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.

Alien registration

Today a group of 10 of us went to the school and to the ward office to get our 外国人登録証 (Alien Registration Card) paperwork taken care of. Since we were going as a group, I had to play along and take public transportation. We took the bus to school, and did the paperwork there, with the SKP Buddies checking to make sure we did the paperwork correctly. Then we walked to the train station, and took the train to the ward office, then after that was done repeated the route in reverse. The train cost 200円 each way, and the bus 220円; all together, for probably less than six miles, it totalled 840円, which at the current rate is about $7.96.

I think I'll stick to my bike and my feet for daily errands, and definitely for going to school. Taking the bus every day I need to go to campus this semester, assuming I don't take any weekend trips, would cost 19580円: $185.42. I can think of a lot of things I'd rather do with that amount of money.

Anyway, I hadn't met any of the people in the group yet; most of them got here in the last couple of days. In no particular order: Alysson and Bob from London, Aoife from Dublin, Peter from Australia, Stephani from Seattle, and a girl from Soeul whose name I forgot (hey, I'm trying). We met three more of the SKP Buddies. SKP Buddies are Japanese Ritsumeikan students who help us lost new international students around. I had already met Yuki and Miho, who live in the I-House II. Today I met Asako, Tomoyo, and Yo-chan. They're all really helpful, and Yo-chan in particular was loads of fun. She asked us if any of us were in the Japanese World Perspectives program, and when we answered that we were all in SKP (Study in Kyoto Program, the intensive language track), she gave a delighted laugh and refused to speak any more English for the rest of the day, and tried to keep us talking as much as possible.

I did bring my camera, but my attempts at candid group shots pretty much all completely failed, and I didn't feel like asking for a posed group shot. Pictures with people will come sooner or later.

One thing of particular interest I learned today came from Eva: a program called Anki exists that does a lot of the things I've been looking for in a program. It's got kanji and word information and does intelligent progress-based flash card quizzes. I'll still write my own program, since this still doesn't have a pretty major aspect of what I have in mind for what I think would be the best kanji and vocabulary learning software, but for now this has the very distinct advantage of already being written and working. I'm going to be pretty much studying all night tonight, and all of tomorrow, in preparation for the written placement tests Friday morning. They don't really care how well or poorly people do on the placement tests, as they have classes ranging from almost pure beginner to completely fluent, so I don't need to stress out about it... but I want to get placed into a level that challenges me. The better I do, the harder things will be, so I'm aiming high.