Working Back Up

As I am sure that you religious readers can tell, I have been falling behind in my blogging. This is mainly because it is a little annoying to have to take a break everyday to type my life story. Nonetheless, I shall continue to write as I get to it. Today, I shall get to it.

Tuesday

Today was a day of reminiscence as I was to meet with my visiting CIE director, Dr. McCrillis. After Japanese class, I was to report to the CIE office to have a lunch meeting set up with him. After explaining what I was there for, I was led into a waiting room while he finished up with a meeting he was in at the moment. It wasn't very long before I was greeted by him and his collegue from Valdosta State along with one of the CIE employees. We made our way to the cafeteria in order to have lunch and talk.

In the lunch room, the concensus seemed to be for curry rice, but I opted to go for the club lunch. After a quick explanation of what it was, Dr. McCrillis changed his order to the club lunch as well since it came with rice and miso soup as well. We talked about my time in Japan and how I was adjusting to it. He wanted to make sure that I was doing alright and there were no underlying problems with the culture and being away from home. As the CIE person said, there were typically one or two people who decided to go home early because they couldn't deal with the culture differences. After a short tour of the CIE, we stopped to take a picture before saying our farewells since he had to go to other meetings.

Once departing, I made my way to the city hall to pick up my alien registration card that had finally been prepared. Happy that I was legal, I went back home to attend a meeting for the dorm. The meeting was primarily geared toward the girls, who had apparently not been keeping their bathrooms as clean as the boys. Ironically, there was only one girl among the ten or so boys who attended the meeting.

Wednesday's main event was my first non-Japanese test that was to be held in my International Negotiation class. The test was a very lovely set of essay questions that left my hand in pain. I should have done fine except on one question that I knew I got wrong after discovering the real answer after the test.

Thursday brought about a movie in my culture class, Family Game. The movie was about a lazy Japanese student being tutored and how his family dealt with what was happening. I wasn't able to watch the whole thing in one sitting since it was longer than my class time, so I had to come back after school to finish. We had another presentation in Human Resources and it seemed to go on forever. Once classes were over, I went with Yusuke to study for awhile before going to finish the movie. The end of the movie absolutely confused me since it had no notable reason as to what happened. I almost feel like it would have been easier to not watch the end and speculate on what happened. I received an email from my phone company saying that my account was now registered and I now have an email address. I confirmed this by sending a test email that was successful. My address was some rediculous slew of numbers and letters, so I wanted to change it. As I discovered with the help of the dorm caretakers, I lacked a password for my phone, so they set up a meeting with my RA to go to the phone store the next day.

On Friday, I had a Japanese test. As I later found out, I missed some of the listening portion, as most of the class did, but I got all of the writing portion correct. After class, I went with my RA, Masato, to the phone store in order to find out about my password. They had us call the support center, so we did so on the way back to school. After getting the center, they told us that the store could reset the password or I could contact the rental company in order to get the code. I figured that the store could not reset the password since they had us call, so I emailed the company instead.

After my phone fun, I went to the computer lab to translate my study guide into Japanese so I could study for my midterm oral exam. I had my Japanese friend, Yuka, check my work. I hung out with various Japanese friends until it was class time. After class, I went with Nabil and Todd to dinner.

Saturday was Karaoke Day. We had four people attend. On their side was Saki and Chiaki, and on my side was Keisuke and myself. I was pleased to find that there were songs that I actually knew and liked, especially since they made me start. I sought out a slow song to begin with and chose Time by Alan Parsons. From there, the others rotated songs. I continued with Spiders by System of a Down. After the next rotation, I did Our Time Is Running Out by Muse, which I thought was my best performance. Next I did Emerald Sword by Rhapsody, Pushing Me Away by Linkin Park, Needled by System of a Down, It's Been Awhile by Staind, Sea of Lies by Symphony X, Papercut by Linkin Park, and finally Knights of Cydonia by Muse. By the time everyone sang about that many songs, our three hours were up. I have some videos of everyone singing, but I don't know where I can upload them in order to share.

From there, we went to dinner at an Italian style restaurant. I decided upon getting a pizza, but it isn't what you'd expect. This was a Japanese-style pizza with shrimp, clam, squid, and tuna. I was able to happily eat the whole thing. Once dinner was concluded, we went to the bus stop where we went our separate ways. While on the bus, I saw a very scary looking Japanese girl with horrible piercings all over her face and hair that she purposely made look awful. Not only that, but she also began to talk on her cellphone during the bus ride, which is a cultural taboo. It was disturbing enough to point out. I also helped an old lady who dropped her bag and could not find it. Finally, I began construction of my catch-up blog while chatting with friends online.