OMG drums.

For the better part of today, everywhere I went, I could hear drums and flutes and bells.  I'm not 100% sure what the festival was, but there were a lot of people with a lot of portable shrines stomping around town.  I listened for them all day in my room, hoping they would come close enough for me to get some cool pictures from above, but none did.  It was really neat, though.  When I was out walking, if I got out of earshot of one troop of partyers, I would wander invariably into the presence of another group. 

I got to witness my first domestic disturbance, today.  Normally Japanese people seem to be very composed, concealing their emotions behind a facade of manners and politeness.  The two people I saw were not concealing any emotions.  I think the guy may have been, but I couldn't be sure.  It all started when the woman starting yelling at the man a lot.  She grabbed the younger girl, presumably their daughter, and walked off ahead of the guy.  The guy, still attempting to salvage what was to become a very emotional situation, kept talking to the woman, but she was beyond discussion and leaving with the girl.  The guy then threw down his cigarette, grabbed the girl and started off in the opposite direction.  What I found interesting was that after he threw the cigarette down, the little girl stomped on it to put it out.  Interesting that there would be that kind of wherewithal in the middle of such a stressful event. Anyway, the fight just seemed like it was between who was going to get the little girl.  After a while, they just all left together, so maybe they decided that they should go somewhere else and settle their dispute, rather than airing their dirty laundry, so to speak, while walking down a crowded street.

I managed to get my classes registered today.  That was pretty incredible.  My assigned adviser is currently living in Australia(I think), so I had to go to an interim adviser with one of the other exchange students, Kaitlin.  We left this morning with an hour to get there because we were afraid we'd get lost.  As it turns out, we walked straight to the building with fairly little effort and then spent 20 minutes wandering the halls of the second campus looking for our adviser's room.  We went to all of the places that the room should have logically appeared, but to no avail.  We eventually decided we should look at the maps on the walls and cross reference them with the posted arrows pointing to ranges of room numbers and found out that for whatever reason, rooms weren't arranged in any sort of logical pattern.  It wasn't as though the numbers were fed through a wood chipper and wherever they landed, a room was built, but the rooms were definitely not layed out in a pattern I was accustomed to seeing.

Once we found the room, we finally were able to decide what classes we would take.  She took a few random Asian studies classes and I took the block of language that I'm required to take and then added a Saturday culture class and a Friday seminar class about Japanese media.  The Saturday class seems like it will be awesome because most weeks we go on field trips around Tokyo and see things that I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise.  We have to write something like six papers, but that's no big deal at all.  The seminar class seems really neat, because it's taught in four sections and each section has a separate expert teaching it.  It seems like it will be really difficult, but it should still be fun.  I think I start classes at the end of this week, so I'm pretty excited.