Kansai Gaidai at last

The actual campus for Kansai Gaidai is a bit far away; about a twenty minute walk from our dorm room. We'd find out soon enough that a twenty minute walk isn't really that bad; almost everything is at least ten minutes away unless we bike, but not many people have bikes just yet, so until everybody gets one, we walk.

There is an extremely amicable man in a uniform (campus safety I presume) by the gate closest to our dorm, who is always there, and extremely nice to us. When we walk in, all of us bow as we walk by, saying, "Ohayou gozaimasu", a polite way of saying good morning, and he does the same in return. Pretty soon greetings like this become second nature. Bowing is like something that you to do everybody, and greetings are the same way. If you pass somebody on the street, and neither of you look like you're in a particular hurry, it's normal for both people (complete strangers even) to stop and greet each other in this way. This is especially true for campus safety officers, police officers, even construction workers... essentially, anybody in a uniform of some sort.

The campus is very different architecturally from the rest of Hirakata, built very much with a more western style in mind. It's definitely beautiful, but in a different way from the rest of the city. There aren't many Japanese students inside the campus, which at first I thought was strange; everywhere I looked there were ryugakusei, but no nihonjin (japanese people) unless they were workers or faculty. Later I'd find out that the reason for this was because classes for Japanese students at Kansai Daigaku don't begin until the 25th of September. Why they have almost a month with no classes when we have class is beyond me.

There is a boatload of paperwork we have to do for orientation, starting from the day we went into the campus and not ending for quite a while. Insurance. Liability. Payments. Deposits. Privacy consent. Banking. Everything has a form related to it, and if you fill the form out even remotely incorrectly, you have to start over with a blank form. It's like playing the game operation. And I'm seriously not kidding - one of the forms I had to fill out to make a bank account with Suritomo (a bank in Japan) required you to not touch ANY of the lines on the paper when you write on it - none whatsoever - or they make you start over. Why? I have no idea.

The cafeteria is fairly large and run by a group of little old japanese women who are used to having ryugakusei try to order food, but still speak no english whatsoever. Most of us simply order food by pointing at something and saying "Sore wo onegaishimasu", or, "I'll have that, please". The more advanced students will ask if they have a certain item, or ask what is good. The food is absolutely spectacular, and incredibly cheap at the cafeteria. For 400 yen (about $3.50) we had rice with curry and miso soup, and a coca-cola. And by we I mean, all of us had the same exact thing (this was a result of me ordering curry and everybody else saying, "onaji onegaishimasu," or, "I'll have the same").

We have a tour of the campus given to us by a Japanese student named Yohei-san. He's a bit... How shall I say this... Absent-minded. Not unintelligent, but a bit not there, either. He shows us excitedly all the different places on campus, including a convenience store, the bookstore, the ATM, the (a-hem) Makudo-narudo, which is how Japanese people pronounce McDonald's, the library, the registrar, and the Center for International Education building, which is where all of our classes will be held. Yohei-san doesn't have all of the answers to our questions, so better-informed classmates seem to be the way to go when looking for answers.

I didn't bump into Eliza at all, but I did meet some new people when I went back to the cafeteria to get dinner. There was a large group of people, two of whom I recognized, and I immediately got pulled into their group of friends. The group seemed to revolve around two nihonjin students, Yuuki and Hana Ryuichi, who is constantly changing which name (his family or his given name) he prefers to be called by. I'll call him Hana for now, since it's what I hear more people call him. They explain that they get made fun of a bit because Yuuki means snow and is generally a girl's name, and Hana means flower, and, well, you get the idea. With them is Ruth and Kim, two girls from Colorado, who laugh at me a bit when I tell them I like snowboarding ("Snowboarding? In NY? Hah! You don't know what snowboarding IS until you've been to Colorado!"). Also with them is a kid named Corey, who is almost fluent in Chinese and has been to China, and his friend Chris. We sit and talk for a while eating our early dinner, which for me is simply rice and miso soup for a startlingly cheap 200 yen (= about $1.75) and quite filling.

Yuuki and Hana are freshman at Kansai Daigaku, and are studying English rigorously; even more so than our Japanese. They, like most nihonjin, studied English in both middle school and high school, and have taken English courses for six years. They're fairly fluent; so long as you don't talk particularly fast, they'll understand everything you say. They're just as interested in learning English and speaking English with us as we are in speaking Japanese with them, so it works out quite well for everybody involved. Then comes the words everybody was waiting for; Ruth says excitedly, "Let's do Karaoke tonight!!"

... It's amazing how these things spread.

Three hours later, I'm leaving my dormitory with about 20 other people, most of whom I'd just met that day, heading further into Osaka, led by Yuuki-san, Hana-san, and their two friends, Mana-san and another Japanese girl whose name I didn't catch. I'm not exactly sure how I went from knowing two people, Eliza and Aaron, to knowing twenty people, and now I'm going with them to a Karaoke place... But, well, you know what they say: When in Rome... err... Japan...