The Misadventures of José Faxner

But I don’t really know what about. Kinda weird, really, since there shouldn’t be any kind of shortage of things to write about… but still, here I am, drawing blanks. I had walking class today though. I guess I could talk a little about that.

So yeah, Walking class. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a class where we go walking. I had to take 12 credits for the fall semester, and since the Japanese classes I’m taking only cover 10, I needed to fill the last two out with something else. I could’ve taken some global economy class or whatever, but since the credits won’t transfer when I get back to Sweden, I figured I could take something fun instead. At first I was going to take Shodou (??, calligraphy), but since that class is held every Friday from 7PM to 8.40PM, I dropped it in favour of the aforementioned walking class, as well as Joudou (??, “the way of the stick”, a martial art where you use a 4 foot stick). Turns out it was a smart move; apparently the calligraphy class is absolutely horrible, and the teacher speaks in a way which someone described as “????????” (eigo janai eigo, “English which isn’t English”)… Neither the Japanese nor International students can understand anything she says, and on top of that the class seemed generally boring.

Luckily, my walking (and Joudou) teacher can speak English perfectly fine, the class is on Tuesday afternoon, and walking (unlike calligraphy apparently) is actually pretty fun. We’re a small class - the five of us from Sweden (Carl, Olof, Jonas, Thomas and myself), our friend Yi Chao from Singapore, and Mao, a Japanese girl who (I think) is doing her second year at AIU. Last week, we took a walk through the forest - though it was more like a crawl, because of the insane amounts of spider webs, all conveniently stretched face-height over the walking path - to a natural spring, where we got to taste the spring water, as well as have a short lecture on walking form. This week we continued to talk a bit about walking form, and took a 5 kilometer walk around the gargantuan sports complex right by the school. It was really nice; for once the weather wasn’t horrendously warm and/or humid, and I didn’t have to fear my impending, spider-caused death like I had in the forest the week before. It turned out to be a nice, hour-long stroll, definitely something I’ll want to repeat sometime when I have time off.