Beware of Kappa

While walking along a riverfront of sorts, I came across this sign.

Apparently kappa are a real menace to society.

But um anyway, Day 2 in Japan was not as exhausting as Day 1, luckily for me. Yesterday was a lot of running around between where I'm staying in the Seminar Houses to Kansai Gaidai's campus which is about a 10 minute walk away, but the trick is that once you get inside the gates, it's another 15 minutes to get to anywhere you need to be, which is annoying. But I managed to make it just in time to the Hirakata City tour, which is the closest city (a small one at that) about a 10 minute bus ride away for 220 yen. We were shown about the city by some Japanese kids and then ate dinner at a place called Asian Days where we had all-you-can-eat dumplings. My favorite looking ones were the ones shaped like pigs, featured in the center of this lovely photograph. When I got back to my room around 8, I "took a nap"/crashed and then eventually went to bed properly... I'm mostly over the jetlag, but I still love sleep.

I met one of my Japanese speaking partners today, a girl named Ryoko. We had a lovely time chatting in English and Japanese about ourselves and languages and No Doubt. The Japanese students are almost done with their semester, so she's about to end her first year of college and then go on break until April. But I felt sufficiently satisfied with my ability to communicate with her in Japanese, and actually found myself reverting even when we were talking in English. I have a such a strong desire to get better and improve in all the ways that I can, and I'm really excited about all the Japanese I'm going to learn. Taking the placement test today, I was staring at the advanced section thinking about how badly I wanted to know how to read all of it. And while it may not be entirely clear to me what it is I'm doing with my degree in this foreign language at this point, I know that I have enough drive to make something of it.

Here are some perfectly packaged Japanese strawberries from the supermarket.