Oct. 13th

Yesterday Braden went to his first day of class! And me too! I signed up for a free introductory Japanese class on campus and went to my first day yesterday. There are only a few students. Me, two chinese guys, a guy from Mongolia (I think), a woman from Indonesia, a guy from Sri Lanka, and a guy from Kyrgystan. ALL of them speak at least some japanese, except me :P, I feel like I'm the only one there who can't carry out even a simple conversation in Japanese, but I was happy to be there. Braden went with me the first day, I was too nervous to go alone, but now I've met everyone, and there's at least one person there who speaks really good english (the guy from Sri Lanka) so if I'm having difficulties I can ask him for help. The teacher speaks a little english, but not very much, which I guess is a good thing cause if the lessons are mostly in Japanese I'll have that much more exposure to it. Braden is taking a lot of Japanese classes this quarter. He's taking Japanese 1 and 2, Intensive conversation, Prep for JLPT part 2 (Or something like that :P. Its a prep class for a national Japanese test that foreigners can take), and he's also taking a Japanese culture class, and an Intro to Foreign cultures class. Sounds like a lot of work, but two of the classes (the intensive conversation and Prep for JLPT) are not for any credits, they're just kind of like bonus classes for now. I'm excited to learn Japanese, I can't wait till I can actually talk to people, but I gotta be patient :P (Never one of my strongest attributes, hehe).

The University had their school festival the other day which was fun. All the school clubs and organizations had booths out and they were selling all sorts of snacks and food, and there was music and lots of socializing. I bought some candied grapes and a chocolate covered banana. Braden bought some cool little fried ice cream balls. They were little scoops of ice cream covered in some sort of fried batter, they were really good. There were tons of people around, it was sort of like going to the fair, except just the food area :P. Oh, and by one of the booths was a girl dressed as a maid and holding a guitar. Lol, I wish I'd had my camera. Then nearby we passed a booth where there were guys dressed as maids, the poor things looked like they'd been put up to it by the president of their club. They were obviously trying to attract attention to their booth, and it was working, but one of the guys looked quite embarrassed! The next day (It was a two day festival) I saw a guy in the same area dressed as Pikachu from Pokemon. Lol, it was like a mini anime convention. I had mentioned earlier that I hadn't seen that much sign of the anime culture in Matsue, but then I realized you just have to go to the right places to see it. Like rental stores. The first time Braden and I went into one I was shocked by the sheer number of anime and manga (yes, you can rent comic books in Japan) you could rent there. The video game and movie sections were comparable in size to rental stores in America, but the anime and manga sections were huge! Too bad its all in Japanese, I can't read any of it yet!! Someday though, someday :).