Tobacco, banking, decency

I hope my Tufts University water bottle is safe. I left it in the fridge, and if anyone took it I'd be pissed, though perplexed. (You couldn't really take it out in public without the chance that the person you stole it from went ahead and saw you.) I left it there to, um, dry off, because I figured that as the water would evaporate there'd be no problem with bacteria thanks to the refrigerator. See, I ended up wasting about half a Nalgene of store-bought spring water because I left it inside the freezer overnight. Then I tried to put tap water in it, and the tap water tasted like tobacco. Gross. So I cleaned it out and put it back in the freezer.

Boring. Next story. I went to the university at about 9:30 with a group of people I'd met, got there about 10:00 (yes, it takes that long to get there from university housing) and took the Japanese language placement test, which happened to mirror the order in which things showed up in my textbook exactly. They use the same textbooks. It was great, except for listening which was like hell.

Dull. A third try. Well, let's see. I went to the gym briefly but realized I had no time, and then the "Banking Session," in which a bunch of us tried to set up bank accounts with a Japanese bank. Let me tell you, and let this be a warning to Tufts students who go to Japan: setting up a bank account in Japan is ridiculously hard. And, if you'll excuse a third or a fourth "let," let me quote the person who introduced the banking session: "Welcome to the Banking Session. This is the most frustrating, irritating, and--interesting time" and I can't remember the rest. This being the last thing I would expect a Japanese person to say when presenting something, I thought it was quite hilarious.

Insipid, but not for you, the reader. What happened? Well, we had to write with "NO ERRORS"-- and what is an error? Well, you had to write your name and your address exactly as it showed up on the passport. This was not limited to whether a comma was in the name or not. This included whether the middle tip of your M stretched down to the bottom of the legs, whether the I had horizontal lines at the top, and so on. You couldn't even "over-write," e.g. write over a mark if you made a mistake in the direction the mark was initially going. NO MISTAKES. You had to write a signature two times, and it had to be the same both times. Eek. I invented a new signature for this purpose, about 1/20 the size of that on my passport, and that was acceptable. What a disaster. If you were jittery, there was no way you could've done this. Some people didn't finish at all and had to go home with penmanship homework (e.g. basically had to copy things perfectly at home and wait for the next banking session). Anyway...

Yeah. Later I took a tour of Makino Station, which was so-so until the restaurant, which had great food and awesome conversations. Definitely won't forget that soon.

And I'm spent.
Alex