Brian: Kyoto, Day 2

It seems like I have to pay for less and less now because there are more people I can rely on now, like the Stanford program and my host family:

Expenditures for 4/21/2007
¥250 fare to Doshisha on Karasuma subway
¥650 lunch at Doshisha cafeteria: hayashi raisu (rice with beef stew)
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¥900 total

We checked out of the hotel by 8:45 AM today, and set off once again for Doshisha, this time with all our luggage. Yesterday, I used up all the money on my transportation card on the trip to the ward station in Ukyo-ku to complete my alien registration. So, I had to pay ¥250 for the train fare today. At Doshisha we left our luggage in the library and then had a quick computer orientation (that was when I posted the entry for 4/19 since it happened to be on my thumb drive at the time). The Doshisha computer specialist would explain all the procedures in Japanese, and then Nishimura-san (on the SCTI staff) would translate it into English. So, they don't expect us to know much Japanese at all. The computers at Doshisha are very good: my computer was 3.6 GHz and I heard they have over a thousand computers on campus that are for public use. Also, it is somewhat strange to say this, but the manual they hand out to students is also very good. It has very clear pictures and screenshots and instructions in Japanese for all sorts of common things, like changing your password. They should do that kind of thing in America too.

After the computer orientation, we were taken on a tour of the campus, led by Doshisha students in the cultural exchange club. It is a club with very friendly people, of which Shigeo Majima, who was one of the SJEC exchange students, was one. It seems like everything has a 10% discount for students. Right now I'm tired enough to fall asleep so I will keep this short. Our host families came to pick us up after the tour of the campus. It was like a lottery, sitting in the room while people got called one by one when their host family arrived. All of us were really nervous because we were about to meet our host family for the first time.

It turns out that my host family is really cool. The father is an assemblyman, which means he is on the city council (not that he works in an assembly line -_-). The mother used to teach elementary school, but now is retired. The son works for a political party doing what, I'm not sure. I helped my host mother make dinner, which meant stirring and placing 3 dishes into various smaller bowls, and cooking chicken. She said I was a いい男の子 or a good boy because I helped out. Dinner consisted of sushi, spinach, chicken, seared ahi, and lots of Sapporo beer. It was the second night that I had a lot to drink, since yesterday was nomihodai. My host parents kept refilling my glass with more beer, and would complain when I was drinking too slowly too. So, in addition to learning how to speak Japanese well, I will also learn how to drink large quantities of alcohol, it seems. After dinner, we had a long conversation in Japanese, which was very awkward for me because I could only understand at most 50% of what they were saying. So, it was very important for me to understand and infer enough to know what questions to ask such that I could answer their questions without sounding entirely stupid. For example, one of their questions was what was famous about Orange County. I wasn't sure how to answer this, so I ended up talking about the beach and how there were a lot of rich people. The KCJS student, Charlie (a junior from Tufts), would help me out when I seemed completely lost. There is more I would like to talk about, but I already almost fell asleep while writing this post, so I think I better go to bed now and post the pictures tomorrow.