Week 20 in Japan: Finals, Bars, Work Trip

In January I turned 20 years old and now the amount of weeks I've been in Japan is 20. 20 is a big number and to me so much more than 19. Anyways I had a cool week so let me tell you a little about it. This past week was the last week of classes and so I had some reports to write, presentations to give, and tests to take. I think I did pretty well on all of it so looking back now at the hard work is a great feeling. Wednesday I had one of my more important tests at 9am. Despite of that I went to Karaoke with my friends Zen, Karen, and Yunseok until 1am. Some might say it was a poor decision to go have fun the night before a big test but it turned out alright because I got an A on the test. One key to studying, especially studying things you don't want to forget as soon as the test is over, is to study over time and put things into your long term memory. Studying 5 hours the night before a test stresses you out and you are prone to forget the things you learned after a few days. A lot of times forgetting things they teach you is alright but for me I want to learn the language well so I try to study things using the Spaced Repetition System. Anyways as for Wednesday me and my friends Yunseok, Teppei, Kaori, and Palguem planned out our trip to Tokyo and bought tickets for the bus and booked a hotel too. We used my credit card to book the hotel because I was the only one with one. I was actually able to pay using dollars rather than yen and that saved some money because the dollar is kind of stong in comparision to the Yen right now. I thought of my friend Tim James and his work with forex. Friday I went to a couple different bars in town with a group of friends. I went with Irina, Sebastion, Claudia, and Szilard who are all from Romania, and also Sasha who has is from Russia (and depsite the name is a guy). This was only my third time in Japan going to western style bars. Usually I go to places with friends where you have a private table sometimes in your own room where you drink. From Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon I had a work trip for my part time English job. The job is a fairly new organization on campus and is a place where students can come and study English. Students study to prepare for future exams, future traveling, and many other reasons. The trip this weekend was training for the staff on how to do different teaching methods for students who come. We also were planning out how things are going to go for next year. I work mainly with the special conversation circle nights that are twice a week. So me and a few others in particular are in charge of having that go well. So we come up with new ideas, and ways to improve it and to get people to actually want to come. Although it was a work trip it was a lot of fun because everybody who works there are my friends and the boss is really cool too. For the trip we went just a short ways to a town neighbooring Akita called Katagami. We stayed at a hotel where we had most of the meetings and training. The food was really Japanese style. The food was extravegant with so many different parts to it. I've been in Japan almost 6 months but I didn't know what some of the food was before asking. Thanks for reading this week and definitely come back to read next week because I'll be going to two different festivals over the next week that should be awesome.

 This is a picture of most of us on our way into the hotel, there were around 15 of us. You can maybe see me in the picture because I didn't take this picture.

 Here is the food from the dinner Saturday night. Things like squid, a couple different types of fish eggs, and some other crazy stuff.

 Here is me at dinner Saturday night.

 It's cool because you can drive just around 30 minutes out of Akita City and feel like you are far from civilization as you ordinarily know it. Here is a picture from the hotel.