More school things and also karaoke

So we're finally done with orientation, and tomorrow is more or less a free day.  Here are some pictures.

More trees, but this time the're from the fourth floor.

This is just a house near school that I enjoyed.

This is a flavor of Pocky I had not yet tried.  It is called "Pocky Panda" and is cookies and creme flavored.  Normally I avoid Pocky thanks to the weeaboo associations it carries, but weeaboos seldom make it to Japan so I just went for it.

I said before that I don't really want to talk to the other international students too much, and that's still true, but I took this picture of a girl drawing one of the peer assistants because the drawing actually came out pretty well.

Dinner was at a very, very small izakaya that at which my host family seemed to know everyone.  Also, to let you know just how small it is, to the leftt of my host dad there are about six more feet of space until the door, and just past the right-most edge of the picture there are about five more feet.  And this was taken with my back against the wall.  This is common in Japan.  It was lots of fun, because everyone there talked to everyone else, regardless of whether or not they were already friends.

Here I am with my host mom, still at the izakaya.

As always, tilt your head.  ANyway, this is what I had to drink.  It is NON-ALCOHOLIC beer, and I decided to try it for the novelty.  It tasted like bitter garbage, so I got a soda instead.  That bottle behind mine is real alcohol and was my host dad's.

I totally forgot the name of this, but it tasted a little like roast beef soup or something.  It was good.

Here are various pieces of sashimi. It was all good, but the octopus was my favorite.

These are fish bones prepared in such a way as to make them totally edible and kind of like potato chips.  They were not bad at all, but I didn't have too many because they were fried.

My host family decided we should go to karaoke for an hour after dinner, so we did.  It was at a place called Shiddax, which is incredibly fancy on the inside.  Like a mansion.  The song selection is so much bigger than the one in Georgia that I ended up singing my usual songs anyway out of sheer inability to choose from so many things.

I have a grandparent that likes to fish (HI PACA), so I ha dmy picture taken in front of the nearby fishing supply store.  I plan to go in some time during the day.

Tomorrow is free of classes, but we have to go down to city hall to apply for my foreigner card, then the school is having a tour of the area that I am going to go on.  Look forward to that, I guess.

Also, if you were wondering whether or not the smugness of some students was settled once the class placements were posted, it was.  Wesley and I are in the second highest level, and most such people are below us.  So you know, take that, jerks.