Rice and Ramen

This has been one of the most dizzying, confusing, exciting, and intimidating days of my time in Japan. I thought that reading manga or watching anime or even talking to other adults about their jobs had given me some idea of what the working company world in Japan is like, and I did have an idea to a small extent, but the full-on company inundation was rather overwhelming. Let me start at the beginning. I had a late start today so I wasn't expected in the office until noon. I took the time to admire the very offical-looking office building: This is the third largest building in Kanazawa and houses the Hokkoku newspaper, a hospital, a performance hall, and a golf club, among other things. At noon I was met by my liason, Mr. Yasuda who took me around the building and generally put me at ease. At two we drove to the Ishikawa prefectural government building where Zoey and I had a very formal meeting with the head of the government. I had a three minute speech, mostl...

Today was the first day of actually PII events. I woke up around seven and after breakfast I caught the 8:15 bus (which was really more like 8:20) to the RIFARE building. It's a large complex that does lots of international relationship things like language classes, cultural activities, passports etcetc. We have classes on the fourth floor. There we all are! To start off, after a brief orientation and introduction to the teachers of PII we had two final placement tests: writing and speaking. The writing prompt was something along the lines of : What is the most important thing in your life? Suitably generic and difficult. So I babbled a bit about family. The speaking test was much much easier, I had no problems with that one. They were softball questions like "What did you do yesterday?" or "What do you want to do in Kanazawa?" After that I had a small lunch from the convenience store on the first floor (host families are only responsible for provid...

Ryo and I began our second day of touring Kanazawa with breakfast in a small cafe. I had toast with butter and anko (red-bean) topping. Then we took a bus to a district called Tera-machi, which literally means "temple area" because the whole neighborhood is one temple or shrine after another; there's upwards of 70 there! One in particular is called Myoryuji, or "Ninja-dera". We weren't allowed to take photos inside the temple, but it really was an architectural masterpiece. There were two pitfall traps if you removed boards from the floor. There were several hidden staircases, and though the building looks like a two-story construction (which was mandated by law) there are actually seven levels within it. There's even a small room specifically for seppuku (ritualized suicide)! The temple has nothing to do with ninjas: it was actually built by Maeda Toshitsune for his samurai to stand by for battle. From there we went to a neighborhood which is...

Hello my friends, family, and folks of the internet. Once again, こんにちは! I am returning to Japan after two and a half years for the summer through a program called Princeton in Ishikawa. (What is Princeton in Ishikawa, or PII for short? Glad you should ask. Kindly follow this link for more information: http://www.princeton.edu/pii/index.xml  ) I'll be learning an academic year of Japanese in eight weeks and hopefully making some new friends. Those of you who know me should find it no surprise that I'm trying to go back to Japan, to the extent that I'd agree to suffer school in the summer. The things I do for love of a language/food/culture/country I tell ya... This is just a small note to remind you that this blog is ALIVEEEE. Expect more posts as soon as the action begins, so put this on your bookmarks page and be prepared to be amazed... All the best, Claire

Sorry for the large rush of posts in a row guys, but since I found the internet cable--haha!--I decided to post as much as possible about the week. But still, not much to say, so really this post will be a lot of photos. Tomorrow I leave the orientation and go to my host family. It's very difficult to describe how I'm feeling about that, but ultimately I can't wait! Here are some photos of the orientation that took place: That is Furufuru (right) and Haruka (left) my group leaders. And here is my group, Group 2, at a shrine. We were all American. Japanese culture both old and new!

FINALLY IN JAPAN! It's kind of hard to believe that I'm really here. To be thinking about this date for months and to finally have it happen is surreal. Everyone at the orientation is really nice; and meeting people from around the world is something you don't get to do everyday. We have a lot more in common than you'd think, and I've already talked to people from New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Denmark and Belgium. It doesn't get much more multi-cultural than this! (Oh, and the video above is just us as we were just getting into Tokyo.) And that's probably the most interesting that's happened. We've been getting "orientated" these past two days about culture and experiences and a lot about AFS structure. My group leaders--Hanako and Furafura (isn't that the coolest name?!) are super cool. Lost of the stuff is things that I learned already from my previous trip to Japan, but it's allright. Getting to spend lots and lots of time ...

こんばんわみんな三！(Good evening everyone!) This will be my last internet opportunity for a while since I depart from LAX tomorrow morning and won't have any internet until after the Japanese orientation once we arrive. (Which apparently is supposed to be 1-2 days. I can't believe they have that much to orient us on, but I'm quite sure I'll be proven wrong.) Today has been pretty dull, all things considered. Long flight delays, introductions, and general waiting made for a pretty SNAFU. The orientation today was definitely the most interesting thing. The two groups that are leaving out of LAX are AFS China and Japan, and of the group that is here probably 17 of us are going to Japan. Everyone is very nice--and very quirky! I met someone who would be staying in my prefecture, as well as some people I remembered from the facebook group. Everyone seemed to get along pretty well, though I'm alone in the room I'm sharing right now since most people went to Walgreens or som...