flameraven | Isogashii da ne...

Yare yare. It seems like no sooner do I sit down then I’m off again, lately.

The dinner was, in fact, fantastic. There was an absolutely prodigious amount of food, even if a lot of it was meat and thus kind of unattractive to me. (I have nothing against meat, most of the time, but a hamburger patty slathered in barbecue sauce, and mysterious, fatty strips of meat bubbling in a pot of broth are not all that appealing for me.) Anyway, I ate until I was absolutely stuffed, and it was wonderful.

Afterwards Keleigh and I went to the onsen, which was also the best thing ever. There was a bit of initial awkwardness, as neither of us had done this in several years, and I was trying to remember exactly what to do while not really being able to see properly. Eventually we got things sorted out, though, and sat and soaked in the wonderful, wonderful hot water. The baths were all but abandoned while we were there, and the place itself was really nice—the indoor bath had a huge setup of boulders and a waterfall, and outdoors they had three separate baths, with family or individual tubs at the end. Apparently they all had different properties, as written on signs on the walls, but we couldn’t read enough of the kanji (and I couldn’t see well enough anyway) to make out just what they were. We sat and soaked for over an hour, and afterwards I practically melted into bed, utterly relaxed.

I didn’t get one of the futons, sadly (those were claimed by the Taiwanese girls), but the beds were generally comfortable nonetheless, minus the pillows, which were too hard and dense for me. At least there were only beans on one side of the pillow.

We got up at seven and went down to breakfast, which was a little more sparse, but still pretty nice. There was a lot of food-swapping among the Americans, which probably looked more than a little strange to the rest of the students, but apparently not too strange, since several people ended up donating their grapefruit slices to Brian. (I’m only disappointed I didn’t make it more known that I also like grapefruit.)

There was an hour to kill once breakfast was done, and so I finished my book while we puttered about the room… Seirei no Moribito came on at nine, but we got kind of hurried out right after it started by the cleaning people. It seems this is a recurring thing. I remember during our first orientation in Matsushima, Fullmetal Alchemist was premiering, and I missed it due to a meeting. Alas. At least I know when it’s on, so I can catch the episode next week (assuming we don’t end up going off on some other adventure).

“Free talk”, which was basically three meetings with the various teachers, lasted from nine until eleven. I went to the Spanish teacher’s meeting on manga and gender, which I understood most of (and learned the word for ‘main character,’ shujinko), went to Takahashi-sensei’s meeting because nobody had shown up for the first one, and talked about differences between Japan and our various countries, and then went to the English teachers’ meeting, which was just…really weird. After those, we got on the buses and headed home.

In some ways, it was a fairly straightforward Japanese school trip: all very scheduled, and thus busy as hell. But Keleigh commented, and I had to agree, that… the school really is taking very good care of their ichinensei. Granted most of them probably had to pay for this trip, where we did not, but… it really was a good introduction to the school and the teachers. If IUPUI had been half as interesting or helpful in their orientation, I might actually do something on campus instead of simply going to class and then returning home as quickly as possible. Naturally the situations are very different; IUPUI has almost ten times as many students overall as Hakuoh, and there are many schools within the campus, and of course it’s a commuter college as well, but… still. Ii kanji desu. It’s kind of a nice thing, for Hakuoh to do so much for their students.

Once we were back we ended up going to the station yet again. Usui-san had said that the Starbucks had wireless, and, with Keleigh and I desperate for internet, we tried it. I think my wireless receiver actually got switched off accidentally (though I didn’t find that out later), but we both had trouble finding the network, and even more trouble connecting. So that was a no-go. We ended up wandering around the stores at the station, until we finally got hungry and had dinner at a ramen place before heading home.