Settling In

Things are starting to get into a regular routine in Kanazawa. We've completed our placement tests, and been issued our laptops (reliable internet!). Classes start tomorrow at 9:50, and go until about 3:30 every day. I will be studying Japanese language and culture.

It's really a change to get settled into a regular daily routine after moving around so much. It's a little more normal, and a little less fun. Even so there's still a lot of cool stuff going on here. We were walking to dinner tonight, and stopped at a corner to check the map when the shopkeeper hustled out of one of the stores and asked if we were Rose-Hulman students. Apparently he knew Professor Lautzenheiser, a math professor at Rose, really well. We weren't quite able to figure out where he'd met him, but it was interesting talking too him all the same. He showed us a Christmas card from Professor Lautzenhesier, and was really eager to talk to us in English. He spoke really well, and apparently had learned all of it from US radio and TV. He was really excited to ask us about Japanese food in the US, and he wanted to know our opinions on the Iraq war. We ended up eating dinner at his restaurant. It was really good, and fairly cheap. The entire experience was a really strange small world experience.

We did a lot of stuff over the weekend too. The Hyakumangoku Matsuri festival was held in Kanazawa. The festival celebrates the historical unification of the region by Maeda Toshii. We visited Kanazawa castle, and Kenroku-en garden. The castle was fairly neat, but the garden was phenomenal. Kenroku-en is Japan's third most beautiful garden (who knows what criteria?) and has a bunch of trees and a river. One of the really interesting things to see were the way the trees were supported. Almost all of the large trees had wooden posts tied to the branches in order to support them in the winter. As a result, a lot of the branches were grown into strange, almost impossible shapes. I'll post a bunch of pictures once my internet is a little better.

After seeing Kenroku-en we walked back into town to watch a parade. A lot of the parade was fairly normal by western standards. Marching bands, cheer squads, boy scouts (they have berets in Japan). It also had some decidedly eastern conponents, such as a performance by the firefighters, where they did acrobatics on top of laddders raised in the middle of the street. The entire parade culminated with a samurai procession re-enacting the entrace of the victorious Maeda Toshii into Kanazawa. After the parade there was a huge folk-dance competition in the streets, with competitors from different companies dressed in different color kimonos. The entire city was alive and lit up, entirely different from the way I'd seen it before.

Overall I'm looking forward to a more normal routine. It'll be nice to settle down (a little bit).