My life has settled into a bit of a routine centered around school. Breakfast at 8 AM, bicycle to school for classes starting at 9, 50 minute classes with 10 minute breaks, a 40 minute lunch at noon, classes till 2:30 and home to study, dinner at 7 PM, more study, bed.

The pace is pretty fast with new stuff everyday. I am so far holding my own but vocabulary is a struggle with 20-30 new words a day as well as the words that I am already supposed to know that I don’t. The focus is on conversation which we do in some form or another for 5 hours a day. Kanji is not taught in the class but is still used as most of the Chinese students are already fluent so it makes things easier for them. Not for the rest of us though. My classmates are great, we all get along well and are getting used to each other. The class is a good size with 10 people. Most of them are here for at least a few months, some of them for a year or more.

Lunches are a bit hurried and the usual option is to walk to the Domy supermarket next door and buy a bento. There is a large variety, all good and all fairly inexpensive. Lots of little side dished to buy as well. I have eaten more fried stuff in the last week here than I have in the last year in Vancouver though. We pretty much all eat together. We cheat a lot within the group and there is probably more English used than Japanese with a lot of side excursions in Chinese. This does seem to be changing gradually and more Japanese is being used all the time. It really is pretty amazing how much you can warp what you want to say to make it fit whatever grammar structure you are currently struggling to master. Domy was closed on Wednesday which (I think) is usual although there was also some other holiday this week which may have factored in somehow. Instead we drove to a local curry/ramen/katsu place (a chain I think), made our selections from a vending machine in the lobby which gives you a ticket for what you want, entered, sat down, presented our tickets, got food, ate and were back in time for class. I had a chicken katsu curry which was quite good but pretty big for lunch.

I was really not looking forward to Wednesday afternoon when the weekly tests are given. There is a 2.5 hour written test + a “break” sometime in the middle for a 1-on-1 oral test. Levels at Yamasa are 4 weeks long. If you don’t pass all of the tests in a level with an 80% average you don’t get to proceed to the next level. From that standpoint I guess it doesn’t really matter how well I do as I am only here for 4 weeks but I still want to do well. I have studied a lot but there comes a point where more is not better. I thought that I did reasonably well on the written test with the exception that there were parts that I did not understand as the kanji was missing furigana and I guessed or just had no idea. I thought that the oral test went about as badly as it possibly could and was quite surprised on Thursday to find that I had gotten 85% and 80% respectively. Their grading is overly kind.

Thursday is graduation day for the students that are leaving that week. Everyone who is leaving has to give a speech in front of all of the assembled students. I had better start working on mine! Only 2 students left this week so it was a pretty short ceremony. We also had to give oral presentations in class in the afternoon. Wednesday we had been put in teams of 2 to come up with a fake company. We had to create an interview for new hires, a company advertising poster and a background for the company. We had 3 minutes to introduce our company, say why you would want to work there, give list of rules, pay scales etc. After the presentation we had to interview the other students for a job and in turn be interviewed for their company. At the end you had to talk about which company you wanted to work for and why. A few people chose my company (a bicycle shop that builds custom bikes) which was nice. The main reason was that I seemed like a slack/fun person to work which likely means that I should not operate a business.

There had been no lessons posted for Friday to study so I did not study anything new. That did not however mean that there was no new material covered. There was a lot. We are not following the book in a linear manner but are jumping all over so it is difficult to predict what will be next.

As Friday is a short day we decided to have a leisurely lunch together and possibly plan something for the weekend. Domy bentos lost out to a trip to a local noodle shop where we all ordered some variation on a bowl of ramen/soba/udon/(flat noodles that I can’t remember the name of). It was all really good and we had the waitress take our picture. If I get a copy I’ll post it.

Most people are going to Matsumoto this weekend but that town is in the direction that I will be going later so I’m doing a solo trip to Takayama and Shirakawa. It’s a 3 hour train ride which should give me time to study if the countryside is not too interesting. I’ll overnight there and come back sometime late on Sunday. When I told my my host family that I was going they had lots of advice, brochures and a even a map! There was also some advice about crossing the street which for some reason seemed dangerous. Perhaps I don’t come cross as overly competent but it is kind of cute to be treated like I’m still in grade school. I’ll have to find out what the best omiyagi to bring back is when I’m there.

Anyway, I just got back from the ZigZag where I helped keep Guinness and Sapporo in business and it’s past midnight and I need to get up at 6 so that’s all for now.