6th post: (dis)orientation

So I woke up at like 5am to get in some study for my placement test today.  I decided to focus on grammar, as I hadn't even looked at it since like November.  There is a lot of grammar in Japanese, and most of it I don't know.

Anyway, I left about 7 to go meet up with Liam - which was lucky because I totally left all the orientation info on my desk where I'd been studying.  Stupid me!  It was actually pretty easy to find because there were Rikkyo flags up all the way from the station.

This is me outside the front entrance.  There was totally nobody else there when we got there so I thought we had the wrong day or something.

This is the entranceway.  It's all very British and Hogwarts-like.

 Once you get through the entrance there is this big square with all cherry blossoms and stuff.  It's a very pretty campus.

More cherry blossoms.  By lunchtime this whole place was packed, we couldn't get a seat in the cafeteria, which was super Hogwarts-like.  I expected to be sorted into houses and stuff.  There were lots of people advertising their clubs and stuff.  I have been trying to talk Liam into joining the baseball club, but I want to join the lacrosse team as they have super comfy-looking trackies with the school name on them!!

Anyway so first off was orientation.  Everyone was sitting around in pairs, because they were from the same school or knew each other from the dorms or whatevs.  I thought it was going to be really cliquey but by the end of the day I'd talked to about half the people and they were mostly all really nice.  A lot of us are Australian, there are two from Sydney who we hung out with a bit, they were really nice, and some from WA and QLD too, I think.

Orientation was not thrilling, but Tomoko-san was very sweet.  She seemed very nervous but she did a fine job of taking us through everything we could ever possibly want to know about studying in Japan - she even played for us the sound your phone makes to alert you of an earthquake!  The best bit of orientation was the hilarious brochure on why drugs are bad - just one time taking drugs and you can turn into a zombie!  It was in comic format too, it is the best thing ever.  Tomoko-san's advice on drinking was "drink as much as you can... but don't drink more than that".

After lunch we had the placement test which was broken up into grammar, composition and reading comprehension.  Grammar was multiple choice, you had to work your way through the questions until you couldn't do any more.  I made it to 50 out of around 120 until I had to stop.  I think this was mostly laziness as I couldn't be bothered trying to decipher stuff I only partially understood, but by then I only had time to revise what I'd done anyway.

I really stuffed up the written composition.  There was a question for beginners and an intermediate/advanced one and you could pick whichever.  I picked the one for beginners as I couldn't even read the other one.  The question was "what is your opinion on learning a foreign language" and... I don't think I really answered it.  I said how it's good to learn a foreign language because then you can listen to people's conversations on the train without them knowing you understand (creepy), and how it's hard to get the time to learn so much kanji (offensive) and I have no confidence in my Japanese (justifiably, obvs) and how through studying Japanese I'd made lots of awesome friends (that bit was good) and how we talk in Japanese together and cook Japanese food together (lies, but I was running out of time) and ended off by saying therefore, even though studying a foreign language is hard (actually I think instead of hard I said expensive and luxurious) it is good.  Also couldn't only remember like 5 kanji and everything else was in hiragana.  Am totes going to be put in the dumb class.

After all that, I wasn't expecting too much of myself for the reading part, but I did okay.  There were like... seven parts I think, progressively harder and I did the first three easily and could work out most of the fourth, so I was happy with that.  Clearly, reading is where I'm a viking!

It was 5pm by the time we finished.  I walked to the station with Liam and the guy from Sydney whose name is possibly Vincent but I keep thinking he's Paul for some reason.  They headed off to buy mobile phones (I can't yet because I haven't registered as an alien) and I went home.

Seriously, that myth about packed trains in Tokyo, I don't believe it.  It was way less crowded than the Epping line on a good day.  I have to change to the subway at Sugimo, so I went to buy pain strips but I didn't like the look of the ones at the place near the station and they were 1200 yen so I didn't.

When I got home, I took photos of stuff in the flat, as promised.

 This is our big-arse telly, on which I am going to watch Arashi in about 19 minutes.  It is going to be the best thing ever.

 There are signs everywhere in our flat full of useful advice.  The garbage is actually quite complicated.

 This is the toilet seat cover and mat that we bought to go with our new towels.  We don't have a fancy Japanese toilet but it is still way more roomy in there than in my en suite at home.

 This sign is just in case you can't open the door yourself and see inside.

 Our shoe cupboard.  We aren't allowed to wear shoes inside because of tatami mats and stuff.

 Is is seriously a whole room with a shower in it.  I think that space could've been utilised better.  Also, they are not joking when it says it takes a few minutes for the water to heat up, it takes at least 5, you could go and have a coffee and come back and it would still be heating up.  And the bathroom tiles are fricking freezing when you're waiting in the morning.

This is my study area.  On the desk there you can see the orientation stuff that I left at home this morning.

We are supposed to tell the real estate if people stay over so they can charge you extra, but I figure they won't mind if my boyfriend stays occasionally.  He is an idol, after all.  Also, rocking the strawberry hat!

My boyfriend was supposed to clean my room while I was at school but the lazyarse was still in bed when I got home.

Oh, this uploaded in a weird order!!  This is the smoking room at my school.  Near the end of the day it got very crowded.  There was a cute boy in a hat smoking in there on my afternoon break.  Not as cute as my boyfriend in the strawberry hat though.

In our lunch break I went to buy school books.  They have books and pens with the school name on it! (Our school was founded by some missionary dude in the Meiji Restoration, so it was originally St Pauls.)  I don't know why it delights me so much to have stationery with my school's name on it, but I think that's just bonza!