Action-filled Day

Well, today was certainly an action-filled day!! Still waking up at 6:00 in the morning... though this morning I at least *tried* to go back to sleep for a while. Unfortuanately, it didn't work too well. Ah well.

Let's see... oh yeah! Placement test! That was this morning. It was a bit daunting. I felt a little better off about it than a lot of my friends, since I've never actually taken a class (nor am taking Japanese classes at college), so it doesn't matter at all where I get placed! The only thing is that I would *like* to get above Level 1, because I'm afraid most of it will be pure review. But hey, I guess I'll just take whatever they give me.
The test was... well, it was difficult. But it was difficult for pretty much everyone, so I'm not alone, ahaha. First was the listening, which was probably the most difficult! They would give you a short dialogue, then ask you two questions about it. And they only said anything once. Ummm, yeah, it was hard. Then there was hiragana/katakana/kanji translation. I was great at the hiragana, katakana and kanji, but not the actual translation part on the back!! ^^ After that was a grammar portion, where you were only supposed to do parts up to how much you've studied. I did the first two, though a lot of my answers on the B section were guesses, eheh. Finally, it was kanji recognition, which I knew about... hmmm... 5 or 6 on each part.
Well, we'll see how I do!

Though, I've been looking at the class descriptions, and I'm starting to think that I might want to not do the Reading and Writing class, because I really want to take Religions of Japan. It would be so much fun! So, if all goes well with registration, I will be doing Spoken Japanese, Religions of Japan, Survey of Japanese Art, and Brush Painting. But that will only be if I get a good place in the lottery. The only one I'm really worried about filling up, though, is Brush Painting, so we'll have to see.

After that, lunch at the cafeteria. I'm getting good at this whole ordering thing! I didn't have the whole confusion about the soup/soda like I did yesterday. I'm growing quite fond of curry rice! Then we got iced coffee at Seattle's Best Coffee, which was delicious. And I also ordered it in Japanese. Go me!

Upon finishing that, Casey and I had the language lab orientation, which is the computer program that we'll use to do many homework assignments and study in Japanese class. The headsets... are pretty awesome. They've got a microphone and everything. I felt like I was in Star Fox! Though it's going to be a bit awkward having to record things when everyone else can hear you. Ahaha...ha...

Tonight, we went to the mall again, now that we had more time and could pretty much look at whatever we wanted to at our leisure. It... seriously... it's just so fun looking around at things. It's like an overload of cute half the time! And we also went to a different bookstore that had more sheeeeelves of manga, and it made me so very happy. Though I still can't figure out how to find any series easily yet, ahaha. But we also ate at the mall food court, well, "Eat Court", LOL. I got some pasta... I actually think it was shrimp alfredo. It tasted like it at least. It was called Ebi no Kuri-mu Chi-zu So-su, which is basically shrimp pasta with cream cheese sause. It was good. Then there was a Baskin Robins there... so I got green tea ice cream!!! It was so very tasty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yummm.

After the mall, we all wanted to go to a karaoke parlor. Which ended up being UBER FUN. It's a good thing we had Laura with us, because she's quite profficient in Japanese and could figure out what the guy was telling us when we paid for it and everything, lol. But we sang a whole bunch of songs from Japanese and anime songs to stuff like an Abba medley, Spice Girls, Maroon 5 and Backstreet Boys. It was awesome. Plus, the karaoke parlor itself was in an arcade!! So we pretty much went crazy in there. Casey and Ellen played a guitar game, and Laura and I played TAIKO DRUM MASTER! It was pretty much awesome. My arms got so tired though! It takes a lot more energy than the Playstation one, ahaha.
Finally, to end the night, all five of us fit into a print club booth to get pictures. It was absolutely hilarious. You get to choose from tons of backgrounds and then take the pictures in front of a green screen, basically. Then, when you're done, you can go through them and add props and write on them and add effects... we had way too much fun with them. The funniest ones were us riding an elephant backwards and then one where we posed in front of a garbage can and added strange sparkles coming out of it, ahahaha. XD

So yeah, it was a really fun night.
Tomorrow, the actual orientation begins, so there are more things going on, like the opening meeting, registration lottery, and... oh, I can't remember what else. But it's all on the schedule.
OH, but awesome sauce - we all signed up to go on the Kyoto tour on Friday, so that should be LOTS OF FUN. I'm excited~!

Well, that's about it, that I can think of. I'm pretty much bushed! Hopefully, I will be able to at least sleep until 7 tomorrow. ^^

Edit:: Hmmm, the pictures are taking forever to upload, so the server must be pretty booked. I will upload them tomorrow though! It always goes quickly in the morning!

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