In the morning KIT's anthem woke us up, and first thing after brushing our teeth we went outside for a flag raising and some morning exercises/stretches acompanied by radio music. Then we had breakfast. They served toast, fruit salad, hard boiled eggs, corn chowder, and tea, and it was all really good. Then we boarded the busses to see some other places.
Anamizu Field Trip
This weekend the KIT staff planned a field trip for us to their Anamizu Bay Seminar House. It was an overnight stay, but there were a lot of stops along the way. Our first stop was at a Japanese mechanics or robot museum. A nice tour guide gave us a demonstration of a few interesting old robots. Both were made hundreds of years ago. The first was a robot that served tea:
Karaoke Night
Today we had a test, and I guess we're going to have one every Friday. Then after lunch we had more Japanese for Science and Technology, and we learned a bunch of vocabulary for shapes and geometry, and then made some origami by following some instructions in Japanese. Later we came back to meet some Japanese students and play a name game and something similar to musical chairs.
Rube Goldberg Machine
Today we had class Japanese language class as usual, and then we had culture class, and we learned a lot about the different periods in Japanese history. After our usual classes we had the first meeting with our group for our project for Japanese for Science and Technology class. Our project is to build a Rube Goldberg machine. There are six of us per group, and each pair needs to create three different parts of the machine.
Lotta work
Our first Japanese language classes were today, starting with the core language class. It was mostly review and it was a little easy really, just reviewing positional words, introducing yourself and asking questions, and adjective tenses. We're making little posters to introduce ourselves to hang in the Logos lab where the KIT students who want to learn English go.
Classes Start
We woke up early to get our laptops today. They broke us up into groups so we didn't all just come right when they opened. We figured they would just give it to us one by one when we got there, but instead we waited for everyone from our group to show up before we received our laptops. It was kind of indicative of Japanese culture and how they tend to think in a group mindset instead of focusing on the individual like America.