Ii Desu Yo

ay, suckaz! just registered for my classes. i'm taking six hours of japanese language classes a week, and my other classes are japanese art history in the world context, introduction to tohoku culture one, and introduction to japanese society. yesterday we went in groups to a giant mall in an akita city suburb. about ninety of us climbed onto a little shuttle bus and wound around on narrow tilted roads until we got to this monstrous complex. it's got a "geimu senta" or arcade, a movie theatre, a bunch of giant department stores, and shops with names like "three minutes happiness" and "purple heaven forever". i bought a little sign that combines two of my favorite things, japanese and references to poop. then we came back here and had an ice cream social for new international students. we were introduced in groups by continent, and each said hullo and some sentence or other about what have you. i kind of bummed around the campus for the rest of the night and chatted to some folks and then went nitey nite. today we had more orientation and opened japanese bank accounts using our japanese personal seals. mine says "ku i su to" in katakana. tonight, i dunno, maybe go back to the woods or check out a bike from the res hall office, which i just found out i could do, or maybe i could go back to the mall and watch a japanese moobee? on one of my first long weekends, i want to take the train up to a town called kakunodate, an old preserved samurai town about 15-20 miles to the north. i'll put up the next day from the journal in a few hours, but right now my damn hands hurt from all the typing. see yez.