For those of you that don’t have the password for Part 1 of this saga, this post is for you. Everything had been going great with Kayoko, my Japanese roommate who has been here all of about three weeks, until I suddenly heard from a classmate Thursday morning that she wanted to switch rooms. [...]

So the past few days have been pretty much some of the worst days I’ve had during my stay at JCMU. Everything had been all hunky dory until Thursday morning, where I woke up at exactly 8:45am thanks to someone calling my room. My alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and so I had [...]

So I haven’t written anything in my blog lately because….nothing has happened. I haven’t gone anywhere, or done anything. Here’s the basic rundown of how my days are going lately:
7:30am: Alarm goes off. I reset it to go off in another 10 minutes.
7:40am: Alarm goes off again. I lay in bed [...]

So for the past month, I’ve had to put up with a lot of noise coming from the other side of my window. During Christmas break a bunch of trucks and guys one day just showed up at JCMU and started putting up scaffolding all around the dorm building. Seeing as there was [...]

Sunday I went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Osaka once again. My main reason for going was to obtain pin #6 of 7 in the Guitar Case series, and luckily it was not sold out. Unluckily though, the Fashion Statement pin for Osaka was already sold out. So instead, I [...]

For the past month, I’ve been enjoying using the special Seishun 18 tickets, which allow you to go as far as you can go on JR trains in a 1-day period. I could try to add up all the money I’ve saved, going to Tokyo, Ise, and Osaka, but that would take brain power….we’ll [...]

Yesterday, with much much thanks to my roommate and her classmate, Youko, I went to the travel agency at Viva City and bought my roundtrip tickets and booked a hotel room in Sapporo for the snow festival next month. Buying plane tickets in Japan is very different from the US. For one, pretty [...]

Level 3 Japanese is a scary place. I want to go back to that nice happy place that was the Genki series of textbooks. Now I’m up to ‘Intermediate Japanese’, and I feel like I’ve skipped a semester somewhere. It didn’t help that Kitasaka-sensei came in to do her hour of kanji, [...]

So, leading up to this week, I had had 3 blissful weeks of no roommate-ness. It was a nice time, spent in a nice warm room with 2 space heaters, without worrying about people slamming doors and waking me up or having to clean other people’s dishes. I was able to walk around [...]

Well, last night after about 8pm, all of the new people started to slowly trickle into the JCMU building. Hung out with a few of them for a while in the TV room and in the lobby/balcony, though most of them were too exhausted/jet lagged to utter coherent sentences. It was just nice [...]