First view of Konan
The story continues with my description of Thursday's events. Hopefully by the end of Monday I'll be caught up, although we won't get into a pattern until next week probably. Again, I wrote quite a bit, although it's only one day instead of two and a half or whatever. My host parents are just sitting on the couch watching TV at the moment while I sit at the kitchen table with my laptop. I'm really glad I have my laptop and even more glad I can connect to the internet here, even if it's a little limited on where I can do it. I was worried I'd have to lug it to school to print papers or something, but now I can just email them to myself. I probably won't have to use my Konan email account all that much. Oh yeah, it should be in my profile now if anyone wants to contact me. If you know my other email accounts, you can use those too. I'll probably check my other accounts more often, actually, especially here because I already have them bookmarked and all.
09/11/04 1645
I've been so busy in the past couple of days that I haven't even had time to type up things that have happened, and there have been so many new things that it's hard to remember all of them anyway. I'll try to continue where I left off though.
So on Thursday, we all had to get up and be ready to go by 9:00 for more orientation. I had most of the same things as the previous day, although I felt like I couldn't eat as much. I'm still not sure whether that was jet lag or nervousness, but I suppose jet lag was the cause of not being able to sleep terribly well. In any case, by 9:00 we were walking toward the train station to travel to Konan. This would be our first real orientation, since we would get our network login, see the Ajisai room (more on that later), eat in the Konan cafeteria, and get an overview of each of the four possible English-language classes.
For some reason we didn't actually go to the station that's closest to Konan (Okamoto). I forget why, but we had to walk a fair ways to get to the campus once we left the station. Some people were complaining, but it was an interesting walk, I think, even if it was really hot out. Just like my high school from my previous exchange program, the entrance road to Konan slopes up significantly. Also in anime I've seen a number of schools have this too...I'm not sure why, except that Japan is so mountainous that there are a lot of slopes around anyway. Jeff said that Kanazawa (his previous exchange university) didn't have a sloping entrance though.
I didn't take any pictures of the outside of Konan yet because I figure I'll have all year to do that. I'll be able to take pictures in every season even. I did take a picture of the inside of a Japanese-language room because I thought the desks looked interesting. I'm getting a little ahead of myself though. When we arrived, we were taken to Building 5 and shown into the Ajisai room, which is basically the international student lounge. Ajisai is the Japanese word for hydrangea...not sure why they use that flower for the name of the room though. One of the Japanese students in the Konan international student club is actually named Ajisa, written the same way.
We were given name tags and Konan guidebooks and then split up into several groups. Amusingly enough, Jeff and I were in the same group. We thought it was rigged again until we discovered that Doug and Tassa weren't in the same group. Anyway, each group had three Japanese students from the international club to lead us on a tour of Konan, plus one of the five Australian students who have been here since January. I guess the Australian school year is reversed from ours, so they start the program in January and leave in December so they get two semesters. They're lucky since they get a whole year I guess, although it seems like sometimes they return to Australia for the three-month summer break. Anyway, in January we'll be able to help the new group of Australians get settled in. They'll need more help since they only get one day of orientation before starting class, as opposed to our three.
I don't remember where anything is yet, but we visited a Japanese classroom (where I took that picture), the library, the tech center (or something like that, where students can search for things in the library), a computer lab, the gym, and a couple other places. The other two students we had were Kana and Youhei; all three of them talked to us in whichever language was easiest. So Jeff and I talked to Youhei mostly in Japanese. Of course, they like to practice English, too.
After going through the campus store (and noticing that they have some cheap used cds plus a student discount on new cds...), we ended up at the cafeteria. There are quite a number of choices, many of which are quite cheap but filling, so that's nice. I may end up eating there fairly often for lunch, we'll see. Anyway, I had kitsune udon, which is basically a soup broth with really thick noodles (udon) plus some thin slices of meat (which is represented by kitsune, literally a kind of fox, but it's not fox meat. Do people actually eat foxes?). That was about 270 or 280 yen I think, which is less than $3. It didn't last me the whole afternoon, so next time I'll get something more, but it tasted really good, anyway.
While we were eating, we had to fill out a little piece of paper with our name, school, major, hobbies, Japanese foods we want to eat, and favorite word. Most people filled it out in English, but Jeff and I did it entirely in Japanese, just because we could. I think the Japanese students were a little surprised. It seems that after just a few words of Japanese, a Japanese person will compliment you as a foreigner on your Japanese no matter how little you know, but after that, they seem not to be terribly surprised if you can speak quite well. However, if you then demonstrate that you can read a few kanji, they are once again surprised and start giving compliments again. I noticed that effect with my previous host family too.
After lunch we had several different informational sessions. One was in the computer lab, which gave me a long-awaited opportunity to go on the internet briefly and check my mail and such. I still didn't have a response from my host family, although I'd sent them a message about a week earlier. I figured they probably didn't check their mail very often though. Most elderly people don't, I assume. I was confused by the lab at first though because on the first machine I tried, the internet didn't work. I have no idea why one random computer wasn't hooked up, but after I moved to another one, I didn't have any trouble getting it to work, even though all of the machines run the Japanese version of Windows. I know what things should say enough that even if I can't actually read it, I still know what's going on. Konan is fairly generous with its computers though; the labs have decent hours, plus we are given 50 MB of space on the servers and 500 pages of printing per semester. Actually, they said 1000 for the year, so it's probably possible to use more than 500 in one semester, although I don't know why I would. The UIUC college of engineering only gives us 300 pages per semester, and I don't usually use that much.
We also had an introductory Japanese lesson; we were divided into three groups by skill level and then separated into different classrooms. I theorized that it was by number of years of Japanese, but a couple of the Pittsburgh students were in the same group as me, Jeff, Doug, and Tassa. We've all had three years, but the Pittsburgh students have only had two. I talked to Melissa later and found out that since the Pittsburgh program focuses on speaking, often those students are assumed to be better than just two years' worth. However, they don't know as many kanji, so they can't read as much. Melissa herself didn't appear to know much during class, oddly enough, but she said later that she knows quite a bit, but the class happened to use a few certain phrases that she was never taught. In any case, it wasn't much a problem for us, except that we had to do jikoshoukai (self-introductions), which I really hate doing. They're always formal and always use set phrases, but I usually end up forgetting what order I'm supposed to say the various things, which usually include at minimum (1) name, (2) university/city of origin, (3) major, (4) closing set phrase. We UIUC people all got a little confused because our jikoshoukai have always included hobbies after saying our major, so once we got to the end, we tried to think if there was anything else we had to say, but there wasn't. Besides for that, we also went over a number of common situations with set phrases, just as a review. Nothing terribly interesting, although I heard later that the teacher we had is pretty strict and kind of mean when it comes to corrections. I believe it. I don't really want to have her, but I think she teaches the higher levels.
During a session on things to do to make our homestays successful, we met Professor Rycroft, who is a big, friendly, British man with white hair who seems very nice. I like his accent in English, too. In Japanese he just sounds English-speaking foreign for the most part, but in English he has a nice British accent. He's been in Japan for twenty-some years, so he knows Japanese quite well it seems. He'll be teaching a class called "Encounters in the Meiji Era" or something like that, which I decided I wanted to take after reading the description and hearing him talk to us before the Japanese lesson. I was going to take Professor West's art history class, but after the descriptions, Rycroft's just sounded a lot more interesting, plus it counts for literature credit, which I need for my major. We'll be reading several novels in translation, plus some other stuff too. I've heard West is a cool teacher, plus he does interesting field trips, but I'm just not as interested in the subject. I'll probably take his class in the spring though (I forget what it is at the moment). The third class is a business and economics class, whose professor wasn't even present to talk about it. I wasn't going to take it anyway, so I didn't really care.
The fourth class, which will be the other class I'll take this semester, is Professor Kim's linguistics class. Chin Woo Kim is the director of the program for this year, actually, and he came from UIUC to do this. He's actually a linguistics professor at UIUC, but he was selected to be the director for this year, so he's here with us and has a house somewhere near the campus to live in for the year. He speaks Japanese, better than us, anyway, plus English of course, although he's ethnically Korean and I'm sure he speaks Korean also, since he has a Korean accent in both English and Japanese. We were supposed to sign up for classes then, or at least be given the forms to do so, but Kim-sensei decided not to pass them out until Monday because of the whole delay in the orientation schedule and such.
Once we were dismissed from our orientation sessions, Jeff wanted to hurry back to the hotel so we could sign up for keitai denwa (cell phones). He'd found a good deal from the company called "au" which would cost about 2000 yen per month plus fees for calls made and emails sent and such, and would give us the phone included, if we signed up for a year. The fees seemed reasonable, and it sounded like we might be able to get an additional student discount of half off those fees, too. When we got there, though, we found out that randomly, that office was closed on Thursdays. Wednesday or maybe sometimes Monday or Friday are common days to take off (besides the weekend), but we never thought it would be closed on Thursdays. Jeff was disappointed, since it means we probably won't be able to get them until Monday.
That night, we had a Konan-arranged dinner at the Chinese restaurant near the hotel. The food was quite good, but again, I felt exhausted by around 6 or so. I forced myself to stay awake, but my friends noticed I was spacing out for a while near the end. After that was over, I went back to my room and napped with music for a while. I was going to wrap some presents for my family (Jeff and I had gone to the little mall near the hotel and found some wrapping paper before dinner.) but I was too tired. I ended up napping with music and then just going to bed about 11.
09/11/04 1645
I've been so busy in the past couple of days that I haven't even had time to type up things that have happened, and there have been so many new things that it's hard to remember all of them anyway. I'll try to continue where I left off though.
So on Thursday, we all had to get up and be ready to go by 9:00 for more orientation. I had most of the same things as the previous day, although I felt like I couldn't eat as much. I'm still not sure whether that was jet lag or nervousness, but I suppose jet lag was the cause of not being able to sleep terribly well. In any case, by 9:00 we were walking toward the train station to travel to Konan. This would be our first real orientation, since we would get our network login, see the Ajisai room (more on that later), eat in the Konan cafeteria, and get an overview of each of the four possible English-language classes.
For some reason we didn't actually go to the station that's closest to Konan (Okamoto). I forget why, but we had to walk a fair ways to get to the campus once we left the station. Some people were complaining, but it was an interesting walk, I think, even if it was really hot out. Just like my high school from my previous exchange program, the entrance road to Konan slopes up significantly. Also in anime I've seen a number of schools have this too...I'm not sure why, except that Japan is so mountainous that there are a lot of slopes around anyway. Jeff said that Kanazawa (his previous exchange university) didn't have a sloping entrance though.
I didn't take any pictures of the outside of Konan yet because I figure I'll have all year to do that. I'll be able to take pictures in every season even. I did take a picture of the inside of a Japanese-language room because I thought the desks looked interesting. I'm getting a little ahead of myself though. When we arrived, we were taken to Building 5 and shown into the Ajisai room, which is basically the international student lounge. Ajisai is the Japanese word for hydrangea...not sure why they use that flower for the name of the room though. One of the Japanese students in the Konan international student club is actually named Ajisa, written the same way.
We were given name tags and Konan guidebooks and then split up into several groups. Amusingly enough, Jeff and I were in the same group. We thought it was rigged again until we discovered that Doug and Tassa weren't in the same group. Anyway, each group had three Japanese students from the international club to lead us on a tour of Konan, plus one of the five Australian students who have been here since January. I guess the Australian school year is reversed from ours, so they start the program in January and leave in December so they get two semesters. They're lucky since they get a whole year I guess, although it seems like sometimes they return to Australia for the three-month summer break. Anyway, in January we'll be able to help the new group of Australians get settled in. They'll need more help since they only get one day of orientation before starting class, as opposed to our three.
I don't remember where anything is yet, but we visited a Japanese classroom (where I took that picture), the library, the tech center (or something like that, where students can search for things in the library), a computer lab, the gym, and a couple other places. The other two students we had were Kana and Youhei; all three of them talked to us in whichever language was easiest. So Jeff and I talked to Youhei mostly in Japanese. Of course, they like to practice English, too.
After going through the campus store (and noticing that they have some cheap used cds plus a student discount on new cds...), we ended up at the cafeteria. There are quite a number of choices, many of which are quite cheap but filling, so that's nice. I may end up eating there fairly often for lunch, we'll see. Anyway, I had kitsune udon, which is basically a soup broth with really thick noodles (udon) plus some thin slices of meat (which is represented by kitsune, literally a kind of fox, but it's not fox meat. Do people actually eat foxes?). That was about 270 or 280 yen I think, which is less than $3. It didn't last me the whole afternoon, so next time I'll get something more, but it tasted really good, anyway.
While we were eating, we had to fill out a little piece of paper with our name, school, major, hobbies, Japanese foods we want to eat, and favorite word. Most people filled it out in English, but Jeff and I did it entirely in Japanese, just because we could. I think the Japanese students were a little surprised. It seems that after just a few words of Japanese, a Japanese person will compliment you as a foreigner on your Japanese no matter how little you know, but after that, they seem not to be terribly surprised if you can speak quite well. However, if you then demonstrate that you can read a few kanji, they are once again surprised and start giving compliments again. I noticed that effect with my previous host family too.
After lunch we had several different informational sessions. One was in the computer lab, which gave me a long-awaited opportunity to go on the internet briefly and check my mail and such. I still didn't have a response from my host family, although I'd sent them a message about a week earlier. I figured they probably didn't check their mail very often though. Most elderly people don't, I assume. I was confused by the lab at first though because on the first machine I tried, the internet didn't work. I have no idea why one random computer wasn't hooked up, but after I moved to another one, I didn't have any trouble getting it to work, even though all of the machines run the Japanese version of Windows. I know what things should say enough that even if I can't actually read it, I still know what's going on. Konan is fairly generous with its computers though; the labs have decent hours, plus we are given 50 MB of space on the servers and 500 pages of printing per semester. Actually, they said 1000 for the year, so it's probably possible to use more than 500 in one semester, although I don't know why I would. The UIUC college of engineering only gives us 300 pages per semester, and I don't usually use that much.
We also had an introductory Japanese lesson; we were divided into three groups by skill level and then separated into different classrooms. I theorized that it was by number of years of Japanese, but a couple of the Pittsburgh students were in the same group as me, Jeff, Doug, and Tassa. We've all had three years, but the Pittsburgh students have only had two. I talked to Melissa later and found out that since the Pittsburgh program focuses on speaking, often those students are assumed to be better than just two years' worth. However, they don't know as many kanji, so they can't read as much. Melissa herself didn't appear to know much during class, oddly enough, but she said later that she knows quite a bit, but the class happened to use a few certain phrases that she was never taught. In any case, it wasn't much a problem for us, except that we had to do jikoshoukai (self-introductions), which I really hate doing. They're always formal and always use set phrases, but I usually end up forgetting what order I'm supposed to say the various things, which usually include at minimum (1) name, (2) university/city of origin, (3) major, (4) closing set phrase. We UIUC people all got a little confused because our jikoshoukai have always included hobbies after saying our major, so once we got to the end, we tried to think if there was anything else we had to say, but there wasn't. Besides for that, we also went over a number of common situations with set phrases, just as a review. Nothing terribly interesting, although I heard later that the teacher we had is pretty strict and kind of mean when it comes to corrections. I believe it. I don't really want to have her, but I think she teaches the higher levels.
During a session on things to do to make our homestays successful, we met Professor Rycroft, who is a big, friendly, British man with white hair who seems very nice. I like his accent in English, too. In Japanese he just sounds English-speaking foreign for the most part, but in English he has a nice British accent. He's been in Japan for twenty-some years, so he knows Japanese quite well it seems. He'll be teaching a class called "Encounters in the Meiji Era" or something like that, which I decided I wanted to take after reading the description and hearing him talk to us before the Japanese lesson. I was going to take Professor West's art history class, but after the descriptions, Rycroft's just sounded a lot more interesting, plus it counts for literature credit, which I need for my major. We'll be reading several novels in translation, plus some other stuff too. I've heard West is a cool teacher, plus he does interesting field trips, but I'm just not as interested in the subject. I'll probably take his class in the spring though (I forget what it is at the moment). The third class is a business and economics class, whose professor wasn't even present to talk about it. I wasn't going to take it anyway, so I didn't really care.
The fourth class, which will be the other class I'll take this semester, is Professor Kim's linguistics class. Chin Woo Kim is the director of the program for this year, actually, and he came from UIUC to do this. He's actually a linguistics professor at UIUC, but he was selected to be the director for this year, so he's here with us and has a house somewhere near the campus to live in for the year. He speaks Japanese, better than us, anyway, plus English of course, although he's ethnically Korean and I'm sure he speaks Korean also, since he has a Korean accent in both English and Japanese. We were supposed to sign up for classes then, or at least be given the forms to do so, but Kim-sensei decided not to pass them out until Monday because of the whole delay in the orientation schedule and such.
Once we were dismissed from our orientation sessions, Jeff wanted to hurry back to the hotel so we could sign up for keitai denwa (cell phones). He'd found a good deal from the company called "au" which would cost about 2000 yen per month plus fees for calls made and emails sent and such, and would give us the phone included, if we signed up for a year. The fees seemed reasonable, and it sounded like we might be able to get an additional student discount of half off those fees, too. When we got there, though, we found out that randomly, that office was closed on Thursdays. Wednesday or maybe sometimes Monday or Friday are common days to take off (besides the weekend), but we never thought it would be closed on Thursdays. Jeff was disappointed, since it means we probably won't be able to get them until Monday.
That night, we had a Konan-arranged dinner at the Chinese restaurant near the hotel. The food was quite good, but again, I felt exhausted by around 6 or so. I forced myself to stay awake, but my friends noticed I was spacing out for a while near the end. After that was over, I went back to my room and napped with music for a while. I was going to wrap some presents for my family (Jeff and I had gone to the little mall near the hotel and found some wrapping paper before dinner.) but I was too tired. I ended up napping with music and then just going to bed about 11.