Catching up (Part 2)

Dated 08.31 at 6:30 AM...

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Well, it's 6:30 in the morning here as I type this, and I can't get a connection to the internet.
The planes were pretty good; the Chicago - SF one was business class, with a meal I didn't expect on a plane: sausage, ham, cheese omelete, potatoes, muskmelon, blueberries, grapes, and drinks. The SF-Osaka one we just barely got on (we were there early, it was just a space issue), and that was just a normal (11-hour) flight.
We got into Kansai about 4:00PM in the time here (midnight CST), where it took about an hour to get through everything. We pretty much went from the plane to an automated shuttle, then to a quarantine area where we and another plane just unloaded on, pretty much filling the place. Took about 30 minutes to get through there, then we ended up in actual customs. Nothing like the US there; they didn't check anything other than the passport and even then it wasn't that much. We found the group meeting place for the school pretty quickly.
We got onto a bus (with 11 people total on it, seemed kind of wasting space, but they had tons of them) and drove through Osaka to get to the campus; about 1/2 the bus was taking pictures all over the place. The entire ride, there was a backdrop of mountains and cloudy peaks over to the west and north. We didn't see that many pachinko parlors until we knew what we were looking for, then we were seeing them close to everywhere.
90 minutes later, we finally got to the dorms. We got in pretty quickly and moving in right away. The housing is pretty much what you'd say as Japanese, though. There's a room by the entrance for shoes; the rooms have western parts to them, but the main portion is Japanese. The rooms are a bit larger than Eau Claire's dorms, but it's pretty much a door, followed by a small entrance (with closets on each side), then you step up onto a tatami mat floor which is about 12'x12'; the bedding is all futon-style, just folding it up and placing it to a side during the day. Then on the other end is about a 12'x5' space of desks, chairs, and everything you'd need. The plugs on the wall are the equivilant to 2-prong US-style plugs, so I have power to everything that I need.
The campus is pretty strict with their network (I knew this going in at least), so there's confusing language with setting up the laptop with a connection. At least, I can't figure most of it out.
At about 8:00PM we had a brief touring around some parts of the town, as well as the local supermarkets. There's a place to eat on the campus, but we're pretty much on our own here. This was my 25th and 26th hour awake, so I just ended up getting some food which I knew what it was (just some onigiri a guide said was seafood inside) with some liquids which I've had before, and got home and crashed.
Random thoughts so far:
There are a lot of Minnesotans here for some reason.
I think Helen ended up being creeped out on several occasions at how observant I can be in an environment; last night, even after being up for 25 hours, I was talking with her when she was smoking and mentioned there was an ashtray about 20 feet away, on the other side of the group we were in.
Either there are a ton of driving ranges around here, or they're just really easy to see. You look across a cityscape and see these big green poles and netting every couple minutes driving on a highway. We had to have seen at least 10 going from Osaka to Hirakata.
The interesting thing about driving around for 90 minutes is that the city really came down in uniqueness. Not so much that the city didn't look special as it just wasn't as different as you'd expect. It felt like going through Chicago, just that a good number of the
The dorms are about a 10-15 minute walk from campus, which kind of makes everything a bit of a time getting around.
Everything seems very much purpose-driven around here. There isn't room for doing something other than in the place it was meant for. You don't bring food outside the eating area and kitchen; you don't bring shoes beyond a certain point.
It really bothers me for some reason that the equivilancy for a dollar here is just a relatively-simple coin.
It's a very good thing that there's a AC in the dorm. It's not so much a good think that the entire dang thing is in Japanese, most of it kanji. There's a guide for it, but I accidentally set it to the "heat-only" setting last night.
It's actually been very helpful that I had that one year of Japanese before-hand, as it's easy to figure out most things around here with just that knowledge. At least knowing a little bit about formatting and how things should look.