First weekish: arrival, my room, orientation, etc. 8/31-9/2

As I'm sure you can all imagine, after the power outage and a flight change, I had been feeling pretty damn flustered up to the point when I finally left for my flight. Somehow, however, during most of the trip, I didn't feel sad, or particularly anxious, or overly excited, either... It all just felt a little bit surreal (and I don't doubt that coming down from that frenzied last week of summer contributed to the apathy of it, either). The first flight to LAX was fine (mom cried upon departure, of course); I slept most of the way and watched the pretty mountains of the West coast after I had awoken. Getting on my connecting flight straight to KIX, Japan - the one for which I had to turn my American phone off forever, yeah, that one - made me feel more anxious, but I've discovered that it's really impossible to feel anxious for an entire twelve hour flight. Since my iPod is experiencing some serious life struggles, I wrote a little, read a little, watch a movie or two... And didn't sleep. Which was annoying, but how can you sleep when you're on your way to Japan? The young woman next to me turned out to be fluent in both English and Japanese, too, so I had some help finding the correct bus to Hirakata City, my new home (it actually wouldn't have been that hard, anyway).

I didn't find out until a lot later, but I was technically the last to arrive to Seminar House 1 during orientation week (I was just being fashionably late?). In any case, here are some pictures of my room:

I live on the upper of two floors, room 206 with Jess! She's actually from Australia, not Sweden. That flag was just a mistake.

We sleep on Japanese-style futons. Apparently everyone thinks it's really weird that we sleep so close next to each other (it's not).

We live in an 8-tatami sized room; one tatami mat is one of those green rectangles on the floor.

Keeping with the traditional Japanese style of the room, our desk areas are behind the shouji 障子 (sliding paper doors).

I like Jess a lot. She's adorable, half-Chinese but fully Australian, and we get along really well. Though I took these pictures today, our room is actually always that clean. The only differences we have are that I always fall asleep before her and wake up earlier than she does... Womp.

And here's a picture of us with our other friend, Leila (from Finland):

Since I arrived late due to Hurricane Irene, I did indeed end up missing all of Orientation except for the last day, which was the Opening Ceremony and Luncheon. Which was all rather boring, so I don't remember much, but it looked like this:

Those are the flags of every country which is represented in Kansai Gaidai's international program this year. 32 countries, US domination in terms of number of students, followed not very closely by Australia.

That day I was also able to get a lot of housekeeping out of the way, such as signing up for classes, paying my fees, opening a bank account, receiving my ID to access the computers, and taking the language placement test (I placed into Japanese 3 out of 7, not bad!)

And that's basically about it for the first couple days. Sorry that was incredibly boring, but the weekend after this was much more interesting. In my next post I'll talk about the (first) typhoon, the humidity, the bars, and I'll introduce some more of the friends I've made :) Look forward to it!



P.S. Today (in real time, not in backdated blog time) my seminar house is celebrating American Thanksgiving together. It really makes me miss home! I hope everyone has a nice break from work and classes and a wonderful time celebrating with family. I'll be home in a month to catch the tail end of these celebrations!

UPDATE

So contrary to the fact that I haven't posted anything since I arrived in Japan, I am indeed alive and having a wonderful time!

For about a month now I've earnestly been meaning to get around to posting, but things here are just so busy, as I'm sure you'd all imagine. However, after much pestering from my mother, I'm ready to bring this blog back from the dead! I'm gonna start from the beginning of my trip here and slowly catch up to speed with where I am now. With less than six weeks of my time here left, I'm not sure it will actually be possible to publish everything before I return home, but I'm going to try. I know you've all been anxiously awaiting news from me (ha, ha).

I can't believe how much time has already passed. It's really incredible.

Here's a picture to tide you over until I write something meaningful: