ARGH * scratch scratch *

Yep. I got it. Damn. And this soon... and without even remembering touching any! There must have been some trace of it on a table or something.

What the hell I'm talking about?

Urushi allergy!

Courses and Projects

After two weeks of school it's about time I started proving I'm actually doing something here, right?

So here we go:

Yosakoi Video!

Ahhhhhh I found one after all, by using the Japanese Google!

I am 95% sure that this actually is the Yosakoi group of Takaoka Campus!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFBOvI3Btlw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ_HZ5IEiHs

A minute to breathe, thank you?

Wow, I don't even know where to start... It has been a week since my last 'real' entry – meaning not only pictures, but an actual report – and that week has been packed. One of the most important things happening was definitely the fact that I can finally use the internet at school with my own laptop. Already the week before, when I finally (after one and a half week of waiting) got my own username and password to use the school's computers, the people from the office told me that, sure, you can also use the Wifi, the 'cable free internet', with your own computer now. Wrong.

Picture book: Hanami

Ahhh Hanami! The time of the cherry blossoms! A myriad of blossoms, a myriad of Japanese sitting under them, eating and drinking, and a myriad of pictures! Here some of them!

First off pictures from the trees around Senshinen and at the school!

Picture book: Genuinely Japanese

Here a few more pictures which I missed to post before. All are from the 10th of April last weekend, which I spend with Kana Earashi. A click on the pictures should open them a little bigger.

Senshinen (or: the curse of Japanese air conditioning)

The place I live at right now belongs to the Takaoka campus and is usually used to house teachers that have come to this school for only a short time. Or then, as in my case, exchange students. It is a place with a community kitchen and different western and Japanese style rooms. At the start I wanted to take a traditional room but then it turned out that those will be used soon for some kind of exhibition or meeting or something, so I took the cheapest room there is, the western single.

It's very small, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

Listening, Learning, Laughing (and bowing, of course)

When thinking about it now, there is surprisingly little to tell about these first two real school days. In a way I think the Friday with its 'cooking game' was more intensive than Monday and Tuesday, which doesn't mean that they were bad or boring, quite the opposite. But they went very nicely, smoothly, apart maybe from the fact that I still haven't gotten my password for the school computers.

It's little things that I now remember

Genuinely Japanese

(concerning the weekend of April 09. and 10.)

When I first got in contact with my school here in Takaoka, the person I wrote to was a woman named Kana Earashi. But about a week before I set out for Japan she told me that she won't be working at Takaoka campus anymore when I would be arriving here. I was a bit sad about that, since she seemed like a very nice person, so last Friday I wrote her a short mail just asking if I might be able to meet her because I also had brought a small souvenir for her from Finland. On Saturday she called me and invited me to visit her and her family at their home. This was to be my first contact with a genuine Japanese household and I could hardly believe my luck to have this chance already now, barely a few days into my exchange.

Kana picked me up from Senshinen

A smile and a bow

Ok, so first the frustrating news and the reason why I have to get a second entry done today.

I still have no password for the school computers/ the wlan. Which means I cannot use the computers on the weekend, because now I'm only using them through my tutors account and logically she won't be here on weekend. It's so frustrating! They have to send the request for a password to the main university in Toyama! What the fuck? I mean seriously, one single tiny little computer password for an exchange student – what can be so hard about that? In Lahti at my home university this could me made in a matter of hours or longest a day. I don't get it... and those were the first news I got in the morning, after I had met with Ai around noon.

The next thing was that I was supposed to

Phones and sugar

(happenings on April 7th)

Ahh, today was a much better day already. I didn't really get that much sleep but was still way better rested than on Wednesday. Today was for the most part more organisational stuff: student card, library card, general introduction to the school and its facilities, as well as getting a schedule of all available courses so I can have a look at them and test them out freely next week before deciding which I want to take. All well with that. Both of the teachers that have been kind of 'assigned' to me seem very nice, especially Taro Ogawa. He's a bit younger and very friendly, in a boyish kind of way. He seems a little bit more open than the other teachers in general, but that is probably only because his English is a bit better.

I really need to work on my Japanese,

Hello Japan

Flying for 9 hours was much less fun alone than it was the first time in 2009 when I had friends by my side with whom to share the view and the weirdness of it all. As is turned dark yesterday we were asked by the stewardesses to keep the shutters down and over 'Tron' and 'Black Swan' from the onboard entertainment system, the night fast-forwarded. With us flying east and then south-east into the morning, the sun, when it rose, shone directly into the window, which made looking out pretty much impossible while still over the Asian continent. I was rewarded in another way though.

Flying over Japan the first time it had been hidden from view by a thick blanket of clouds, but this time the sky was clear.

Goodbyes and boxes

The first time I went on exchange I was 16 years old. I went to Finland for a year, for the first time alone away from home. Now, nine years later, I will leave again from a place that has become home.

That sounds all sappy and sentimental,