First day of class, food food food

So as I look at the pictures I've taken for this blog post, I can't help but notice that they're pretty much all of food. Whoops. I guess this entry won't have very many pictures. I can never remember to take pictures unless I'm sitting down at a restaurant somewhere. Rest assured that my sakura festival entry will have a bunch of awesome pictures in it, though. More on that later.

Munching on these while I write

So, yep, yesterday (Friday) was the first full day of class. I was placed into 102, for those of you who don't follow me on Facebook and didn't know that. Following a trend, I woke up at the crack of... the middle of the night (around 4ish) and used the morning to clean my apartment, make breakfast, Skype my parents, be on facebook, and all that other good stuff. The truth is, I probably could have slept some more, but I was too excited for class to begin, and it was keeping me up. Oh well.

I arrived at the building around 8:30, found my class assignment, and sat down in a random seat in my assigned classroom. Everyone was pretty quiet, possibly as nervous as I was. Our worries were soon allayed when our professor, Ooae-sensei, started class. She speaks very quickly, but uses simple enough words that, when combined with generous usage of hand gestures, conveyed the points she was trying to get across. It was pretty cool being able to actually understand a native speaker at regular speed, even if she was using extremely simple language.

The way class is laid out, the entire class stays in the room we're assigned, and as the periods change, the teachers pack up and move rooms instead of the students. Apparently, that's the way that high schools work here as well. For the first two periods of the day, we had the same teacher, and the class period seemed to be mostly review. We introduced ourselves, learned how the class schedule worked, got our textbooks, talked about class policies and rules, and other first-day-of-class stuff. All in Japanese, of course. That's a rule, actually--nothing but Japanese in the classroom.

Our second class, headed by Honda-sensei, was a little different. Apparently this class was grammar, so we spent most of our time together reviewing different verb conjugations: te-form, ta-form, dictionary form, masu-form, etc. We also had a little exercise where we would talk to and interview each other in plain form. I had a little bit of difficulty with that portion of the class, since speaking is by far my weakest point. Still, there seemed to be a number of other students in the same boat, so at least I find myself in good company.

For lunch, an Australian girl and I tagged along with the Taiwanese students as they went to a nearby ramen shop. That was actually a lot of fun because we were pretty much forced to speak Japanese the whole time, since I certainly couldn't speak their language. I bet they could speak English (as most of the students here seem to be able to), but I'm kinda glad we didn't. The more Japanese we speak in our off-time, the better we'll be!

You know, one of my favorite things so far about my stay here is how adventurous I've been able to be, food-wise. The ramen shop we went to offered free tea, for example. Back in the states, I never drank tea. It's not that I totally hate tea or anything, it's just that I never branched out and acquired a taste for it. Same with most vegetables, or really anything that wasn't burgers or Italian food. The food pictured to the left there, for example, had tons of vegetables in it. I didn't even know what kinds of vegetables they were (and I still don't) but they turned out to be pretty delicious with the curry flavor and the ramen noodles. The tea was pretty good too; I ended up having a number of glasses of it before we went back to class.

After class was over, I spent the rest of yesterday and the majority of today studying and doing homework. There was a decent amount of homework, all in all about three hours' worth, but I wanted to study all the chapters that would have been covered in the 101 class, just to make sure I wasn't missing any grammar points or important vocabulary words that would put me at a disadvantage. I've finished just about everything I wanted to finish this weekend, class-wise, but I'll definitely have to spend some time tomorrow morning doing some extra studying so that I'm 100% prepared for class. With how intensive this class is supposed to be, I figure it'll be pretty easy for me to fall behind. I'll really need to do my best to stay ahead of the curve.

Anyway, it's about 9:30ish, and honestly this is just about the latest I've stayed up during my entire week here in Japan. I'm incredibly tired so I'm going to go to bed. Tomorrow I'm gonna be going up to the castle to watch the festival and take some awesome pictures, so expect a trip report in the next few days.