Yesterday my day started a little earlier than usual because I had to go to campus to take a placement test in order to sign up for classes. I made a few mistakes on the test at first because they gave us instructions in Japanese, and while may listening might be okay when it comes to specifics I still have a hard time if I can't pick out the noun and subject. The room was packed with Japanese and foreign students alike. Some who seem to have been here for quite some time as well as first timers such as myself. Within ten minutes of starting the test two people sitting a seat over from me got up and walked out and said they had no idea what they were doing. I guess being raised in American school systems we're taught to at least try, especially considering some of the test was multiple choice.
Time flew by without me knowing it and to make matters worse my contacts starting drying up on me. Patrick (the other new comer from American I've mentioned before) finished his test with about thirty or forty minutes to spare. I wanted to take my time and use everything I had, or at least thought I had. I did what I could and ended up with ten minutes to spare. I honestly expected nothing more than a zero out of this test considering my katakana and kanji aren't that great, but I can read hiragana alright and have a decent vocabulary. After that me and Patrick went down to the Hyaku-en (dollar store) so he could pick up some living necessities. I got some more kitchen supplies such as large cutting knives (for a dollar!) to cut meat and what have you. I also picked up some supplies such as pencils, a pen, and more paper since school is starting in a couple of days.
We headed back and got a call from our teachers who were angered we hadn't picked up our test scores, but once again there was some confusion because we weren't told in English when to pick up our scores and my tutor said it'd be the 7th to pick it up and not the day we took the test (the 6th). That being said I'm going to comment on the misconception that the Japanese are anything BUT punctual. Every time I've gone to meet someone I've always beat them there, and when I went to meet one of my teachers about this English teaching gig on campus she was thirty minutes late...so I think me being late for picking up a test score can slide. Patrick, a German student, and myself walked over to the office after talking to one of our sensei to get our scores. I ended up making the same score Steve did the first time he took the placement test which isn't great, but I didn't make near as low as I thought. I made higher than the two who were with me when I picked up my score and for some reason although I made higher they put the German student into Intensive 2 (intensive meaning they throw a lot at you so you can learn more, not advanced) and put me into Intensive 1. Another Brit squirmed her way into Intensive 2 somehow even though she didn't do that well (not sure what her score was, but it wasn't enough to move her straight into Intensive 2). Her explanation being she wasn't sure what was going on in the test and if she had more time and knew what was going on she would have done better. I hate to be an ass (well not really it's kinda in me to be one) but if you didn't understand the test why in the fuck (excuse my French) does one think they would do better in a more advanced class. In the end I wasn't going to push my way into Intensive 2 as I think I can have a better learning platform by starting my Japanese from scratch. According to Steve I more than likely won't be challenged until the first couple of weeks pass by because it will be solely review for me. While I did come here to learn the language better at least I won't be under a lot of pressure for a while, and it will also give me time to settle in to my little teaching job I'll be starting next week.
The rest of the day was very lackluster and the only other time I left the dorm was to grab a beer with Steve at the convenient. Which still feels weird to me because he's under 20 and buying alcohol here. I stayed up really late and didn't go to bed til 3 in the morning and had to get up to meet my tutor at about 8:30 in the morning. Needless to say I had a hard time getting up but I made it there right on time. I needed my tutor to sign off on my part time job and turn in my class schedule form. It's so sad I've been here for a couple of weeks now and I'm still doing paperwork. The bureaucracy here is horrible, but I'm sure it's just as bad in America (if not worse) for foreigners. In the end I couldn't turn my forms in for the job because my gaijin card isn't ready and I need a copy of it as well as my alien registration number to complete the paperwork. So there might be a chance I won't be able to teach the first week. I personally don't see anything wrong in teaching one week and the forms would undoubtedly be completed by the second class. They seemed very against it when I said that though. When I got back I had me a nice unhealthy breakfast of Coco Krispies and OJ. After having a smoke with Steve we decided to go down to the castle grounds of Takeda-shingen and hit up Book Off again.
The center of town is situated around the station and is about a mile or slightly more from the dorm. As I've said before getting there is quick because it's downhill but that ride back is helping me drop the pounds I tell ya. We hit up Book Off first and I realized that there's a Denny's right next to it. What a combo, cheap book and crappy food. We always take our time in Book Off for a few reasons: there's a lot to look at, even with Steve we can't read everything, and Japanese people loiter like no others reading manga off the shelf without purchasing. Of course due to the ware and tear on manga because of loiterers that have a dollar section of manga that might not be in great condition but it's not like anything is torn out, just the paper might look dingy because it's been flipped through or is kind of old. In the end I always have to ask (in Japanese!) where the manga I'm looking for is. This week I got one of my favorite shows (recently made into a movie) that has a manga, and is called DMC (Detroit Metal City). It's about a kid who moves to Tokyo to go to school and join a trendy pop band. In the end he can only join a death metal band and it's a very funny comedy, almost a parody of sorts. Unfortunately, the manga does not have furigana (hiragana over kanji) and makes it harder to read. Scratch that, it's pretty impossible for me to read unless I use my DS Kanji dictionary and that takes a lotta time.
The other manga I grabbed were two volumes of "Shikabane Hime" which just started airing on television this past week. From this manga I learned there are two companies that specialize in putting furigana in their books. This will really help me learn new kanji, all the while increasing my reading ability as well as my vocabulary. Steve grabbed some more volumes of Tenjou Tenge (hard to translate but the best we can make out of it is "Heaven and Earth" or something like "As it is in Heaven as it is on Earth" kind of like a Japanese idiom of sorts) which I think is a great read but no furigana for me.
After leaving Book Off Steve wanted to explore but the day was overcast and it looked like rain (which it eventually did much later) and I wanted to hit up a park that once was an old castle ground for a warlord that once made Kofu one of his main bases operation. Although the sun wasn't completely shining the park was clean and very beautiful. It's also a great vantage point to see the rest of our city we live in. Those were pretty much the only pics I took today and here are a few. To see the more check out my flickr (always under my "Who" in the sidebar on the right). Won't have any pics of myself for sometime I'm sure, so I'm doing something different and am going for a mustache and goatee. Wonder how that will end up turning out...hopefully not as bad as my horrible ghetto peace signs I throw in my pics...
About where the city meets the mountainside way back in this picture is how far away the dorm is. I hate going uphill >.<
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