And then

Plane rides are seldom worth discussion, and this was no different. It was my fifth international flight, and the novelty has long since worn off. The only excitement came when my flight out of San Francisco was delayed for about an hour because they had to replace a part. The plane itself booked it, so we arrived only half an hour after the expected 2:30pm arrival time.

After navigating immigration, customs, and retrieving my luggage from the spinny metal place, I set off trying to find the meeting place for KCP. I also attempted to call the parents, but I didn’t know the exact code to do so, so I sent an email instead. Luckily my iPhone still picked up the 3G network, so I was able to read the email that told me to head to the north wing of terminal 1. It was easy enough, and I was very thankful that I had packed as light as possible.

I expected the meeting point to be some remote corner of larger room, perhaps there would be a line up of people holding signs written on cardboard. I would have to look around for a bit until I found the KCP section, or something. Instead, it was a medium sized room that was teeming with Americans. Several teachers were walking around, and there was a professional looking KCP sign. In other words, it was an official deal. The school was not a front for some elaborate con.

I found a seat and relaxed. There were probably about 20 Americans there, though there were some from Europe as well. Most everybody was pretty approachable. I’ve learned from college that you need to take advantage of meeting as many people as you possibly can during the first few days, because eventually that window closes. So, despite being pretty wiped out from the plane ride, I did my best to be social.

There were two other people from Idaho, one was a guy who lived in Boise but was currently a student at Western Washington (which was one of the affiliate schools with KCP like U of I), and another was a girl who lived in Moscow and went to U of I. There was a guy from Virginia who was lamenting how few people he could find from the east coast, a guy from London, some people from Washigton, California, and a lot of people who’s information swiftly exited my brain shortly after entering.

We waited for about 45 minutes after I arrived, during which time about five more students trickled in. I finally met Mr. Tanaka, the American student liaison with whom I had been discussing many issues about the school before arriving. I got a little packet filled with a printed copy of the dormitory rules, a map of the area around the dorm and the area around the school, an emergency contact information paper, a schedule for the semester, and a train pass for the next three months. During this time, I found two other guys who were staying in my dorm in Okubo. Steven, who is the one that lived in Boise but attends Western Washington, and another Matt, who lives in Washington, I think.

After I parted once again with my luggage in order that it be sent directly to my dorm, Tanaka and some other teachers began to lead us to the train, and the KCP kids formed a massive mob of starry-eyed foreigners. The first train took us from the city of Narita, which is where the airport is, about one hour west to Tokyo. We transferred a couple of times, and eventually all the other students who were going to different dorms or doing homestay left with teachers and it was just us three Okubo kids and Tanaka. We finally got to our station, Nishi-Waseda, and it was a really strange feeling to get out of the station and onto the street. In my searches for KCP-related videos on YouTube, I found a whopping three videos documenting the walk from the station to our dorm. So I knew exactly where I was and where to go even though I had never set foot in that place before.

The Dorm
Okubo Men’s Dormitory is nestled (don’t you love that word? It makes it sound so much more nice than, say, “crammed”) between several residential buildings. There are two floors, the second of which is only accessible from a staircase on the outside. We went into the first floor, went through the complicated taking-off-of-the-shoes process in the entry, and walked past the kitchen area where some Korean students were making something that smelled awesome. We also met Donnie, who had arrived about eight days earlier and with whom I had been talking to in the week before I left. The dorm manager, Mr. Sasaki, wasn’t in at the moment, but Tanaka called him and found out what our rooms are. Donnie mentioned that whoever got room 102 was lucky because it was about twice the size of the regular rooms. It turned out that the three newcomers would be in 203, 204, and 205. Stephen and Matt dropped off their stuff in their dorms — both decently sized with some nice storage space — and I went to my room at the end of the hall.

I came in with a pretty open mind of about probably smallness of our dorm rooms, but I was still expecting in my naive heart to have some sort of closet. Instead, I have a room that is 45% filled up with a twin-sized bed, with a small desk on the far wall, and that’s basically it. No closet to speak of. There is a space between the foot of my bed and the wall that is big enough for my suitcase and other bags to park, but that’s all I can hope to fit there. Anything else must either fit on the desk, under the bed, or be in the middle of the room. Good thing I packed light.

As restitution for my destitution (look at me all dropping rhymes) I have perhaps the two best windows in the dorm. There is one which takes up over half the wall parallel to my bed which looks onto the main street that the building is on, and another which mostly faces the neighboring building, but allows me to see most of the way down that same street. I’m really the only room in the dorm that isn’t directly looking out to concrete. (Donnie’s room, which is directly below mine, has a comically terrible view of bricks on one side and concrete on the other, both about a foot away from the window)

Tanaka then took us all into the biggest of the three rooms and went over the dorm rules with meticulous detail. No girls, don’t be loud, don’t use a ton of electricity, don’t leave before 7:00 or after 11:00, etc. One issue is that the dorm gets very hot and we can’t just leave the air conditioner on all day. I came home from school the following day and the thermostat said 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit). I ran the air conditioner long enough to get it down to 27 and then shut it off. Each of the rooms has a meter above their doors and I’m trying to see if I can use the least amount of energy out of all the rooms on the floor.

After we were finally done with all the housewarming (ha!), Donnie led us three down to the AMPM down the street. We got some stuff that would pass as a dinner for the night, and looked at everything that was available. I wound up getting a bag of yakisoba flavored potato chips and a Gogo no Kocha (basically just iced tea in a bottle) and we went back to the dorm. Meanwhile, Donnie told us how he had already been through about every awkward situation imaginable during his first eight days.

Arriving back home, everyone happened to gather in the kitchen where Mr. Sasaki was. Mr. Sasaki doesn’t speak English, and he doesn’t want to speak English. I think he’s in cahoots with the school, because he makes all the students speak in Japanese only when they’re within earshot. It’s actually kind of fun, and it keeps the Americans honest and away from getting into too much of a comfort area. The conversation jumped all over the place, and eventually we were trying to decide if the character played in the movie Amistad by Anthony Hopkins was John Adams or John Qunicy Adams.

I went to bed at about 10:30, which I thought was pretty good, but I woke up at 2:30 and then again for good 5:30. I just sat in my bed for a while, and tried to think what I should review before the placement test. I wound up just going over the grammar points from the textbook, really wishing that I had my Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar book that was still in my not-yet-delivered suitcase. Eventually, 8:30 came around and it was time to head to the school.

It really is quite easy to get to the school from the dorm. It’s about a 7 minute walk to the station, it takes about 3 minute to get to the subway, the subway takes about 5 minutes, it takes about 5 minutes to get out of the station, then it’s about 7 minutes to get to the school. And because the school is really close to a lot of good places in Tokyo, it means that it’s pretty easy to get to the good parts of Tokyo, too.

When we got to the school, all the new students from both the Summer short-term program (like Donnie) and the new arrivals were gathered, and I would now estimate there to be about 100 students. Someone told me that they were surprised how few people there were, but I had never really estimated how many students would be in the program at any one time. It seemed about right to me. At a little after 10:00, we all went up to the eighth floor and had the opening ceremony. They would say everything in Japanese, and then translate it into Chinese, English, and Korean. So it took about 4 times as long as it should have, but it wasn’t too boring. Important points:
*This school is very hard
*Believe in yourself!
*Expect 6 hours of homework a day (Probably exaggerated, but still)
*There’s an English-speaking support staff including Tanaka and two other teachers.
There were speeches from the President, the Vice-Principal, some other administration-types, a student representative, and some teachers. They also had some people act out sample conversations from beginning (level 1 or 2), intermediate (level 3 or 4), and expert (level 5 or 6) classes.

After that, the group was separated by native language and took the placement exam. The first part was a listening test, and a tape player in the front of the room was playing the questions and we had a paper that we wrote the answers. I did mostly okay, but occasionally couldn’t hear words very well and was forced to guess. Almost all the problems I had were from not hearing correctly, or thinking too slowly. These were sentences that, if I had 3 seconds to process them after hearing it, I would have understood. Still, I answered most of the questions correctly.

The next test was a grammar test. It was incredibly hard, and asked the sort of questions that I would have been drilled on if I had actually taken classes in the past. Instead, my test probably gives the impression that I’m below the level that I am actually at. I began to feel level 4 slip away, but I didn’t find it to be an injustice.

Then we had an interview, first with Tanaka in English and then with one of the teachers in Japanese. They asked things like what I had focused on, which textbooks I used, what I was weak at. The teacher also went over the grammar test and tried to clarify whether or not I understood the concepts being tested or if I just happened to miss the question. At one point, she was asking if I understood what the meaning of a causitive conjugation was, which I do, but for some reason I temporarily forgot. It wasn’t until a few awkward seconds that I realized where my thinking went wrong and corrected it. At least I corrected it.

The jist of the meeting with the teacher was that I have a very strange background. Because I’ve been teaching myself (and it’s hard to learn from someone who is just as dumb as you) my focus was a bit lopsided. I know the kanji of a level 4 student, and I know a lot of way difficult vocabulary, but there’s also a lot of simply vocabulary that I don’t know, and there are entire grammatical concepts that I didn’t even know existed. Before the interview got over, I voiced my concern that even though there was some material that was covered in level 2 that I didn’t know, for the most part, the level would be too easy on the whole.

She recommended that I take a different test, so I went up to the teacher’s lounge and spent another hour and twenty minutes on two more tests. The strange thing was that they were the semester final exams for level 3. I had long since given up on level 4, but I’m not sure what to assume from them having me take this test. Perhaps to get an idea of what from level 3 I knew. The evidence is stacking up that I may be put into a makeshift class. Things like level 1.5 or level 7 aren’t unheard of in this school. I’m certainly a special case in that my background is so messed up. I did well enough on the test to show that I knew a decent amount of level 3 material. For now, though, there’s nothing to do but wait until Monday.

After the test, while my brain was completely fried in a way it has never been before, I met up with Stephen and we walked around Shinjuku a little bit. I told him that I wanted to find a decent quality restaurant for dinner because I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch (it was only 3 pm, though). We found a ramen shop and both ordered the basic ramen dish for 700 yen (like $7.50). It was definitely great. I could way get used to eating ramen for every meal if it was necessary. I promised myself that I wouldn’t pick around certain foods in Japan, so I ate everything, including a strange object that had the texture of vegetables but the vague taste of fish. I wanted to know what it was… and I also sort of didn’t.

We both turned in early for the day, because Sunday is completely free of any obligation, so we’ll get our sightseeing fix then. For the time being, I know my suitcase had arrived and I would have to type of an immensely detailed blog entry to cover the previous two days. Two hours later, I set a precedent for blog entry length that I absolutely cannot keep up. I’m still getting over jet lag, so I think I’ll get to sleep pretty soon. Have a good morning, everyone.