classing

First day of classes. I went from roughly 4 months of complete nothingness (academically speaking) straight into a 5-class day, 9am-7.40pm. Yeah, I don't believe in soft starts. I thought I'd most likely drop dead by the last two classes, but surprisingly am still alive and reasonably well.

So I started the day with a lovely 3 hours of Japanese. Now the Japanese course I'm taking is the very very basic one - the kind which uses educational cartoons of ridiculously over-acting characters displaying phrases such as 'good morning' and 'thank you'. There was even that awkward video where a foreigner introduces himself and makes even more awkward cultural mistakes. Highly educational, and also a minor bitch slap to my self-perception. Thanks to the classes I am now fluent in Japanese. Jokes.

After a proper rockstar lunch of plain rice and seaweed I headed to Mita Campus for more proper courses (the basic ones are at Hiyoshi Campus, where I live. Good for early mornings!). I felt so confident after the morning's success that I went to Elementary Orthography - learning to write Kanji, the Chinese characters. Allow me to give examples: 肉 or 全 or 食 or 用 or 適. Fun, eh? But it is, once more, a big part of Japanese language so necessary to learn in order to understand newspapers etc. I think on average you need to know about 2,000 of these to understand daily things. So I ventured, full of confidence, almost arrived late as I was rambling around the wrong building at first, sat down - and the teacher started speaking. In Japanese. Only, in Japanese. No English. At all. Thankfully the Swedish guy next to me understood a lot and translated for me. We learnt the numbers 1-10 in Kanji, and they weren't too difficult to be honest. We also got a schedule of the Kanji characters we'd learn each week. Holy cow, it gets difficult. Undecided whether I'll continue this class or not.

We finished early so I sat down with the girls and looked through clubs and societies we can join. I particularly liked the "I am uninterested in ordinary human beings. If you are a creature from outer space, please join." but then saw that no non-Japanese speakers were welcome. I can't but wonder - how the heck do those criteria go together? We wanted to e-mail the leader and ask (I mean, we do have Alien Registration cards!) but decided not to. He might be creepy and it's best to keep a low profile around the creeps. Anyway, found some interesting ones - cooking, basketball, dancing (of which I probably can do none as I am a. vegan, so cooking class will be awkward, and b. have a busted knee so no sports for me). 

Then it was time for class numéro 4: Japanese Psychology. It was all about conflict and anger management and the teacher spent one hour explaining why she was interested in it (cultural shock of the violent outrage anger expression from an African student, say no more) and discussing why more girls than boys took the course. Then we drew our representation of 'Anger' with coloured pens and everything. Very, erm, special class. Might not go back. Yeah, probably not. Seeing other people's drawings freaked me out. Fricking artists.

So when the bell rang (yes, they have bells proper high school style!) I thought the Arts Workshop might be a better place for the very artistic soul that I am (note for all Sheldons out there: sarcasm). However, this arts class sounds incredible. Field trips to museums, photo books, book covers, fake food, self-portraits, Edo glass art - the list is long! And the teacher wants essays to be fun and colourful! How can you not love that?! I just hope I can squeeze out some creativity, because at the moment it's all focused on writing, not 'art-art'.

Tomorrow is a national holiday which means no class. A whole 3 days free until Monday when it all begins again. Before then of course - football with Freddie on Saturday! Also planning a trip to IKEA in Yokohama...

Now - sleep. Awfully tiring this school stuff.

Jo x