The first few days in Hakodate have been packed with placement exams, meeting people and sightseeing! We woke up before 5 AM to catch a plane to from Tokyo to Hakodate and didn't even get a chance to put our luggage away before being whisked off for hours of placement tests. Still, we had enough energy to do a little exploring after dinner on Thursday, and I walked around the brick warehouses and Hakodate Bay.
Elliot was brave enough to try the perplexing "salted squid guts" at dinner on our first night. They were very interesting and each bite had a few waves of very distinct but not quite unpleasant flavors.
On Saturday we had another test (very mysteriously labeled "SPOT Test" on our schedule,) which turned out to involve filling in blanks in sentences on paper while listening to extremely rapid Japanese.
Luckily, this rather painful test was mitigated by the excellent breakfast buffet provided at the hotel that morning. Observe on this plate: fresh Hokkaido milk, an entire squid, pumpkin, rice and various (unidentified) delicious side dishes. This is real Japanese food, not the California rolls or chicken teriyaki type things they sell at the Chinese-owned Japanese food places near my house.
Later on Saturday, I went with 9 or so other HIF students to the other side of Hakodate near the historic park. It was a several mile walk, and it started raining when we got there, so I'll have to go back again soon.
This morning, I woke up early again from jet-lag (時差ボッケ) and went to breakfast around 6:30. I like sitting there for a long time, because it's a great place to meet other HIF students and have conversations with them. I met two PhD candidates, one from the Harvard Divinity School and another from Southern Illinois University as well as several graduate students who told me about what they were studying.
After that, I went to the Asaichi fish market, where the vendors were selling mainly squid, king crab, sea urchin, and cantaloupe. The people in the stalls were so friendly and we talked to them and observed すごい seafood.
The most fun part was talking to the woman selling "taiyaki," little fish-shaped pancakes with red bean paste inside. While she cooked the taiyaki, we spoke to her in Japanese. I told her where I was from and what I was studying, and she explained how she made the foods she was selling (she's been making taiyaki for 50 years!) I couldn't understand everything she said, but we talked for probably almost 10 minutes, and I left with a feeling that my confidence in speaking had improved.
After a brief excursion to buy a little notebook to write all the new vocabulary I'm learning (today's kanji is 株, "kabu" or stock,) a group of us decided to try to hike Mt. Hakodate and then go to an onsen, or hot spring, which are famous in the area. We climbed part of the way up the mountain before reaching a dead end, so we decided to save the rest of the journey for another day and head to the onsen. We didn't realize that the onsen was also a public bath, divided up by sex, until we walked into a huge room of completely nude Japanese women: we turned from cool, Japan-savy foreigners to flustered, embarrassed, "baka na gaijin" in a split second! Still, we had already paid, so we reluctantly showered in the huge public shower area. After about 10 minutes, we got over our Western embarrassment and had a great time, and we were really happy that we went!
