I believe that I have stumbled onto the cure for jet lag. Don't sleep at all the day before leaving, then nap on the way to the airport, nap while waiting for your flight, nap repeatedly during the flight itself, doze a little on the bus ride after leaving the airport, then finally get a good night's sleep. I did all of that and was up and chipper at 7 a.m. sharp (this plan however is not recommended for those who are not terminally insane such as myself).

Breakfast was juice and donuts, kindly provided by the JCMU staff in order to entice us to sit tight through the orientation and review of the campus rules (which basically boiled down to the horrendously difficult to remember: don't be dumb). We were then provided with bikes and helmets courtesy of JCMU and let loose to poke around Hikone on our own (someone, somewhere I'm sure was getting a damn fine laugh out of this, I'm sure). A bunch of us exchange students stopped at a little restaurant called Champon, scaring the noodles out of the few patrons already there. If you're ever in Hikone I highly recommend getting the yakesoba. It was, to be blunt, simply incredible, and I regretted more than a little not ordering the extra large portion. My only recommendation is to go in a group slightly less than forty people; that probably was why the service seemed to lag a bit.

Another one of life's little lessons: the most feared creature on the planet is not the great white shark, Siberian tiger, or even me when I'm on the prow for cheesecake. This most fearsome of beasts is the Japanese housewife when encountered in a grocery store on sale day. I was probably twice as tall and three times as massive than everyone else in the building, but several times I came within an inch of getting body checked through a display because I got between some nice little lady and the discount beef cuts. After narrowly avoiding getting mauled in a free for all in the produce aisle, I just grabbed what I could and made a break for the check out line. Which leads to my current dilemma: just what am I supposed to do with 20 lbs of whole octopus tentacle?

Today I also had my first my first sighting of that amnipresent staple of anime: the traveling pack of Japanese school girls, and much to my disappointment, I failed to discern a single mahou shoujo among them, although I suppose that that particular subtype is rather hard to pick out unless the obligatory talking animal sidekick is hanging around, or a monster pops up and starts devouring random mailboxes forcing them to discard their secret identity and annihilate the beast in a spray of pink fluff and cheesy catchphrases. I did however have the rather unsettling experience of having the entire bunch step aside and titter at me when I said, "sumimasen" (excuse me) as I rode my bike past, leaving me to wonder what precisely they might've found so amusing. Was my pronunciation that bad? Did I once again forget to put pants on? Or did they find something inherently amusing about a fuzzy gaijin on a slightly too small bike trying to ride down the street while balancing 20lbs of octopus on his handlebars?

Another observation: there are vending machine everywhere. I could have thrown my twenty pounds of octopus in twenty different directions and hit twenty-four different vending machines. I didn't see any of the fabled dispensaries of young woman's used undergarments, but every kind of beverage imaginable had a distributor set up every four feet or so. Although I'm reasonably sure that I am the closest Georgia Coffee has ever come to Georgia, it overcame any doubts I had about the tastiness of hot canned beverages received via vending machine.

More inanity to come tomorrow…