Motto motto happi!

Japan is crazy. It feels like I've been here for weeks already because my days are so jam packed! Orientation has kept me busy, but my own adventures have kept me even busier. I've been hanging out with three really great girls and we've been having lots of fun exploring Hirakata.

And so, let the pictures begin!

First, the flight from Detroit to Osaka was 14 hours long. That was noooot fun. I had a row of three seats to myself so I could stretch out and sleep, but there's only so much sleeping you can do with roaring engines and dry, recycled air for 14 hours. It was my first time in a 747, and this thing was huge!

And after 13 and a half hours - IT'S MT. FUJI!!!!

And oh look, the airport! :D Yeah, that little island thing. It's not even a real island, but one the Japanese made because they had no other place to put an airport so they decided to create one of the world's greatest engineering feats and put it in the middle of the ocean.

Our flight path. I saw Canada! Not much happening there though.

See how long that is?

After crashing the first night, I had a lot of adventures the next day. Sleeping on a futon was very nice (though it took me awhile to figure out how to set it up), so I was ready to go the next day. The first thing I did was figure out how to get to the university, and from there took a tour around the campus. Here's the main part of it.

And the main gate! Students don't live on campus so there are gates to close the university after hours. The Japanese students live with their families or in apartments, and the international students live in the Seminar Houses (dorms) or with host families. The kanji on the gate says "Kansai Gaikokugo Daigaku", which is the full name of the university. No wonder they just call it Kansai Gaidai.

This is the student lounge in the Center for International Education, the international student building. It's referred to informally as the "Gaijin Fishbowl", "gaijin" being a sort of rude shortening for "gaikokujin" (foreigner), because it's a known hangout for foreigners and sometimes the Japanese just walk by to look in and gawk at all the crazy foreigners.

A picture looking out over the athletic field. You can see part of Hirakata, and in the background there are mountains! I'm so excited to be living near mountains. ^_^

After the tour Jackie, Nicole, and I got lunch at the McDonald's on campus, pronounced in Japan as "Makurudonarudo" which is really fun to say five times fast. Anyways, Jackie got a big mac, as seen below. As a warning, things run small in Japan.

And I mean really small. Everything you order at restaurants or see in grocery stores is really tiny compared to American sizes. I haven't eaten a meal yet where I've felt full, but that might be more because my dislike of seafood and therefore a very limited choice of food. I'm considered tall in Japan and I get stared at for it sometimes, but I'm not sure if it's just that or being gaikokujin (foreigner) too.

Since Jackie and I both needed adapters for our 3-prong laptops in a 2-prong country, the three of us went on an adventure to find an electronics store. We took lots of pictures along the way, and at one point I stopped to take a picture of a gas station. The attendents saw me taking the picture and posed for it! You can kind of see them waving and making V signs. That totally made my day.

We found the electronics store, which had this crazy happy theme song playing over and over again on the speakers. After we found our adapters, we also found this:

Virus protection software boxes!! Note all the mean looking viruses on the roof trying to invade your home. Also note, this is Jackie and Nicole. ^_^

Later we took a tour of the main part of Hirakata (I guess you would say the downtown part), which has lots of buildings all over the place with many different levels going crazy ways. Everything here saves space or maximizes the use of it in some way. For example, the department stores not only sell clothes on 6 different levels, but the basement is a grocery store.

This here is Hirakata Station, the main station in the city (obviously). The train is on the bottom floor, and is above it are shops and restaurants. The station is not only the train station, but also the main bus station where all the buses run to, and where all the taxis like to hang out.

For dinner we ate okonomiyaki, which is something like a pancake but with sauces and vegetables or meat. I got beef with mine, but Jackie got... squid.

That pointy thing sticking out on the right side? Yeah, that's a tentacle. It looked disgusting. >_<>

Anyways, here's Jackie again and the other girl we've been hanging out with, Ying-Yu. Jackie, Nicole and I are from the States and Ying-Yu technically is too, but she's spent most of her life in Taiwan and speaks Chinese and English fluently. She's really good to have around when we come across complicated kanji we can't read. Ususally when us Americans pull out our cameras to take pictures of all the crazy things we're seeing for the first time, Ying-Yu pulls out her camera to take pictures of us being silly foreigners. Apparently, Taiwan and Japan are somewhat similar and she's seen this all before.

I have a speaking partner, and I met her for the first time today. Her name is Haruko and she's a student at Kansai Gaidai. I was expecting our meeting to last like half an hour but we spent 2 1/2 hours together. She's studied English for 8 years but isn't fluent, just like I've studied Japanese for 5 years but am not fluent. I think we're about on the same level of fluency, so our conversation was a lot of half English and half Japanese. It was fun, and very good practice for both of us.

Even for only being here such a short time, I think my Japanese has improved, maybe not a lot but noticeably. I'm remembering lots of stuff I forgot last semster, and I'm realizing maybe I'm not so bad off as I thought. I can work my way around to most things I can't say and I haven't had a problem yet, except when I took the placement test for the Japanese language courses. It was all multiple choice, which was ridiculous because I couldn't tell which one was the right answer. You know how in America they'll put in answers that you know are misleading? Well, I know Japanese well enough to be asked a question and give you the answer, but I don't know, when looking at A,B,C,D on a test in Japanese, which one is correct and which is misleading because they all look plausible! I hope I didn't do too badly because I really don't want to be in a low level class...

Anyways, next up is pictures of a bunch of crazy things I've seen in Japan so far. (And I know I've said "crazy" at least five times so far, but it's about the best thing I can say to describe Japan right now.)

This is a part of the sidewalk in front of Kansai Gaidai. There's a bunch of little animals on this strip, like cows, dogs, koala's, cats, etc... They're so cute!

The vending machine in my Seminar House. I was feeling sort of homesick and overwhelmed the first night here, but then I saw this and it made me happy. MatsuJun! ^_^

This is an elementary school bus. It goes around and picks up all the kids from this one elementary school, and it's so cute!! All the different elementary schools have their own cute-styled buses.

A sign near the river that runs through Hirakata. It reads, "abunai" meaning danger! And yet it's so funny!

The toilets in Japan are amazing. The ones at Kansai Gaidai have heated seats! They also have this little gadget in the stalls. If you can't read it, the essential part of the sign says, "Please place hand in front of sensor. This device makes sound of flushing for 25 seconds." Haha. >.>

During orientation we had a safety briefing meeting, and we went over what to do in case of an earthquake. Lots of useful stuff, and my favorite one was what the government says to do if an earthquake happens while you are in a shopping center or underground: "Cover your head with a bag." Yes, this is true, and it was on the powerpoint. See, I have proof!

Wow, this was a long post. I hope it gives you some idea of what life has been like here so far. Things are going to change drastically once I move in with my host family and school starts. Right now I'm still in the "everything's new and exciting" stage, but I think my bubble's going to burst soon because I'm craving a decent hamburger, fries, and big chocolate milkshake right now and there's nowhere I know of within miles to get one.

Tomorrow I go to Kyoto, and I'm so excited about it!! Kyoto is one of the main reasons I came to Japan, so when I found out Kansai Gaidai was going to give a tour I knew I had to sign up. I'll post pictures on that later.