< Live here has started. I'm real busy now...
On monday we had the opening ceremony for Keio exchange students at Mita Campus in (more or less) central Tokyo.
There were a few speakers, who all spoke in japanese only, so it was kinda hard to understand. Most of the people I could follow as much as to get the gust of what they were saying.
After the opening speeches, the language teachers were introduced, and the way the studies are going to be was explained. We then split up into classes (according to our language proficiency level) and went to classrooms for the first time, on the way there we also went to the student/campus foods/books/goods store to get our books (for free!). At the classroom the people from KOSMIC (stands for Keio Organisation of Student Members of the International Center) told us about welcoming parties, bowling events, language partners and so on... Then our Teacher/Professor gave us an overview of the books we're going to use handed us a huge book of kanji learning copies and gave us homework! for the first time.
Real class is going to start thursday, so i better get that homework done while I have the time.
This morning i got up at 7.00 and went to meet a member of the Keio Judo Team. He took me to the practice hall where he introduced me to the team. After doing the usual judo starting ceremony I had to stand in front and give an introductory speech (naturally in japanese). Actually I think it went quite well, I hope the teammembers thought the same!
The Team as a whole was very nice and welcoming to me and I had a lot of fun.
Training was structured into warming up/stretching, groundwork exercises and randori, and then standing exercise and randori, afterwards was throwing practice and then again stretching. The whole thing went on for about 2.5hours. I hope my stamina will go up soon as I'm now going to do this daily. Today I was way to tired already when standing randori started and was thus thrown around quite a bit.
Looking forward to training tomorrow!