Beer.

I have recently discovered that beer is delicious in Japan.  I've mostly been drinking Asahi, but today I purchased what appeared to be some sort of seasonal brew of Sapporo and it was awesome.  It's no Guinness, but it's also not as strong or imposing a flavor as Guinness.  What I mean is, it's not so strong that you can drink it with only certain flavors or by itself.  It isn't imposing.  I'm not really a connoisseur of beer, but I know I like the beer here.  I don't know why I feel so self conscious expressing an opinion on beer.

We did our kanji test today and it was less than awesome.  Our previous placement test had a significant amount of what I would call "basic Japanese" in it.  So much so that when I finished the test, even though I had to leave the last two sections essentially blank, I still felt good about myself.  I did a decent job remembering things.  The kanji test, however, did not have any real "basic kanji."  Instead, it had maybe a dozen that were recognizable and aside from those, gobbledy gook.  It was humbling leaving so much of the page empty.

The sakubun test was a little bit less terrible, but still pretty awful.  They basically handed us two very large pieces of paper with squares on them like a chess board and told us that we had 50 minutes to write an essay either about our city or our hobbies.  I proceeded to spend most of my time talking about Springfield.  I talked about how we had a lot of trees and how the dangerous weather in the winter destroyed them.  I talked about how Brad Pitt is from Springfield and how I'd never actually met him.  For whatever reason, this was all I could thing to write, so I stopped after filling in about 3/4 of the first sheet.  It wasn't until after I'd left the room that I thought of a bazillion things to write.  It was not my proudest moment.

I think it's finally sinking in that I'm in Tokyo and that I'm not leaving for a long time.  I'm starting to miss things.  Some of them predictable, like Ryu and some of them not really predictable, like rude people.  In Springfield, if I was having a bad day or week, it was a sure bet that sometime someone would do something to piss me off and I'd have a way to vent.  It's really not that big of a deal if someone blows their nose at a table, but it's a reason for me to let off some steam from the day.  Since everyone is polite, I just bottle up my aggression here and spend a fair amount of time angry at random people for things that are either perfectly reasonable or not worth brooding over.  Surely I'm not the only one feeling this way, and yet no one warned me of it before I came.  I suppose people aren't necessarily nice everywhere else that students go to study.

We have our interviews tomorrow morning and then I guess we're going to start into the meat of our classes.  I'm very excited for things to get going.  I feel like a bowling ball that someone picked up from the shoot thinger, put their fingers into my holes and then got ready to throw me and then didn't.  I don't think they meant to tease me, but it's good for the ball to acclimate to the climate of the bowling alley before you throw it down the lane.  If you don't take care, you won't make a strike or, worse still, it's a gutter ball.  I'm just sayin;  if I start classes too early, I'll end up in the gutter.  I'm not sure where the gutter is in Japan, but it's probably not as awesome as whatever a strike is in Japan.