Day 4 - busy busy busy

Today started with breakfast with the family. The youngest daughter was here, Rio-san, and she ate breakfast with me and mama(who insists on my calling her mama). After that, I took the train with Mama to Shinjuku, where we split, and I went the rest of the way to waseda on my own. This morning we had orientation regarding what kinds of classes we should take. I'm going to end up taking an economics class, a modern japanese literature class, and a bunch of Japanese classes (6!) that only meet one hour a week. A lot of them look really interesting, especially "Learning Japanese through Food".


On the way into the orientation today, the group and I noticed the campus was really busy, and when orientation was over, we realized that the clubs and circles on campus were showing up today as a sort of "rush". Well, rush is a very simple way of explaining it. It holds none of the desperation, excitement, and all over just crazy, hectic-ness of what happened today. The streets in japan are pretty narrow already, so when the streets of the waseda campus are filled with booths and clubs searching for possible new members, it becomes a claustrophobic bottleneck of eager hands passing out fliers. I'd be walking just fine, checking out a few interesting booths, when I'd be onset by a mob of people, dumping their club's info into my hands, chattering away in whatever hodgepodge of pseudo-english they could think of. It's extremely exciting and a little intimidating at once. Some clubs were typically Japanese, like the biwa-playing club, or the aikido club, but some looked really cool. There's a number dance groups on campus, about two do traditional japanese dance. We got to see one of them preform, and man, do they have energy. I was amazed. The other makes their own costumes and travels japan on long weekends and breaks. Other interesting clubs included a table-top gaming club, a pokemon fan club, some sort of german thrash metal music enjoyment circle (what?), and the best of all, Waseneko, a group that goes about, feeding the stray cats that live on campus, and doing fund-raisers to gain money if some of the cats get ill. They were soooooo cute! Ugh. I dunno if I'll join the group, but it's certianly interesting. According to the website, there's over 300 clubs and circles on campus. The difficulty is finding the ones that are okay with and can accommodate someone who doesn't speak japanese very well. But I look forward to the next couple of days, when I get to sign up for classes, and take another look at the types of clubs I can join. Suuuuuper excited.


Anyway, after that, I got to go meet up with some other waseda students, and study abroad students who've been in the program for the past year. They brought us to a cell phone shop and I got to pick out my cell phone! Even though it was free, it's way better than my american free phone. A lovely aqua blue, it has a 13.1 megapixel camera that makes an annoying noise whenever I take a photo, infrared for exchanging information with other phones, and most importantly, that little hole so I can attach a bunch of adorable japanese charms from it. If you wanna contact me, and don't mind paying out the butt to call international, you can call me at 011-81-80-08056822392 or maybe 011-81-90-08056822392. I haven't found out which one is the right cell-phone code yet. Another way is to message me. In japan, cell phones get emails, not texts, so my email is 0hb325440cj5v0h@ezweb.ne.jp   That will send an email straight to my phone! The wonders of japan never cease.


After getting cell phones, the group moved on to get dinner. We went to what I can only describe as a Japanese version of Shari's. It had almost the same color scheme, the seats were the same style, it just had the whole feel of Shari's to it. The one different thing it had was a drink counter that you went to on you own. You could get whatever you wanted, and as much as you wanted, for a flat fee of like, 300 yen. Pretty cool.

That was a kind of boring dinner, but after that Tamarra and I went to a nearby bakery and I bought a beautiful cake called a Sakura Roll cake, and it had mochi and sweet bean paste rolled inside.

 

When I got home I had a second dinner with Mama (I forgot to tell her I already ate, and I couldn't tell her no. She's so sweet.), Miri, and a new face, Saori(?) who actually studied at PSU a year ago. She's a friend of mama.


Conversation after dinner was a whirlwind. I'm not sure I completely followed everything mama said, but a lot of it was just… wow. We talked about the president, and grammar, and different places to not go in tokyo, and the earthquake and tsunami last year, and how there's so many earthquakes, and she's afraid the house will fall down so she sleeps in the living room when there's an earthquake… There was a part where we ended up taking about nuclear proliferation, I think, it was a little confusing there.


I'm so cold right now. Mama doesn't really have heating, so I get to sit up here on the second floor on my bed, in the cold while I type this. I expect that it'll be nice come summer, but for now I'm freezing. Summer can't come soon enough.


Also, if anyone knows what a Raffle Cleaner is, let me know. They have them in almost all of the classrooms here…