Things around here have been pretty quiet. With moving in all done last week was pretty much devoted to studying Japanese and wasting time on the internet. Typical that as soon as I actually have nothing to do I start looking forward to classes. Aizu is divided into labs based on the sub-school of CS that they specialize in. Kawaguchi-sensei has been asking round to try and get us placed into one. Hopefully once that is done I’ll be able to find a little more to stay busy with. We’ve been talking about travelling somewhere, but with 4 people it’s going to be a little expensive. The idea keeps getting kicked around, but we’ve all seen a fair bit of Japan during the last trip, and no one is ready to commit the money to it. In the mean time it may not be too exciting, but I guess I am learning a lot of Japanese. It would really help if there were more students around here to talk too, but the school is still mostly empty.

Over the weekend we went to dinner at Orr-sensei’s house. He’s still out of town visiting US schools but his wife and daughter were there, as well as his daughter’s boyfriend, and a handful of staff from the school. Kawaguchi-sensei came, which was really interesting. He’s only a few years older than us (just finished with his PHD in the US) and seeing him in a more casual setting outside of school really just reinforced it. Dinner was really good, and it was a great chance to practice Japanese. Orr-sensei’s daughter is starting school in the US at next year, so a lot of what we discussed was the US college environment. In Japan, students work harder in junior high and high school, but once accepted to college, it’s more or less expected to be a free ride. Even at Aizu, the staff admitted that very few students are truly motivated on their work. Coming from the US this is almost the exact opposite; students in college are expected to work harder than in high school, definitely not a free ride. Again, this is part of the reason that Aizu is so willing to accept American students. All of them are ready to work hard, even though the environment here does not explicitly require it.

Sunday we stopped in at Superstar. Since it’s their least busy day of the week we were offered a special rate. When we showed up it was completely empty, which was really nice. Instead of doing karaoke like usual, we hung out with Hoshi-san and the hostess there. It was really cool to relax with them, and again to be able to really practice Japanese in an immersive environment. One of the things that we’ve been learning here is Aizu-ben (会津弁), the local way of speaking. In Japan, regional speech patterns consist accents (like in English) as well as large numbers of completely different words. These words are completely unique to the region, and not understandable as part of the regular language. It’s really pretty amazing the amount of variance in the language. In America we certainly have accents, but there are very few words that are entirely exclusive to a specific region. Another interesting discussion we had was over social interactions. Nick mentioned that he really liked the fact that in Japan people were always much more polite. The hostess at superstar disagreed. After living in New York for two years she said that she thought Americans were actually much friendlier. She said that while Japanese were kinder and more polite during initial meetings that Americans became friends with people much more quickly. I thought it was an interesting insight. That Americans were initially unfriendly, but opened up much more quickly.

This coming weekend looks to be pretty busy. Friday we are having a nabe (鍋) party at our apartment. A group of the Aizu students are coming over, and we are going to cook dinner in a large pot on the table. It’s nice that more students are starting to get back to school, I’ve really been looking forward to meeting more people here. In the mean time its back to trying to figure out the rest of the weeks before school. Where do we want to visit in Japan?