The first classes

The office building and the main gate of the dorm (you have to use your student card to get in).

My first Monday in Japan was pretty peaceful. I didn't have any classes until 13:00, so I just woke up slowly and hung around the (nearly empty) house until I went to run some insurance-related errands before class.



A pretty standard cafeteria lunch. This one is called Mushi dori yasai ramen.

They have a somewhat intriguing system with the classes here. The first week of each class is open for anyone to just come and see what it's like. Usually the teacher just hands out the syllabus, talks about the grading and what sort of excercises the class is going to have. You can attend as many of these "trial periods" as you want, and you only fill in your course registration after! It's a very handy system if you are in doubt whether you should take a certain course or not. For example, I took two classes on Monday afternoon but I will only receive credit from the one which I eventually choose.

The program I'm in has two kinds of classes: compulsory Japanese classes and elective classes. Electives are mostly held in English (some partly in Japanese though) and they deal with various kinds of topics. I'm mostly geared towards history, politics and cultural studies, but there are courses on e.g. fluid mechanics and environmental studies. All of these are joint classes with Japanese students, meaning that they will have some international students and some regular, local students. For them, the course also acts as language instruction.


Look, I actually cooked something proper! I...won't say it was delicious (I'm still a bit in the dark about which ingredients actually go together), but it was okay. I'm getting there.

Some of the classes have a limited number of participants (because it's a little difficult to have a conversation-based course with 50 people) and extra people have to be thrown out. So was the case with my Tuesday afternoon course on cultural representations. There was a 20-person limit and there were about 34 people who wanted to take the course. The teacher simply took our student cards and randomly drew a certain number of exchange students and Japanese students, the rest had to go. Luckily, I was among those who were allowed to take the course.

 

My Japanese classroom. The whole humanities department has this charming (?) traditional feel to it... The science department, on the other hand, is pretty fancy (isn't that how it always is).

I also had my first Japanese class on Tuesday. I was a bit worried about it, because I really had not expected to get level E...not to mention that I've never really had any intention of writing a thesis in Japanese (which levels E and F are supposedly leading up to). But, to my surprise, I actually understood about 95% of what the teacher said during the first class, and the texts of the first unit didn't seem too bad, either. Well, the teacher also said that the difficulty level would rise relatively soon. But I only have about 15 hours of weekly classes (actually it will be closer to 10 one some weeks, since one course takes place only biweekly) so I will have plenty of time to do my homework properly and make sure I keep up.



Rainy evening @ the Acanthus Bridge. The sun sets REALLY quickly, I'm shocked every time.