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Published: September 25th 2009
Days 6-9: September 22-25, 2009
The past few days have been pretty laid back.
Both on the 22nd and 23rd, pretty much all I did was wake up, talk to parents, go out exploring (I found this HUMUNGUS 7-11, I was so happy), eat lunch while out, come back, make some sort of dinner, talk to more people, go to bed. It was nice having a few quiet days.
The 24th was the day of orientation, and Ashley and I had met in the hallway the night before and made plans to go together. Lita and Shinae went with us too. Orientation wasn’t until 2:30, so we decided to leave at 12, eat lunch in Yotsuya, then go to orientation. Well, it took us longer to get there than we thought it would, so we had to eat a fast lunch. By the way, I got rice, fish, and miso soup for lunch, all under 4 bucks; it was pretty sweet… Orientation was boring as hell… Basically they tell you that you need to do a bunch of things, and then don’t tell you how to do them… Then we met our Japanese monitor students. Mine doesn’t speak
much English, so we just spoke Japanese with her. It made me feel a little bit better about the test I had to take the next day; at least I remembered a bit of conversational Japanese. After that, Ashley, Lita and I came back and explored the East side of our train station, ate dinner, did a bit of shopping, and then came back to the DK House. Then I worried myself to death about studying for the placement test, but I was so tired that I barely studied at all… It turns out that I’ve studied a lot of kanji, and don’t remember nearly as many as I should…
I woke up at 5 to study, but didn’t actually get out of bed till about 5:30, and even then I just got my stuff and studied in bed (not very productive…). When I STILL couldn’t wake up, I went and took a shower, then came back to study some more. It seemed to work out better after the shower. I got ready, then met Lita and Ashley downstairs at 8 to go to school. We ended up getting there almost an hour early and had full intentions of
studying, but it didn’t happen… By the time we went into the testing room, there was a huge group of people from the DK house in the back of the room just talking to each other. The test was a normal test for me, I guess. I made it through most of the intermediate kanji, and even guessed a few of the advanced; grammar was great for me, I did pretty much all but the most advanced section of it; my composition sucked horribly --it was the most basic bull crap I could pull out of thin air, but at least it was 11 lines, when it only needed to be 10. When I got out, no one else felt good about the test either, and we all decided that once we got our results back and our class assignments, we were all just gonna go up and dispute the placement ;p We have to be difficult foreigners, after all…
After the test, we decided to go to Ikebukuro to try to find me a phone; Mike and John had found a shop with a guy that spoke English, and John was gonna take me to him. Well, after
walking for about an hour trying to find this place, we find out that they don’t have prepaid phones… So then I spend the next 30 minutes walking into random shops asking if they had prepaid phones, and none of them did. All of us were tired by then, and I didn’t want to waste the money to ride the train all the way back to Yotsuya when we were already kind of close to our train station in Warabi, so Lita, Ashley and I skipped the welcome party the school threw for the exchange students and went home, while John opted to go back to school. On our way back, we ran into some other girls that decided if we weren’t going, than neither were they --we’re such bad influences…
So now I’m spending the rest of my day reading stuff online, cleaning my room (which desperately needed to be done), and getting my blogs and pictures up to date.
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