Back to School, Back to School

So I had my first day of school today. Well, my first day of orientation. Classes don't actually start until the 28th. This whole week is all orientation, placement, and registration related meetings and information.

Today I took the written placement test and did fairly well I think. They had a very short, simple portion on characters and I'm pretty sure I aced that part. The rest of the test was grammar related and was broken up into three parts. The first part was equal in difficulty to the 3rd and 4th (the two lowest levels) of the official Japanese Proficiency Test. That's the test you have to take if you want to do any translation work or even just work in Japan using Japanese. That part wasn't too hard, it was just long. Then the second part was equal to level 2 of the JPT and I was able to answer all of the questions there. We'll see how many I got right on Wednesday. The third part was equal to the highest level of the JPT, level 1, and it was pretty hard. I was able to answer a few of the questions, maybe correctly, but definitely not scoring high on that. That's okay though, because that's why I'm here. If I scored well in the level 2 section and my interview goes well tomorrow I think I should be placed in higher level class. We'll see. I'm not going to get my hopes up.

I was busy and tired, because I was at school fro 8:30 to 6:00 taking the test, listening to orientation (Rie and I already took care of all the legal stuff they told us about (Foreigner Registration, insurance, and whatnot)), and then sitting through the entrance ceremony. It was interesting because Doshisha is a Christian school, so they had a prayer at the beginning and end and had read the parable of the sower (the seeds by the wayside and stuff) from Matthew. They also had the dean of the religion college who is a reverend I guess bless us and the end. The chancellor of the school is an older gentleman, he spoke to us and seems really nice. He told us to take care of our atama (head) and kokoro (heart) health more then anything else. Mental health I guess you'd call it.

One of the hardest parts was after the test, which ended at 11:30, we had until 1:45 to do whatever until orientation began. We had two hours where none of us knew what to do. We went to the cafeteria and ate. I sat at table with a guy for New York, one from California, and one from Germany. It was a long time to wait.

At the end of everything they had "party" with food an drink for us. I ate real quick and ran. It's funny, the administrative people all know me because of the trouble Rie and I caused over my visa. But they are nice, so no worries.

Anyway, I was only able to take one picture because I was busy, but I will take more later. Of the school I mean.