Good Weather = Good Day

The weather was absolutely gorgeous today! For me at least, it felt like t-shirt weather at a whopping 23 degrees! The sun was shining, the air was crisp, and most importantly there was no rain!

As usual, I was a bit late getting to class this morning. Ok well that is not entirely true. When I got to campus I spent a good five minutes talking to Steve in front of the Okuma statue. This became an every morning thing last semester, and looks like it will this time too. If I am late to campus, I am obviously late to class. If I am early to campus, I talk to Steve which makes me late for class. It is a win-win situation! Today was a rare day in Japanese class because I had to explain why I was late. I came to class 5-10 minutes late every day last semester and the teacher didn't say anything. She didn't even take it out of my attendance. So nice of her! This morning I also ran into none other than Shohei, one of the volunteers who helped us at the beginning of the year (Asuka being another one.) He is taking a law class which sounds pretty tough.

For lunch I met up with a giant group of people. The original plan was to have lunch with just Asuka, but from the looks of it, there were going to be 10+ people instead. Luckily, due to Steve's sister being in town, most of the group went with him. I stayed with Asuka and Sonja to have a nice and peaceful lunch. Too bad all the restaurants and bento places were packed. Asuka said it was because of all the new freshman... Figures... We eventually bought some snacks at the Coop and ate them on a bench in the middle of campus. Asuka taught me a little Miyazaki-ben (it is a small town way down in Kyushu). 食べちょちゃわ equals 食べている. Weird stuff!

Asaka went to class after we ate so I ended up talking to Sonja for the next hour. I had time to kill and nobody else was around. When she left for home, I read my book for another hour. Finally, Michael mailed me and asked if I wanted to play some Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles in the lounge. I did that for the next hour.

In the lounge I also got to meet some new people, namely this girl who goes by the name of Emily. She can speak 5 languages fluently (or well enough to communicate anyway), originally from Thailand, went to school in China, and now going to college in Japan. She looks and acts a lot like Shoko which I found to be comforting. I could almost predict what she was going to say about what I thought. Anyway, when asked about what I was doing in Japan, I gave her the rundown. Her response was simply:

"Well you chose the wrong country."

I chose the wrong country? Really? Sure Japan has its flaws, sure I hate Tokyo, but the wrong country? I suppose she is more able to say something like that because she has lived in other Asian and European countries before. It is just that she is the first person I have heard say that Japan sucks. Almost all other people hail Japan as being the capital of the would or so it seems. After that I pretty much decided that I needed to get to know her better. Really? A bad place? There has to be some deeper reasoning to that.

Luckily she wanted to go to the engineering campus and I happened to be there to take her. We walked, talked, got lost, and found the building she was going to. There I got to meet one of her Chinese Computer Science friends who could not speak English very well. He seemed like a pretty cool guy. So after this I told them I had to go to Igo club and departed. Before leaving campus however, I thought "what the hey?" and visited Yoshimoto Sensei in his office. Michiyo Sensei also happened to be there so I talked a little about the practicum. Fun stuff. I was told that I should visit more often to have fun and stuff.

Lastly, I made it to the Igo club. There were a surprisingly large number of people there. I ended up playing Tomo san a couple of times on the 9x9 board. I lost the first to times with a 0 and 2 stone handicap, but with 3 stones I managed to beat her. With that she told me that they were having a nomikai tomorrow and I was welcome to come. Cool, I may have to do that. Upon exchanging email addresses, I returned home.