at miyagi university of education the classes are no-stress compared to at högskolan dalarna. we need 8 japanese language-related classes, each class meets once a week and is around 90 minutes long, meaning 8 classes is 12 hours of lessons per week (compared to dalarna's 3 hours). we have almost no homework, writing only in hiragana is okay, showing up to presentations/speeches unprepared is okay. the lessons are JLPT N1 level, but not understanding is okay. for example, one exchange student is N3 level so there's a lot they don't get. it seems like the teachers just want you to learn "something".

everything is entirely in japanese. there's about 12 exchange students studying japanese, around 7 are taiwanese or chinese, 3 swedish, 1 estonian, 1 russian. 8 others aren't studying any japanese so we haven't met them. those who know chinese already know almost all the kanji meanings, though they don't know japanese grammar or pronunciation so well. one taiwanese girl has only studied japanese for half a year but she's already as good as i was after a whole year, and she's probably better at kanji than i am even now after a year and a half!

when going to MUE from the tohoku uni student apartments (sanjo machi, 三条町) you turn left, take a right at the first traffic light that you can in fact see already from the front of the apartments, and the bus stop for bus 70 is there. ride that bus to River Inside (kawa uchi, 川内) subway station, it's the final stop (終点) so you can't really miss it. the subway is the 東西 "east-west" line, you ride one single stop (towards the zoo) to Blue Leaf Mountain station (青葉山).



from blue leaf mountain station, turn right


MUE's entrance/exit




mess hall (食堂) and convenience store. the mess hall serves food like big bowls of ramen, but during lunch hours the line is insanely long and the cafeteria is packed full. since it all probably has wheat and sugar i've never eaten there, instead i buy onigiri from the convenience store if i need it. the prices are exactly the same as in any other shop, in general there doesn't seem to be price differences in food in any of the shops (no matter if it's a tiny mom-and-pop shop or chain store) except for when it's 100% super local food shops, or import shops. anyway, instead of eating in the cafeteria i eat in the break room right across from my classroom, though after i get more used to the school in general i might switch it up a bit.








this is building 2 i think... braille and culture classes (meant for japanese people, not exchange students) are held there.








here to the left is the office and in the same building is the second braille course, i think...


class stuff

this is where all the japanese courses for exchange students (kanji, grammar, speech/presentations, etc) are held. before going into either here or the break room, take your shoes off and put on these classroom slippers! but in other buildings/classrooms having your shoes on is fine. it seems like the rule is, if the floor has carpet then you need to use slippers. in some public-ish bathrooms (not ex. at the train station, but at a camping lodge for example) you also need to use slippers, and when we went to the doctor we used slippers there too.













it's fine if you only write in hiragana, but you should TRY to write in kanji. apparently all us dalarna students are utter crap at kanji until we've been in japan for a while, don't worry... i'm trying to write all my notes and everything (ex. self-made maps so i don't get lost) in kanji whenever i can, but y'know...

grammar course. basically we go over N1 grammar, 3-4 words ("grammar points") per class. at dalarna we had tests every 1-2 weeks, or it felt like that anyway, but here i have no idea because we don't even get a syllabus!! we're certainly not tested on last week's kanji that we were supposed to be practicing, for example... well, i'll find out eventually.








reading, talking etc. class. we read through a page or so of text and say which words/sentences we don't know or understand. then we take turns reading it aloud. then the teacher reads half a sentence or a few words aloud and we copy his pronunciation. there's a few worksheet questions too, then we answer those on the board after doing them all ourselves and/or talking to a neighbour about our answers.


other lessons: these aren't things i'm taking for points, i'm just sitting in ("auditing") them to improve my japanese. that basically means i can come to class whenever i want (skip class whenever i want), and don't have to do any homework. they're all classes meant for japanese students. i'm taking braille 1 and 2 (though i'm quitting those because they're way too hard), japanese culture (we exchange students do this class a favour and show our culture to them so they think about wow japan actually is different), "teaching japanese to foreigners" (we talk about how we learned something or what's difficult for us in japanese, etc). other exchange students are taking things like art and music, but because we never saw any kind of class list we have no idea what the school even offers.

we already have to be at the school every day for our required classes anyway, and the commute time is an hour or longer depending on when you get to leave (sometimes the busses only run once an hour) so in general it doesn't matter if you sit in on a bunch of different courses. i think it's a good idea because you're actually thrown in to "real japanese" with normal japanese classmates, unlike in the classes meant for exchange students. my plan is to just take them until i get a job, then see if i need to quit the extra ones.

"teaching japanese to foreigners" class. the teacher is one we already have for a couple required classes, and they go over memory tips or high-level grammar etc so it's good even if just for that. but the class is at 4 or 5pm and by that time we're finished it's already dark out, making going home difficult!!






braille. definitely the most difficult course i've sat in on!! the teacher's a really nice guy who's completely blind, so ends up doing stuff like writing on the blackboard... on top of other words he's already written. he writes in kanji too, and handwritten kanji is already hard enough for me to read but handwritten kanji by a blind person is reaaaally difficult. then when you don't know words like "paragraph" (段落), it instantly becomes impossible because the whole class is about ex. how to use braille punctuation.

the learning speed is pretty fast too, the first time i went they were still on japanese letters, i missed a class and suddenly they had already covered numbers and were now on english letters! also the class is meant for sighted people, in that you're supposed to get used to reading the dots with your eyes... i was trying to read and write without looking at all (ignoring that's braille's intended use, i'm learning for if i go blind in the future or when i can't be bothered to use my eyes to read y'know!!), so it gets really confusing because ex. one paper has how you write the letter, the other paper has the same dots but mirrored for teaching you how to read that paper. anyway we get stuff like one page of normal japanese, and the backside of the paper is (ink) dots that we have to try and figure out. japanese braille follows pronunciation, so if you ex. don't know the pronunciation of a word on the "normal japanese side" you're screwed.

on top of all this, one braille class is early in the morning and the other is pretty late (right before "teaching japanese" class) so it's a pain to go to. it's a shame but i'm going to quit. a study abroad should be fun, i shouldn't make going to school be a chore!













in our classroom we were even thrown a welcome party. everyone has japanese students who are tutors, they're supposed to help us if we need class help or help around town (i guess?) or something... i have two, they're both taking the braille class so i can self-study braille with them instead of going to class.

during braille when my tutors were there, this was basically our first meeting, one asked me if i could understand the teacher and i said 全て分かりませんが（大体分かります） "i don't understand everything (but i understand more or less)", the problem is she cut me off after only half my sentence was done which means my sentence's meaning turned into "i don't understand anything at all". so now she thinks i don't understand ANY japanese at all and is using as much english as she can with me, despite that i'm speaking in japanese to her and stuff... well, it'll get sorted out eventually...




i couldn't eat any of this since it had sugar and wheat in it (the other dalarna students had similar problems so none of us ended up eating really). the brown thing is rice wrapped in something-or-other and then fried; O (王), a Taiwanese student who I'll just call King, tried it and said it was way too sweet.

the first time i had to go to school alone (since i was taking braille which starts earlier than everyone else's classes) i was pretty scared. near the subway station i asked a lady sitting on the bus if this was the correct stop, she said yes but by the time i stood up the doors had already closed so i started to panic a little, she said "the next stop is fine too!" and pointed out the station building to me as the bus rode past it. i got off the bus (it IS the last stop...), got on the subway. when i was getting off the subway the lady standing next to me said "it's probably better if you hold on to me right?" and held out her hand, and holding on to her hand (then on to her shoulder as that was easier) she walked me all the way out of the station!! i said she was really nice and was almost crying, and she said "no no! my husband's the same with his eyes". she spoke at a whisper and at some points it was impossible to hear, only later did i realize she was doing it because blind people have better ears and probably her husband has super good hearing so it's just a reflex. i almost cried all the way to school, it was so touching, thank you lady!!!



on friday (was it oct 20th...?) after class we prepared for the "global cafe", which is an international culture festival held at the school or something like that. we went to another classroom where me, king and ryouya (凌矢, a japanese student) coloured in this banner. the other students did origami and wrote on the blackboard and stuff... but we didn't really know what was going on so we all just chatted together. i got ryouya's email and now we're friends *thumbs up*

it seems like most japanese uni students don't use email, to the point where they can't even remember their own email addresses. instead they use LINE (a Skype-like phone app). it's so bad that i emailed some guys asking about a part-time job and they replied to talk to them on LINE instead!! the problem is, i don't have a phone yet and LINE uses your phone number to create your account. i have an old account from before i came to Japan, but since that's on my old phone which i don't have anymore i can't access the account!

i didn't go to the global café. instead i went with the local esperanto club to a traditional inn (ryoukan) in the town of Yonezawa (米沢, よねざわ), which is in Yamagata (山形), the neighbouring prefecture/county to the left of Miyagi which is the one i'm in. i'll write about that in the next blog post.

going home from the global café prep wasn't the smartest move i've ever made. normally i take the subway one stop to North Mountain, get on bus 70 right in front of the station, get off at Touhoku Fukushi Uni or something like that (a big red building with a red bus stop and a convenience store; it's such a prominent stop that they even announce it in computer-generated, unintelligible English), walk straight downhill and end up in front of my apartment building.

i wanted to talk with Ryouya some more and as far as i remember he lives in Iwate prefecture/county (just north of Miyagi) so he takes a different train to and from school. we decided, we'll take the subway together to sendai station, i'll get on the bus from there and go home. it was already dark and raining by this time. i'd gone home by bus a few times from sendai station but never alone before. we walked from the subway station to the bus station, sharing the same umbrella so i could use my cane and stuff. "do you know what this is called?" he asked. when two people share an umbrella it's the love-love umbrella, it even has a symbol that looks like an up-arrow. (sort of like, if you hook arms when you're walking it's normally, but not always, a symbol that you're dating someone nowadays). "wow, you know a lot!" he said. yep, i know it from manga!!! anyway, i got on the bus and he left.

...but what if i had gotten on the wrong bus? there's no list of stops at the bus station. the stop names seemed familiar, but what if it didn't get off at the one exact stop i'm familiar with? i don't know my way home from the other stops even if i know they're near my house. in the residential areas there's not many people around you can ask for help. i looked around for the "stop!" button but, sitting in the seat for disabled people and stuff, didn't see one!! after one or two stops, when the bus stopped in order to let someone on, even though he didn't open the doors to let anyone off i stood up and walked to the front. "you're getting off?" (降りますか？) he asked, i said yes and he opened the doors, i swiped my bus card and left. in cases like this it's great being a blind foreigner, i can just have my cane out and someone will take pity on me one way or another and not get mad that i'm stupid enough to not know where the bus buttons are... anyway.

i got off, the bus hadn't gone too far. walked in the direction i thought the bus had come from. passed a girl handing out flyers at the entrance to one subway station that was obviously not the one i needed. found one subway station — it was for the wrong train line (there's only two!). pitch-black and raining fairly heavily, coupled with that i can only see one or two buildings ahead in the best of times, at least i had an umbrella. i also should've gone to the bathroom before even leaving school. i wandered around in the train station but couldn't find a map to the other train line, nor did i find a bathroom. went out, asked a stranger for help and he tried to help then said "the truth is, i'm not from around here so i don't know either, sorry!" and looked really troubled that he couldn't help me. walking a little, right across the street it looked like it might've been another subway station, so i went there and it was for the same train line as i had just seen!

wandered around some more and ended up back at the previous spot with the girl, i asked her for help. showed my bus/train card and pointed to that train line name and explained i was trying to find a station for there, or to get to sendai station. she was confused and thought i wanted to take a train to that station, and i said no i wanted to walk (it couldn't be THAT far!). she said she couldn't leave the subway, which was obvious as it was her job to hand out flyers, and i tried to say "it's fine if you just point to which direction i need to go in, from there i can ask another person" and then i realized i don't know how to say something like "direction" in japanese. it was a very frustrating point.

she noticed there was a map on the subway entrance wall so we were looking at that when a man came up and asked what was wrong, she explained to him my problem and i tried explaining to him too, he said he'd walk me to sendai station!! as we were leaving he looked at my cane and asked "why do you have that?" and i said "i'm a person whose eyes are bad" (目の悪い人ですから) so he took my arm and we shared his umbrella so i could still use my cane! (at one point he asked "this is rude but, just making sure, you're male right?" and i said "yeah" and he said "oh good haha", you know why?? because of the love-love umbrella thing...)

he was from sendai, so i asked if he could speak in sendai dialect and he said "of course!" and laughed, although he didn't switch out of standard japanese. "oh, sweden! ikea country!" he said. i explained that i wanted to learn the dialect but no one i had asked so far could speak it, he just laughed. he asked what i was doing in japan (exchange student), what i was studying (japanese), if i was at tohoku uni (no, miyagi) "oh, miyakyou! yeah i know that place!" he said. i had explained the whole thing with coming home from a school party with a friend, thinking i was probably on the wrong bus and getting lost, and he asked if that friend was japanese or foreigner (japanese). asked me if boys and girls learn together at Miyagi Uni of Education (yes they do!), asked how cold it gets in the winter in sweden, i explained that up north it can get up to -40C "where even your sweat freezes" (i don't really know how to explain "breathing hurts when it's that cold" and stuff like that in a concise way) and he thought that was crazy. he walked me all the way up until where getting to the subway station was just a straight line. it really was a surprisingly long walk, probably 10-20 minutes! when parting i said "thank you very much, really, really" (ありがとうございます、本当に、本当に). he shook my hand and said "(we should meet) again!" (またね！). of course, not knowing each others' names, emails, phone numbers or anything, not even having met each other in the daylight, even if we do meet again we won't know it.

luckily that station had both a bathroom and free wifi, so i managed to send a message to my wife saying i was coming home. i was going to take the sendai subway back to "river inside" station (kawa uchi), then take bus 70 to home, as i should've done from the beginning. but i hadn't ever taken the subway from here before so i was a bit confused on which train to get on (right or left), after carefully studying the maps i chose the right one but as i was getting on a fat old man asked me in english "you want to go to xx zoo?". i said "kawauchi station" in japanese, he said "tohoku university?" "kawauchi", "yes this is the right train". thanked him and got on and sat next to him.

he really wanted to practice english! we spoke in english the whole way, which was only about 10 minutes. apparently he was some kind of hobby photographer and had even been to sweden (stockholm) once. he asked how it was in japan, i said (in japanese) "for example, sweden doesn't have those yellow lines there" (the ones with "braille dots" for blind people to follow) and he said "oh, you can see!!" "only a little" i said. "how many years have you lived in japan?" "i just arrived two weeks ago" "TWO WEEKS?! how is your japanese so good?!!" "i studied in school and also studied at home by reading comics and watching tv". he seemed like he didn't really listen to people, ex. when he asked what i was doing in japan i said i was an exchange student at MUE, he said "oh you're at MUE?" as if he wasn't familiar with the name, and then "as a teacher?" "no, exchange student". i explained to him the whole deal with me coming home from being with a friend and getting lost, but he didn't seem to get it. i tried to give him the URL to my exchange blog but he didn't seem to understand that either so didn't take a photo of it or write it down or anything... this wasn't a problem of language, as each time i thought he didn't get it i said the same thing in japanese. oh well.

got off at river inside, got on bus 70. made it home.

the thing is, in sweden (uppsala) where i was living there wouldn't have been anyone out that i could've asked for help, because there's so few people. if i had gotten lost there that've been the end.