Catching Up on the Day of 444

So it's been about a week since I left home. At 5:30. In the morning. Awful. Columbus to Chicago in an hour, then five more to San Francisco. It was about that flight that I noticed a lot of people that looked an awful lot like students potentially going to Japan. Turns out the flight might as well have been divided into two groups: Japanese people and ryuugakusei (exchange students). Unlike I had thought before leaving Ohio, I was not the only one taking a very specific flight into a very specific airport. Coincidence? Yes, a very unlikely one, but one nonetheless. So then it was eleven hours over the Pacific Ocean to Kansai International Airport. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad but then, at the beginning of the flight keep in mind, my on board computer froze. For the entire flight. Ugh.

So then we landed at 3:00pm JPT (2:00am EST), took a bus at 4:00 to the seminar houses, the dorms in this case, and I finally got into my room about 5:45 -- 6:00. As I was contemplating a nap, I was told of a trip to the supermarket as sort of an introduction to where it was and whatnot. Running out the door to catch up with the group that left, we came to find out that the supermarket we were going to was about 15 minutes away, relatively inconvenient for Japan. (Although later, I came to find out that there is one closer to the seminar houses that I can go to >_<) I finished the night out with dinner and then quickly crashing, with absolutely no energy left in my achy, sleep-deprived body.

Fast forward through your Saturday because at the time I woke up, 7:00am JPT (Japan Time) Sunday, it was still 6:00pm EST Saturday. Yay for weird time differences! I awoke to the not-so-comforting sound of it pouring rain outside; good thing I didn't want to do anything. For a good portion of the day, I sat around the seminar house waiting for the rain to lighten or maybe stop entirely. Eventually, I took a chance that I thought was good and tried to walk to Kansai Gaidai's campus. First thing I had to do to get there was walk the 15 minutes to the supermarket and then keep going. Another 10 minutes, in the rain still mind you, I run across my first convenience store since arriving in Hirakatashi (Hirakata City). It's so "convenient" that's it's only another 5 -- 10 minutes to campus from there, but a smattering of 20 -- 25 minutes from the seminar house. I stopped by for a quick snack before continuing on my way, but I decided that I had enough of the rain for one day and started walking back to the seminar house. Good thing too, cause it started to rain harder again. After sitting around, lamenting the fact that I had not brought an adapter for my computer charger (the kind that changes your plug from 3-prong to 2-prong, effectively removing your grounding), I decided to venture out again and possibly find campus. The weather decided to cooperate with me and it was a dry night and I did eventually find the main gate to campus, almost 30 minutes away by foot. (Of course now that I've been there so much I can make the walk in 20 -- 25 minutes) From campus, I started back toward the seminar house but stopped by Sukiya for dinner. A good description of Sukiya is that it's almost like the McDonald's of gyuudon (beef bowls). I got a medium sized gyuudon for 280JPY (approx. $2.80) which was filling in and of itself. After dinner I finished walking back and soon went to bed, probably around 9:30pm JPT.

Again fast forward to 7:00am JPT Monday. This was the first day of any kind of orientation activities. Honestly, all that happened officially was that there was an introduction to the orientation and then I had a campus tour. I still had to find some sort of adapter for my computer, so I asked around and found a store called ED-ON, which is like a giant department store, that I managed to find one so I could back up on my computer. Later that day though, I went back to campus to turn in some paperwork and also meet my speaking partner, Hiromi Ichikawa (JPN. Ichikawa Hiromi-san), who had club practice that day and was on campus (she's in the Chorus club for all you vocalists that are reading). After we met up, she took me on another tour of the campus and then we had lunch at one of the cafeterias that are on campus before we left and I went back to the seminar house to relax. (FYI, on campus there are 3 cafeterias, a McDonald's, a Seattle's Best Coffee, and a convenience store)

Tuesday was my scheduled Japanese Language Placement Test. I must say that that test was one of the hardest tests I've taken since ever. No joke did I "fail". Although the scores were just meant to help with the class placement, when you see a 36 out of 100, you can't help but feel like you failed, at least I can't. But yeah, I got a 36 on Japanese grammar, a 32 on kanji reading, and a 28 on kanji recognition. Ow. After that I just stress relieved the rest of the day. Not much else of note on Tuesday after that.

Wednesday was the first day of "actual" orientation, when any students that weren't already here for the pre-orientation stuff were going to be here. It started with another introduction to the orientation, and was followed by time scheduled to meet some of the faculty that would be teaching our classes. During that time, I met my advisor Professor Scott Lind and also chatted with a professor I met at the airport, Professor Tom Buchman, who actually teaches accounting to the Japanese students. He gave me a map to a few restaurants that he (and Dr. Barkhymer there at Otterbein) recommended to me. Then there was an official introduction of the staff followed by a safety orientation and then we could go talk to the faculty again. At the urging of Dr. Barkhymer, I went and met Hideaki Okawa-sensei (JPN. Okawa Hideaki-sensei). We talked briefly and he told me that I'd been placed into the "lower level" 2 of Japanese language, but that if I did really well on a test next Friday that I could move up to the "higher level" 2 Japanese course. At that time, I also met Dr. George Hlawatsch another acquaintance of Dr. Barkhymer.

That night some of the orientation assistants of seminar house 1 planned on taking residents to a place called Kappa Sushi, which is one of the conveyor belt sushi places. There were definitely some unique things about this sushi place compared to the one I went to last time I was in Japan (aside from being on the conveyor belt). For example, there was corn sushi, or french fries, or even hamburger sushi. It was lots of fun being there and it only cost as much as we ate so pricing wasn't even too bad (105JPY, approx. $1.05, per plate).

Thursday brought more orientation stuff plus a trip to Hirakatshi. The walk there was about 25 minutes from campus, but I went in kind of the wrong way so it took me about 40 minutes to find the city hall to finish getting my residence card set up. Getting that taken care of, I went back to campus for yet another meeting. On the way, I found one of the restaurants recommended to me multiple times, Ōshō (JPN. 王将, lit. King). Here, I had a plate of gyoza (fried dumplings) and karaage (fried chicken), and dear lord, was it delicious. And at 700-some JPY for it all, was I impressed. I returned to campus with less time to spare than I had thought at the time, time which I spent daydreaming at the small pond on campus. After that I had to attend the session to set up a bank account which took forever and a day, but I got through it. I rushed over to the club building after I finished so I could go to a kendobu (kendo club) practice, but I didn't find them in the room I thought they practiced and so I inquired at the taiikukai (JPN. 体育会, lit. Sports Council, they're kinda in charge of the sports clubs on campus), but there was some difficulty in talking and they said that they would call the next day (which I wasn't). (In fact, I'm still in the process of trying to pinpoint the kendobu so that I can, hopefully, join for the semester.) After leaving campus, I went down the road to another of the restaurants recommended to me. It has a kind of complicated name that I don't really remember off the top of my head, but the food is pretty good and the price is again really good for what I got. The owners were really kind too. From there I came back to the seminar house to sleep.

Yesterday we had ID pickup and also a trip to Kyoto. Before we left for Kyoto, though, it started raining. We borrowed umbrellas from the school (which is apparently a thing; you can borrow umbrellas for nothing I guess, as long as you bring them back within a certain amount of time) and then walked to Goten-yama eki (Goten-yama station, pronoun. e-ki; e as in egg). After a 30 minute train ride, we reached Kiyomizu-dera (Kiyomizu Temple) where we walked around for a while. Eventually we wandered over to Shijo Kawaramachi (basically 4th street), where our hotel in Kyoto was the first time I came to Japan, where we had dinner at a place called Momiji.

Momiji was an interesting place, certainly not a restaurant that I would ever visit under any normal circumstances. It was more like an upscale bar than a restaurant and for eleven of us the bill was around 26,000JPY (approx. $260), of course we ordered a lot of food too I suppose. Overall, I thought a lot of the food was mediocre there but it was fun to be there with everyone. We returned to Hirakatashi afterwards and then it was Saturday.

Today all I had was an orientation for the language software that we'll be using for our Japanese language courses. Then (coming to the title of today's post) I went to Lawson (a convenience store) for a quick lunch so I could start this. My change ended up being 444JPY. I almost thought the cashier was shocked as she handed it to me.

A little background on that. One of the readings for the kanji for four (四), shi, means death and so most people try to avoid that number. Kind of like 13 or something in Western superstition, 4 is a bad luck number in Japan and 444 is probably the worst you can do when it comes down to it. I figured my luck was down the drain after seeing that, but currently I've just been sitting here setting up this blog-site so I haven't had anything bad happen yet, but I have a few things I'm going to go do soon so we'll see.

But overall that should catch everything up to today for the most part. I'll try my best to update here when there is something happening, although once classes start (sorry all y'all who already started) there prolly won't be too much too often. Until next time then.