May 6

So, today it was pretty much rainy. I called JiWei to see if he had bought the tickets for today’s baseball game. We get online at different times, so we hadn’t been in direct contact until then. We agreed to talk again around 11:00, when JiWei would try to buy the tickets. Shortly after, I got up and went to breakfast. Okaasan made me a normal breakfast (I hope pancakes are coming soon) and otousan was surprised to see me up so early because today is a national holiday, but I still had to go to class.

At school, I went to CJS to ask about the letter concerning my stimulus check that I had received in the mail. Even though it was after 9:00 when I went, the door was locked with a “closed” sign on it and Japanese students were waiting outside trying to look inconspicuous by looking at posters on the walls. The closed sign also had the hours of operation on it (which begins at 9:00) so I made the move that none of the Japanese people would and knocked on the door. Shortly after, a member of the CJS staff came and opened it. I think if I wasn’t there, the students would have waited all day rather than knocking.

According to CJS, I’ve already received my check, but when I went to the ATM to make sure, I found it locked. Seriously, ATM’s are 24-hour in the US, why can’t Japan be the same? On top of that, the hours of operation for the ATM were from 9:00am, regardless of whether it’s the weekend (when they charge a service fee) or not, so that was fuben (inconvenient) too.

Today’s class, as it turned out, was the listening lab final exam, though I did not remember it being so. Additionally, finals do not officially begin until the 12th, so I was a bit angered and felt unprepared. Before the test, Hanashiro Sensei went over the information about the swine flu, which consisted mostly of “if you’ve visited these countries over Golden Week, you should go home [and get an unconditional 0 on this exam].” Most of the class started faking coughs to get him to let us go home, but he said (in English for the first time I’ve heard) “Be serious.”

On the topic of swine flu, David and Matt got calls from CJS while we were riding the world’s tallest ferris wheel in Osaka, but I didn’t. In class, the instructors checked with the “three students who couldn’t be contacted,” to make sure they hadn’t been to Mexico or something, but I wasn’t in that group. I felt a bit forgotten. ):

The test wasn’t bad, but I probably could have done a bit better if I had listened to the CD’s from our textbook one more time before going in. Anyway, afterward was practice for the oral exam and then, talking to JiWei!!! Since the tickets were for a game that was so soon, the cheapest tickets (which should have been 1500en) were 3800en. Naho might have tickets for the14th that were the cheaper price, so we opted out and went to lunch instead. JiWei was going to take me to a restaurant he and his friends go to often, but since it’s Wednesday, it was closed. Instead, we went to Mountain (マウンテン) which was known for its weird food. It was really cool!!! The building is partially wood and maybe looks like the kind of restaurant you find on a ski slope. All of the dishes sounded ridiculous, but we decided to be adventurous, so I ordered green tea spaghetti and JiWei ordered black fried rice. While we were waiting though, JiWei kept changing his mind about what he wanted to order, since the lime-green Melon spaghetti, banana spaghetti, and strawberry spaghetti kept catching his eye. When our food did come, it was amazing!!! The thought of sweet spaghetti sounds bad, but my green tea smothered spaghetti with ice cream, a peach, and a cherry on top was delicious!!! It was like eating hot ice cream... which was half-true. JiWei’s fried rice was pretty great too (though I only had a bite). It seemed to be black because of squid ink (the squid was on the side) and had pasta, eggplant, and hot pepper in it too. I ate too much and had to ask JiWei to eat some of my spaghetti, but now we both want to try other things on the menu, so I hope we can go back some time!

We didn’t know what to do with the afternoon, so we went to JiWei’s dorm and looked for thing on the internet, but all we came up with was the 2000en aquarium, which is a bit expensive, we thought. Instead, we just watched movie trailers and youtube videos. We did, however, figure out that we were in the same biochem and biotech classes for next Fall, so that was a plus!!!