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This tiny apartment was home sweet home for a month. Actually, the size of the apartment in this photo is exaggerated by the size of the TV. No, I'm just kidding. It was quite comfortable and you couldn't beat the location. I was basically a 5-minute walk away from school, 3-minute walk away from a market, 2-minute walk away from the subway station, and next-door to a Mos Burger eatery (a 30 second walk, down the stairs?)
Looking to the left from my balcony, over Imadegawa street. I lived up on the 5th floor of a small apartment building with no elevators, but didn't mind the exercise in the least... even in the 90 - 100 degree (F) weather, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic! When you're used to hopping up five flights of stairs a few times every day, it ceases to be much of a physical strain. But more importantly, you can't beat the feeling of coming from outside in the aforementioned weather (and after climbing those five flights of stairs in it) into an icy cold air conditioned room.
This is the view straight out from my balcony: gas/service station ahead, and a sea of 3-storey buildings. I can't call this a "residential area" or "business area" because it doesn't seem that there is much distinction here. Stores and small business buildings are thoroughly mixed in with apartments and houses, making it a combination of both but not distinctly either. On the other hand, in wandering around I saw many areas that were clearly business (malls, banks, restaurants, arcades, wide busy streets), and areas that were clearly residential (houses, yards, trees, narrow quiet streets).
My textbook. See how it says "Kana version"? That means that all of the Japanese is printed using Japanese characters, as opposed to the romanized (transliterated) Japanese of the other version of this book. I very highly recommend learning any language (if possible) using its own characters, as (1) this leads to more accurate pronunciation, (2) if you're planning to become fluent in a language and be able to at least read it, you'll have to learn this anyway and the earlier the better, (3) you'll be able to show off to your English speaking friends when what appears to them as just a bunch of squiggly symbols is at least pronounceable by you, and (4) for Japanese, all you need to do is make flashcards and memorize about 40 symbols (the Hiragana alphabet) and you're off to a very good start.
One day I was wandering around and decided it might be nice to have something green in the room (and to provide more oxygen for my tortured brain cells...), so I bought this plant for about ¥500 ($3.50). That alarm clock you see to its right served me well... it made so much noise that no matter how sleepy I was, its going off caused me to instantly leap out of bed and dash over to shut it off. This became an important ritual as part of waking up in the morning. The alarm rang so vigorously that a couple times the clock made itself fall off of the TV onto the floor. That's a nice way to wake up in the morning!
Here's a photo of 77% of the students in my class. Starting from the top left in clockwise order, there's Vivian from Taiwan, myself (Michael) from California, Stephanie from Beijing, yet another Michael (why does this always happen to me!) from Belgium, Kim Jin (but Kim is her last name...) from South Korea, Jamie from Texas, and Sally from Taiwan. Missing from the picture are Jessica from somewhere in the USA and Naomi from France. Naomi could speak a little bit of English and Jin nearly none; the rest were fluent. I studied with Jin a couple times, which forced us to struggle to communicate only in Japanese, the common language we had. Now that was a challenge.
This is the only other picture I have of a few of my fellow classmates. It's all the Asian girls, where did everyone else go??
Things are winding down for the day. Or... is the day only just starting?
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