First day of class!

I got up and ate breakfast to catch the 8:00 bus. I forgot to turn my phone back on so I missed the text from Nick saying he was getting the 7:40 bus. Turns out I got on the wrong bus and ended up at some other station. I thought stuff looked unfamiliar so I asked the bus driver when I got there and found out which bus to take from there to get to the college. But when I let my host mother know, she said it'd take too long so she just came and picked me up in her car and drove me there. Even then I was at least 20 minutes late. I sent a message to Nagashima-san though and he let my teacher know. They didn't mind since it was just the first day and it was a mistake.

So first was my 3 hour Japanese class, which starts at 8:50 and I have Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I placed into the level 4 class, with level 5 being the highest. There are only two other students in my class, Mackenzie and a Korean girl. A good chunk of the class was going over the syllabus and books but we also learned some new grammar and went back to the basics on how to write kanji.

Lunch was normal and I killed time by hanging out with everyone in the HI-C club room. My afternoon class was the one about Japanese movies and how they relate to culture. The class is in English, even though there are three Korean students taking it too, and much of the class was spent doing things that seemed like a waste of time. Basically, in each class, we watch half a movie, discuss it, and write down a bunch of random things from the movie on label stickers and then arrange them in groups on a paper. I'm not sure what doing this really gains but I guess it's not very hard. We also have to email a 100 word summary each time, which is also pretty easy, and then there's something about doing presentations on anything about Japanese culture and one or two people writing 10-15 questions about the movie every time, though what sort of questions they were was a bit vague.

In any case, I don't have any homework yet in either class and I have no class on Wednesdays. I caught a 6:15 bus back home with Nick and even managed to get on the right one and off at the right stop, though we were questioning it the whole time.

That's about it... there's supposed to be yet another welcome party on Thursday night at a restaurant with the HI-C people, but it costs 2,500 yen for food and unlimited drinks, and I don't really want to pay that much for something I don't really want to go to. Unless it's karaoke or going to a book/music/game store, I'd rather keep my schedule as stress-less as possible.