Snow!

This morning I woke up to someone ringing my doorbell like the world was going to end. It was much to early for me to be getting out of bed. I almost ignored it and stayed in bed, but the doorbell ringing didn't stop for a good minute, so I ended up having to get up. It was one of my friends waking me up to see snow falling from the sky! It's the first time I'd seen snow fall. It was great! Glad I was woken up to see it!

Hakodate weather

Wow! This weather really isn't the kind of weather I'm used to! The temperature has been hanging around 10 and 0 degrees Celsius lately. That's between 50 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And this isn't even as cold as it's going to get! The wind has been really strong lately too. Last night I decided to go for a walk and when I came back, the wind was blowing so hard on my door that I couldn't open it. I thought I had locked it for a second before I realized that it was just the wind! When I opened my door and went inside, the wind blew so hard that it slammed the door in my face! It's really fun to experience new things, especially like this. Though, I am a little worried for when winter actually comes!

Cold~

It's starting to get really cold here! It still hasn't begun to snow yet. The snow shouldn't be coming for another month or so, but it's already so cold! Me and the guys were out walking one night and we were surprised to see that the temperature on the public thermometer read 1.2 degrees Celsius! It's gotten to the point where I need to use 2 thick blankets to not only sleep, but just to be in my room if I'm not wearing pants and a jacket! This island grown boy wasn't made for the cold. But I'm still excited to see snow!

Eventful weekend

This past weekend was crazy! On Saturday we had a sort of picnic gathering with a bunch of other exchange students from other schools. It was really nice meeting other people who were doing the same thing that I was. We were the only ones from Hawaii, let alone the US. All the other exchange students were from China or Korea or even the Middle East. And they were all really good at Japanese AND English. It was very motivational to see other people who had become so proficient in languages that were not their mother tongues. We made a lot of friends there! After that we went to a bar and stayed out the whole night. I don't like alcohol so I didn't drink anything. I just talked to people and made even more friends. There was this one lady who got so drunk she was throwing chairs around the bar. Perfect example of why alcohol can be bad! On Sunday we went to a Halloween party with one of the teachers here and though the crowd was generally an older one, it was still a lot of fun! We made lots of friends there too. We made lots of plans with our new friends so we're going to be very busy from here on out!

University Festival

Today was the university festival. It was really fun! There was a lot of food you could buy, but the good stuff sold out really quickly and we ended up not being able to try all the food that we wanted. There were a lot of booths and galleries and stuff but I spent most of the time in the music club room. They had various bands from the music club performing on stage and a lot of them were REALLY good! This school has some very talented musicians. I'm hoping I can learn to play something as good as all of them by the time I leave here! All in all today was a really fun day.

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.

Part Time Job!

Last week me and the two other students who came with me were helped in getting a part time job so we could get a little more income each month. It's a pretty sweet job! It's an English teaching class. You teach English to Japanese people who kind of just want to learn for fun. No Japanese is allowed by you while teaching the class, so I don't have to worry about having poor Japanese skills; I can still do my job! You meet once a week for 1 hour and the pay is 2500 yen per session, so that comes out to about $30ish with the exchange rate. The students are an older crowd; maybe mid 30s and up. They're all really nice people! You're given an easy to follow workbook to use with the class and I haven't had any problems yet. I actually have my next class in a couple of hours so it's time to get to work!