The weekend after my first week in the dorm started on Friday as the five of us staying there headed to an izakaya. It was a good chance for us to really get to know each other— I hadn’t spent a lot of time with those guys specifically before the second month. We went on a walk to see the ocean. It was misty and we could barely see anything, but had a great time together.
On Sunday, I set off around 11:30 to my host family’s house. It was a 4km run in the midday heat and humidity, and I ran with a change of clothes on my back. By the time I got there I was sweating bullets! I took a cold shower through which I continued to sweat. We ate Japanese pizza which had shrimp and curry sauce… not quite sure how I felt about it. That night I went to a jam session at the last jazz cafe I would go to during my time in Hakodate. Because it was amateurs, the quality varied a lot.
That week we visited the Hakodate campus of Hokkaido University of Education, a small college about half the size of Williams. About 15 students from HUE had been visiting our classes as part of one of their courses, and it was interesting to see the smaller scale Japanese style of higher education. I had visited a smaller campus of Keio University last year, and both of these colleges felt like sprawling high schools.
On Friday, we presented four minute book recommendation speeches. I got fairly nervous during the memorized portion but when the Q&A section started I felt a lot more comfortable. Giving speeches in Japanese is something I still find to be pretty difficult— unlike in English, I’m not fluent enough to improvise when I forget the script. I was able to remember everything but I got a lot more nervous than I thought I would have.