MULC and Japanese gameshows

Class today was rough, but not in an academic way. I have ample time to practice a new word we learned this week: gamansuru (我慢する）: to be patient!!! I am not the world's most patient person, so this is a good time to learn. It would be so useful in this class, 役に立つ。。。 Gamanshiyou!!!

I promised a few weeks ago that I would show pictures of the MULC, which is the second floor of the gorgeous library. The MULC is for studying languages other than English, because English is very popular and has its own study building, the SALC. Kanda University is for international studies students, so they often learn other languages. So here are the study areas designed like different parts of the world, used for practicing other languages. I think this is a pretty cool thing to have inside your school's library. :D

 Vietnamese 

Korean

Indonesian

Chinese 

Spanish!

Brazilian Portuguese

After class I studied a little at the SALC and then went home and did homework. I had an essay to write and a survey to create for my research project. It wasn't a very interesting day, but tomorrow I think I'll go to Akihabara with my friends and nerd it out.

Dinner tonight was excellent, as usual! Soba is such a good meal. Takumi reminded me to take a picture. :) We mixed those noodles into a cold broth, then added dried seaweed and things that reminded me of Rice Crispies but with seasoning on them. YUMMM.






After dinner, my host family loves to watch either very funny/sadistic game shows or Japanese dramas. Here is a photo of a Japanese drama that we saw tonight. I couldn't understand much of anything except that this group of guys were all close friends on a dance team and the tryouts were really stressful... and they were always there to help each other up when they fell! The background music was lovely.

 

I wish I had a picture of the game shows we watched last night. There was one that had quizzes about kanji, Japanese historical figures, English vocab (I was so good at that one), and the names of strange animals. It was fun for all!! Then there was a show where this group of men in business suits were locked in a sushi restaurant until they could guess which sushi were in the Top Ten (Most Popular, I think). So they were in there for like 10 hours, eating all of the sushi and trying to guess what each one's ranking was. They looked so miserable by the end!! It started at night and they ended sometime around 10 or 11am the next day! The sushi looked so good, so I asked my host mom if we could get some more sushi sometime, and she said, "Tomorrow I'll make a reservation for that place in this game show that we're watching right now!" So she did, and we're going there on Saturday!!! :D It's not a very expensive place, but she said the last time she went there, they had to wait for two hours to get a table, so they gave up. I can't wait to goooo, I love sushi so much and in Japan it tastes better. :D

I barely packed any clothes at all for this trip and yet I feel like I packed WAY too much. I have already bought 7 new articles of clothing (although some were from a Recycle Shop aka second-hand). My host family and I do laundry every day because it's a small but efficient machine that washes and dries over the course of a 3 or 4 hours all on its own. It's very convenient to do a full load every day.