Week 1

So continuing on from the last post...

Saturday 18th September
The next day (Saturday before classes started) we went to hang out in Osaka. We stayed in Umeda area. It was surprisingly quick to get there. It took about 15mins on the Hankyu express train from Nishikita (Nishinomiya-kitaguchi station). I really gotta get used to the fact of how close Kobe and Osaka are => 30mins on the express train! Geez, if only Melbourne and Sydney were that close eh?

We did a whole bunch of things that day. We first went to the big Yodobashi store opposite Umeda station. Yodobashi is an electronics chain store, but this particular store was like 7-9 floors or something of electronic goods. O___o!!! Friends bought the newly released Pokemon black and white versions and we had some fun in the Gachagacha corner (the little toy dispenser machines), before going to the Pokemon Centre. This ended up being a store full of Pokemon merchandise. (Pokemon is still pretty big here in Japan, and in the US and Canada apparently =S)

Then we went to the Hep5 building and rode the big red ferris wheel before going into Namcoland and played taiko and took stickies with the machine that gives you creepy eyes. Then we went to the nearby shopping mall street and had some ramen, where we bumped into a couple other KGU exchange students, so basically the whole ramen place was bombarded with KGU exchange students =]. Then karaoke! Then we caught the train back home.

Sunday 19th Sept
ME DAY! Was feeling bored at home so took a stroll to Sannomiya and explored Centre Street again.

Monday 20th - Wed 22rd Sept
First week of classes
Monday was a public holiday (Day for the Respecting the Old or something) but us exchange students still had classes. Nothing too exciting happening besides classes.

Thursday 23rd Sept
This day was also another public holiday (Autumn Equinox Day). I asked my host family what do Japanese people do on this day every year and they said that nobody does anything and the reason why this was special was because the day was gonna be exactly 12hrs of day and 12hrs of night. [I wish Australia had as many public holidays as over here....]

So on this day, we went to Takarazuka and checked out the Tezuka Osamu museum. For those of you who dunno, Tezuka Osamu was the creator of Astroboy. *thumbs up* Had a bunch of fun there, camwhored, became amused with the halograms, and watched a biopic of Tezuka Osamu where we all felt sleepy afterwards. Afterwards, we had lunch at Lotteria (ebi-mayo burger is *thumbs up*)and then went bowling at Round 1 =]

Friday 24th Sept
Back to uni again. Nothing too special besides how unfamiliar this Japanese tertiary schooling system is to me..... It seems a lot less stressful and disorganised....

Saturday 25th Sept
Sports Day
Went to Nigawa and checked out friends' host siblings' sports day (undoukai) at their primary school. It was quite the experience. Very very different to the Athletics carnivals we have back home. Got to see some events, such as the one where the kids have to throw as many of their coloured balls into the basket above. Another was some sprints. It looked kind of like a production line the way they went through all the races. All the relevant kids were lined up near the starting area, and one after another they went through all the sprints. It was done very methodically and efficiently. And then we tried to explore a bit of the school before checking out the finale, which was a whole bunch of human pyramids made by the students and even some of the teachers participated in them too. You could really feel the mentality of working in a group is so strong here. The coolest one was perhaps the 6 storey one. And the way they set it up and went back to the ground... wow...

Afterwards, we met up with Evelyn who was also at the undoukai (Turns out she was in my Japanese class last year.... and totally did not know that... >____>) and we went k and had dinner at Denny's, which turned to be not the Denny's the north american kids were used to.