20 June 2012
Took me a while to get this one up XD
Let's start at the beginning. On May 16 two teachers of my school in the Netherlands came to visit Shinshu University. There were in Japan for 2 weeks so they could visit all the other universities with which we have an exchange program. We were up for Wednesday. They came to sit in class in the morning, and in the afternoon they had a talk with us to see how everything was going here. That took about an hour and then they had to leave for a meeting. Later that afternoon they visited our apartments and made photos and videos of it to show to the people back home. I was so glad I cleaned up my room XD
In the evening all the Dutch students and the two teachers were invited for dinner at Sato-sensei's place. We were all asked to bring food, so Janneke made curry rice and Manon spaghetti. Sato-sensei's home is very spacious, not at all what I'm used to (usually houses, especially apartments, are very small in big cities). I guess that's an upside of living in a for Japan small city ^_^ He also own a talking stove that warns you when the gas is too high and stuff. I want one XD it was a very fun evening and went home around 1 at night.
In the meanwhile we had exams twice already. For the first exams I got a 69.5/100 for grammar and a 85.5/100 for oral. We recently had the second round of exams so I don't know the marks yet.
We also bought ticket for the Romeo and Juliet show from Takarazuka's Tsukigumi (Moon Troupe) on the 19th of July. We leave for Osaka on Wednesday morning. The show is on Thursday in the Takarazuka Main Theater around 3 PM and will probably run until 6 PM. We have very good seats, all S rank, first row on the balcony. On Friday we are going to travel to Kyoto to meet up with a classmate who is currently studying at the Kyoto University of Foreign Language. On Sunday we return to Osaka to take the bus back to Matsumoto. Looking forward to it already ^_^
One of the classes I'm taking is called Japanese Martial Arts and Traditional Culture I (武道・伝統文化実習I) and we do all kinds of cool stuff there. Last time I played an instrument called a "koto", which is a snare instrument. You play it with the thumb, index finger and middle finger of your right hand, and with you left hand you make the tone different. We only used our thumb 'cause else it would become too difficult. I had a lot of fun, but remembering all the notes was quite a challenge for me so I messed up often. Sato-sensei filmed a part of it which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtXGkmEvtcQ&fb_source=message (the girl in black is me XD)
We also practiced kendo for one lesson. For those of you that don't know kendo, it's a swordsmanship sport. We practiced using a wooden sword called a bokuto, and after a while we got to hit a real person (he wore protection, don't worry) XD
A few weeks ago Manon's tutor Ayumi showed us a really cool secondhand shop where they sold all kinds of stuff. The shop was divided in two buildings; one for clothes and one for games and mangas etc. I bought a couple of earrings, a shirt and 2 very beautiful yukata. I also bought Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards, the manga serie Loveless, Romeo and Juliet, and the volumes of DN Angel I still didn't have. The manga were a 100 yen a piece (100 yen is roughly 1 euro). I also managed to find the album Crescent by Gackt for 300 yen :D
This shop is definitely my favorite, together with the Book-off where they also sell secondhand books, CD's, DVDs games and magazines.
That's it again, またね！
~Marlies / マーリス
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