First Week of School

So, it's Friday night and the first week of classes has finished. I can already feel time moving along a fairly good clip, especially since I've started to follow a routine every day. The good news is that I switched into a more advanced Japanese class which meets later, and thus can avoid the morning rush (or at least the worst part of it) three days a week.

All of my classes seem decent so far. My Asian Business class is taught by the Dean of the entire University, which is a bit imposing, but he seems nice enough. He's having us read the Asian Wall Street Journal every few days or so, which is nice. Japanese Culture is also pretty cool -- it's a lot of reading, but all fairly interesting. We are taking a few field trips too, most notably to the Studio Ghibli Museum, which is the museum of Mayazaki (the guy who did Spirited Away, etc.) Int'l Marketing and Japanese both seem like decent classes as well.

So though it is a bit too early to tell, it seems that my workload will be fairly moderate, most composed of reading and some Japanese work.

So yesterday, I took a much needed afternoon for myself and headed over to the Imperial Palace to check it out. What a place. It's pretty much like Central Park, but with palace buildings all over dating back 500 years or more. What was also nice is that I was one of the only people there. I went over to the Ni-Mori Gardens, which was fairly empty, and just sort of sat around for a while and relaxed. I can imagine how incredibly crowded that garden will be in about two months, but it was nice to kind of have the whole place to myself. The best part was that you could really hear nothing from the city, which kind of gave it that "place to get away from it all" feel.

Looking forward to a few things this weekend, especially tonight's trip to Mosburger and the Sumo Match tomorrow. First, Mosburger is basically the Japanese answer to McDonalds, but totally weird and Japanese. There are shrimp burgers, rice burgers, hamburgers with tofu on top (kinda defeats the purpose, huh) and a whole lot more. I'll report back to you on the actual taste of the burgers, but going to Mosburger is just one of those things you gotta do if you come to Tokyo (besides getting your liver crushed on a train).

Tomorrow, we are going to a big Sumo match near Shibuya. I really don't know what to expect. I mean, I've seem Sumo on TV before, but I wonder what is like live. I hear it's sort of a whole drawn out process where they bless the ring 400 times and do all these dances, in which case it'll be incredibly silly, but I'm not sure. Looking forward to that for sure.

Anyways, that's a quick update on my life. Nothing too too exciting the past few days, but I'm sure I'll have a lot to report after this weekend.

It's been tough the past few days with the homesickness and all as well. After you kind of go through the initial "honeymoon" phase where all is exciting and new, you start to realize how far you are away from home and how different it is, especially here. So, I'm kinda dealing with all that now, and it's tough, but hey, it'll pass. I've had some great experiences the past week and hopefully there will be a TON more to come.

Okay, enough of the sappy stuff. TIME FOR ENGRISH!

ENGRISH CITING: I saw a guy with a patch on his jacket that said "Pick me up, Grandma". Interesting.

ALSO, I am currently friendly with the #3 Rock, Paper, Scissors Champion in the entire United States. He's actually won MONEY at tournaments with this stuff! Unreal.

Jaa mata nee!