The weekend after the speech, I spent most of my time gathering the journals, photographs, and videos I had and uploading them to a webpage. I felt that a webpage would make more sense to present the stuff I had than a powerpoint style presentation. However, I had never made a website before, and while Squarespace makes it easier it’s still pretty time consuming. I finished hakodatejazzkissa.com and bought the domain name for two months. It’ll still be up for another month I think.
On Tuesday we presented our results, and I’ll admit that I was kind of burnt out after the book speech I’d made on Friday and the website work over the weekend. My speech was neither as engaging or memorized as I had hoped it would be, but I think people were generally fascinated by the website and I was saved by some great videos I’d taken. Afterwards I really felt a sense of relief. The only difficult things remaining were a lesson test and the final at the end.
On Friday I had planned to meet a couple of other HIF students as well as students from Hokkaido University of Education and Hakodate Russian University (a “college” of maybe 40 people that shares a building with HIF and grants degrees in Russian). I had thought that we would get dinner then go up Mt. Hakodate, but apparently I got the order mixed up because when I got to downtown Hakodate my friend said they were already at the ropeway to ascend the mountain.
I wandered around downtown Hakodate and frankly worked myself into a pretty bad mood. I later realized that despite the many things I told myself at the time, I was really just nervous about having to talk for a couple hours in Japanese with people my age. When we finally met up for a late dinner, it went just fine. It turns out that I was able to communicate most of the things I wanted to— a fine accomplishment before the start of our final week.