Days 6-7: 勉強 (studying)

Well, the vacation is over. It came to a screeching halt on Monday morning with the start of classes, and I've been struggling to stay on track since. Well, OK, that's actually a little dramatic – and I do hope the vacation isn't truly over, because if I only wanted to study, I could have stayed at Yale to do that. And that seems to be the viewpoint of the Light Fellowship as well; they aren't paying for us to come to Asia and sit in our room with a book all day. At the same time, a certain level of performance is expected, and I really do want to learn and improve. There is just a lot of material for me to review/learn/catch up on, and I'm not quite sure how to approach it.

At any rate, I'll try now to recap the past week, the first week of classes. My goal is that every day while I'm here there should be something blog-worthy, though I won't be able to blog in detail every day. It's incredible how much my feelings have fluctuated over the past week, from excitement to anxiety to stress to insecurity to frustration to happiness and around again (it would have been good to document them as they happened, but alas…). I am definitely very aware of my limitations in communicating in this language – it's a tangible barrier I meet in every interaction, inside and outside the classroom – and I'm learning to be OK with where I am (after just 9 months of study, I have to remind myself) and embracing the opportunities to learn from mistakes I make.

Monday

Monday morning came bright and early, but my body woke up naturally around 6:30. It has been doing that on its own, who knows why (because you know I'm not a morning person)… I guess a result of the time change in coming here. Okaasan set us up with a hearty breakfast – all of which was pretty amenable to our American taste buds (cereal resembling Frosted Flakes, fruit, egg + ham, croissant w/ homemade jam, and coffee to start out the day).

After breakfast, we gathered our belongings together (I was running a bit late getting ready, surprise) and Okaasan showed us the way to school for our first day. The commute is actually pretty easy, especially compared to some friends who live out in the rural stretches of town. From our front door we walk about a block to the nearest tram stop (a street car that runs through the city – I love it), then ride for about half an hour, then walk a few blocks uphill to get to the HIF building.

Walking to school

The uphill isn't so bad, but then walking up the four flights of stairs to the classrooms reminded me that I haven't seen the inside of a gym for two years… I'm thinking this summer will help me get some exercise. Once we arrived, we got our class placement; I'm in B-組 (B−gumi), the second of six levels, which is where our Yale Japanese professors wanted us to place coming out of our first year. The day began with a tour of the facilities, and then we had our first of 3 Japanese classes in a row, with breaks in between.

Osaka-san shows us around the building (here, the cafeteria) 

B-組 classroom

 In class we're using a different textbook than we use at Yale, and I don't like it quite as much, but it will do fine. We spent the first few days of the week reviewing the first half of the textbook (some of which was new and some was review for me – it's a second year textbook), and over the course of our first month-long "semester" we will finish the book before moving to another one. In general I have a lot vocabulary and kanji (chinese characters) I need to catch up on, but I'm comfortable with many of the grammar structures. [That isn't very interesting, is it? Sorry…]

For lunch I headed to the HIF kitchen, where there is a daily selection of a few items, including a daily special bento box. Today's featured chicken in some sort of sauce (sorry, not very detailed), miso soup, etc. It didn't quite fill me up, but for $5 it's a pretty good deal. The building is shared with Japanese students studying Russian, so over the course of my time here I should chat with some of them.

Lunch special at the kitchen

After lunch, I wanted to explore the area a little bit, and I ended up wandering inside the Catholic church right nearby. There are several churches and shrines in the Motomachi area, where the HIF building is. I wondered inside (no pictures were allowed, sorry), wondering about how this church came to be, then sat inside and prayed in the peaceful silence of the sanctuary.

Hakodate Catholic Church

One of many beautiful shrines

I then tried to find a city center I had heard of where there was free WiFi, and it was actually quite close, but I turned around about 4 times trying to find it. With my blonde hair and all, I surely stuck out as a lost foreigner. But once I arrived at the Machizukuri center, it was a splendid place to study, with John Coltrane playing from the speakers. I ordered a cup of coffee (a little expensive, but I forgave myself. I have $8 budgeted to spend on lunch each day, so I had a few dollars left over).

Studying at the Machizukuri center

Around 5:30 I got up to go home so I could make it home by 6:30 dinnertime. Of course, I got off the tram at what I thought was the right stop… but was actually a stop early. After walking around for a bit in the drizzling rain, confusedly unable to find Okaasan's yellow house, I turned to my iPhone for navigation help. Thank God for the iPhone and the data roaming I get from my T-Mobile plan! When I did get home, awaiting us was a splendid shabu-shabu dinner. Various meats and vegetables are placed into a pot of boiling water in the middle of the table, and you pick what you want with your chopsticks and wave the food back and forth in the water (hence shabu-shabu, the sound it makes – kind of) before taking it out, dipping it in a sauce, and eating immediately. We sat and ate as Okaasan sat across the table and kept the food coming.

This was followed by hours more of studying. Every night's homework includes a few written worksheets as well as studying for a daily quiz. Earlier in the day I spent a lot of time on things I was already supposed to know, so I had all of the work due the next day still to do…  I soon realized I needed to rethink this approach.

Tuesday

Tuesday came and it was much the same routine, only this time I spent my pre-breakfast hour cramming and scrambling to finish the homework I had left unfinished (does that sound familiar to anybody who has witnessed my past 15 years of education?). We're still in review-mode in class, so some of it is slow-going, but there's generally so much material that I have plenty to learn. At the end of the school day, we had our first small group about our Independent Study projects. I hate big, open-ended tasks, but I'm trying not to agonize to much over this. I'm thinking I want to study some aspect of Japanese traditional music, and maybe learn a specific instrument.

The view out of our classroom

Snack at tea-time

Lunch at the HIF kitchen – delicious pork at the middle

After class, we had a cultural class on Japanese traditional music – what do you know. Unfortunately, I didn't find it to be the most interesting, but that may be just because I couldn't understand much of the Japanese, and they didn't go into to much depth into the music. At one point the leader of the class taught us a bit of a very popular traditional Hakodate folk song, the Esashi Oiwake.

Explaining Esashi Oiwake

At the class, reporters from the local news media were there, and they asked some students to be interviewed. I volunteered, but once on camera I could not understand – or reply – anything at all. I literally stood there and said "Uh… uh… sorry…". Well, I'm sure they aired that clip… Afterwards, Nick and I went to the local Starbucks on the bay to study for a bit. Yes, I know, not exactly cultural.

Okay so I cheated a little. Studying snack! 

Dinner was absolutely delicious, the main feature being a rice bowl with a soy-glazed tuna. Oh man. The food is getting better and better (with the odd such-and-such every now and then).

DELICIOUSNESS.

After dinner, I was pretty exhausted and I fell asleep on the couch until 9. Oops! Lots of homework to catch on after that.

If you're interested, the general schedule for my school-days is as follows (with some variation, of course):

6:30am Wake up (...hopefully…)
6:35am Shower and get dressed
6:50am Finish homework, study for quiz
7:30am Eat breakfast, continue studying
8:05am Leave house
8:10am Get on the tram toward Motomachi
~8:42am Get off at Motomachi, walk up the hill to HIF
8:50am Last minute studying
9:00am Quiz and Ohayoo-time
9:15am Class 1
10:05am 10-minute break
10:15am Class 2
11:05am 20-minute "tea time"
11:25am Class 3
12:15pm Lunch
1:00pm Cultural activities and/or exploring and/or studying
5:30ish Get on tram towards home
6:00ish Get off tram, walk home
6:30pm Dinner!
7:15pm Homework and studying, accidental napping, perhaps an episode of the Good Wife (if I deem that I deserve it)
~12:30am Sleep

[The rest of the week coming in the next post… Thanks for reading!]

Yoneuchi-san's abacus
(still widely used here for daily computations)