I really have to get better at updating this regularly. I always hit one busy week, and then just start procrastinating after that...

So everything went from zero to sixty in no time. Of course since everything got busy I've just been wishing for more free time. So last week was the first week of school. We started it off by going to two different onsen, one on Saturday and on on Sunday. Both times we tagged along with Orr-sensei. His wife and daughter were out seeing a chick-flick, so he was nice enough to shove us all in his car and take us up to Ura-bandai. That's the backside of Mt. Bandai. When it erupted (late 1800s) all of it blew backwards, away from Aizu. As a result there are a whole series of little lakes back there, and the remaining volcanic activity means a whole slew of hotsprings. Before that though we visited the rebuilt samurai school. Aizu has a really strong historical samurai tradition. If you've seen The Last Samurai you can get the basic idea. During the late 1800s growing discontent with the handling of western powers in Japan, a civil war broke out between the Emperor and the samurai. Aizu was the last real battlefield in the civil war, and is very famous for a group of samurai who commited harikiri upon seeing the castle in flames. Aizu's castle finally fell after a month long seige, but the lasting affects left a huge mark in the local heritigate. A lot of people in Aizu are very proud of the city's samurai tradition. The school we visited is a replica built by a wealthy businessman in the 70s. The original school was completey demolished during the siege. We couldn't quite figure out some of the exhibits, but it was still really cool to see the shool. I'm also really glad we learned more about Aizu's history. Its come up pretty often, especially when comparing Aizu and Kanazawa. They were on opposite sides in the war, as Yamauchi sensei constatntly reminds us. After the school we went out of a bath. Thanks to the altitude it was still snowy, so we headed to a rotemburo. Rotemburo are public baths built outdoors. It was really amazing to sit in a hotspring outside in the snow. The view was great too, we could see the frozen lake down below. The entire thing seemed a little surreal too: hot tub, snow, naked in public. They have monkeys up there too, but we didn't see any. The biggest disappointment of the weekend.

The next day we headed back to Orr-sensei's house for intelligensia. The basic idea is to have a philosophical type discussion in english to help out the Aizu students with exceptional abilities in English. In practice it's a little tough, the Japanese students are really hesitant to contribute. On top of that there are a number of them that had trouble with the vocabulary that kept coming up in the literary discussion. I thought it was a lot of fun though. It really reminded me how much I miss being able to have a discussion that isn't related to science or engineering. There are definately some things Rose-Hulman is lacking. After intelligensia, Orr-sensei invited everyone to come out with him and his family up to the lake to take a hike and visit a sento. Not much else to do, so naturally we tagged along. This time we visited the Inawashiro lake. The shore was nice, and you could see Bandai across the water. I'm still always impressed by the mountains here. I guess that's what comes from growing up in Illinois and going to school in Indiana. When you've got nothing to compare them to even the tiny ones are great. So hike around the lake, then a bath. We finished up by watching the sun set from the balcony of the building, then going out to dinner.

Super relaxing, but the week kicked off from there. Monday disappeared in a mountain of paperwork. Turns out there were a lot of things that we needed to do to get registered. Most of them involved writing our names and our birthdate; Japan loves paperwork. Tuesday we worked all day on writing our presentation for Wednesday. We had agreed to do the presentation when we first arrived, after which the deal got worse. Long and short, by Monday we were scheduled to do a Japanese presentation in suits at a power breakfast, 7:00 Wednesday morning, two hours before our first classes. We started out decently on Tuesday, all of us had our speeches written by noon. What we didn't count on was how long it would take us to rewrite them into more formal Japanese. I finished revising mine with Kawaguchi-sensei (THANKYOU!) at 1AM Wednesday morning. It felt like being back at Rose: up late coasting on coffee to finish everything up for a crunched deadline. The picture is the little blurb on us from the newspaper.

Wednesday morning went pretty well though. We all managed to get in some decent rehearsal time Tuesday, and the speech was solid. We all spent most of it staring at our scripts, but our Japanese came off really well, and we managed to answer the questions asked fluently. That was really a stroke of luck, they could have stumped us with any number of questions, but the only thing anyone asked about was how we had studied Japanese.

The rest of Wednesday and all of Thursday I spent in class. They were overall pretty good, but certainly different from Rose. The most apparent thing was the difference in class participation. Japanese students are really really hesitant to answer or ask questions. In my class today I answered 3/4 of the questions the teacher asked. Asking around I guess this it a big difference between classrrom dynamics here and in the States. Most of the teachers have encouraged us to keep doing it though, they're hoping maybe the whole class will catch on. I doubt it.

Last Friday was Taco night, we invited some people and made it an event. With a lot of searching, and some help from America (thanks Mom!) we managed to scrape together most of the ingredients for tacos. The one missing things was Mexican cheese. The only thing we could find shredded in a large enough package was just 'cheese'. No mention of what type, but it tasted alright. The best part of the whole food gathering process was buying the meat. We bought 1 kilo (about 2.2 lbs) at the supermarket. The butcher repeated the amount three times and double checked with the Japanese student who was with us to make sure we knew what we were ordering. The total for the meat came to $18, not as bad as I originally expected. Everything cooked up really well, and we had a great time hanging out at the apartment. Out of everything from America, I think I probably miss Mexican food the most. Those tacos made my week.

Saturday was pretty much devoted to laundry, sleep, and (a little) homework. Sunday we had intelligentsia again. I liked this week's a lot better than the week before. The topic the previous week was 'the best advice you've ever been given'. It was alright, but there was very little discussion. It was more or less show and tell. Plus, Orr-sensei laid on religion pretty heavy. There were definately times when it felt more like he was preaching than discussing. Just didn't really feel particularly right for a discussion group. Religion isn't something you can really debate with someone. This week's discussion was on love, and centered around Corinthinans 1:13. I guess he usually picks bible passages for these since it's readily available multi-language source material. Anyways, I though the discussion was much better. The reading lent it self as easily to philosophy as to religion, which I think made it possible to actually debate it. Maybe I should dig though on the internet and see if I can find something to distribute.

Anyways after intelligensia we took a hike up to the resivour for Aizu, and then went to the castle to eat dinner. The resivour was cool, but I think the castle took the cake. Hanami, the cherry blossom festival starts tomorrow at the castle, but even last weekend it was unbelievable. The castle is full of cherry trees. Easily 70% of the courtyard, the outer walls, the banks along the moat, were covered in white foliage. We have a few flowering trees back home, but seeing that many all together was really beyond anything I would have imaginged. Really, indescribably beautiful. On top of it the smell is wonderful. Plus, since the weekend the trees all over town have been blooming. Everywhere I've gone there have been cherry trees. It's really disorienting to be surrounded by flowers after how miserably cold it was last month. The actual celebration is this weekend, and I'm really looking forward to it. Most Japanese will go out with friends or family or their company to picnic and drink under the trees in the park. From what I've heard it's a pretty amazing departure from usual Japanese life. Everyone just relaxes under the trees for the weekend. I headed back to the castle Monday with Nick to get some pictures. I got some good ones, but they still don't even come close.



In the meantime, classes are going well. They're definately different from Rose which turned me off at first, but I'm starting to like them better. I suppose it's probably just the pace of graduate school, but it seems like the teachers do a lot less work. There are fewer handouts, fewer homework assignments, less actual instruction. However, what there definately are are large incentives to look for additional information on your own. All of the professors have encouraged everyone to read additional articles, to look at papers online, etc. In the end I think it's just strange to suddenly have a term paper and a test, coming from Rose's constant blizzard of homework and quizzes. The system is a whole different animal, but I'm not sure I mind it.

I guess that brings me back up to today. I really have to get into a more regular routine with these. Writing this much at a time is a chore.