January 11

I almost forgot how cold my room can get. The effect of heat is amazing. As I get warmer, I get so much happier. It’s so easy, I almost forgot. The other day on campus we walked through a patch of sunlight and it lifted my mood in just the same way, and I said Oh! The sun is just like a space heater! and Kate looked at me and said Yes, Emily, you could say that, in fact the sun is the original space heater.

I could write a book on gaijin travel patterns. We’re like freshmen, we travel in herds. But really it’s more like sheep. We had to get from one building to another today, and first we all followed Brian because he was in the front, but he kept saying that he didn’t know where he was going. This is about forty people we’re talking about. Next this enormous group found the right building, but after entering kept going right to following someone into the girl’s bathroom. Half of us were almost to the stalls when we realized we probably should have been going a different way. The worst part was having to walk back past amused Japanese students who were waiting outside their classroom and watching our blunder.

Nanzan might be the ugliest college campus I’ve seen. I will take some photos of it on Tuesday to explain to you, but it’s almost unbelievable. I wouldn’t mind if it was a good kind of industrial, but it’s just a we-don’t-even-want-to-finish-up kind of industrial. The buildings look like List Art outside and are grey and cavernous and cold and unfinished on the inside. On Friday we tried to find internet in the computer building, which turned out to be a whole bunch of floors with ugly, windowless rooms with ancient computers and cubicles. The computers weren’t quite the relics from my dream, but they were pretty old.