Pre-Days 3-5 - A Long Weekend Part Deuce

Nothing brings cool people together better than their dislike for not so cool people, and nothing brings not so cool people together better than their like for engineering. Thus as you can imagine I feel that I've lucked out the last few days in that we coolies outnumber the bottom-feeders.

My first weekend over here got off to a pretty slow start. My Friday was rather uninteresting and consisted of dinner at Zaxby's followed by some TV and an early night's sleep.

Saturday morning began with Claire and I getting breakfast at IHOP, which was followed by a few hours of me studying Japanese, which after about an hour became me trying to find anything I could do to divert myself from studying Japanese. My Saturday began to look much like my Friday night until Claire called me to see if I wanted to watch the Oklahoma game with her (the UF game wasn't playing here). We called in some pizza and walked over to Green's, the liquor store on campus, (awesome, I know) to pick up a liter of Morgan, which we killed over the next 4 hours.

After the OU game I got a bit of a sweet tooth and we ordered some key lime pie, which came with a side of shards of ice and some freezer burn. I guess I was wrong to expect the restaurant at the Holiday Inn to make, or in our case defrost, anything better than a sub-par key lime pie, but I went downstairs to return it anyway. After watching a bit more football I decided to go back to my room and pass out.

Sunday Tim came back from Clemson and invited us to a friend's 21st birthday party (apparently they have a University Commons over here as well). Somewhere between breakfast at Firehouse and lunch at Moe's (apparently they don't believe in red and blue tortilla chips in South Carolina), I learned a bit more hiragana. This will be one of my alphabets for the next 3 months:



After getting about 60% of the hiragana down it was time to head to the party where we merilly celebrated some kid's 21st pseudo-birthday (I call it a pseudo-birthday because I'm convinced he was lying and it was really his 12th). People began trickling in including a guy named Pete, who had spent 9 months in Japan, and another Dane, who was pretty cool but definitely not cool enough to justify the confusion he caused.

Pete basically told us that the "proper" Japanese that we were learning we'd probably never use, which is always reassuring. He did however teach us dirty Japanese words which we'll almost certainly use. Perhaps most importantly however, though obviously not too necessary, he reaffirmed what we'd known all along--Japan will be awesome. After the beer ran out we headed home and I went to sleep.

Which brings us to Monday. Basically, more lunch at Moe's, more hiragana (about 90% proficcient), dinner at Mellow Mushroom, and the FSU vs. UM game.

10 days to Japan.

Dane out.