First day of class

I guess I missed a day of journaling, so I’ll have to catch up a bit. Yesterday was my first day of classes. Classes start at 9:30, so I have to leave the house at about 8:30 to make it there in time what with walking and the subway and all. It’s 10 stops from here to the stop closest to the school, so it takes a little while. Here’s a map of the Fukuoka subway if you’re interested (I get on at Susenji and off at Akasaka).

Consistent with Japanese culture, you have to take your shoes off as soon as you enter the building, put them on a rack, and put on a pair of slippers that they provide for you. The first thing I had to do after that was undergo a brief oral interview to determine my level of proficiency. It was basically just a bunch of simple questions like “Where are you from?” and “What are your hobbies?” Then, I underwent orientation. Nothing really of note there. After that, since the level check and orientation only took about an hour and my classes didn’t start until 12:30, I had a couple hours to kill. I wasn’t really hungry, so I just kinda wandered around the city until it was time to go back. I tried a Fanta Shaker, which was kinda interesting. I suppose the best way to describe it is carbonated jello in a can. Like the name implies, you have to shake it before you open it or, well, it’s just a big lump of jello that you’ll have a hell of a time trying to get out of that small a hole.

After that, classes started. It was sort of different from what I expected. A lot of…talking. It feels kind of slow to me, but I guess I’m used to the pace of a college education. For some reason, we were talking about different kinds of children’s games in Japan. The only two I had actually heard of were sugoroku, which is some kind of board game, and janken, which is better known to us as rock paper scissors. After class ended, I was starting to get hungry so I looked for somewhere to eat. Admittedly, I wasn’t feeling very adventurous and it’s still kind of hard for me to read menus, so I copped out and went to McDonald’s. I have to say, though, it’s set up pretty differently from the ones in the west. I wasn’t sure, but from what I could tell there wasn’t any menu for ordering things a la carte. There were just 4 or 5 different burgers with an individual or combo (they call them sets) price listed. Interestingly enough, none of the options had no cheese. I ended up going for a quarter-pounder combo. I didn’t realize it until someone pointed it out to me later, but it’s interesting that they still call it a quarter-pounder when the rest of the nation uses metric.

After returning home, I did the simple homework that was assigned that day (fill in the blanks with new vocabulary). Because I was tired, I ended up going to sleep around 8 PM. I’m equally tired right now, but I’ll elaborate on my exploits today in a different post because I don’t feel like writing any more right now.