So I guess I forgot to post into my blog that I have a new roommate. Had a few issues with my previous roommate, so I swapped out and now I’m living next door. My new roommate is Stacy, who you’ve seen in some of my early pictures. We’re both in 2nd year Japanese, and we both go to U of M, and we both get along pretty well. My new room isn’t very different from my old room; brought over my toast over along with some other things, and my fridge situation has been upgraded again, this time with a larger fridge! My bedroom is only slightly different as well, its on the other side of the room so things are a bit switched around, and I bought a cute World Expo noren which is hanging up now, but otherwise its the same. I’ll be taking a picture in the near future of it to post on my blog.

Wednesday I started my third class, Japanese Religion in Practice: Buddhism in Film, Architecture, and Modernization. It takes place at the University of Shiga Prefecture, which is about a 25 minute bike ride away from JCMU. USP is one of two colleges in Shiga Prefecture, the other being Shiga Daigaku. The college consisted of about half a dozen beige buildings connected to each other with some green space in between. The buildings didn’t have names, just letters and numbers. My class was in building A3, and once we got there, the teacher introduced himself and we went on a very short tour of the campus. We saw the cafeteria (cheap food!), the library, and other academic buildings. After the tour we had to move to a larger room since we had so many people in the class. From JCMU, there were about 23 of us, with 10 students being from USP, and 2 students from the community. The class is taught in English, so that makes it very difficult for the Japanese students, so just them coming to class gives them credit. The way the class is set up is pretty interesting. Its a 4 hour class, but since it started in October, its only a 3 credit class. Of the 11 class periods, 3 of them are field trips. Every 2 classes there is a new teacher. The first teacher was very funny, and while the class covered the life of the Buddha, sometime I’ve already gone through in a class at least twice, it wasn’t a very dull class period. Unfortunately, some of my fellow JCMU-ers spent their time in class sleeping, talking, or working on homework. One particular person who I sat across from spent the entire time sleeping with her arm hanging over the edge of the table. No shame at all. Not sure why they’d even bother taking the class….oh well.

After class was over I biked back and stopped at Caines to do a little shopping and eat at McDonalds with Ian and Joe, two of the video game guys that I’ve been hanging out with recently. After wandering around the store and looking at toys and video games, we came back to JCMU, where I logged in another house of Resident Evil 4 before doing some homework and going to sleep.

Thursday was the regular Thursday at JCMU: class until noon and then studying all the rest of the day for the Friday test. So after making some food and cleaning my room, I got down to studying. After meeting with Sensei that week, I had decided to change my mode of attack for studying. I’m used to tests in the US, where we learn certain grammar patterns and vocabulary, and then on the tests we apply that by translating sentences or filling in blanks. Here its straight memorization. 3/4 of the test is almost word-for-word out of the book. So I spent most of my studying time memorizing certain passages I knew would be on the test, and come Friday, it helped me out quite a bit. Though, I won’t really know until I get my test back on Tuesday (holiday on Monday so no class).

After the test was over, our Friday Project was canceled so I spent the morning talking on Skype to my mom and friends and playing more Resident Evil 4. Then I took a nice long nap, and since it was raining, there wasn’t much else for me to do but…watch anime! After a couple hours, that got old, and the rain stopped, so Cassidy and I rode our bikes back to Amika, the bulk restaurant supply store in search for cheddar cheese. When we got there though….we discovered that they didn’t have any. What I had seen before and thought was cheese turned out to be grated egg. What you would use grated egg for is beyond me. But I picked up some other tasty looking food, and then went to McDonalds again, this time I got a kids meal so that I could get a cute little Shinkansen toy with it! After coming back to JCMU, I sat around in the TV room and watched some random Japanese game shows, and as I’m writing this I’m sitting and watching someone else play some video games, and will be soon going to sleep.

At the moment I don’t have any plans for this weekend other than studying and catching up on sleep. Depending on how much homework and studying I might get done, I may end up going somewhere on Monday. The one thing I hope to do this weekend is get a haircut. My hair is getting way too long at this point, and luckily Cassidy also feels the need for a haircut, so I think we’re going to venture out together to get it done.