I swear this post will be shorter. Waking up at 6 suuuuucks. I hit the snooze a couple of times but got up in time for breakfast. Strangely, I was the only one eating…
My first class of the day was at 9, so I had some time to kill, but I decided to go early just because. I mean, I didn’t have anything to do at the house. There were tons of people on the train, I mean, considering how early it was (I got on the train around 7:15). I thought a bunch of people looked at me a couple times during my trip, probably because I’m a tall gaijin with long hair and a beard.
I got to Imadegawa around 8:15…and no one was there. I waited in the AKP library, a small room, tried reading some of the pillow book, failed, and read a little of a book on anime, which was pretty interesting.
At 9 we had a Bicycle safety course led by two policewomen in Japanese. I managed to understand the basics of what they were saying, and while I don’t ride a bike during my commute, it’s handy to know the rules so I can ride a bike around Kyoto when I want to get somewhere (and you don’t have to wear a helmet in Japan, weird).
After that I quickly got some notebooks and things for class and headed to my first academic class: Japanese review. Some of our time was spent talking about trivial things like what we did over the weekend, stuff about ourselves, etc. We also did some oral comprehension and particle work. The class went rather quickly.
After that, my lunch consisted of ramen from the cafeteria, which has very good food. Then I headed to my next class, the “Other” in Postwar Japanese Cinema. It was an introductory class so we got the syllabus and he told us what we’d be doing (the professor is a cool guy) and we ended up watching a little bit of an old propaganda anime from 1943.
It was very…subtle, as propaganda goes. I mean, it focused less on the American devils and tried to focus more on colonization and why that was a good thing. I guess it wasn’t too subtle, actually.
We didn’t finish the movie, but we discussed it for a little, then class was over. I went to the AKP office to look up a cool place to go, because I don’t have homework due until wednesday, so no homework to do tonight, so I figured I’d see something in Kyoto before heading home. I couldn’t find anywhere easily accessible, so I ended up going along with two other people to Sanjo, a huge shopping place in Kyoto.
The main attraction of Sanjo is a covered walkway that houses stores and restaurants and such on either side. At first glance it looks small, but the walkway extends for a long while, and when my friends were doing purikura (they was rather boring purikura booths unfortunately) I discovered a similar walkway running parallel to the one we had been walking on. There’s a tremendous number of shops there, and I’d like to go bck when I have more time so I can thoroughly explore the area. Most of the shops are clothing stores, and there’s not much that’s more boring to me than clothes shopping, but there’s also cool places like manga stores and stuff like that. I’d like to return.
We didn’t make much headway because we stopped in stores and stuff, so we turned back around 5:30 and I navigated back to Kyoto Station and got on the train going back home.
I got home and deposited my things upstairs before going downstairs to watch some tv before dinner. I managed to make a little conversation at dinner, more so than the previous nights, but not by much. After dinner I brought my computer down and shared some photos of my friends with okaasan and somehow managed to explain the various connections I had with them. It felt good doing that because it was solid conversation and it tested my language skills at various points.
I took a bath after that, and now I’m here.
Ha, told you I’d make it shorter. From tomorrow onwards I’ll have real work to do, so blogging may become less frequent. Hopefully, it’ll become more interesting too. Now that I have some kind of routine and I’ll be learning more Japanese on a regular basis, my skills will improve and I’ll actually be able to talk to people and do things and go on more adventures!
We’ll see.
-Shimon
