my first real day in Japan

Hello!

I believe I am currently experiencing jet lag, although I can't be sure- I had a long day. I woke up today a little before 7 am and waited until the dining hall opened at 8. Despite going to bed at 2:10 am and thusly getting only 5 hours of sleep, I was wide awake at 7. Breakfast was interesting, my first struggle of the day with understanding Japanese. The cafeteria lady kept trying to explain how to make toast and that I could only get coffee with this "Western" breakfast. I was trying to explain to her that I didn't want coffee and that I wanted water instead. Perhaps I give myself too much credit in this account. It was more like she spoke an endless stream of Japanese with pantomime subtitles while I shook my head, strained to hear a word I knew, and muttered the words "mizu" and "onegaishimasu" meaning "water" and "please."
Well, all's well that ends in marmalade:














After breakfast, we enjoyed Japan's favorite past time: paperwork! Several hours later, it was lunchtime. We (a group of friends, Laura, and I) went to a cafeteria on campus that sold curry. To get lunch at cafeterias:
1: Read all the options (don't worry they're in English, kind of.)
2: Ask someone was each of the meal choices looks like.
3: Insert coins into vending machine
4: Press desired button
5a: Retrieve ticket and change from slot and take ticket to the counter.
5b: While waiting, inspect other vending machines and discover the most DELICIOUS JUICE IN THE WORLD unshuumikan! Supposedly, it's tangerine juice, but I've had tangerine juice. This is no tangerine juice. Imagine Sunny Delite, except without the biting tanginess and more mild.
6: Eat the delicious naan with vegetable curry mixed in.





Discover that red miso soup has ham in it. (Don't worry, I only had a tiny sip before I discovered the ham.)
7: Yay! You just had a Japanese meal!
After that, we returned to the dorm to make sure the fingerprint reader could recognize our fingerprints and therefore let us back in the building. Mr. Gotoh was assisting, and let me just say, the Japanese are SO cute in all genders in all stages of life.
After that we took a tour of campus and I took a ton of pictures of some cool things.
Like this awesome fountain.











Or this building covered completely, top to bottom in ivy.

The tour took a long time, it was hot an muggy outside, and we were tired. We thought it was the perfect time to trek out to Valor. Let me just say that during the day time when it's not raining, Kasugai is freaking gorgeous! The suburb is more tightly packed than even some parts of downtown Indianapolis, but then you have fields of rice. It's pretty awesome.
Ok, this post is getting a little long, so more to come tomorrow.
-Jonathan