The past two days have been just a jumble of information! We start school at 9:30 for the placement exam on both days (day one was grammar, day two was reading, composition, and oral). On September 17, we learned about PE and the gym. I decided to sign up for aerobics! September 18 was a tour of the library and of Sannomiya.
On September 17, we all split up for lunch. I ended up going with Aurelien, Aaron, Michael, Wynton, Duke, Reynold, and John to this little hole-in-the-wall ramen shop. I got yasai-itame, which is literally stir-fried vegetables. However, it was served with some seafood and on top of rice! It was yummy and affordable! On September 18, lunch was a little more difficult because everyone ended their placement exams at different times. I ended up going with Reynold and Duke to find a place to eat, and along the way we ran into John who had already ate. Now, if there's one thing you need to know about the Konan Okamoto campus, there is nowhere to eat directly outside of school! Like you have to walk a bit to find anything edible, and if you find something, it usually is only a coffee shop with drinks and cakes (not suitable for lunch!). We walked until we found this cute cafe whose name I forgot (I actually I never knew it). The inside looked like someone's house, we discussed that it was as if an old couple got bored and lonely, then turned their house into a restaurant. The decor was very interesting and they even had a little book/manga collection that you could read from. Duke had a ball reading a Japanese book with some German comments about a Corgi who goes on adventures. We all got delicious omuraisu!
On September 18, we got divided into groups randomly to explore Sannomiya. Most groups had 2-3 foreign students with 2-3 Konan students, however my group was just me and three Konan girls! Ha! I am someone who despised speaking in front of people just a week ago, and now I am being forced to. It is actually quite refreshing! We always had something to talk about and it was really fun! We explored the Sannomiya Harbor-land area which is extremely beautiful! We walked around the new shopping complex, which I will need to revisit. We also went up the Kobe Port Tower! I am so grateful that my group members were game to spend 600 yen to go to the top with me :D After that we walked around some more and got dinner at this hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Kibou-ken, known for their ramen! I got the tsukemen and it was amazing! They also give you 4 free gyozas per person if you show your student ID! How awesome is that? We ended the day with some purikura, then they put me on my train. That was my first time walking home in the dark but it was alright, I know I'll get used to it eventually. The train was surprisingly crowded though...night rush hour?
On another note, I had the strangest dream last night that I was in a zombie apocalypse. I feel like I should right it here because it was so interesting and I don't want to forget it. It was a very "realistic" dream, as in the zombies were dangerous and intelligent! In my dream, you could become a zombie even if zombie saliva were to touch your skin because it burns your skin and goes directly into your bloodstream. So there was this guy in our group who was extremely useful that saved my life, but he went one-on-one with this zombie that kept her saliva in a bottle and she would spray the bottle! How evil! There was also another guy in our group that hit, and we knew that he had been bit because he was talking in Japanese :p Apparently, speaking another language that you don't know is a sign? Either way...we didn't shoot them to end their misery real quick. We ended up just putting them in body bags and tossing them into the ocean with a lot of rocks. They would break their necks on the rocks I guess. It was quite depressing because there were children in my dream tossing their siblings off the same cliff. Oh! Also, in my dream for some reason I move half my regular speed, so it is EXTREMELY frustrating, and I am useless. However, despite all the havoc going on, people would still go to work and stuff. I guess the apocalypse was in it's earlier stages? Either way, I enrolled in a jiu-jitsu class in my dream so that I would be better prepared. It was a really strangely realistic dream, but it was as if I was watching a TV show, because it was broken up into episodes. It's hard to explain now, but like at some point in my dream I was like "Wait I saw spoilers on this, I know so-and-so is going to die!" But I had to live it anyway. Weird.
