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 much no one flies anywhere inside of Japan, because trains are much more convenient and usually a lot cheaper. Plane tickets to anywhere in this country are astronomically priced. I’ve flown from Baltimore to Detroit before for less than $100..why can’t I do that here? Initially I was just going to be purchasing a plane ticket there and back, because I had talked to someone online, an American living in Sapporo doing the JET program, and she told me that I could crash in her apartment. But, after looking over all of the different plans, I ended up getting a package that allows me to fly to Sapporo on the afternoon of February 3, stay at a pretty nice looking hotel for 3 nights, and fly back on Monday night for only $50 more than just the plane tickets.

Getting back from buying my tickets, I had to go back to my room and make up a few boxes of good ol’ Mac & Cheese for the potluck that they have every semester for the new students. I figured that mac & cheese would be a great thing to make, since you cannot buy it in Japan (or at least, not in Hikone), so all of us that have been here for 4 months could have a little taste of home. Though the newbies won’t be able to appreciate box mac & cheese much since they’ve only just gotten here. Oh well. This semester’s pot luck was a lot more fun than the first one. A lot of people stayed around, even if the lobby was totally freezing, but I got to talk to some new students (and some I knew from U of M), and managed to find someone that wanted to go to Himeji castle with me tomorrow! Yosh!

Also at the potluck, Tim and Nathan came over with their delicious hand made pizza, and I started chatting with Tim about the fact that I had just bought my tickets for Sapporo. He told me how much he has wanted to go to Hokkaido because he loves to ski, and that when his family came over to visit him last month, they even brought over all his ski gear and he was lamenting the fact that he had not been able to use it yet. So we chatted for a bit and I gave him all the details on my trip. At this point, he and I are both pumped for Sapporo because now I really want to go skiing! On Monday he is going to try to buy some tickets on the same flight that I’m on, so I (hopefully!!) won’t be going to Sapporo by myself after all!

To finish the night off, I was talking with a bunch of new and old students, and had my trusty new heater by my side since I’m always cold. Scott, who I took Japanese class with at U of M and who just arrived at JCMU, bought the same heater as me and decided he’d bring his out too. He plugged it into the surge strip that I brought out, and everything was going great for about 20 minutes when suddenly both our heaters shut off. I figured the plug fell out but turns out we tripped a breaker! And wouldn’t you know it, the router that provides internet to the ENTIRE dorm building was plugged into the same wall outlet! (At this point I was basically laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of how things are at JCMU, such as in the TV room, where the cord providing cable comes in through the WINDOW…yes, the window.) So after I stopped rolling on the floor in laughter, I went up to my room and grabbed an extension cord. We all pondered what to do for a bit but then realized we could use a plug up on the second floor balcony behind the microwave. During the 10 minutes or so that the internet was out, all of the WoW (World of Warcraft, a big online multiplayer game that basically sucks away the souls of those who play it because they never come out of their rooms) gamers actually EMERGED from their rooms to see why their game had been interrupted. This instigated another round of laughter from me, but since their internet was restored fairly quickly, there luckily were no riots. Just another day at JCMU…