Nine Things I Miss...

So, the follow-up to the previous post (linked if you haven't read it yet) will be this one. ^^ I'm so creative, aren't I? :p The next one will make much more sense...

Anyway, since I have been away from home for nearly a month, I figured I should do a post on the top nine (representing September as the ninth month in a year) things I miss back home that I can't get here....

1. My Boyfriend, Chao~ ♥

2. My kittens!! =^..^= Taboo (black&white) and Gobbles (fluffy one). My mom had to lure Gobbles out to take the photo by holding a piece of ham in front of him.

3. American Foods! I love deep fried Oreos... maybe I'll make them while I'm here?

4. Family (I suppose)

5. Chao's bed sheets... weird story about this: I am strangely fascinated by his bed sheets for some reason. Each time I look at them, I see a different pattern or design. I really like them for that reason.

6. And Chao's curtains... for a similar reason. XD

7. My favorite Udon~

8. As well as a my favorite dish!

9. My bed!!! The beds here are super hard. It is not comfortable at all. I use my neck pillow as a regular pillow because the pillows they provide are made of rocks. I kid you not. :/

Shall We Make Friends?

So on September 21st, the Event Committee on campus had set up a semi-formal dance for the student body. It was really fun~! ^_^

Since the invite said "Dance" on it I assumed that it would be like the "Welcome Back Dance" that IAC put on but with fancier clothes. It was mostly performances and games, but we did get to dance eventually towards the end of the night.

After being let out of Manga Mania, Heather, Rebecca, and I gathered up in Heather's room (on the 2nd floor) with clothes to try out for the party. It wasn't until her roommate came back that we switched over to my room on the 4th floor. There we prepared by doing our nails and chatting.

The outfit I was planning to wear, but chickened out of wearing

The outfit I ended up wearing
We originally planned to leave Komachi at 6:50, but then got there at 7:23. XD We can be such girls at time. (Insert angry crowd of people saying how that's sexist). When we got there, the members of the committee were putting on performances in maid costumes. Unfortunately/Fortunately, no photos of that. But I did take photos of us~ ^^

Well chilled out for awhile and talked to people we already knew. XD Even though we were suppose to be making new friends... :p

Aika, Heather, Rebecca, and me

Heather and me

Ai and me
We watched the crowning of the Queen and King of the event. I am actually in the Traditional Dance club with the Queen. As for the king and another of the competitors, I'm pretty sure his outfit was made of colored duct tape. That is going to hurt taking off, no? I assume it would, but I never wore duct tape like that, so I don't know?

After that, we watched a girl perform a Bollywood dance. I think she was good, but I do not know much about Bollywood dancing so she could have been doing a terrible job. I doubt it though.

After she performed we played some games. Well, we didn't. Other people did. There was the mochi stretching game and the marshmallow eating game. We (as in everybody) got to play a which is right game before the mochi game, but no pictures of that. :/

Go YUZU~!!!

Yuzu's team won!!

Round 2!

How scandalous~!!!

Measuring out how much they stretched the mochi

The soccer players from above tied with Yuzu~!!

Marshmallow eating contest

They have chipmunk cheeks~ ( ^ _ ^ )

The next game they played was pulling the tablecloth from underneath a plate of cheese and two things of water. Good thing I was in the front row! *rolls eyes*

Okay, so a little story with the pulling tablecloth game, I was sitting in the front row with Rebecca and Heather and Kin were sitting behind us. Behind them were two obnoxiously drunk European foreigners (for once it is not the Americans being obnoxious). They had a lot of space behind them, but kept taking up any space in front of them where Heather and Kin where. So, the one guy's foot kept stretching out and kicking Heather in the butt. So we would move closer to give her and Kin space to not be near those guys. So we ended up being kind of close to the front where the competitions were going on. Rebecca and I kept repeating "Move closer, move closer" until we realized what they were going to start. As soon as that happened, we turned around and went "move back, move back!! They're gonna pull the tablecloths!" So we all had to shimmy back towards the drunkards. Luckily, the guy directly in front of us playing the game was good and didn't spill anything. XD

A parody of Uta no Prince-sama (うたの☆プリンスさまっ♪):

After that, we watched another performance. They were doing AKB48 songs and dressed up similar to AKB. It was awesome!!! They were so good they got the audience shouting "encore! encore!"



They ended the night well. For the last 30 or so minutes of the night, they played music for everyone to have fun and dance to. They were also taking the decorations while doing so. They (meaning Phil, our wonderful disc jockey of the night) had played Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO which then transitioned into Gangnam Style by PSY. Everyone was shuffling and horse riding to both songs. It was great!! ^_^ Bragging rights moment of the night: me shuffling in 5 inch heels. HOLLA!!!

It was a fun and wonderful night! Thank you to all of those on the Event Committee for putting this on for all of us!! ^_^

After I Became a Student...

Here's the follow-up of the last follow-up! ;p This one would make more sense as the follow-up to this post, but since I like confusing people, it's not!

I attend classes on a regular basis, just like I would at Ursinus. I feel like I don't have as much work here than Ursinus, but I do know some people who tell me this is more work than their home universities or other universities in Japan. AIU teaches all their classes in English except for the languages that is. So I can see why non-native English speakers may have a difficult time with it. But compared to the intensity of UC, this is a breeze. My first semester in which I don't have to worry as much.

So I joined quite a few clubs. Like how in my previous-previous post, I had listed the courses and my thoughts on them, I'll do the same with the clubs. ^^ So the clubs I will be talking about are (order based on which day of the week we meet): Traditional Dance Club, IAC, Honey Bee, The Outsiderz, and Dance Club.
~ Traditional Dance Club - I really enjoy this club. Sara, Rebecca, and I are the only foreigners in the club so my Japanese listening will get better... I am hoping. :p But I really like this club. Everyone is so nice and the dance we are learning is so pretty. Bonus: I get to wear a yukata as I dance~! o(^0^)o Here is a video of the dance we are learning:

Skip to about 1 minute ~ IAC (or the Intercultural Affairs Committee). In my opinion, this is one of the best clubs to join if you want to interact with Japanese students in a comfortable environment, which Japanese students who want to hang out/be around foreigners. Everyone in the club is so friendly. It is one of the few clubs on campus that actually accepts foreigners to join in and add their input to what goes on in the school. Whenever I see an IAC member outside the club, they are always so friendly to me and asks about my day even if I only talked to them once. I feel comfortable trying to use my broken Japanese on them because they understand how difficult it is to be speaking in a foreign language. They are great people~! I am so glad I joined IAC. It really was made for anyone to join... even a shy person like me gets a chance to speak and share ideas. I highly recommend this club to any new students coming to AIU!
~ Honey Bee - because I want to become an ESL teacher in the future (and maybe TESOL), this club is a good starting point to me because I'll be teaching English to 1st and 2nd graders who had no English exposure to the English language before. I am very excited to do this. We take a short walk (about 15 minutes )over to an elementary nearby and teach them for about 30 minutes than walk back to campus. We are going to have a theme each time we go over, which will be once a month. Even though it is once a month, we meet up every Wednesday to discuss what we should do. I'm really excited, but I hope they don't choose to do it on the days I'm busy :(
~ The OUTSIDERZ - this is a club my friend Jessica, me, and a few other international students had set up. We are a dance group that comes from different backgrounds - both in dance and in the world. Our purpose is to create an environment that combines everyone's background in dance as well pull out their strengths. The reason we started this was because we didn't really feel welcomed at the dance club meeting. I'll explain in the next paragraph.
~ Dance Club - I really love and enjoy dancing so I thought this club would be a good thing for me. However, at the meeting, since all the groups are preparing for the AIU festival (there will be a post on that) so they aren't accepting any new members until after that. However, they kind of said that with a mean kind of tone, which is why the international students set up our our. I still want to join one of the many subgroups of the dance group (either K-pop or hip-hop group), but we'll see after the AIU festival.


So... other things I have done since becoming a student here: have an American Breakfast!! Most of us are missing our home country's cooking. No offense to the Japanese, but we need real meat and no fat on it! Because of this, we made our own American breakfast. Sara, Rebecca, and Thomas went out and bought the goods. As a result, Heather and I along with Danie and Tara cleaned up the mess. It was only fair. Thomas made everyone fluffy pancakes while Sara cooked the bacon and cut up an Asian pear and Rebecca made scrambled eggs with mozzarella cheese thrown in. Of course, the meal was delicious. We also had maple syrup to go along with our meal. I don't necessarily like pancakes, but haven't had it in a long time that I thought I'll give it another try. They were so good! The whole meal was delicious~!! Thank you, REBECCA, SARA, and THOMAS~!!! :D

Rebecca and Thomas cooking~ :9

American breakfast~!!! ♥
I mostly hang out in the Komachi (my dormitory) lobby and talk to people there. I made a few friends that way. Sometimes I watch people play one of the many systems there, which Heather and I organized recently. It'll probably be a mess the next time I check. We watch movies in there as well. We watched David Bowie's Budge The Labyrinth as well as Black Swan in there so far. We tried to watch the greatest movie in history that is less than an hour long Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but we didn't have the HDMI(?) cable that connects the laptop to the television. So Gustav, Heather, and I went into one of the study rooms to watch it. Heather and I sang along to it as we watched it. Poor Gustav, but he said at least we weren't horrible at singing. So that's good? Heather and I also watch movies that we rent out from the library. We usually pick up 3 to 4 at a time but always end up watching 1 or 2 of them. So far we watched: Lilo and Stitch, Leroy and Stitch, Atlantis: the Lost Empire, and The Bells of Notre Dame/The Hunchback of Notre Dame. We love Disney movies~!! ♥ Also, we like to listen to Disney music in different languages. Swedish (in both Heather and mine's minds) does the best job at finding voice actors that match the American version. It's beautiful... here's a clip for your enjoyment.
♥
As mentioned before in different posts, I attended two different events: IAC's "Welcome Back Dance" and Event Committee's "Shall We Make Friends?" (linked for those that haven't read either one yet). As of this moment, there is a rock concert going on in the Student Hall. I hope it's over soon. I need to get to bed.

Um, yeah... I don't know what else to write about. I mean other things to do here after being a student is going to Akita City or AEON mall or doing your laundry or homework. So yeah, normal student stuff, I guess. Well, I hope you enjoyed reading my blog posts and stuff. Please feel free to comment or not, it's really your choice. But comments are always appreciated. ^^

Before I Became a Student...

As you guise probably know, I have been here in Japan for almost a month. It's crazy, I know. Now, when people go away to college, they say time goes by faster than normally. But when you are doing study abroad, it's surprising on how fast it really seems to be going by.

It doesn't seriously feel like it's been that long of a time being here. It feels as though I was stressing out on what to pack happened days ago. I guess this is what my mother feels like when I was going off to college, yet she was (probably) thinking of how it seemed like not too long ago she would be walking me to the bus stop for my first day of kindergarten.

Baby Lizzie and Baby Kelly, we were cute, weren't we?
Looking back now, it really did go by quickly. Orientation lasted two weeks and I only had two weeks of classes. This is crazy business~! From having to sit through the boring same old, same old orientation stuff. Don't get me wrong; there has been a few interesting ones (such as the sexual education seminar). In the US, it's mandatory for schools to discuss sex ed, but in some countries, they don't get "the talk." So that is why I had to attend the meeting. Now, because Americans and many other nations got that talk before, there is always someone in the audience who makes it uncomfortable by laughing. Luckily, there was no one doing that this year. After attending that seminar, it was surprising to me on how little I knew on the subject after being introduced to it in ninth grade. In this seminar, they actually showed us what each std looks like so we would be aware of it. I never knew what they looked like; we only learned about what the symptoms were. It was an interesting experience sitting through that lesson and seeing how the subject is taught in a different country. So yeah, enough on this paragraph?

Before classes started up, all the international students and new fall semester students had to attend a semi-formal Matriculation Ceremony to be introduced into the Japanese schooling society. The ceremony would have been really interesting if it wasn't so boring and hot. When my body gets too hot in a situation where I can't do anything to cool it off immediately, it tries to fall asleep to regulate the temperature, or something like that. I kept nodding off, but catching myself. I eventually did "wake up" - I never actually fell completely asleep - I was fully awake for the rest of the program. We listened to speeches and then they called our names one by one. Once they called your name, you stood up and said "yes" indicating that you were there and will be an official student of Akita International University (AIU for short). There was also a somewhat famous violinist person playing there. She was really talented! After that, we all got to eat some fancy and some casual foods in the cafeteria in our semi-formal outfits.

Yeah, we classy~! Credit: LingLing

Before I tried to sleep...
Rebecca, Ivan, and myself... UC kids representing!!
Credit: Sara Birnbaum

Look how nice we could look~ ^_^
Thomas, Sara, Rebecca, Yuzu, Kelly (me), Heather, Gustav
Credit: Keli'i Lum

With my friends Mim (from Thailand) and Amanda (from Taiwan)
Credit: Mim!!

Mim and I are so pretty, ne?
Credit: Mim~!!!
So once that was over, classes started up the following week. I am in the following courses: Business Practice in China Today, Japanese Language, Japanese Literature, and Manga Mania. Let me just tell you a bit of each course.

Business Practice in China Today - this class is very interesting. We discuss exactly what the class sounds like we would discuss: today's business in China. I really like the course and usually eager to do the homework and attend class. It's a shame that I usually have no idea what any the business terms mean though. When I told a classmate of mine (who is a business major) that, he told me "just assume that it is talking about how people are stealing money and corruption." XD In the class, only 8 full-time AIU students are business majors. Out of the 35 in the class, only 4 are foreigners.

Japanese Language - it is a continuation of my previous schooling at Ursinus. Actually, we are going over a chapter we have already covered so it is a nice review for some of us. We did learn a few new things in that course (like the stupid pitch pattern!!!). However, we are going over kanji so slowly. I prefer Mizzy-sensei's method of teaching about 5 each and being tested on it then repeat. Sure, it might not help us remember them completely, but I don't think this method would be any better than that. I would hate to say it, but a lot of students will only memorize for the test. I admit that I do this sometimes. I am trying to change that though~

Japanese Literature - where do I begin? This class is so boring. I dislike saying that about classes, I really do, but I can't help it for this one! It is dreadful. I guess dreadful is too harsh of a word to call it. Hear me out: the professor has a very thick accent and speaks in a monotone voice. Everyday to class, people bring in extremely sugary drinks and snacks just to stay awake. It is also very hot in the room so like I had mentioned before at the matriculation ceremony, everyone is trying to stay awake. This class is so bad that a person I met (who was a Japanese Literature major in his home university) had dropped it! That's how bad it is~!! >.<* But I'm trying to be positive about it... let's move on?

Manga Mania - last but not least. This is class is also very interesting. I am not a huge fan of anime or manga but I don't dislike it. I can appreciate the effort the creators put in to the making of it - from the idea to getting people to back you up on it, designing the characters, story line, getting published, getting an anime adaption, drama adaption, etc. But for the actual product, I am not so easily impressed. I took this course to figure out why there is such a hype on the anime/manga culture and why it has such a huge fanbase, which is probably larger than than the official fan base of DBSK/TVXQ/Tohoshinki (5.5 billion in 2008 with continuous rising popularity). Apparently in 2008, that band was announced to have the world's largest fan base by Guinness World Records (I couldn't find it on the actual website itself, though). And let me just say... there are a lot of manga/anime fans in my class.

But enough about classes, you are probably bored of hearing about all of this, no? Well, I don't know what else to talk about... but whatever. This will be all for now. I'll keep posting updates and everything as soon as I can! ^_^ Thanks for reading and feel free to comment here or on the facebook post that you got this from. <3

Manga Souko

Okay, so I am behind in playing catch up, but I am almost there. This even happened last Friday (September 7th). After this post, I will have one or two more posts before I will be on track and stuff.

So, I am in a class called "Manga Mania." Yes, I know what you are thinking... Kelly, you don't really like manga all that much? Why are you taking that class? Well, that is the exact reason as to why I'm taking the class, because I am natural about manga and anime. I have neither a like nor dislike for them. I figured this would be a good why to find out why people like manga so much. What appeals to the vast amount of people that would buy volume after volume for a long ongoing series? What makes them so popular? Now, I am not sure if I will ever get those answers, but this class is a good great starting point.

Anyway, one the first day of class, my Manga Mania professor tells my class that he is having a field trip on Friday and only the first 25 people to sign up can go. However, if someone doesn't show up, then someone can take their place. The trip was free, so no worries. Everyone rushed up to the desk to sign up to go. Some people in the class could not make it.

So, Friday comes and get get onto our little bus. See below! Some people were there that didn't sign up and waited until the signed up people didn't show up before getting on the bus. We get on the bus and off we go!

The bus fits exactly 26 people plus the driver

Heather was my seating companion
After about 30 minutes are so, we arrived at Manga Souko. Manga Souko is a used manga shop that also sells character goods, costumes, cds, fishing supplies, clothing, and had crane machines you can play with. All the stuff there is really cheap! :D I know where I am buying some more clothes ;D

Manga Souko store from the outside

My friends... yes, I do have some that aren't imaginary~

Totoro~ I want him <3

Posing by the SLAM DUNK crane machine for Chao <3 I would have tried to win him something, but his favorite character's uniform was not in the grabby section. It is, however, the display uniform!! #11 Rukawa Kaede!!!


The items were really cheap - especially the clothes. I bought a skirt and shorts for myself, presents for a few people who I will not name because then it ruins the surprise, a Hello Kitty charm dressed as a bear to put on my camera, and yeah.

The see-through shirt layering shirt I bought

How cute are these?!?!?!?!

The pockets are so huge! That is a regular sized Apple Fanta!

I have a bunny Hello Kitty and now a bear Hello Kitty~ I must collect them all!!!
I would highly recommend this place to anyone that wants to buy cheap - mostly in good shape - items from anime/manga or clothing or designer goods at a low price, etc. This post is technically "What to Do in Akita? [Part 3]" but I am not counting it as so.