Days 5 and 6

So Friday was our first day of proper lessons, we had to get up at 7ish in order to be ready to leave the house at 8. The journey to uni is quite interesting, we walk to the station, which takes about 10 minutes depending on whether a train comes past the level crossing and we have to wait. Following that, we get on the train, which is incredibly busy every morning, changing once on our way to Meguro. Then, it's another 30 minute walk to get to the uni. We arrive at about 8:55, so we have a little time to spare as the lesson doesn't actually start until 9:10.

When the teacher arrives, she introduces herself, and we begin the lesson. The morning consisted of two 1hr 30 minute lessons, with a 10 minute break in the middle. The first hour and a half was spent going over the film that we'd watched a segment of the day before. We were required to answer some questions about the first 8 chapters that we'd already watched, and then we watched another half an hour of the film in order to do some more listening comprehension.

The second hour and a half, we have a different teacher who goes through grammar points with us. She gives us an example verb, and puts it into 4 different tenses, and then goes around the room giving different verbs and getting us to say the 4 different versions of that verb. Then we are given a worksheet with some questions on and we pair up to write answers.

All in all, it was quite a helpful lesson, but after it was done, we head down to the Cafeteria, where I buy something other than Chicken Curry. I'm not 100% sure what it was, it was basically fried chicken with rice and a slightly odd sauce but I quite enjoyed it. Nobody could really decide what to do as we didn't want to go and get a bank account sorted without the help of the buddies as the people that had theirs sorted said that it was quite difficult to do. Because of that, Asya, Kelsie and I ended up just walking around Meguro station, seeing the different shops there.

Asya wanted to go to Baskin Robbins, an ice cream shop, where she got a strange flavoured ice cream. We walked around the shops near to the station and briefly went into an AU (one of the mobile services) to try and get me a mobile phone, but gave up fairly quickly. We found a good supermarket that sold cheese of all things, but didn't really need to buy anything so we went back to the flat.

Torrential rain

On Saturday, the morning was much the same, as we had class again. However, we watched the film in the second half of the lesson, not the first this time. The only difference was that it was torrential rain in the morning. It wasn't cold in the slightest, just extremely wet, so wet in fact that even I, who usually looks at rain and is perfectly content to walk in it with only a jacket for protection, was forced to admit that I needed an umbrella (kindly provided by the uni house).

Excuse my camera

That evening however, Kelsie and Asya wanted to take me for a walk as they'd had a long look around the local area the evening before and wanted to show me what they'd found. We set off from the house and already I could see that there were odd Japanese lanterns hanging above the roads like christmas lights. There was also some Japanese music playing from speakers on the lamp posts, much like in a theme park.

Before long, we saw a strange procession of people, in a big group carrying a small shrine-like object down the street. There was a good 20 or so people carrying it, all chanting words we couldn't make out, with some people with whistles keeping the time of the march/stepping. It was all very odd, so I took a video. Once they'd passed, we walked further down the road to go to a supermarket in order to see whether it was any better than the one much further away that we'd got our food from before. Outside there was a grilled meat stall, which smelt delicious but none of us got.

Once we'd explored the supermarket sufficiently, we continued our walk, seeing another 2 or 3 of the processions along the way. We split our group up once we got to the end of the road, as Asya wanted to go one way, whereas Kelsie had already been that way the day before and wanted to explore in the opposite direction, so I tagged along with Kelsie and we headed towards a more bright shopping area. After a while we started going past some interesting stores including a bookstore and an independent games store that was very expensive, but had an awful lot of games. We kept looking around, and just as we came out of one of the stores, we saw Asya, who had done a big loop, and ended up meeting up with us again by accident.

Fish Game

We decided to head back to the flat, and on the way we went past a temple with a lot of stalls in it. We decided to go in, and it was pretty awesome. There were a load of food stalls, selling grilled meat and fish, there were stalls where you could win goldfish by trying to catch as many of them as you could in a net. Cork gun stalls, where you fired a gun at what you wanted, and if it fell over you won it. It was all very cool really, but after we walked around all of the stalls and decided we didn't want to get anything, we made our way back to the flat and called it a night.