Pictures and friends.

Hey here are some pictures.

1: The first one is me standing by the door to my room. As you can see Japan isn’t built for people as tall as me.

2: The second picture is a picture out outside of my home station. The building on the right is the station building. I took it a while ago and decided to upload it. This picture is definitely not rush hour. I’m going to start taking more pictures of just around Tokyo and where I go.

3: Some people were wondering about where my bed was in my first blog about my room. Here is my futon set up. I have to set it up every night and put it away every morning. It’s actually pretty comfortable.

4: Here you go Andrew. This is control panel next to the toilet. Some toilets in Japan actually sing while you’re doing your business. They sing to cover up the sounds of… well you get the idea. Most toilets just pour water in while you’re doing your business so it sounds like you’re always taking a wiz. There is a wide range of toilets here. Needless to say, toilets are high tech here… Japanese use technology in odd ways.

I met up with a language exchange partner through the internet. In my last blog I said I was going to do it tomorrow. Well, I’ll tell you how it was. It was really fun actually. The girl I met with actually laughed loudly, which is uncommon for Japanese. She seemed very American. It was probably because she had studied abroad in NY for a year. She was very fun to talk to, and we laughed a lot talking about the differences in culture among other things. I’m going to do another language exchange with the same girl this Wednesday at my station in Yotsuya instead of harajuku. She is 25, so she is a bit older than me. There is a culture difference here in that age doesn’t really matter here for dating people. My language exchange friend found it odd that Americans only date people around there own age. In Japan, there can be age fairly large age differences both ways. It can be women older than men and men older than women. It seems really strange to me. I don’t think I could date someone way younger than me or way older. Right now it would have to be within at least 3-4 years, but maybe when I get older I won’t care about age difference so much.

I was late the other day because of an “accident” on the train tracks. They really keep foreigners in the dark about the suicide. My other exchange friends who couldn’t read the kanji actually didn’t have any idea what all the accidents were. I actually have a bunch of really good friends here. I’m glad I went through CIEE instead of going straight to the school as an exchange student. If I went straight to the school I wouldn’t have went through orientation with a bunch of other exchange students. I have three really close friends from CIEE people and we hang out and talk to each other quite a lot. There is like 30 CIEE members and it acts like a group inside of Sophia students. We all know each other and say hello when we pass by. There are really two groups in the CIEE members, the partiers and everyone else. If you couldn’t guess, I’m in the non-partying group, not really by choice but just because that’s just the way it happens with me. I guess it’s my personality. Non-partying group doesn’t mean we don’t go out doing stuff every week.
I think My Japanese is progressing slowly but surely. I notice I can communicate better than I did a few weeks ago. Not by much but I’m sure I’m getting better. I also have been studying more on my own outside of class work. I got these really nice key chain flash cards. I can bring them around with me everywhere because they fit in my pocket. Flash cards are really probably one of the best ways to learn information.

It’s starting to get cold here. Last night was the first night it was cold in my room. I have a heater though so it’s not bad.