この平和はいい戦士の努力の目標だ。

Once again, a new week dawns and begins with a busy Monday. Although Sunday felt both lazy and productive, a perfect day for living in the moment and riding the currents of time, Monday was less than ideal, and it took longer than usual for my natural optimism to reassert itself. The day began well enough - a few tests early on, followed by watching more of Ima Ai Ni Yuku (see last week's entry), which was both easy to understand and entertaining. However, in the third lesson a bomb bearing the name "Project Work" was dropped. From now until the end of November in certain lessons (and outside them, too) we'll be looking into a particular element of Japanese culture, gathering information as well as opinions on it from Japanese students, compiling it all together and giving a presentation including a Q&A session.

There's nothing wrong with all that per se, in fact, the way I've written it it sounds quite fun, but what I don't like is that we have to do it in pairs. For a start I don't think assessing someone on the work they do toward a group effort is an accurate representation of their ability (as the workload can end up getting divided unequally), plus people who have already made good friends pair up right away, leaving people who forge alliances more slowly (i.e. me) feeling a little awkward. Still, it won't last forever, I may end up making friends and it's only worth 10% of the final grade. But while I'm ranting, sometimes being surrounded by so many American accents is even more disorienting than the Japanese language.

I returned home a little disheartened, but things started looking up. For a start, my lunch included an item from my usual bakery that I had been curious about for a while and not tried before. It appears to be a shrimp croquette in a bun covered with tartar sauce, and it tastes like everything one could ever want from a McDonalds Fillet o' Fish, but cost only 98 yen. Tea Ceremony was extremely laid-back as well (didn't catch the name of this week's sweets, they were a form of manju with a sticky orange outer-layer), a few of the students got to wear kimono this week, and while they were getting kitted out the rest of us just waited. This did put some constraints on time, though - I was the last one to get tea and I mixed my own cup, which made the receiving tea from your host/giving tea to your guest aspect of things a bit tricky.

On the subject of kimono, I wasn't too bothered about trying them until today. They look really good, I wonder if I could wear one one week? I'm not sure how my teachers would be disposed toward letting me, though. I definitely couldn't content myself with the male version of the garment - they're plain and ugly!

It was during Classical Japanese that I started to feel that the world is a decent place and that any difficulties I was currently having would work out. I have noticed another interesting difference between the C.J. class I'm taking this year and the one I took last year. Since this course is not compulsory, and all the members of the class have chosen to study it, we function as quite a close group and actually have fun with it. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Tomorrow I have a few tests and need to nip out to pay for health insurance and do some shopping, so it could be full and busy or just few and far-between appointments. Stay tuned!

My early observations on crows and their beaks may have only been a Summer fad. These days they seem rather well-mannered.