Second day of school. School is school, anywhere you go. I forgot that in signing up for this program I'm actually supposed to learn things. Crazy, I know. I'm still trying to cope with it. Also, I've had the longest spring break known to man. I finished finals early, so essentially my spring break was three weeks long. A week in Seattle. A week at home. A week in Japan. It was basically as long as my Christmas break.
Today was my first real run of catching the train to school all by my lonesome. It didn't go too bad. I managed to snag a seat on my first train, although I took a wrong turn while exiting and tried to enter the bullet train waiting area instead of the subway area. Ooops. At least I like to think it's trivial. It is. It is. I got to school on time with a few minutes to spare so I went on my computer (ahhhhhh wifi) to kill time.
My first class was Introduction to Electronics. Probably the most painful lecture I have ever sat through, mostly due to the fact that the lecturer talked. Did I mention it was a recording? A recording from four years ago.
After my classes were done I went with a large group of people to hunt down a place to eat. There were about 15 of us, which would have made it impossible for us to eat at a restaurant, so we settled for the dining hall at a nearby campus. Surprise, surprise, they served the exact same food as our dining hall. But I like to think that we really went for the journey and camaraderie, not the food. Okay, we mostly went for the food.
On the walk back to our campus, we paused by some Sakura trees. The wind was blowing and the petals were falling like snow. So pretty like some kind crazy J drama. I half expected some metro Japanese boy to grab some stylish Japanese girl and confess his love, which unlike the sakura is not a fleeting thing. But no, the metro Japanese boys and stylish Japanese girls continued to sit and be normal.
I met my host mother at Kyoto Tower Hotel. From there we went over to the Kyoto Station so I could purchase my 3 month subway pass. Thank goodness she was there. I'm pretty sure it would have been rather impossible for me to do all of that on my own. We then went to the JR window to purchase my JR monthly pass. Finally, I don't have to go to the window before every train ride and buy a new ticket. Totally saves me like a minute. Hooray!
Tokyo Tower.
After all that bus pass business, which by the way was not cheap one bit (thank goodness we get a travel stipend) my host mother took me to apply for an alien registration card. Although I don't technically need one, since I'm staying for less than six months, in order to get a cell phone, I need to present one of those bad boys. That was a big ball of fun. And I received the customary 'Oh, you're from Hawaii' stare when I wrote out my birthplace.
Did I mention my host family has a dog? Did I mention that dog absolutely loves me? I don't even know why. It's a little dog, I've never been a huge fan of little dogs, but I've been decently nice to this one (it's soft, that helps) but this little thing just jumps in my lap every chance it gets. Anyways, I mention this because after my application to become an alien, we went to visit a shrine. This is the first shrine that I've been to that wasn't completely crowded and packed with people. In fact, no one was there except for my host mother, Sheru (the dog) and me. I liked it. I wish more of the shrines in Kyoto were quiet like that. But then Kyoto wouldn't be Kyoto.
After that, after that, home dinner, the usual. Oh! But there was this fad diet show on TV that my host mother was just eating up. No pun intended, seriously. Apparently you'll get skinny if you eat half an avocado before every meal or eat a bunch of kiwis, just kiwis for breakfast. The show followed the hottest 70 year old woman ever and another woman, the fattest Japanese woman I have ever seen. Both lost weight, and my host mother guaranteed me that by tomorrow there would be no kiwis or avocados to be found in the super markets. It's Japan, they pick up fads like hobos pick up loose change.
Bath bed. I'm tired. I need to get more sleep.
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