Lots of friends!

Just a couple of quick tip for any student readers who are planning to study abroad here in the future:

1. NO ENGLISH
Well, not absolutely none. In my opinion you need to speak English sometimes in order to ease your headache from constantly having to think when you talk. HOWEVER, you should really meet up with the other HPU student(s) that are going with you and work out a deal to try your best to only talk to each other in Japanese. In my opinion the other two guys and I have been talking WAY too much English and it's hindering out learning speed.

2. MEET YOUR NEIGHBORS
When you move in try and make it a point to introduce yourself to at least a couple of the people in the dorm. There are only 16 rooms in the dorms so it shouldn't be too hard to meet everyone. The Chinese students (they come here for their junior and senior year) are REALLY good people to make friends with because a lot of the time they know a bit of English and have also been here for over a year and can show you around and introduce you. Also, since they also learned Japanese in a classroom setting, they know how to "lower" their speech to a level that you would be able to understand. That and they cook really good food :)

3. PREPARE FOR CELEBRITY LIFE
Seriously. EVERYONE will stare at you. EVERYONE. Students, pedestrians.... even people in their cars will stare at you as they drive through an intersection. No one is trying to be rude. Everyone is just amazed that there are foreigners out here in the country side. This makes it pretty easy to make friends with people though because everyone wants to talk to you. Random people will actually ask you to take a picture with them. It's already happened to the 3 of us many times. Be prepared for it.

I'm having a lot of fun here and I'm learning a lot. My Japanese is still very weak but I'm much more comfortable in speaking what I can and don't mind making mistakes as much as I did before.