First day of classes

Hey everyone.

Well, the first day of classes has officially started. Unlike the US, there's a week of classes that meets before your register, so you can try them out and see what you think of them. I sat in on Japanese Culture at 9 this morning. The class seems like it'll be a lot of fun, but there wasn't really much structure to it (ie, for a compulsory note-taker like myself, wasted laptop battery life). Hopefully that's going to change once we get into a textbook or two. Next was Intro to Japanese. That was a bit boring; our homework for the next class with that teacher is to work on tracing and writing hiragana. I learned all that by myself, so it's quite a bit more review than I would like. It's a class taught by 4 different teachers, so hopefully we can get some of them to go a bit faster.

I'm done for the day here, so I've got some downtime on campus. Normally, I'll take that time to work on various homeworks that I don't have yet. With each class meeting once a week (excepting, of course, the language class), it doesn't seem like it'll be that bad. Thankfully though, I can take this time to post on here, and give you guys some feedback as to what's happening.

Take this for example: Yesterday we went on a small bus tour of Nagasaki. We stopped at the Peace Park (the park was built in the same general area that the atomic bomb was dropped). The statue (don't worry, guys - pictures will follow when my laptop can get put on the network) has one outstretched arm, and one arm pointing straight up. These signify a warning of future usage of atomic weapons (from the sky, pointing up) and the prosperity that peace can bring to the world(outstretched arm, showing the wide area of beauty of the park).

After the park, we traveled to Dejima Island. Dejima is no longer is an island, though - the land around it was filled in so that there could be more settlement area. It was originally a man-made island built by the Portuguese when they were pushed out of Nagasaki for trying to spread Christianity. After the Portuguese were forced off of Japan completely, the Dutch East India Company took over the island (they were originally stationed out of Hirado, an hour or so north), and for around 200 years, ran business from the island. They were not allowed off the island, however, and a ship only came once every six months, so these Dutch men were stuck on this piece of land less than a square mile for 6+ months. Not the best way to live.

Again, I'll have pictures of all this once my laptop has access to the network. For now, I bid all of thee, adieu.