Life is… Normal

SAM_0781 [Fish ice cream and approximately 55 cents, because I’m rich!]

I’ve now gotten into some semblance of a routine as far as school and the rest of life goes. I have class starting at 11am most days, and going until either 4:30pm or 6:20pm. The classes tend to move back and forth from the extremes of “I’m falling asleep and need a coffee between every class because it’s so terribly boring” to “wow, am I really this stupid?! How do I not understand ANYTHING today” (the 2nd one is all of my Japanese classes). The classroom experience alone has managed to surgically remove some of my overconfidence, which is good (I guess?). There is some homework, but it’s not overwhelming and most of my time is still free, for better or worse. I participate in some of the social events at school, but otherwise my free time is taken up in much the same way as it was at home. Someone sends me a message or stops by my dorm room and asks if I want to go work out/go drinking/go explore and I either join them or occasionally just stay in and study. If no one seems to be taking initiative then I’ll do it myself, such as with my planned group trip to the park this Sunday to play football (AMERICAN FOOTBALL) and frisbee. Side note- Amazon.co.jp is amazing, I paid $3.50 in shipping for same day delivery of a football and a frisbee!

SAM_0802

I have generally enjoyed my sessions as a chat leader quite a bit, even in some situations that I was expecting to dread. Most chat sessions go really well, regardless of which ‘level’ I am helping. The levels are beginner, intermediate, and advanced. There is also a video chat session with the other Aoyama Gakuin campus as well as elementary school and junior high sessions. So far I’ve done 2 beginner sessions, 1 intermediate, 1 advanced, 1 video chat, and 1 elementary school session. The elementary school session was the one that most terrified me beforehand, but I actually ended up enjoying. The chat room coordinator walks the chat leaders over to the elementary school, and we each get assigned around 10 students. For the 40 minute session we play games and try to keep the students in English mode. For the first session we ended up playing hangman for a while, and the students were pretty good at guessing zebra and purple and a few others (they guessed purple based on the number of letters in the word, they didn’t actually guess any letters). Then they wanted a difficult one so I chose… TURQUOISE!  They got all of it except the Q and couldn’t figure it out, and then I had to find an object in the room that was turquoise so that they would believe that it actually is a color. After that we played a game where we spread a bunch of picture cards on the floor and I would call out the names of the objects on the cards and they tried to grab them the quickest. The time flew by and just as I was struggling to come up with a 3rd game, time ran out. Saved by the bell! But it was a lot of fun so I don’t dread the elementary school sessions anymore (and they scheduled me for more so I guess they thought I did alright too).

I haven’t been able to do as much exploring as I’ve wanted to, but here are some pictures from the large Meiji temple I went to:

SAM_0723 SAM_0724 SAM_0720

The temple and the giant park that it’s part of is definitely one of my favorite things that I have seen so far in Tokyo. While walking through the open fields of the park it was easy to forget you were in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, although the skyscrapers on the other side of the trees do take a little bit away from the illusion. In the forested areas of the park you can’t see anything except forest and I was easily able to keep the illusion alive there.

SAM_0717[Vaguely aware that I’m in Tokyo at this point]

SAM_0719 [Yep, now I think I’m in the middle of nowhere]

I’ve done a lot of walking around but my picture taking has slowed down considerably since I originally came to Tokyo. I had a student in one of my chat sessions ask what surprised me most about the cultural differences I’ve experienced and I had a very hard time answering him. I think that I had just put myself in a very open frame of mind before I came and after I arrived, because nothing really surprises me at this point, or it’s such a minor surprise that I quickly forget after it happens. I’ve found that people are people everywhere you go, and I get along with most of them pretty well. Any cultural differences seem to be at a fairly inconsequential level.

SAM_0785 [The view from the roof of a Keio University building, towards 川崎市(Kawasaki City)]

Oh! and the building across from my dorm room has a creepy sun design on it with eyes that light up and then dim again in a continuous cycle as it starts to get dark. That was ‘fun’ the first time I noticed it.

SAM_0800[Yep, certainly not creepy at all, thanks building designer!]