Interesting day. We actually had a brief orientation event last night, but I was too tired to write an entry. It was pretty basic and introduced ourselves to the group. I don’t quite know everybody’s names yet, but it appears that there are about 12 people in our group of students. All of them are international students. I think that we have 3 Americans, 1 Mexican, 3 Indonesians, 1 Chinese… And I am missing the other nationalities. I could be wrong on the group size too, but I’ll get it right sometime soon. The dorm is interesting. I’ve got a small room all to myself. Its pretty basic and does not have wireless (not complaining, but want to provide useful info for future students). It does have a refrigerator. There’s a shared kitchen down on the 1st floor, but we need to have pots, pans, utensils, and personal place setting (plate, bowl, eating utensils) in order to be able to cook and eat. I have none of these items. Today’s course include lectures from Dr. N. Tanaka and Dr. Tony Chittendon Sustainability and Energy. Pretty basic, but I liked their lecture styles. Tony is originally from New Zealand, but has been here for a long time.
We went to a grocery store for some basic supplies before getting some dinner. It was a small store though and had limited choices for me. We also went to dinner. I think that I’ve given up any hope of being at all vegetarian on this trip. It seems pretty much impossible. We (Ben, Andres, and I) went to a restaurant tonight and it had no pix of food and no English text (see photo below). The owners knew no english either. They either don’t know my custom sign language for fish, or they didn’t actually have any on their menu. So we randomly ordered 3 items off of the menu after the guy didn’t want to choose 3 items for us. We got deep fried squid (very yummy), a bunch of raw bacon and a hibachi grill that we could cook it on, and a veggie stir fry dish with bacon with a side of deep fried squid! Hilarious. Andres also ordered a bottle of Sapporo Soft (white liquor of some sort that was actually pretty tasty and very smooth… Weird. The whole experience was weird. The place was about 3 blocks from the guy’s dormitory which is about 6 or 7 blocks from campus. Anyhow, very interesting experience. Jet lag still has me under her grips and I am going down early and quickly these days. We’ll see how long I last after sharing that bottle of alcohol… Origato! (Thank you!)
