Decieved!

So, for the past week or so, Yamasa has been heavily advertising a trip to Okazaki University, where we would meet new people, maybe speak some Nihongo, eat free lunch, etc. Well, it turns out we were decieved. The bus took us to Aichi Something-or-Another University, where we sat for an hour+ and watched a "Speech Contest." This is what happened in the Speech Contest: various foreign folk, some from Yamasa, some from not Yamasa, stood up and gave a speech. Evidently, they were under a time limit, as one Chinese girl was forced to end early at the sound of a bell. For the first few speeches, I tried very hard to listen for words I recognized, and see if I could make any sense of what was being said. Pretty soon though, I drifted off into the fantasy world inside of my head, which I'm sure my family is familiar with (I did, however, restrain any physical gesturing in the process). In this world, stuff happened, but I don't remember what.

Eventually, I returned to Nihon, as the speeches ended and some Armenian lady who was teaching at a university in Tokyo gave a lengthy speech in Nihongo, pointing at various points on a map of Armenia. After the fact, I would learn that the speech was about genocide in Armenia, which is a curious topic to discuss after a friendly speech contest. When she finished, they announced the contest winners, who were given fun gift bags, and we were excused to lunch, where we ate food that was pretty tasty, although if it was warm, it would have been even tastier. At this meal, Christian, Verena, and I deduced that we had been tricked into coming here so that the speech contest would have an audience.

After eating our fill, we moved on to explore the University, which was having a festival of sorts today. This actually made the day well worth the trip, as it was interesting simply to explore a small Nihon no Daigaku (Japanese University), see what the student life was like, etc. Over the course of the day, we were challenged to 3-on-3 basketball (which we politely declined), sampled some student-made food, witnessed a fabulous view, watched an excellent performance from an apparently famous musician playing intersting Chinese violin-type instrument, discussed how it is difficult for blacks to live in Asia, especially China, because there is still blatant racism against them, and then proceeded to watch a group of Asian students wearing clothes that might be described as "ghetto" and breakdancing to popular American Hip-hop (they weren't very good breakdancers, except for one guy who could do sweet one-legged backflips). At some point in time, one of the female students, whose english wasn't all that bad, called me "cute," for which I politely thanked her, and then we resumed an otherwise completely different coversation. Hmmm (for the record, she was okay-looking, but there were many prettier girls on campus). Christian also told me I was getting lots of good looks from many of the girls at the school, although I was not particularly looking out for "looks," I did not notice them so much.

After the event was over, the bus took us all back to the school. Christian and I headed to the bank, which was open, but not for money-changing, which is a shame because I had less than ¥1000 yen on me left. We then proceeded to a CD/Movie store in preparation for the massive Movie Night event we have planned for tomorrow night in my apartment. There will be a lot of people squeezed into this tiny apartment. Finally, we topped the day off with a delicious and inexpensive meal at Yoshinoya (an important place which is getting its own blog entry...soon). Magically, there is no homework or vocab due tomorrow, so I'm free to get lots of sleep tonight, or more likely stay up too late for no reason.