Brian's Japan Adventure

Monday September 10^th, 2007

It’s early as I write this. I have been fairly busy this morning. I woke up around 7am, which is a good regular time for my future schedule, so I hope I can keep it up. I have been sleeping well the past few nights, so I think the time-zone problems are a thing of the past. I’m still getting to bed earlier than I would like, but with all the exercise, that’s probably natural. Mom called last night at 10:30, and I had been asleep an hour already. Ah well, better than no call at all.

              So anyway, I did a little laundry since I have time today. It’s only been a few days since the last bunch, but I don’t have a hamper or anything, so dirty laundry is kinda laying all over the place. That’s probably not a bad thing, since it forces me to keep up with it. I do need to try a little harder to find bleach at the store next time I go.  When I came in from filling the washer, Marc was up and told me that a centipede in bed bit him last night. Oh yay, now there’s something new to worry about; being eaten in my sleep.  The bite looks nasty, but he’ll live. I guess I need to start watching for critters in my room.

              After breakfast (scrambled eggs & toast), I headed up the mountain to check the Internet. I had a few pages of stuff to print out for my Wednesday class too, so I got that out of the way first. I had quite a bit of email waiting this morning. One was from my sister-in-law telling me about the kids’ first week at their new school, and another was from Ptuny, containing a list of Internet cafes in Hiroshima and Okayama. I’ll look for the two in Okayama, but my schedule in Hiroshima isn’t going to be flexible enough for that kind of thing.  The bad news is that I checked the website for that pool in town, and they are actually a club, with memberships and all that. I think I may just have to forget about it.  Wah! 

4:00pm.  I mentioned in the previous paragraph that my niece and nephew both just finished their first week at new schools. Yeah, well, now I can say “me too!” to both of them. I just finished my first day at Japanese school. I wasn’t totally sure how to get there on my bicycle, but I made it on time. Marc was already there since he was teaching this morning and went directly there afterwards. The two of us were the only ones in the class other than the teacher.  She introduced herself and we briefly looked at what she wanted to use for a textbook, which she will order and give to us during the next class session. We’ll be going there twice a week starting today, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, there are several Monday holidays coming up, so it’s going to be an off-an-on schedule for Mondays, but it looks like Thursdays will be a regular thing.

We discussed greetings and very common interpersonal phrases like “konichi-wa” and stuff like that which I already knew. We then moved into various types of food and names of vegetables, meats, and types of fish.  Other than the ones that were clearly derived from English, I knew very few of these. For homework, we are supposed to memorize these words. That was no big deal.

Then we went over the entire Hiragana. She showed us the stroke order of the characters and we had to write them in little boxes. For more than an hour we traced and copied letters into little boxes. For additional homework we need to memorize all of them and write out a few short sentences. By Thursday. This is why I mentioned the kids first week of school. I remember writing letters like this during my first days in school.  I wonder if the kids realize that if they play their cards right, they can be doing the same stuff more than 30 years from now?  Somehow I don’t remember having to memorize the entire alphabet in two days though.  I just know she’s going to do the same thing with Hiragana for next time.  That’s more than a hundred characters all together. Oh well, it’s work, but this is really what I came here for I guess.

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