絶望した！私の名前は絶望した！

Well kids, here we go!

Had a great time at the festival on Tuesday. If there is one thing I've learned from it, it's that portable shrines (Mikoshi) are INCREDIBLY heavy. If there's two things I've learned from it, it's that bearing a Mikoshi is enjoyably hazardous to your health. Here's the step-by-step process for participating in a Mikoshi festival:

1.) Gather massive amount of people in happi coats.

2.) Lift Mikoshi.

3.) Walking very slowly, and chanting to keep rhythm with each other, move as slowly as you possibly can along the street, causing moderately amounts of chaos and drawing all attention - even going as far as to stop traffic on a main Tokyo thoroughfare.

4.) Set shrine down carefully on sawhorses.

5.) Drink.

6.) Repeat steps 1-5.

7.) Repeat step 6.

8.) Repeat steps 6 and 7.

We had a great time, met some fantastic new people, and a few of us headed out to do some karaoke in Shinjuku to round out the night. Good times. Pictures are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36733168@N04/sets/72157622448919916/

(Be warned, there are a lot of them).

Next day saw me heading back to school for opening ceremonies and preliminary class preparations (get textbooks, first homework, etc.). Yes, I had homework even before classes started. Oh well - life is still good. After that, I made a quick (?) dash back to Ikebukuro before meeting my friend Erek (who works for Square Enix) in Shibuya. With his being former anime club president at MIT and my (on hiatus) presidency of Rice's anime club, there really was only one natural destination for the two of us: Akihabara.

It's a brave new world, y'all. And it is beautiful.

In all honesty, it was just about what I expected. I suppose I lost a little bit of the 'wow' potential because I had already been to one of Tokyo's biggest anime stores and seen all the goodies. Still, I found a few choice items at great prices and called it good. We hung around in the arcades and shops and then parted ways around dinner time. It was going to be a big day the next day (today).

I started off today by finally going to get my foreigner registration card. Things went really smoothly and I am now a fully registered resident of Bunkyo-ku for the remainder of my time here. Welcome home!

I finished my homework (took a little bit of reading, but nothing obscenely difficult - not yet, anyways) and headed to school. I had two classes scheduled for today: Popular Music in Postwar Japan and Introduction to Japanese Law. Pop music was a scream - the professor is a visiting professor from Dartmouth college, and it was a full house for the first class. We went over class specifics and then listened to a little sampling of what we'd be focusing on over the course of the semester. There is a surprisingly rich history of Folk music (the kind we heard in the heyday of Bob Dylan and PPM) that is really going to be fun to experience.

Intro to Japanese Law was cancelled. Fail.

After that, I came home, folded the laundry, and now I need to go back out to Ikebukuro to buy a couple spiral notebooks.

絶望した！