Friday, February 13, 2009

遅かった

Sorry for the huge delay, I’m still alive. The semester ended over a week ago, and this past week was the first week of spring break. I was expecting spring break to be filled with free time and boredom, but I’ve been far busier this past week than during the actual school year. I got to see many of my foreign friends off for the last time (only 5 or so of the 20 something JASIN students are staying in Japan for the next semester), and I moved into my own apartment. I also did some site seeing, attended a festival, and went to the Nagasaki and Togitsu city halls to take care of the paper work for my registration. I’ll post pictures and go into greater detail in subsequent posts.

Anyway, since fall semester just ended last week, it can easily be seen that school semesters in Japan run on quite a different schedule from American ones. The semester began at the end of Sept. and ended the first week of Feb. The next semester begins at the end of March and ends the first day of August. This means that I essentially have a 2 month long break. The orientation period for next semester is, I think, 2 weeks, so it is actually a bit longer than that. It should also be noted that the school year in Japan begins in the spring, not in the fall, so there will be many new students coming in next semester. There will also be many students graduating in March, including a lot of my friends.

There are a couple American students from an air force academy that arrived here a couple weeks ago due to a misunderstanding of the different semester schedules, so the school kind of threw together a few classes for them at the last minute. Since it’s break, I’m going to try to get in on these classes as well to continue my studies.

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