Grand Finale

I’ve now been done with finals for a week, and I feel pretty good about it on the whole. Finals were something of a joke, with the exception of Japanese and Japanese Literature. Japanese was hard, and I’m pretty sure that I failed my final, but I feel okay about where I am with the language, and I intend to keep taking it, at least as long as I’m here. The teacher gave the test in three sections, meaning that in order to get part two you had to turn in part one. I suppose that in theory this is a good system but in practice what it means is that as soon as you finish the first section your attention becomes divided between the section you’re working on and agonizing over all the mistakes you are sure you made on the previous section. I’ve tried studying language several times now, and while I feel I have a better handle on Japanese than any of the other languages I’ve tried to learn, I’m still a long way off from it being useful in daily life. IN my experience, studying language works by allowing you to remember some grammar and some vocabulary some of the time, but never corresponding pieces of a puzzle, and certainly not at the same time. It is as a result of this tendency that I can study for a test and feel pretty good about it and then be able to fill in less than a third of the answers. It’s frustrating, but I can’t really complain, as I’m sure my initial confidence was misplaced. There’s something about the way that I study that is really ineffectual, and I think part of the problem is that I tend to either know things or not know them, and so studying either results in me already knowing the material (or feeling as though I do) or me getting frustrated and falling asleep on my book. Back to the point though, I finished the final and I’m trying to focus on the next step in my Japanese education.
Japanese literature did not have a final exam, but rather a final paper, something for which I am extremely grateful. I don’t think I could have handled a final exam to be perfectly honest, not with the way that class was presented anyway. The professor’s strategy was to cover a large (very large) amount of material in each lesson, and force us to review it by having us write a series of papers. All well and good but as a result I can’t imagine what a test from him would have looked like. The final paper itself was somewhat painful to write. This teacher likes his paper’s to be single-spaced, and in 10-point font. I’m not sure why he would do such a thing, as it seems to remove any pleasure that could be had for everyone involved in the process. In any case, this paper needed to be five pages long, and on the subject of our choosing. I ended up writing about Haiku and Heian period waka (short) poetry, and how the imagery in each is both similar and integral to the structure of the poetry. I got off track several times, but in the end I was reasonably pleased with the paper. It was one of those papers that just doesn’t flow out easily, and writing it was painful. In the end, if you were to reformat my paper to the standards that most regular people use, it would have been 14 pages long, which is a lot to ask for with only one week to do it in.
My other two classes were much easier, and I would not really call what I had in them finals, or even really tests. They felt more like quizzes, which doesn’t really bother me, but it still seems odd to me that the easiest test of the semester in two of my classes was the final. In my Mass Media class the professor simply recycled the questions from our last quiz and added the essay questions we had had to choose from when writing our essay. Introduction to East Asia was just a section test, as we have had four professors (intentionally) covering four different sections throughout the semester. I’m not complaining though, I’m just happy to be on break.
In total I have about three weeks off between the end of the semester and when I have to register for winter semester. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my break but then I got sick and my mind was made up for me. It sucks, and I’ve been feeling very fluish, achy and tired all the time. I’ve been sleeping a lot though, so I’m feeling better. I’ve got about ten days here left, and I’m going to try to make it somewhere interesting for New Years.

There and back again

Been a lot going on lately, and every time that it occurs to me that I should write about something I’m away from my computer and by the time I make it back I’ve forgotten. Another part of the problem is that I’ve been doing a lot of academic writing lately, which takes the fun out of the writing process and leaves me wanting to anything but write. That’s finished now though, and we’re moving on to our second big break of the year.
Before I get into that though I should recap a bit on what I’ve been up to. I’ve been getting out and about more lately, which is good since it would be a shame to have visited Japan only to have seen the AIU campus. Not that it isn’t nice, it’s just that there isn’t a lot of variety to be had on a college campus. Last weekend I went with a few friends to Tazawako, which is about 3 hours worth of travel away from campus. It’s probably not that far, but getting there involves taking three trains and a series of buses so it feels like more of an expedition than it really is. We had to catch the bus at 8:45 am, which for a college student is about four hours before we can function as usual. As a result, there’s not much of the travel that I can really remember. I spent most of it drifting in and out of sleep while an elderly Japanese man looked at me and frowned. Our original intention had been to do some hiking around the lake that the region is famous for, and after that to go to an onsen (hot spring), but by the time that we got there it was already one in the afternoon, and most of the onsen in the area had their day service end at three. After three, they have a night rate, but if you do that you are paying to stay for the night, which costs around $100. So we decided to cancel the hiking portion of our excursion and just go to the onsen. The place we went to was really cool, though I can’t remember the name. It was up in the mountains, and we had to take two separate buses to get to it. I took some pictures and as soon as I find the cord that lets me upload pictures onto my computer I’ll post them. It was sort of like a miniature town, with a bunch of little buildings lining the main path. Most of the buildings were guest rooms I think, but I only went in the building where you pay so I’m not sure. Since we got there at two and the place closed at three, we were only able to spend an hour there, but that was about the right amount of time. There’s only so long you can sit in a hot spring before you start to feel a little overheated, so by the time three o’clock rolled around I was ready to get going. The thing about hot springs is that, if they’re natural, they smell like sulfur, which makes sense. It’s not so bad really, it might bother you for a minute, but that goes away pretty quickly. The problem is that afterwards you, and by extension everything you brought with you (and some things you didn’t) are also going to smell like sulfur for the foreseeable future. I’ve washed the clothes I wore that day multiple times, and they still smell. Other than that though, it was well worth the trip. There was no snow when we went, but they had pictures that made the place look beautiful in the winter, so I’ll probably go back at some point to see how it looks with snow. After that we took the bus back to the train station, and still had an hour and a half before our train. We wandered around until we found somewhere to eat, and we found a nice place where we were able to get ramen and raw horse meat, both of which were delicious. We headed back to campus after that, which meant another three hours of buses and trains. Getting around Japan is remarkably easy, all it takes is the ability to read hiragana, and to know where it is you are trying to go. It can be a little pricey but that’s to be expected, as they seem to take their public transportation seriously here. All in all we spent about seven hours traveling and three at our destination, but it was still quite a bit of fun.
I’ll get into finals week a little later. I just finished the last of them, and I’d rather not think about it for awhile. I’ll get back to it soon though, so keep an eye out.