I forgot to mention the coolest part of the trip to Miyajima. Most of the people did end up camping overnight there, and as you might imagine the incredible number of deer on the island posed a bit of a problem for the intrepid campers. More to the point, they posed a problem to the bag full of important papers that Owen left where deer could reach it. When he woke up the next morning, the deer had completely consumed his bank book and his international driver's license and partially eaten his passport. Of course, they couldn't just eat the blank pages in the back (although they did that as well); they had to eat the only important part of it - the visa stamp. So now Owen has a passport that's been taped together and has deer teethmarks where a visa should be. If it weren't so hilarious, it would be an unmitigated disaster.
Success in dropping that class. The system here is incredibly inflexible, so you are not actually supposed to be able to drop any classes once you've registered. This is of course ridiculous, as it means that you can't test out a class to see if it's too easy or too hard or simply uninteresting. As a result, all the other foreign students had massive problems trying to fix their schedule, but when I finally decided to fix mine, they were ten kinds of incredibly helpful and nice. Where everyone else's request was met with bitternes and suspicion, the lady who handled my change was really sweet and kept saying how amazed she was at all the classes I was taking, and how she understood that the class I dropped must have been simply too difficult to continue with, and generally made it clear that she thought I was an excellent person who had made a bold and courageous decision. This is a hilarious contrast to the guilt-tripping and outright refusal that everyone else had to suffer through.
So this poetry course I have is by far the best one this semester. I think it's one of the only courses I'm taking in which I'll actually learn something; it's also the only course in which I can understand almost everything the professor says. She is an extremely excitable 38-year-old Japanese woman who speaks in this breathless, fast-paced Japanese, but somehow she contrives to be perfectly understandable. I learned more about this Japanese traditional game called "Hyaku-Nin Isshu", or "One Hundred Poets, One Line (each)". This guy in the 1200s took what he considered to the best single line each of 100 poets, then gathered them into a book of the above title. In the 1600s, after Spanish and Portuguese missionaries introduced playing cards to the Japanese, someone took the hundred lines and split them all in the middle, putting the two halves on seperate cards. The basic way the game works is that all the first halves are gathered in a stack, while all the second halves are spread face up on the table. One person reads the first half of a line, then everyone else has to find the second half of the line as soon as possible. Now, as a game, this lacks several important elements essential to Western games (fun, for instance) and has several others considered antithetical to them (massive amounts of requisite memorization, difficult classical language, and poetry). Nonetheless, I'll almost certainly shell out the cash for a set of the cards because a fun-free, classical-poetry-memorization game is such an awesome idea. Don't worry, I won't expect any of you to play it with me. Unless you rouse my ire Beware the Ire of March! Wait, that's not how it goes.
