絶望した！立つことは絶望した！

What a difference a day makes, twenty four little hours - like the sun and the flowers where there used to be rain.

And the fact that I have used almost all of my landing money and gotten everything that I'll need for a while. Here's the story. I went back to school for orientation today. Today's talk was mostly bureaucratic things that I could find in the student handbook. It was over quickly enough. Then, everyone staying in the Keio dorms had their housing orientation, and I was a free agent for the rest of the day. As such, I decided to wait up for my friends at the meeting so that we could all go and pick up our phones together. As I discovered yesterday, it's so much easier to do things like this here in large groups. So, while they were dealing with housing orientation, I wandered the campus and Mita area to get a feel for the place. I liked what I saw. The campus itself is gorgeous - many Tudor and Oxfordian style buildings such as the Old School Library, along with some beautiful new ones including the East Gate and the New School Library. I found the university co-op (pronounced /koop/ by the faculty), which has everything a student would need - including writing utensils and school supplies, books and food, and even a small manga section (gotta get what's important, right?). After my exploring, I headed back to the first school building, where the housing orientation was still in full swing. I decided to hang out and wait in a classroom across the hall. While many times bigger than my homeroom when I studied at Ritsumeikan Keisho High School back in 06, the smell and feel of the room was scarily familiar. I felt like I was right back in class 2-H and working on getting ready for the school festival. It put me in just the right mood.

After the meeting concluded, we met up and went straight for a little store across from the SoftBank we were in yesterday. Our original plan was to just buy the phones and activate them at SoftBank itself. Instead, we found out that not only could we not just purchase the phones, but that this other place would offer us an even better plan - same monthly rates, but a lower charge in total for the duration of our stay. Not bad. All it took was a little patience, a lot of standing around, and a few butter cakes from a patisserie down the hall, and we all walked out with shiny new SoftBank phones. Yippee!

Having accomplished that, four of us (including my fellow Rice student, Paul) went out to celebrate. We were all starving, so we wanted something that would be filling. I suggested a little ramen shop that was almost directly across the street from the east gate of campus. We went in and found that it was a vending machine-ticketed style shop. The menu is literally a pair of vending machines, which dispense tickets with different ramen entrees and optional tickets for add-ons. 850 yen later, I was standing at the counter (there were no chairs in this place - it's meant to be a quick and easy in-and-out type place) with a steaming bowl of negi (onion) ramen. That by itself was fantastic, but the complimentary accents included crushed red pepper, spicy bean sprouts, whole cloves of garlic with a garlic press every few feet, mirin, red chili paste, fresh ground sesame seeds, and more, it was almost too much. It was the first food I'd had since toast and kiwi that morning - but it was still enough to fill me to capacity and keep me satisfied the rest of the day! The four of us decided that from here on out, Fridays are 'celebrate the weekly anniversary of our getting our cell phones by going out to the ramen place across from the east gate for lunch' days. It's as good a reason as any to celebrate.

While some more of our friends were signing up and getting their own phones, I decided to sneak over to Tamachi station to check out how much my rail pass between Ikebukuro and Tamachi was going to be. I wanted to put it on a Suica card, which is the auto-scan type card that you brush along the turnstile instead of feeding a paper pass through. In total, it cost me 30,550 yen for a six-month pass between these two areas. I tried to use my debit card to make the purchase, but it was declined due to Bank of America security measures. As luck would have it, I was carrying 30,566 yen exactly with me at the time. One new card later, I was back with my friends at the shop. Now a bit miffed at my inability to use my debit card, I decided to head home in order to clear this up with the people at B of A. Once I got home, I saw the 'theft alert' e-mail in my box and called the international number to their customer service center. It will probably cost me a bit extra, but if I didn't do it, then I'd be practically cut off from a large and important chunk of my own money. We got the issue cleared up in a few minutes, and there was no problem after that.

Now home, I've just done laundry here for the first time. My housemate Xavier (from France) showed me where there was a coin-op laundromat with dryers (we don't have one at the house, and it was already too dark to use the outside drying area at the house). Now I'm here and getting ready to make a quick run to pick up some pencils and notebooks at the convenience store before settling in to watch the Countdown with Keith Olbermann online and then call it a night.

Japanese language placement test is bright and early tomorrow morning.

絶望した！