Third week - About classes

After getting back to the dorm, I was internetless just for something like 20 minutes, after which I went to visit Mika and Samuli to their apartment. Mika was sleeping as I rang the doorbell and Samuli wasn't about. The guys had spent some good time on their weekend, at least judging from the pictures and videos that Mika showed me from his computer. They'd been to a few bars, one of which was a drink-all-you-can, "nomihoodai" equipped with karaoke, a couple of guitars and a drum set. The bar visitors were allowed to play the instruments themselves, but although Mika was able to play the guitar, he didn't get drunk enough to actually get up on the stage and play some music. Instead, one of the two daughters of the bar owner sang while the bar owner played the guitar himself, grouped with a bunch of other people on the drums and the bass. Judging from the pictures, the evening rocked - especially after Mika had thrown up in another bar as they moved on through their epic journey of being drunk in various places.

After Samuli came back, we strolled together to the first Japanese class. First, there was an introduction given by a different lecturer, who basically told us in Japanese that we have three choices regarding the courses and should choose the one appropriate for our own level. Me, Mika, Samuli and Matias went to the basic class among with a Thai woman called "Waraporn" and a Chinese guy "Tanriwa" or something - I really couldn't be sure about his name. In fact, there was another Chinese guy, who wanted to be called Tom, because to an uneducated ear, his name sounded very much like "Tan" as well.

In the Japanese class, there was a Japanese woman in her forties teaching us about "konnichiwa" and "sumimasen" and other very basic words in Japanese. Most of the stuff we went through in the course of one hour and a half was really basic, but the homework didn't seem so easy. There were many words I'd never heard of before, three big pages of them. What made it seem especially bad is that I didn't have a dictionary. In the introduction, we had been given books called "Minna no Nihongo", which contained some of the words, but it seemed difficult to find them from between the lines. I thought that to really study Japanese, I would have to buy a dictionary anyway. Without it, studying kanji would be really tiresome.

After the class was over, we went back to the dorm, talking about the class and how it seemed too easy at least for now. We wanted more lessons than just 1.5 hours per week, but after asking about it, it wasn't possible all that easily. I knew that in some other Japanese universities taking exchange students, there are much more lessons in a week, so we would have to spend huge amounts of time on self-study due to the lack of education.

Back in the dorm, I tried to login to the internet, and like magic, it worked. Petri had spent some time getting it to work by using another person's cable and after a while, we decided to change the cable and move the WLAN router to my apartment, because it was closer to the person actually sharing the internet connection.

In the evening, Ville asked if anyone wanted to go to a ramen place just down the street to eat some noodles. He'd never been to it before and granted, I hadn't ever eaten real restaurant ramen either, so I was in. Matias was coming as well, so we all took bicycles and went down the street to check out the ramen place. When we got there though, it was closed. There was no menu or anything, just a text saying "ramen" in Japanese, no opening and closing hours either. So we thought it was best to find another restaurant, since we were all hungry and on the go.

After cycling for what seemed like a few kilometers, we reached a large supermarket called "Tobu". It was just about to close, so we could grab something for really good prices - usually, when the markets close, they have all the bentos for half price, so that's what me and Matias bought. At the same time, I got the idea that to live cheaply in Japan, all one has to do is to benefit from the half-price sales around closing hours. Doing that, there would be little need for cooking and one would still be able to taste all the mysterious and sometimes highly dangerous delicacies of Japanese origin.

After getting out of the supermarket, we still wanted to go to a restaurant. So cycling back, we strolled to an expensive-looking place, not really knowing what to expect from it. It was a nikuyaki restaurant where you fry the various types of meat above a charcoal pot. The restaurant personnel were really friendly for us, or at least we got their attention. How? By being white. They said "gaijin, gaijin" and started to serve us with even more vigor than your typical Japanese waitresses, which is already saying a lot. The food seemed to be actually quite cheap here, so we took a couple of sets of beef slices and fried them to our taste. The heat of the red-glowing coal really warmed up our hands, frozen in the cold evening air and the food tasted really good. After we'd finished, the waitress who had first greeted us came to us, offering a plate of seashells. I'd never eaten them fresh before, so it was an experience by itself, but the actual gesture of giving them was really friendly. When we got out to pay our bills, she wanted to offer us a bag of onions too, but Ville declined the offer. I didn't understand what she was saying, but I would've at least liked to have them.

With Matias, I went to buy an electronic dictionary on Wednesday. I didn't know much about them, other than what Johan, a Swedish guy studying at APU whom I had visited last year, had told me about it. He recommended the Casio EX-Word series, so I was inclined to buy one of those as well. When we finally reached the store by bicycle and got to look at the different models, it became clear that buying a model without a stylus, a kind of digital pen to write text to the screen with, was a bad idea. So I took the cheapest EX-Word model with a stylus, priced around 28000 yen. I hope this was my last expensive electronic purchase, because I cannot afford much more. I calculated that I have about 1300 yen per day to spend, which sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. So I have to severely cut on my expenses in order to cope with daily life or I'll be broke before summer.

On Friday, I was going to Obihiro again. This time, I packed a bit more stuff with me, so I wouldn't have to bring my clothes back and forth between Obihiro and Kitami. I skipped a voluntary seminar on the afternoon because I was just too tight on time and went cycling to the bus terminal on downtown Kitami. When I stopped in the last traffic lights, I was next to a group of schoolgirls. They glanced at me and said something about "kakkoii" and "ryuugakusei", which mean "cool" and "exchange student". I didn't understand much else about it, but I could imagine they talked about me. That imagination was confirmed later to be true, though.

In the bus, there were also a lot of schoolgirls in the bus. I couldn't get to the back seat, being already taken by three girls, but the seat next to it was free, so I went there. After the bus started moving, I could easily hear the schoolgirls talk in English: "Where are you from?", "What is your name?", "How old are you?" They were just practicing the lines and I paid no mind to it, but couldn't really help smiling. After a while, they had mustered enough courage to start talking and promptly asked "Excuse me" loudly enough so that I was supposed to hear it. After that, me and the three 15-year olds talked about Japan and Finland until each of them left off at a different stop. They had more courage to talk than many of the university students, which I thought to be great. I tried to encourage them to keep it up, too, and keep talking English in the future as well.

One of the girls left off at the last stop of the first bus, Rikubetsu. She was kind enough to show me the only restaurant of the whole village, a soba noodle place. I'll have to visit it in the future if I go on such a bus that has a longer exchange time than 10 minutes.