Today was the first day of the rest of my life.

Just kidding. Today was, however, my first taste of what I’m really going to be doing with myself on the main campus. Initially I was a little later than I had hoped to be (but still on time, thank you very much), but I went in and had the Japanese test and interview for the International Center on campus. This was pretty frustrating, as I could read most of the questions and grasp the meaning, but I couldn’t remember a lot of the grammar points, and my vocabulary was certainly lacking in the interview portion. Actually, the first one they asked me was isu, which means chair. Naturally I only remember this later that afternoon, when it didn’t matter any more. Ah well. In a lot of ways it reminded me of the test that I had to take for the scholarship, and I did wonder why they couldn’t just use the results from that, but I suppose everyone has their own little ways of doing things. At the end of the interview, my interviewer pronounced, “You are elementary level.”

Well duh, I could have told you that.

After that I went to the Office for International Students (OIS) that’s a part of the Engineering school. I managed to snag some free stuff for my room and found out about the Japanese classes that they run there that I’ll be going along to until my other ones start… so for about a week, I think.

I had lunch at Subway today, which was kind of novel in and of itself. Slightly different menu, everything is done in six-inch batches, the straw hole cover is off-centre, much like the ones at Wendy’s were… oh, and the paper the sandwiches are in is folded/sealed in a funny way to protect the sandwiches. Quite neat, actually. I managed to fumble my way through the ordering process and had a cajun chicken sandwich.

Back at the OIS, I waited around for the first Japanese class. It was just basics again, but good revision for me and some useful vocab. It was at this point I remembered about the word for chair, right before the class was to start. Figures. After class I wandered around campus for a while and took a few pictures, including being a passer-by-photographer for a random bunch of Japanese people.

After that it was back to the dorm to chat, surf and email. Kind of zombie-like, actually. Oh, I found out that there’s a local Amazon as well – I’m in trouble.

I finished watching the anime Claymore today. On the whole I wasn’t particularly impressed with it. It had some nice fight sequences and some characters that looked like they had some depth, but the anime didn’t really explore the characters as much as I thought it was going to. Apparently the manga that it’s based on is much less about the fighting, and I can well believe it. Worth a watch for some nice art and an interesting (if under-developed) set of characters, but probably not one that I’d re-watch, or rave about to people.