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. ^^