www.davynextdoor.com

A quick update on my classes: they are pretty much ridiculously easy and boring.

Japanese class is easy. I’m learning much more just being in Japan and interacting with Japanese people, but it’s a good way for me to learn how to speak formally. Japanese has very structured levels of politeness so when I talk to a friend I have to say things pretty significantly differently from when I talk to an elder.

Japanese art history is easy. My teacher, by the way, is insane. I don’t know how she got a job. She yells at us often for nothing and lectures us on how the world is going to end, it takes a long time to become a man, and college kids these days have no respect. It’s a class of about 35 and there are 4 white guys in this class of Japanese, including me. The teacher calls on students and for whatever reason out of the 8 or so times she called on people last class 4 of those people happened to be me. Also, she calls all the Japanese students by their last name with the “-san” tag added for respect (i.e. Tanaka-san) but she throws that all away for me and just calls me David.

Approaches to Japanese Society is easy. Although we don’t have to do much work there is a lot of meaningful discussion that goes on in the class and I feel like I’ll actually have learned something by the time its over. “Meaningful discussion” doesn’t come often for me in class, either. Way too often in humanities classes I find myself bothered or annoyed by the ridiculous discussion that goes on. Here though, I’m actually pretty impressed by the points made and the questions brought up. About 70 percent foreigners here.

Oh, and, I dropped Shakespeare and opted instead for Masterpeices of World Art which is also easy. The teacher is incrediblllllllly dry but its nice to refresh all the material I forgot from Art History in high school and add onto it with things we never got to cover. The class is huge, maybe 80-100 people, the vast majority of which are Japanese.

Granted I haven’t taken any tests yet so my opinion of these classes might change soon, but it’s pretty ridiculous the amount of free time I have here. It’s fantastic, it’s amazing, it’s greattttt! It lets my brain have the time and space to absorb as much Japanese as possible and it gives me time to edit pictures, look at others pictures, and read about photoshop.

More from Ueno:

It should be set up now so when you click on the first image you can move your mouse into the top right hand corner of it and a “next” button should pop up that you can click on. A similar “prev” button is on the left side to let you go backwards.

In Ueno Park I spotted in the distance some people playing hackey sackkkk! I was extremely excited of course and ran over and joined them. These guys were good. Like, ri-dangdong-diculously good. Far better than anybody I’d ever seen these guys were doing jester stalls over and over again like it was no big deal in the midst of many crazy, spinning, and jumping moves. When I came over they were all practicing stalls seperately so I had to ask them in my broken Japanese if we could all play together for a bit.