Nishinomiya Gardens and Nihongo Partners

On my first full day in Nishinomiya my host father and I walked to Nishinomiya ACTA building to see about getting a phone sorted out.  It's not a very long walk.  Along the way he pointed out buildings that were destroyed in the 1995 earthquake (basically all of them), which was reassuring.

  A year or so ago my host mother got a new phone so their exchange student at the time started using her old one.  They just added a small plan onto their family plan.  This has several huge advantages.  The first is I don't have to buy a phone or enter into my own contract.  Also, it is cheap and I get free contact with others in my family.  The only drawbacks are that the phone is a little bit older (but still light years ahead of my Canadian phone) and there are some passkeys in strange places that are inconvenient because several other people had the phone before me.





After they figured that out, (And I sat and nodded at the Docomo salesman as he went into intricacies of phone contracts in Japanese) we went out to eat on the top floor of Nishinomiya Gardens.  Nishinomiya gardens reminded me of a slightly smaller, but much nicer, version of Metrotown in Burnaby, BC.  We went to a Teppanyaki restaurant on the fifth floor, where I had Okonomiyaki.

University orientation started on Monday.  On that day also we met our Nihongo Partners.  Kwansei Gakuin assigns exchange students Nihongo Partners to help them develop their Japanese skills (Maybe in part so they don't produce a bunch of students who speak old fashioned Kansai dialect like their host families.)  My partners are Ryo and Ritsuko.  Ryo is studying western history, while I believe Ritsuko is in a program for academic counseling.  (But I'm not sure on that count.  The word they used in connection with university usually means "guide", so maybe she is studying to give campus tours.)  (On another sidenote, for all you James Clavell fans, the word for guide is "annai", which sounds like it shares a root with "anjin".  Therefore "anjin" no "anjin san" literally means "guide person". It does not however, show up in my dictionary as anything so it's either really old or made up.)

Anyhow, they are patient with my horrid and strange Japanese.  Ritsuko spent a year in Canada so when I get totally stuck we can usually find a common word in English and then translate it.  This afternoon they were given the task of helping me with my alien registration card.  We took the bus to the city hall, filled out a form, helped the bureaucrat deal with my English handwriting, and were done in fifteen minutes.  As we were finishing, a group of about ten other Kangaku students came in.  I'm not sure how as we were all waiting at the same bus stop together.  

My communication felt like it was improving so I was quite happy when I got home to study some random vocab dealing with university that I was given in an orientation session.  I then watched some Sumo, some baseball, the news, (no suprise that Ozawa lost) and now I'm remembering some Canadian companies that I need to pay, such as Koodo and BCRS.