Hit the Ground Running

PII certainly doesn't do things by halves, not by a long shot. Classes have officially started and if I thought that Yale's pace was quick, it's nothing compared to the pace PII is going at. Well. No going back now I suppose.

Yesterday I was put in the class for level 2 students. The day was purposefully a review of transitive and intransitive verbs (for the most part). Not something English really has, so it's tricky to remember two verbs that (to us) mean the same thing. But me being the academic masochist that I am, I asked if I could move up into the 2.5 level (which was where the Yale teachers said we "should" be). They allowed me to try it out today, and it seems like today went alright so I guess that's what I'll be doing from now on. I think I'm going to work myself to death, that obviously seems to be my academic ambition.

Anyways. We cover a chapter a day in the Nakama 2 textbook. There's another textbook, Tobira, that we'll start in week 3. And we have a kanji quiz every day, so I have about 20 new kanji and the subsequent words they form to study for tomorrow, along with homework and covering tomorrow's grammar on my own. Going to be a busy busy time. These eight weeks are going to go by at lightning speed--it seems hard to imagine that it's already been two weeks since I left my home in Chicago.

Sorry no pictures today. But tomorrow we're going to be making wagashi (traditional Japanese sweets) and on Saturday there's a festival so there'll soon be lots to tell. Wish me luck...

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Enoshima: The Heavenly Maiden and the Dragon

This past Monday was a national holiday -- Mountain Day -- so, of course, Troy and I headed to the beach instead. Well, to an island near a beach since (as some of you may know) I'm not exactly the beach-going type. Plus I'd just climbed Mount Fuji, which was more than enough mountain for me. Enoshima is a small island off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, fairly near Kamakura. It's connected to the mainland via a bridge, so you can just stroll on over from the train station. The entire island is dedicated to Benzaitan, the goddess of everything that flows -- time, water, speech, music, and knowledge. According to the "Enoshima Engi," (a history of the shrines and temples on Enoshima) there's also a legend associated with the creation of the island involving Benzaitan and a dragon. In brief, the area around Enoshima was once wracked by violent storms and earthquakes. Eventually the tumult ended and a heavenly maiden (Benzaitan) descended from the clouds....

Homecoming

This is it. It's Friday, February 3rd and in less than 24 hours I will leave this house for Tokyo train station, which will take me to the airport, which will take me...home. Most of this week has been taken up with goodbyes: to schoolmates and teachers, and later, close friends. There were tears involved. I think the photos will do it a lot more justice than I could: Kohei, from tennis group. All the tennis people got together for dinner at an okonomiyaki (think cabbage pancake, with yummy stuff like shrimp in it) but first we went to a boardwalk which had nighttime light shows. Top: Anime Club. They threw a small party for me, where we ate lots of food and watched (what else) anime and talked. Bottom: one of my English classes. They asked me to teach them an American game for the last day, so I taught everyone how to play Heads-Up 7-Up. They were pretty good at it. The other exchange student, Nom, and my Japanese teacher. The last view of school: the walk leading u...

Reflections on Typhoon Hagibis

As some of you may have known, this past weekend Typhoon Hagibis blew through Japan, specifically the Kanto region where Tokyo is. It had the grim distinction of being the strongest/most deadly storm to hit the region since Typhoon Ida in 1958. Typhoon classification scales are confusing (and, interestingly, the only difference between a "typhoon" and a "hurricane" is the naming convention of the region in which it occurs ), but at one point Hagibis was classified as a "violent typhoon," the strongest category the Japan Meteorological Agency has, roughly the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Fortunately it didn't make landfall at that strength, downgrading to a Category 3 equivalent storm. Personally, although Typhoon Hagibis (which means, appropriately, "speed" in Tagalog) was not the first typhoon I've (pardon the pun) weathered here in Japan, it was most certainly the most extreme. Most typhoons don't directly hit Kanto, inst...

Rice and Ramen

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