Belligerence = デッカイ

Made it through the first full week. Class is tough just for the speed and volume of material it covers but so far nothing in that aspect is too overwhelming. I spent most of the first week being frustrated with my speaking ability knowing it hasn't been measuring up to what I'm capable of, but the weekend came with a couple of nice breaks for that.

Incidentally, Japan sells whiskey bottles out of vending machines. Not that I like whiskey, but just knowing such a machine exists makes everything better.

For Fami's birthday, a bunch of us went out to a nearby Yakitori (grilled chicken n' stuff on a stick!) restaurant and stuffed ourselves silly. I made a point of sitting away from the English speakers (I'm probably coming off as "that guy" to the other American students on the program for avoiding them, but this is what I need to do for my own language practice--Sorry that I'm a huge tool) to hang out with the Japanese roommates. And we bonded in the way that young adult males inevitably will- we made a bunch of crude sex jokes.



Perhaps I'm a terrible person, but I will never get tired of my Japanese friends learning how to properly pronounce "election".

Another thing I've found is that I sometimes need to create excuses for conversations. My roommate and I still don't speak that much (he's busy with his part time job, entering the hell of a Japanese 3rd year college student's career search, and fairly quiet) so I'm creating small excuses everywhere when I go out, like stopping at the civic information center to ask about where to find the bookstore when I have no intention of going to the bookstore.

Another thing about using excuses to meet people- one of our homework assignments was to go out and interview people on campus about their hometowns. Which of course, was fairly awkward to approach strangers and ask them personal questions. But Will had brought peanut butter and apples to the campus cafeteria to share with our Japanese friends (peanut butter exists but is surprisingly rare in Japan) and eventually used the leftovers to go around offering "traditional American snacks" to random people in the cafeteria. He used this as a seque into meeting people and when we realized one group of girls would still be there during our class time when we were doing the interview, we asked them if we could come back to interview their group. So basically, we've used homework as an excuse to meet girls. Everyone's jealous that I interviewed the totally hot girl.

Saturday night I went to a bar, my first foray into 大阪 (Osaka) proper (we actually live a couple train stops away in 吹田市 (Suita)). Aside from being totally awesome that it was the first time I've gone to a bar by myself (I'm getting the jump on my 21st birthday next week by taking advantage of Japan's drinking age of 20) I stayed for 4 hours just talking and listening to other conversations. Most bars in Japan are tiny, and this one had maybe 8 or 9 seats. While I was there, the number of patrons never exceeded three. So I got to chatting it up with the Bar Master. At first it was the typical "Oh! So you're a foreign exchange student! You're studying Japanese!" type interactions, and since the first Sex and the City movie was playing on tv they all gossiped about which characters they liked. (The second one just came out here, so it's kind of a popular topic). But for a while when it was just me and the bar master we got to talking about my own research on America-Japan relations post World War II.

The bar was pretty sweet and I'm definitely gonna keep doing that on the weekends, even if it means I subsist on ramen and rice balls for most of the week to offset the cost.

On Wednesday the whole program took a trip to Arayashi Yama and 天龍寺 (Tenryuuji) temple in Kyoto. My family has a tradition of posing with statues because we're cool like that.

Kyoto also included モンキーパーク(monkey park) where we got to walk through trails surrounded by Japanese macaques. I tried to explain my own experience with the monkey lab at Yale and how monkeys are evil and will still all your things given half a chance.

OM NOM NOM