve it so that she has an excuse to buy a nicer bike, so she took the buses home. The rest of us rode. Between riding through the city and the view from the station, I have a much better sense of the size of the city and the overall character of it. Just seeing the city and riding around in the cooler weather would have been a good day; the tourist bits and the company made it even better.

Direct link to the photo album of the day

Interview, Food, Boredom, and Bikes

So this morning kicked off with the placement interviews to determine what level of conversation classes we'd be going into. Apparently, when my name was up and I was walking from the waiting room to the classroom where mine would be held, I looked terrified. To say that I am currently shy about speaking in Japanese is an understatement, and I expected the worst. My fears were by no means assuaged when I saw that I had two interviewers instead of the one that everyone else reported, nor by the fact that they were reading my (Japanese) essay from the application to the program. Being generous to my speaking skills and humble about my reading and writing skill, I'm about 10 times better at the written aspect, and I spent quite a lot of time working on that essay, with a lot of dictionary use. So my immediate thought was that they were going to hold me to that level, and that I was completely doomed.

But, the interview was surprisingly gentle. They asked me to introduce myself. When I ran out of ideas for what to say, they prompted me with questions--why I wanted to come to Japan, whether I like Japanese food, how Kyoto and Albuquerque compare, what my hobbies are, etc. They asked follow-up questions that flowed directly from my responses, which usually lead me into language dead-ends where I didn't have any idea how to answer. But they were always very friendly about it. In the end, it wound up being not nearly as bad as I had expected, despite the fact that I did just as poorly as I had expected. I once again feel like they got enough information in the right way that I'll be placed exactly where I need to be.

After that, I decided that my 3-egg breakfast had been entirely insufficient, and went to the cafeteria to obtain some much-needed protein. A quick tour of the options, as with so many other things at this school, put UNM to shame. The cafeterias are all run by the Rits Coop, which is a coop in the truest sense of the word. Members' desires run the show here, and profit doesn't seem to be a factor. I decided on the buffet after noticing the sign that said "1 gram = 1.05¥" and heaped a plate high. That price works out to $4.53 per pound, and it included plenty of meat, with everything cooked and absolutely delicious, in a country where meat is usually several dollars more per pound.

This leads to an interesting side note about how good Google's calculator has gotten. A search string of "1.05 yen per gram in dollars per pound" gives you the answer directly. I'm impressed.

Anyway, there was also free tea, both hot and cold. On first impression, the Rits cafeteria gets an unreserved two thumbs up.

After food, it was paperwork and info sessions, both of which were mind-meltingly dull and stretched for five and a half hours. After that, some of the other students at the I-House asked me to show them a couple of biking shortcuts I found while getting lost, and I got to play guide. I got to enjoy the perverse pleasure of a guide enjoying people complaining about a little bit of a hill (heh), and the less-perverse joy of being told someone else thought it was fun and amusing too.

The last note for the day is that I upgraded my Skype subscription, and now have a US phone number that people can call to reach me. If and when I get a cell phone, I can also forward calls straight to it. So my connection to home just got much stronger. My girlfriend called tonight, and while we've been talking almost every day, her being able to call me again is making me all warm and fuzzy. If anyone reading this wants my phone number, leave a comment and I'll get it to you (providing I know you and whatnot).