iTalk

Today's Japanese Word of the Day:
会う
Au
(Verb: To Meet)

Today is dedicated to catching up on my blogging, which means there are a couple of places I need to talk about that I really should have but I haven't yet. One of those places is the iTalk Center.

iTalk is essentially our home away from dorm. The International Club meets here, and a bunch of the English-speaking teachers are here, too. After class, we pick up food in the cafeteria (which is about 30 seconds away), then carry it in here, where we eat. We talk with some of the Japanese students who come in here, but the main attraction is the internet access. This is where I come to do my blogging and e-mailing, and everyone breaks out their phones and laptops, and once in a while their homework.

iTalk is also the launch point for most, if not all, extracurricular trips. They all conceptualize here.

The International Club has their information pinned up on the whiteboard here, along with some sample sentences for them to use ("Nice to meet you!!"; "I recommend you see X"). These profiles of the students include where they're most interested in going, and it seems a lot of them want to go to Australia.

We haven't gotten these out yet, but I figured you guys would get a kick out of this. Note the Settlers game on top of the pile.

Also entertaining is the list of universities that exchange students with Shitennoji University. Note that SLCC is on the list. Apparently there were here for three weeks right before we arrived, but their program is less intensive Japanese study and more "Wheee! I'm in Japan!" Not that that's a bad thing, you know, since that's essentially what I've been doing this whole time...

Also not the "Japanglish" title of this chart. One of the guys wrote the word "GO" on the end to make it a complete sentence (this chart is taped up to a large whiteboard), but it looks like it got erased.

Also, there's a handful of Macs here. That keyboard might look normal, but it's not.

Here's a couple of pictures of the location:

Remember how I said some of the students at the university like to stop us and ask for our picture with them? Most of those happen at the iTalk.

I'm not in that last one. You might also notice in all of these the favorite picture pose in Japan.

The Japanese girl in this picture is Ayaka. She's pretty much our guide here. She helps us get on the right trains and buses and is the one to orchestrate a lot of our extracurricular trips (like to the Pokémon Center).

The first full day we were here, the International Club held a welcome party for us in the iTalk. The Japanese students were instructed to speak in English, and the American students were instructed to speak in Japanese. It was a lot of fun. There was food, too. This one I found kind of funny:

Sprite. Note the English logo on the other side, which you can see all backwards there.

It was during this party that I tried sushi for the first time ever. We were all standing around the food tables, and I saw it there, and decided it was time to get it over with. I told everyone that I had never had sushi before, and the Japanese students helped me pick out a mild tuna sushi. It wasn't too bad, though I probably won't have it again because the seaweed was really kind of gross.

 Those are the food plates, already mostly picked through.

And that's the iTalk Center. Perhaps not the most exciting post, but it's really kind of important to the American way of life around here. I promise the next post will be funnier.

~Amanda