My first week of classes at AIU just wrapped up. As far as reading load goes I think they will be easy, for example I only had to buy two text books, one for the Modern History of China and the Other for International Organizations and Law. In two classes the sensei (professors) just handed out a reading packet, and I brought my Japanese texts with me as I thought that they would be useful to study while I was traveling.
On the other hand, I think most of the sensei expect more of us because we are native English speakers and thus should be able to read and pick up the lectures easier than the Japanese or other international students. I guess we will see when the first round of tests come out. The sensei are awesome though. Just extremely top notch on all fronts, from qualifications, education, working experience, and personality. I’m very excited for this fall term.
I’m gonna try to post up a lot of pictures here and describe them a bit, so get ready. This first one is a shot of the Sun Mall which I cruised around for awhile in Sendai when I was there. I ate at an awesome curry restaurant which seem to function a lot like greasy spoon dinners in the States. You can sit at a booth or the counter, and it tends to be a lot of working class guys, a few suits, and then students and other twenty-somethings. The Sun Mall is a labyrinth of buildings that contain a variety of restaurants, clothing shops, and pachinko parlors. Pachinko is like Japanese slot machines but they are EVERYWHERE. Bright colors, anime characters, sexy advertisements. They tend to bring in a lot of older people and salarymen.
So, yeah, this is a picture of the outside of a pachinko parlor. I have not been in one yet, I hear they are kind of depressing places where people act like robots just dropping yen into the slots. But i think at some you can win money, at others you can win other prizes. I did go into an arcade though and of course got trounced in a couple games of Tekken. I heard that the arcades get rowdy at night because most of them are open all hours of the day so people who are out carousing will stop in for the drunken Street Fighter and such. Some the games are absolutely amazing, just the technology and such, but they also have a lot of old school games like Galaga and Centipede.
They have this fishing guy with a straw hat on everything in Akita, it must be their town mascot or something. Its really kind of strange but its kind of cute too. Akita is very rural by Japanese standards, though I think that it is pretty urban. So I guess its pretty neat that they take such pride in their city, and where they come from. Maybe that should seem more obvious that they have strong pride in their roots with all of the cultural festivals and just the emphasis in general that they place on culture in general.
Here is again with the fish but this time on a bus seat. So yeah, its kind of neat.
At the hostels and the ryokan I stayed at they give you these summer cotton kimonos. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose is but I think they operate the same way as a bathrobe, because they have public baths in most places.
Only one hostel had an actual shower in the room. The rest told you where to go for the public bath and gave you the robe.
The picture on the right I think is a pretty accurate depiction of what our evenings consist of. We usually all meet up in the Global Village, where I live, meet any new comers, talk about home, have ‘cultural exchanges’, play music either out of an ipod or make our own, get good and drunk, sing songs, go for a last minute run to the beer vending machine, and usually somewhere between 2AM and 6AM everyone finally rolls into bed. Its a lot of great fun and probably the best way to meet new people. Only good times are had, and it always makes for great stories in the morning. The three guys on the right side of that picture are some of my best friends here. From right to left, Michal Kolmas from the Czech Republic, Peter “Sandy” Edwards, my roommate and fellow American, though he’s from New Mexico, and finally Yong-Tae from Seoul S. Korea. I didn’t know what real laughter was until I cam here, I think, because some nights I am genuinely scared I’m going to die from laughing too much. Its always a great time hanging out at the GV, though almost every night the front desk guy, who can’t speak English, comes out and tells us to quite down, so then we go hang out across the street at the Konbi (convenience store) and then go back the GV, or go walk around. There are a few of the desk guys, and two of them are really nice but there is one that is really mean and we call him “Dame-san”, because when he comes out he keeps telling us “dame, dame” which means “bad”. Anyways, its always a great time and I’ve made some excellent friends in the short time I’ve been here.
The other picture is of the Kanto festival performance that took place after dinner one night. There is a Kanto festival club on campus too. The giant lantern contraption is pretty heavy, and while people rotate in and out on the drums, a few other people rotate carrying the lanterns. They carry it around and place it on different parts of their body, like their hip, or forehead, or chin. Its really exciting to watch and sometimes they get carried away with the momentum and have to run a bit to keep it under control. The other guys in the picture from ,left to right, are Tonatiuh, from Mexico, whose name is Aztec and whose parents and family support help out with the Zapatistas in Southern Mexico. Next is one of the performers, and then on the other side of me the Yong-Hyung and Yong-Tae from South Korea.
I will continue with the pictures and stories as I collect them. I have a lot more pictures and I plan to put them up on a flickr account soon so you can browse them at your own leisure.
