Quick update

I have some free time so I figured I’d write a quick update on my blog.  And by free time, I of course mean it’s about 1:30am and as I’m up late already, I figured I’d write a blog post.

I started my second term of school on Tuesday.  Though Tuesday was an opening orientation, Wednesday was a full day of tests, Thursday I only had two periods, Friday I was sick, and today was a half day, so I can’t exactly say I’ve felt the rhythm of how the second half of my school year will go.

Let’s see…my classes are very different from my first term.  First term I had about half normal classes, and the rest were private Japanese lessons or special courses for me as an exchange student

This term about all of my courses are normal courses.  Almost every single one of them.  Which means I’m also taking courses such as Math II (I’m still deciphering the meaning of the “II”. Whatever it is, it’s a very difficult II), Contemporary Japanese Literature, Biology, and Japanese Classics.  By the end of this year, I may not be able to say all my zoo animals but I may as heck be able to use vocabulary contained in literature from ancient Japan. 

Today, I had Chemistry (It’s not even on my schedule? Though for some reason I had it), Math II, Japanese History, and Japanese Classics. 

While the Japanese Classics teacher was explaining how the book he handed out in class would work throughout the year as well as gave an introduction, all I managed to do was translate the title of the book.  Turns out the book was assembled by the school, and thus the title was the course name.  I felt it wasn’t a good start.

I’m going to start Lacrosse on Monday.   Well, technically I’ll just be watching but that sounds really boring to write on a blog post.

Hmmm that’s about it.

Oh I saw this ad the other day in Shibuya advertising a skin lotion that raises money for a charity that combats sex trafficking. 

I don’t know.  It just didn’t seem like the right shop to sell it at.

Oh my.

Today, in English class, one of the class discussion questions was “What  would you say is cool and not cool in Japan”, in order to exercise the word “cool”.  It provided some very…er. sad. results. There are a few things people said:

Things that are cool:

• Akihabara (the electric town)
• Maid Cafes (one of the sadder experiences of my life)
• Wii
• Television
• 80s music
• Video games

Things that aren’t cool:

• Outdoors
• Rap Music
• traveling to foreign countries (they claimed it wasn’t cool to get sick with swine flu)

—–

My calligraphy class.  You can just see everyone is feeling the rush of drawing Chinese characters in an artistic fashion:

I feel like it is my duty to note, though, that this was in fact the break between the two periods.