ONE MORE DAY OF WAITING
Harry Potter. Saturday. YES. I am ready.
Um yeah. We all got in big trouble today. I don't know if this university will want any Americans next summer. We skip class alot, the boys are drunken disasters, and the hotel that we stayed at for Nagasaki doesn't want us back. So the Associate Dean called us all in for a meeting and said how he was dissapointed that we aren't taking the program very seriously.
Personally, my only crime is skipping class. I missed for the Kyoto trip, and slept in two days. I'm so burned out. Four hours of Japanese a day, at 8:45 in the morning, (sometimes we have 8 hours a day) gets old fast. It's been six and a half weeks, and I have absolutely no will to go to class at all. I've learned SO much Japanese, but at this point I feel overloaded. So far I've taken, in six weeks, the equivalent of 3 semesters of St Ed's Japanese classes. Yep. And there's another whole semester in the next two weeks. I'll have gone through the entire Genki textbook!
Surprisingly, I'm able to use my Japanese in dialy life quite often. My favorite phrase is "~~ga arimaska" which means "Do you have/Is there ~~?" I can ask "Do you have milk" at a restaurant, "Do you have English books?" at a bookstore, etc. It's great! Unlike some of the others in the program, I don't freeze up on the spot when I have to say something in Japanese in real life. Because it's one thing to know how to say stuff and then be too nervous to say anythign at all, and another to have the guts to brave mistakes and just use what you know. I've gotten so good that sometimes they mistake me for knowing more than I actually do, and they blabber on in Japanese, and I just nod and smile. The thing I hate most about the language is that it takes SOOOO long to say anything. When in English you can say "That's my book." In Japanese it's "Kore wa watashi no hon des." Thee syllables verses 7!!
Yeah, I'm ready to go back to the states. I miss my family and friends, and real meat. There's almost no beef here. I want fajitas soooo bad. Just two more weeks. Daijoubu. It's ok.
I've been going to the onsen quite alot, and I have to say that it feels sooooo good. Public bathing really isn't so bad once you get used to it. Even though lots of the Japanese women stare at me cause they've never seen a naked white girl before, I just smile and they look away, since staring is really impolite. My favorite onsen is an outdoor one, women only, with big rocks instead of tile or concrete, so I feel like a mermaid. The minerals in the water are soooo good, my skin feels awesome afterwards. It wasn't as skin tinglingly hot as some of the others, but hot enough to be really relaxing. I'm going to miss the onsens! Beppu is actually the hot springs capital of Japan, were lots of Japanese people come for vacations. After seeing thebig cities like Osaka and Kyoto, I can see why this woud be a nice change of pace. However, I would not want to be stuck in Beppu for for years of college! It's quite boring and really far away from the rest of modern Japan.
Yeah, Steve and I went to Kyoto last weekend. It was awesome! Kyoto is my favorite city I've seen in Japan. There was a huge festival that weekend, so almost all the girls were in Yukata (summer kimono) and the streets were filled with vendors and...well I guess they were like parade floats, but they were actually ornately decorated boats on big platforms, with paper lanterns hung allll over them, and people inside them playing tradional Japanese drums and music. It was really cool! I ate some okonamiyaki, which was delicious, and a candy apple, and some nikuyaki, or meat on a stick. Mmm. There were also entire grilled squids, tacoyaki (octopus balls) and yakitori (chicken on a stick) and tons of other stuff. The games were those little kiddy pools full of water, and you have to try and scoop out little prizes or fish into a bowl using a thin paper thing, which breaks when too wet.
The ferry ride to Kyoto was NOT fun though. It was an overnight ferry, and while I might be used to bathing with other people, I'm not used to sleeping in a room packed like sardines on kindergarden nap-time mats with 40 other people! The ride back was worse though, because one lady was snoring so obnoxiously loud that I could hardly get to sleep.
Anyway. Tomorrow I have class again, and then I might go see HP 5 movie in Oita, since tomorrow is when it's coming out in Japan.
I'm SOOO psyched about HP7!!!