Might As Well Start Somewhere

While I'm sitting on hold for Air France to pick up their line, I figure I might as well do something worthwhile (besides clicky-click around Facebook) and do the first update to this blog.

It's been only what... 4 days?  And what a long 4 days with the 6:30AM wake-ups, jet lag, and constant activity.  Actually, it's really been 4:11AM wake-ups until 6:30AM rolled around, horrendous jet lag making me yearn for a bed at 6PM, and lots of gaps between activities around campus.  Maybe KCJS wants us to get us acclimated to the new schedule while accounting for jet lag.  Maybe they just like breaks.  Who knows.

It's been a great experience getting back to Japan so far.  I actually feel like I know a thing or two this time around, which is a far cry from how I felt in the dormitories back in Kyushu where I had no cell phone, bike, or sufficient knowledge of kanji to read a Yahoo Map.

The people are great too.  Going to an ivy league-esque program has the potential to pit you against some intimidating competition, and maybe this is 4 years of UofM speaking, but I feel like everyone's down-to-earth and genuinely nice.  There's been no problems with anyone really, and that says something considering Japanese knowledge can be a pretty polarizing thing (see: anime discussions, long dissertations about Asian history, et al.).  Hopefully it keeps up when the returning students get back.　今までは、人間関係はよかったね。

Coincidentally, today marks the 4th day sans-baggage.  It seems Air France mixed up luggage at De Gaulle and- even now- they can't find where my baggage is on the tarmac.  That's a very disconcerting feeling considering my body doesn't fit Japanese clothing very well, I'm on a limited budget, and Air France is supposedly notorious for being stingy with missing baggage compensation.  I'm hoping for the best but anticipating the worst.  However this turns out, it'll be an interesting life experience!  Speaking of anticipating the worst, I've been on hold with them for a good hour now and haven't gotten a human yet.

Hopefully my experiment of including the Twitter updates to the right make this blog a bit more readable.  Bite-sized updates are easier on me since I'm trying to limit my Internets time in this new, crazy city... and I'm sure you don't want to read these long posts any more than I want to edit them so they're comprehendable.  Keep an eye peeled to the right or check out my Twitter directly to get more instantaneous updates.

From now till bed, I'll be checking out which cell phone providers offer the best prepaid plans (or short-term contract paid plans!).  I'm swayed toward Softbank thanks to the following phones:

versus au's toy-like phones:

and DoCoMo's lack of any prepaid phones whatsoever.  Not to mention, Softbank offers a 300 yen/30 day unlimited plan for texting, and since that's how things get done in these parts that's way better than paying for texts per message.

Well, time to go hound Skype some more until someone picks up over at Air France.  As a parting gift, here's my bedroom in my new apartment.  I'll give a more proper tour once I get a... proper camera.