Busy busy busy

Life has been pretty exciting here.  We've been getting a crash course in life at Doshisha University--which subway lines go where, how to get to our house and back again, how to get transportation passes, getting registered as foreigners in Japan (oh god is that a painful form thank god for helpful people), getting cell phones, figuring out how the cafeteria works, et cetera.

One really nice thing was that the university found us people to help with all the things.  Namely, a bunch of Doshisha students, who showed us which trains to ride and read maps for us and helped us do foreigner registration.  So I spent all of this afternoon, really, wandering around with two Japanese guys (Hiroki and Shuntaro), being sometimes really amused and involved and sometimes very confused (the stupid foreigner registration thing confused THEM and they could understand all the words being said!).  It was a lot of fun, and it was really nice to have a chance to hang out with some actual Japanese people while not teaching; I feel like I stretched my conversational limits, and they're currently doing okay.  Like, pop culture things I'm bad at talking about simply because I don't know about them--I have the same issue in English.  But with subjects I know about, I can do conversation just fine.  We talked about music, manga, how trains work, a sort of very loose intro to politics in which I got very confused very quickly, the difference between hanko (a sort of name stamp that acts as a personal seal in Japan) and American signatures, and a whole bunch of other stuff in between. 

Let's not mention my reading skills.  They're wonderful.  I know ALL the hiragana and ALL the katakana.  (For those of you not in the know, those are the easy phonetic ones.)  See how wonderful my reading skills are???

Anyways, that was really cool.  And hopefully we'll have a chance to hang out more.  Tomorrow, though, we go live with our host families.  Hopefully that goes well!  Also hopefully I don't blank on all the words ever.

In other good news, my fellow AKP classmates are generally pretty cool; I still love love love ofuro, and my sleep schedule is very messed up right now (I keep waking up around 4am!).  My classes are straightened out, not officially but as good as; there's another girl who had conflicting schedules but in the opposite time slot, so we're just switching one for each of us.   I will be taking theater class and then a seminar class comprised half of AKP students and half of actual Japanese students.  I think it'll be pretty cool.  Also I have a phone, it is white and gets lots of texting and some calling, it's not too expensive, and I want to decorate it.  And that is that.