Kanazawan Holiday

As anyone over forty can tell from the name (for those under forty, it`s an allusion to the famous movie Roman Holiday, my favorite romantic comedy), today was a good day. I woke up at six-forty and did my best to sleep in another hour. At which point I was close to being late. I got up, ate breakfast and got ready for school. While doing this, I realized why I was able to sleep in twenty minutes more than usual, it was because neither of my host brothers were up (chopsticks hitting plates is what gets me out of bed, it`s not loud, but it works) because they had classes a little later. Anyways, I bandaged my foot (which is being skinned by my solid leather shoes), and headed off for school.



At school it was the second day of the festival, I went to my home room, helped clean, and then went off with my friends (they speak a few sentences of broken English and their not jerks). We waited while the yakisoba stand got setup and we were about fourth in line, after which the line bacame longer than the courtyard it was setup in. We walked around, played golf, shot airguns, and generally had a good time. I also tried tapioca, a drink with fruit candy at the bottom, which makes it more like a drink mini-game when they give you a straw equally as wide as the candy. And a few hours later, it was over, just before the rain started.



So, I decided to use this time to talk to my teacher about my classes. Right now, all my classes are in Japanese. Biology, literature and history all have to many kanji for me to learn in a month, the English classes are basically me reading the booklet, almost crying at the butchered version of Romeo and Juliet ("Juliet you are as beatiful as the sun" just doesn`t do Shakespeare credit enough), and then I get asked by the teacher to read a few paragraphs slowly. She asks me to slowly pronounce a few key words, and then goes back to speaking at a mile a minute pace in Japanese. And as for the math class, well, the teacher is easily distracted and their just doing distance right now (AB=sqrt[(x1-x2)+(y1-y2)]). So, I decided to try and throw some classes around. So next week, forty percent of the classes I`ll be taking will be various levels of mathematics and physics. And by the time this was all sorted out, the rain had stopped.



I walked "home" and was told that my host brother was hanging out with some of his rebounder friends. So I took the bus over to Kanazawa station (which is also a six story shopping mall) and join them. Both his friends spoke English well. We played air hockey, Mario cart (an arcade version) and had our pictures taken in some crazy famous Japanese style. After that, I got on a bus to go back "home" (Kenji decided to stay a little longer), and sat down behind two middle-aged white women. A few seconds into the bus ride, I realized they were speaking in French, so I waited, and when the opportunity arose I excused myself and joined their conversation. We never exchanged names or addresses (we indroduced ourselves by nationality, one was Swiss and the other American), but we had a lovley chat about why I was in Japan, then on to the Japanese language, about the difficulty of learning it, and the interesting and facinating things we had noticed in the language. About five ot ten mintues later I thanked them for the opportunity to use my French and got off the bus. I understood eccentially all of the conversation, there were only four or five words I didn`t catch, and they complimented me on my French despite a few minor mistakes I made like saying "hai" instead of "oui."



All in all, today was an excellent day, unfortunately I probably won`t spend the night smashing guitars over secret agents` heads or falling in love, but attempting to write a few sentences in Japanese and working out isn`t too bad.



Here`s a picture of the front area of Kanazawa Station. You can see the giant wooden pillars off to the left in the back. I would have taken a picture from in front, but you can see that on any site about Kanazawa, and I thought this was a nice cross section.

I`ll post the pictures taken in the strange picture booth once I get a clear picture of them.

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