Lots of new life things

Today was a busy day!  Short summary: placement test in the morning, lunch with Doshisha students taking up a good chunk of afternoon, one class, then off on field trip to see noh play.  I was basically going from 8 AM until 10 PM. 

Longer summary following.

This morning (well, technically yesterday morning and also this morning, because we had speaking portion yesterday), we took placement tests to determine Japanese level.  This is after a week or so of review.  It was a fairly long test, with a range of questions from relatively easy to very difficult.  For me, the very difficult were pretty much all, "WHAT IS THIS KANJI???"  The rest focused mostly on reading comprehension (I'm good at that, I've had lots of practice in all kinds of languages), and speaking yesterday (considering my first large chunk of Japanese was learned pretty much solely through speaking, I'm OK with that), and writing.  The writing could have been better, mostly because the question we were to answer was terrible.  "Why did you want to come to Japan?"  Well, okay, I want to talk Japanese lots and travel places and meet people.  That's at most 3 sentences, and the only grammar you can possibly work in is connective て form.  So.....on a placement test where the point is showing off one's skills.....what is one to do?  Lots of BSing, trying to work in more complicated grammar, and repeating oneself in various different ways, apparently.  It was a very bad essay from a writing skill standpoint, repetitive and unorganized and lacking any real message worth the number of words it had....but it did show off grammar usage abilities and a little bit of kanji usage abilities (there were no complicated kanji to use in there, but oh well, I don't know many complicated kanji anyways). 

And that was placement test.  I am in Ohno-sensei's class apparently, which we *think* is the top-level class but I'm not 100% sure and won't be sure until Tuesday when class starts for real.  It's kind of weird--I spent the summer knowing that most of the people I was working with were better at Japanese than me, and now I'm at the top of the group I'm closest to.  I'm not sure what to think of my Japanese level.  @.@ 

Next thing.  Lunch with people!  Basically, we had a luncheon thing, theoretically to thank various people (read: Japanese students) who had been showing us around campus and the like, but more realistically to eat sushi and pizza and chat and make friends and be told about various English-language clubs that want to make friends with us.  It was fun because I want to make friends, and they want to make friends, and this is a good deal all around.  Also sushi.  I do not know yet if I will be joining any of the clubs mentioned today, mostly because I do not know what other clubs there ARE yet (and since the Japanese students are still on summer break the whole thing is irrelevant for another couple weeks), but the fact that they actively want to be friends with foreign people and are clearly willing to put up with language barriers and the like is a huge plus in their direction.  Also it was funny that they all tried to recruit people by going, "We talk English sometimes and Japanese sometimes!  We meet a couple times a week!  Also we go drinking together once a week or so!"

Class was joint seminar class and went until 4:30.  That class will be more interesting once Japanese students are no longer on summer break.  And then after class, we ran to station, got on train, got off train, got lost, got directions, got more help, and got to Noh theater around 5:10.  Noh play started 5:30.  We had time to buy onigiri for dinner but that was about it.  XD 

Noh play was very interesting, to be honest.  It's not my favorite theater type still, but I have a much higher opinion than I did a day ago when all I'd ever seen were video clips.  What we saw was actually a bunch of noh-related things; first some short dances taken from various plays, then a longer dance selection, then a kyogen slapstick-comedy thing, then more short dances, then an intermission, and then a full-length play.  All in all, it was about 3 hours.  My favorite parts were the Kyogen, in which a small child talked in old-fashioned Japanese and made fools of two grown men through the use of an invisibility hat, and the actual full-length play, a piece called Yamamba.  The play was about a dancer who made a really good dance about the mountains, and hence was given the name Yamamba (a legendary mountain spirit who sometimes appears as an old lady).  The dancer-Yamamba goes on a pilgrimage and crosses the mountains, where she meets the spirit-Yamamba.  Then she teaches the spirit-Yamamba her dance, and the spirit-Yamamba dances it, and they go their separate ways.  The tricky bit comes in when you realize that spirit-Yamamba is essentially the mountains that inspired the dancer-Yamamba's dance.  So the mountains showed the dance to the dancer, who then taught it to the mountains.  Which is the real Yamamba?  *Head spins*  It was an interesting piece, with some vigorous dancing and dramatic costumes (spirit-Yamamba actually *looked* like a mountain, through creative shaping of the basic trousers and kimono top that Noh actors wear), and it's definitely better live than in video clips and in whole length rather than just a short dance piece. 

From here on out is weekend.  It is a 3 day weekend, because Monday is....agh, I don't even remember, some special holiday like 'respect for the elderly' day.  I am planning on going to Shijo (a shopping district) on Saturday with people, and Gion (those not familiar, google it) on Monday, and not sure yet on Sunday, and also doing Tuesday's homework somewhere in there.  Yay exploring!  So I should have pictures to post sometime soon. 

Yes, Jen, food is still delicious.  Katsudon, some korean dish with beef my host mom made the other night, sushi, Japanese pizza that actually tasted GOOD and like real PIZZA, apple and sweet-cheese bread-pastry-thing.