Mission Accomplished

So I got my slippers back. I saw them sitting in the lobby yesterday and swiped them as soon as I could. I am pretty happy to have them back. I get a little sick to my stomach when I think that someone else used them but a Japanese person would say "sikata ga nai" which means literally "it cannot be helped."

A lot of things have also happened the past few days, I hope that I can get them all down here.

So yesterday morning started with orientation. The director of my program is Dr. Peter Firkola, originally from Canada, has been in charge of the program since its creation 11 years ago. He is a short chap but is rather funny and speaks VERY fast. But things went pretty smoothly, he outlined the program, the expectations and such so it was ok.

After he was done speaking we had another professor give us an orientation on the Japanese language classes that we would be taking. Now this guy was a character. Apparently he is fluent in 5 languages, japanese (duh), spanish, portuguese, Chinese, and English. But whats even better than being fluent in 5 languages? Being a Sapporo Ham Fighters fan. That is Sapporo's baseball team btw, and apparently they had a game today, and they have a game on saturday that if they win they will be very close to winning the championship.

So before he even speaks, he takes a pair of thunder sticks out of his bag and starts banging them and yelling about how amazing the ham fighters are and if anyone wants to go with him to the game on saturday. So for 2k yen, he got me and a couple other friends really good seats for the game with him, and I think it will be quite an experience. I will be sure to take my camera and write about it on sunday.

After that we had lunch and then took a japanese proficiency test. It was rather difficult at times, and also easy at times, so I am not sure exactly how I did, but I would guess that I got around 70-80% of the questions correct.

After the test we were supposed to meet our supervisors, however apparently mine was busy so I have still yet to meet with them. sigh.....

This orientation was also the first time I was able to see all the gaijins (slightly derogatory term for foreigners) in one place at once. There are 3 french men, 2 russians, and a partridge in a pair tree. Well no, but really, there are 3 guys from finland, a guy from hungary, sweden and probably 8-10 Chinese students, 3 korean students, one from Singapore, then probably 15 Americans. So it's a pretty diverse set of students, 36 in total.

After the orientation was all over, we decided to meet up and see about going out somewhere to eat and drink a little, so we ended up at a bar that was in the basement of a hotel, but it was still pretty nice. We had to all sit Japanese style, so on our knees (that lasted about 10 seconds) in front of the tables that are only about 1 foot off the ground. It was really cheap and good though, for 30 minutes, you could drink and eat all you could for only 300 yen. So we stayed for 2 hours eating drinking and sharing stories from different parts of the world for about 2 hours, and it only cost 1400 yen (roughly 15 USD).

All in all it was a very good night. Not much japanese spoken, but still a lot of fun.

So today was the first day of classes. It was also the first day I had to sort my garbage...yay. So in Japan, there are 9 categories of garbage, and it is up to you to sort your own garbage into the correctly colored bag. Luckily I have a guide (in english) which explains how to do this, but it was still rather annoying. Im glad its done...for now.

More on the rest of my past couple of days soon. I need to sleep. Oyasumi!