3 days down . . . about 27 to go . . .

So, tomorrow morning I go onto my fourth day of classes. I have a unit quiz in language class where I`m supposed to have 10 dialogues memorized. I don`t know who can possibly memorize these word for word, but I`ve started to give up on the possibility. I also have a computer term quiz in the Japanese for Science and Technology.

One of my friends was put into a lower level than me and she asked to move up, and today they told her that the language class isn`t so much harder, but the Japanese for Science and Technology class will be really hard with long readings assigned each night. So they gave her the choice of changing or not. Do we get a choice? No, which I probably wouldn`t change away from class 3 anyway, but it seems the work load is already large enough without all the readings in Japanese and the projects that are soon to come. My point here is to learn as much as possible. I just hope they grade easily. I really only have to pass to get credit, so I might just go for the passing at 60%.

I`m kind of running out of things to blog about. Now that we`ve been in class 4-5 hours a day with hours of homework to do besides, I don`t really have much that is interesting to write about. The most exciting time of most of these days is going to meals, and what next will be put on my plate. The only thing I can put on here would be a journal that I`m writing anyway for culture class. It`s just random observations I`m making on differences in the culture from America to Japan. If you guys would like to read that, just to make sure I`m alive and all, comment and I`ll start putting those up as blogs.

An interesting thing happened to me today. I had gotten some ice cream after lunch (oh, how Japanese food makes me crave sugar afterwards . . . ) and we decided to walk around a bit outside before our next class started in a few minutes. Suddenly something swifted by my shoulder and flew out in front of me. It freaked me out. It was a large hawk, maybe an eagle, that was at least a foot to maybe a foot and a half tall. After I had gotten over the surprise of a bird flying that close to me; I swear it could have landed on my shoulder, I looked to take another bite of my ice cream, and it was gone!!!!! The eagle had come down, grabbed the ice cream out of my hand and flown away to enjoy its prey! I hadn`t even noticed that the wrapper was empty until after it had flown away. I think the Japanese around me were laughing inside, but we just started out bursting out laughing. We couldn`t stop laughing for about a half an hour, and the laughs continued into class. I found out a few minutes later from a British lady who is there for some reason that this happens all the time, and all the students are watching out for their food if they are outside. I feel like a performer in a bird show as the large hawk comes and takes food from my hand . . . but this hawk was wild.

Oh, if you out of curiosity want to know what time it is here, add two hours to the current time and put it in the next set of 12 hours. For example, if it`s 9 pm in Indiana time, then it`s 11 am here the next day.

We also met our partners today for another part of the Japanese for Science and Technology. We are going to have a bridge building contest between pairs of one Japanese student and one American student. My partner seems awesome. She is also in a more technical field of study than civil so I doubt we do fantastically. Why are they always civil projects? I`m a biomedical / mechanical engineer - I do things that MOVE. Okay, enough of the rant on civil engineering projects - I better go memorize some dialogues.

Toodles!