This mid-November week

I received my Austrian Wahlkarte (absentee ballot) to elect the next Austrian president. I sent it back to Austria 2 days later. To the best of my knowledge, it took a good week to be sent from Austria.

We went to the municipal office to declare our status as students to the Japan Pension System. We don’t want to pay 16000 Yen per month.

We bought Japanese mobile phones.

I trained so much on knees at Aikido, that the top layer of my skin of my knees got ripped off. I burns like hell. I wanted to attend Saturday Aikido practice, but had to skip it.

On Wednesday, we have been at the International Friendship Day. This is an event organized by Kobe University members. Basically it was a nice party to connect foreign and local people. I chatted with 3 local people and learned about Kyudo, Japanese Archery. Here is one Kyudo example video.

I got informed that I won’t get a grade for my second English course.

So I decided not to visit my English classes any more. For the first course, I never got a grade. For the second, I got informed this week. So far I attended all classes. I will not attend them anymore.

Because of Martina’s Volleyball training on Saturday, we shift event day from Saturday to Sunday. Then I can also attend Aikido training sessions on Saturday.

Kanji class gets more and more difficult. 15 Kanji (stroke order, shape, 4 vocabulary, 2-5 readings each) is fine per week. A difficult challenge, but manageable. For next week we have to study 23 Kanji and will have a test for all the previous lessons we did in the past 2 months. So I will be tested on 109 Kanji. I am demotivated and need more time.

On Friday night, we went Bowling with other exchange students. It was fun. Many Japanese people enjoy Bowling after a day of work.

We spontaneously tried to visit a cat cafe before Bowling. Even though the opening doors said different, it was already closed at 20:30.

We bought a pan and a cutting board at IKEA on Saturday.

A small earthquake of magnitude 5.4 struck Wakayama on Saturday. We recognized that the earth shook a little bit. I guess it had magnitude 2 to 3 at our Residence.

We have been on Rokko meets Art 2016 for event day.