5 months have raced by. Elliot left the country 2 weeks ago, and Jamie split for America just Wednesday morning. Seeing as his bus left at 6:30 am, the seeing-off crowd was pretty minimal. The poor kid looked like the dam was about to break at any second, but he fought back the tears with all his might. Then again, he might have just been too sleepy to feel emotions. Getting back to the apartment was the weird part, though. Jamie's room was empty and all his stuff was gone, leaving me as the sole resident of Fragrance A-102. The room's now being used as temporary storage for all the stuff Kawaguchi-sensei will hold onto for next year's exchange students. It's an eerie feeling being the only person around when I go to sleep and wake up. I dunno if I like this whole living alone thing. At any rate, I guess I've only got 24 days left until I head back myself.
Before that, though, I finally made my way out to Kanazawa to visit some old friends. I arrived around 11am at Kanazawa Station and was immediately hit with a wave of nostalgia as I saw so many familiar sights. Luckily, Kohei came to pick me up and we went straight to the farewell party for this year's KIT IJST students. As it turns out, I picked a bad time to go. All of the Japanese students were in the middle of final exams, and all of the foreign students were in the middle of final projects.I wanted to visit all of the places and do all of the things I did last year, so somewhere in the whole mess of it, I managed to rally everyone up for some karaoke at ol' Shidax. It was a little weird being somewhere so familiar with a bunch of folks I barely knew, but after a bit o' nomihoudai, everybody is everybody's friend.
Thanks to Kohei, I had a place to crash and a bike to use all week long. After being in Aizu for so long, I'd started to worry that my Japanese wasn't getting anywhere. Visiting Kanazawa after a whole year helped me realize that I've grown in a lot of ways, even in Japanese. I was able to express myself so much more than I could last time around, and I didn't feel like my Japanese friends were lowering their level of speech so that I could understand 'em. That being said, I've still got a long way to go!I'm actually looking forward to going home this time around. As much as I'm going to miss Aizu and my friends here, I miss my family and friends back home even more. It's been a while, huh?
Here's the one this year's exchange students in Kanazawa loved:
けしからん！ (keshikaran!) - That's outrageous!
