How many unexpected ledges and steps can one small apartment hold? The answer lies in the photographic documentation to your right: no less than three. The Japanese have an obsession with making you step up and down to enter or exit anything. Even the emergency exits here have half-foot high drops for no reason at all. It's like they got together and tried to decide how to make a given set of rooms as annoying to negotiate as possible, then applied that theory all over Japan. Land of the Rising Sun? More like Land of the Broken Hips. I have no idea how old or infirm people survive in this country.
I had another class today that was designed only for Japanese students. The professor was obviously put off by the presence of three Americans in his class, and kept referring to us at random times and interrupting class to talk to just us. He also had me read a passage of the syllabus which was - oh joy! - mostly crazy kanji I'd never seen before. For those of you who don't know, kanji is the non-phonetic writing system, so you simply have to memorize all the possible readings for a given character, and if you've never seen it before, there is no way that you'll be able to read it. He was pretty nice about helping me read it, but I was extremely grateful when he had me pass the torch to someone else. Really, if I could have chosen one thing that I would never have wanted to do on the first day of a Japanese class, that thing would have been reading aloud. It's sort of like asking a Calculus I student to get up in front of a graduate class and solve a triple integral. Maybe next class he'll ask me to wrestle a crocodile nude while singing 'Die Fleidermaus' in accent-free German.
Greco-Roman crocodile wrestling aside, classes have been pretty cool. Apparently there is this Japanese chick who is somewhat sweet on me; she may be in for somewhat of a disappointment when she finds out that I've already got a garufurendo, but maybe she'll be cool with it and let me start up a Japanese harem. Then I could be like the White Raja of Borneo, only I'd be the Greasy Emperor of Japan. It'd be great.
The girls here dress ridiculously for classes - they all looked like they stepped right out of a nightclub, complete with elaborate dresses, impractically short skirts, stiletto heels, heavy makeup and intricate hairdos. I mean, coming from ASU, I'm used to chicks who dress like sluts a-clubbing, but even so I'm blown away. Seriously every girl I've seen so far at the university has been wearing stiletto heels, as far as I can remember. Considering the large, steep hills all over campus, however, this mostly just adds to the general comedy factor of wandering around.
There is this awesome pond on campus surrounded by trees and a really nice wooden walkway. It apparently is the sleep spot, in as much as such a thing exists (without comfy couches, no amount of nature can make a truly great sleeping nook). I sat there and read a little bit today and enjoyed being cold, what with the wind and all. I say, blow, wind, blow! Chestnuts overshadow the lake, so every couple of minutes some nuts would drop into the water with a big splash; before I figured out the chestnut connection, I was fairly convinced that it was either an air raid or mermen. Frankly, I was a little disappointed with the reality.
