Second week in Japan: Classes, Ramen, out of order blogging.

The second week here in Japan has been great; first week of classes, buying cooking supplies, and eating ramen. The first week of classes were fun. I'm taking 7 classes and 4 of them are studying the Japanese language, and two of them are spoken completely in Japanese. This can be a challenge but the Prof speaks simple Japanese that we generally understand... or at least pretend to. The other classes are Japanese society and Japanese Culture. These ones are in English so I have a huge advantage over the vast majority of the students in them. Its fun helping out my foreign friends at something i'm good at: English! The classes are intersting and easy so far. Good classes for getting to know people. I biked to an Aeon mall to buy some cooking supplies. I really had to shop around and kind of bought the cheepest things I could find. I bought a rice cooker (around 60 dollars), a 26 cm fry pan (only like 4.50), a spatula, a wood stir spoon, some chopsticks for 3 dollars, a measuring cup, and I think thats it. I spent like 75 dollars. Now I can cook real food. I'm definitely not a chef yet but even rice with some salt and pepper tastes good right now. Before I got the cooking stuff I was going out to eat quite a bit. Although this is delicious and a fun experience its also expensive and sometimes inconvenient. Ramen is around 7 dollars per bowl depending on what you get and where you go but it seems like its worth the wait to me. Tonight I made the best dish I've made so far. It was rice, chicken, red peppers, onions, and green beans all fried together with some various seasonings i've bought. It was a lot of work because I'm only a beginner but it was satisfying. I'm looking forward to this next week. I mainly just studied this past weekend but I've got more things going on this weekend so i'm looking forward to that. Also looking forward to more great weather. Its in the 70s everyday but its been a little cloudy lately. Oh and this morning it was raining so on my way to class there were these cool clouds on the mountains. The mountains are so pretty. Well thats it for now. I'll make a post sometime this week about something crazy that happened to me. Cooool beans.