international student orientation

Finally! I think my university must be one of the last ones to hold its orientation. It was mandatory for all international students new this semester. We spent one night at a nearby town (?) called Ozu, in the Ozu National Youth Center. I don't think it qualifies as a town, since the National Youth Center is one gigantic structure nestled in the mountains and by a river. Anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Quite a lot of it was lecture, and because it is so late and so many of us have been here a month or so, we already had figured out most of the information, such as how to sort garbage (although some more helpful tips did come up) and bicycle rules. Hours and hours of orientation. Even the new stuff (like how to use the university health center) took forever and was boring. But, on the upside, we did get to spend the night away. Dinner = party. Then shower/bath, then after dinner = more party and some drinking. I did get to meet a couple of nice people, and I am relieved to realize that my aversion for Chinese students/people appears to be limited to a specific set of Chinese international students, because I met some other ones who were nice. We made plans to go to the hot springs together next Friday. I alsomet a few very nice Nepalese students, who were all in the engineering school and studying disaster prevention (architecture and such). The school of engineering apparently has a lot of connections and sister schools in Nepal. It was fairly irritating how country-clique-ish the group was--we were about 35ish people in all. Splitting up at dinner tables, rooming, on the bus, was mostly very country based. All the Chinese students stuck together, all the Nepalese students stuck together, all the Korean students stuck together. I suppose it's natural for people to want to stick to the language they are comfortable with, and I especially don't blame those people who are absolute beginners in Japanese, of whom there were a few. But some of the cliquey-est people were those who had very superior Japanese! And some of the most affable and friendly were those who were absolute beginners. And the Nepalese group was the friendliest of all, with random people coming up to talk to me several times. Go figure. So anyways, us orphans, the ones with no automatic language clique sort of ended up together a lot by default. Or maybe we count as the English speakers from assorted countries and of varying abilities. I ended up sitting next to and rooming with a girl from Vietnam. I am so impressed by the many students here who have to cope in entirely foreign languages. For example, all of our orientation is done in Japanese and English, so people like Ling, my roommate and bus companion, have to get by mostly with their squeaky English since their Japanese is still at the "Intensive Beginning Course" level. I mean, forget any comfort of hearing their native language! Ditto with the students from Laos, Thailand, and I suppose even China and Korea.

I sat at the dinner table with some Chinese students that I decided were either very annoying or very boring. I discovered that my brain does not work simultaneously in Chinese and Japanese--so I'm blown away by those who can force their brains to work simultaneously in Japanese and English (and while thinking in some other native language like Vietnamese or Thai). While I could laugh at the Chinese students' jokes, I could not for the life of me speak more than a few words of Chinese at a time, even though my Chinese is a lot better than my Japanese. When I talked to them, Japanese came out first, and when that failed, English, and finally the Chinese occurred to me. The brain is a mysterious organ...

So the final part of our orientation was a small kayaking excursion on the river near Ozu. But in Japan, a kayak is called a canoe, so I was sort of confused at first. The teachers made it out to be kind of scary, telling us that in the past multiple people have fallen into the river and gotten soaking wet, etc. etc. etc. but it wasn't that bad at all. The river was very calm and not very deep, and we just paddled up and down a stretch of it. It was fun! Very peaceful and beautiful. I feel so lucky to be doing all of these things that I would probably never do in the US.

Something I've discovered about Japanese food: the temperature of food is not a high priority for Japanese people. Having been served food that was quite cold several times over the past few weeks, at dining halls and restaurants even, I've gotten used to cold fried chicken and cold fried fish and cold pasta...well. Let's not say "gotten used to", but rather "am no longer surprised by." Eh. Makes sense, considering that a large part of traditional Japanese food is served at room temperature, such as sushi and sashimi.