It looks like a gloomy start to the new semester. The weather forecast said rain for tomorrow. How depressing is that?

It was 10am when I finally woke up today. I intended to go down to Sannomiya to look for this other textbook I had to get for one of my general lectures. Of course, as I thought would happen, I only actually woke up from zombie-mode around early afternoon so I decided to postpone my outing. I'm so not a morning person. I wish shops were open later at night so it wouldn't matter even if I left in the evening. As it is.... ... well.

Instead I watched the Indiana Jones films the whooooole day - all three of 'em, and I'm wondering why I did it, right now. The first film ticked me off so bad. I hated the female characters. It was like James Bond, the cheesy version! But... I can't say that I don't understand why people like it. Maybe it's just not my kind of humour. The Last Crusade was above all, the least painful. It was interesting to see Sean Connery play such an... odd character.

In any case. I need to go and have some solid sleep today - else I'll never wake up tomorrow. It's always so much harder to wake up on rainy days.

My koto teacher was in Kobe today the whole day. Aurelie and I had decided to show her around. She'd lived in Osaka for so long and had barely been in Kobe except for on special events, so it was really interesting to see her reactions on the differences between Osaka and Kobe.

We tried to be very flexible with our route and yet at the same time, cover a big area. So what happened was that we took her to the imported goods shops which she found very interesting because shops like those were/are pretty hard to find. We passed by the Kobe Mosque, went up to the old Ijinkan area (foreigners' residence one or two hundred years ago), went back down to Sannomiya, walked all the way to Chinatown and then Harbourland. Then we went back to Rokkomichi to karaoke to end the day.

It was really interesting because she was so interested in food culture. Like what I eat or what Aurelie eats, how we eat it, what kind of desserts we have etc. It was kind of enlightening in a way, how she said that food we eat is shaped by the culture and lifestyles that we have.

Anyway. My professor just sent a mail through to the mail-list and sped up the schedule for our first class. I'm going to be sooooo busy this semester!

Dusted off my textbooks today~~

The weather is soooo nice today! It's not hot; it's not cold. It's not even chilly - it's just... perfect! I had originally planned to go take a walk at the zoo but then... it closes at 5pm... which is about... now. Haha. I spent the whole morning and afternoon reading manga, downloading manga, reading a textbook (????) while waiting for my manga to download... which was actually kind of fun?? I didn't get too far with my textbook though; I need to brush up my kanji.

I've settled my schedule for this coming semester already. I basically have Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at Uni. I'm teaching on Fridays, but even so, my weekend stretches from Saturday to Monday! Life is good! (^_^) Of course, I did join the gym... and have officially started playing koto. As long as the weekend seems, I'm probably going to be so busy studying that my flatmate's going to see my brains splattered all over the place regularly. Even though her schedule this semester seems even tighter and even more unforgiving than mine! (I swear! At least I have time to breathe!)

When I was arranging my schedule last night, I checked the ones I had to registered for online at the Uni's pages, and I realised that I accidentally registered for Wednesday's 1st period and not the 2nd!!! I felt so stupid.... I mean, what was I thinking?! My record with 1st period classes is not good at all. Not only that, when I checked the teacher's name - it was the same professor who gave a lecture at the symposium with Paul Gilroy last summer! (Even more shocking!!!) This teacher is nice, but I'd really have to face it, I have no idea what he's thinking about at times. I can't get neither heads nor tails from his speeches. ...I have my work cut out for me.

On the plus side, I was dropped from Ogasawara sensei's lecture (because the computer chooses, and at random, lectures that come under general education), which is a good thing because I was accepted into Sakai sensei's lecture - which is the teacher for my Seminar! His seminar is on the same day, too. (Deja vu.... I think I took his lecture and seminar which were on the same day, too, last semester... what a laugh he'll be having.)

This Spring holiday was much shorter than last year's, considering all the stuff I had to do for my seminar till the end of February. March was cut short too because I'd accepted a lot of days to teach at that (tuition?)school I'm working in. I'm so glad classes start on the 10th. An extra one or two days really makes a difference.