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Monday, 10 October 2005

Time flies

The first “real” week of classes is over. I could choose 11 different subjects and I picked these:
# Current Topics in Modern Physics (2 credits)
# Innovative Japanese Technologies in 3M-bases engineering (2 credits)
# Invitation to Mechanical Science and Bioengineering lecture (2 credits)
# Japanese language (3 credits)
# Japan In and Out – Introduction to contemporary Japanese culture and society (2 credits)
# Media and Communications in Japan (2 credits)
# and the Independent Research (2–4 credits)

I’m not sure yet about courses 5&6, I will probably choose one of them…. or both… I don’t know yet :P I need 12 credits each semester to get the OUSSEP certificate.
This Wednesday I have a meeting with my advising professor and my supervising professor. The meeting with my supervising professor (Takemura-sensei) will probably be about the independent research. You’ll hear more about it later.

Yesterday I planned to play basketball with some friends at the yearly university sports event, because of several reasons we decided not to play. So I went to my host family again. We practiced the Japanese vowels, most of were ok, but other vowels can be improved. Other than that, I learned to introduce myself. Now I can tell about hobby’s, study, family, etc. I was known with most of the vocabulary already, but chatting in real life is so much more difficult. When talking Japanese I just forget words, probably because I’m just afraid to say something stupid. I shouldn’t care about that and tryout more. That’s also what I learned yesterday.
I’m sure the Japanese lessons at the university will help a lot too. The lessons start tomorrow.

= Umeda again === I tend to go to Umeda a lot. Last night we (I and some friends) went to the "International Beer Summit":http://www.ibws-npo.org/ at the Umeda Sky Building ("picture":http://static.flickr.com/28/46396935_7e4a23d393_b.jpg). You could buy food and beer from all over the world, too bad everything was very expensive :( There were dancers from different countries, really nice. I forgot my camera of course, lucky others made some photos, I'll put theirs on "Flickr":http://www.flickr.com/photos/jgelens soon.

Before we went to the Beer Summit signed up for a internet connection at the YahooBB center in Yodobashi. We’ve taken the 12M connection. We didn’t choose the 50M connection because of the distance to the NTT central. The 12M is still really fast anyway. I signed for the connection, so I’m in charge of the bills and modem. We’ll share the connection with about 5 people, so they all have to pay their share every month. Otherwise I’ll just disconnect them >:]. YahooBB will charge me 5458円 (39.582 euros), the first month is for free and can be seen as a trial period. I still have to wait a month though. I don’t have a NTT (telephone) connection, otherwise it would just take a week. So I will be using this crappy connection for another month.

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