Classes, purikura, and the rainy season

So we started our first real week of classes here at 日本ミシガンセンター and, so far, it's been pretty okay. I know all of the material, grammar, content, etc., but my weakest point in the Japanese language (as it is for many people) is speech production. I am TERRIBLE at just producing speech and thinking of things to say on the fly, and I'm pretty sure that's why I'm repeating level two. Which, like I said, is fine. There's always things for me to re-learn, and I'm sure that I'll learn new things while I retake the course.

I haven't gotten the chance to do much sightseeing yet; there's a lot of work to do during the week, so it looks like most of my non-Hikone-area sightseeing will have to be strictly on the weekends. I think that this coming weekend, a few of us are going Osaka. I'm pretty excited for that--Osaka is HUGE and I'd love to see it again. I want to go to Kyoto a few times too... it's only about 30-40 minutes away by train, so that can easily be done in a day. One of the guys down the hall was also talking about going to Hiroshima, which I'm sure would be an incredible experience.

So one of our (myself and the people that I hang out with a lot here) favorite things to do when we go out and there's an arcade nearby is take purikura. Now, for those of you who do not know what purikura is... you are most certainly missing out. It's a photobooth, but not quite like the photobooths in the malls in the States. Instead, you step in the booth, pay for the machine, and pick different backgrounds in front of which you take the picture. Sometimes it's really fast, and sometimes it's a normal pace, but when you're done you select some of the pictures that you want to keep. After you're done taking the pictures, you go to a booth where you DRAW ON THEM BEFORE THEY PRINT. You can draw freehand, or put random little images all over them that come preset. Here's some examples of what I'm talking about if this explanation is less than satisfactory.




Sorry about the blurry ones, the pictures are really small when they print and I tried to take a picture of them but the resolution didn't turn out very well. The last one looks good because my friend Niki (top center in the last one) has a Japanese cell phone and the machine has an option to send the photos to your cell phone, and then she uploaded them to the internet from there. By the way, did I mention that these printed pictures are stickers? AWESOME.

Tuesday is supposed to mark the start of the rainy season in Japan. I don't know if this is a worldwide thing, but East Asia has a ridiculous rainy season where it basically just rains all day everyday for like 2 or 3 weeks. Okay, so the actual season is from mid June to mid July, and it doesn't rain EVERY DAY, but it rains a lot. I want to say that there are at least 2 weeks total that it's raining (though the days are not necessarily consecutive). I love it when it rains, but I have a feeling that this is going to lessen said love.

I'm beginning to feel like I don't need to write about my daily happenings (after all, that's what Twitter and Facebook are for) and I can just update about random cultural experiences that I'm having. I love it here. It's going to be a sad day when I fly back to the States.