My first few weeks at Kansai Gaidai flew by! Immediately after I arrived, I met up with some other CofC students, some students
from other universities, and Japanese students, and went on a day trip to Osaka. We went to Osaka Castle, a maid cafe that received extremely high praise from one of my friends, and ate a bunch of good food. I was surprised that I was already making many new friends, and I was able to get a lot of Japanese speaking practice. I feel like I have been learning just as much Japanese outside of class as I have in class. The day after, we went back to Osaka for the day – this time primarily around Umeda. For the next few days after that, we kept exploring Osaka, and we eventually made our way to exploring Kyoto as well (which is basically the same distance away from the school as Osaka is). Besides having to attend a few school meetings and a language placement test, we had the whole first week to galavant around and experience as much of the Kansai region as we could. Looking back, that week feels like such a blur since every day consisted of constant traveling and walking around, but I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything! Soon, classes began, and we all had to devote more time to studying, so we stayed around the Hirakata area more.
Around this time, we explored a lot of Hirakata city, and we met so many new people. We still found time every weekend to travelaround and do some awesome things. A few weeks after school began, I met some people who were going to climb Mt. Fuji before it was closed for the year, and I agreed to join them. We had to fit the entire trip and climb into one weekend, but we packed a lot of coffee and 7-11 doughnuts and did it! The views at the top were amazing, and I would recommend the trip to anyone, as long as you’re down for a good challenge. Besides traveling, I really like doing karaoke with everyone, and there are many awesome arcades and video game stores all around. It has been like a whirlwind, but the first weeks here at KGU were absolutely amazing!