Friday: Feeling... Fine?

Woke up Friday morning and sat up with the first thought running through my head being, "wow does my butt hurt..." It was around then I realized how true the words biker butt really were. However I needed to leave my behind where it belonged, behind me, and move on to the big event of the day. The placement test...

Now if I were a character in one of my Japanese dramas this is about the time that some epic background music would begin to play and my voice would start out slow and low as I describe the placement exam. It would then ride in both speed and pitch as I race to the finish of my speech and the music draws to a close with my elongated sentence. Picture this, sitting there looking at a paper with symbols galore. Everything looks like gibberish, your head starts to spin, and instantly your struck with a pain greater than you've ever before known. Instant headache is what they call it. It should come as no surprise then that taking a test with a listening comprehension, grammar comparable to the size of a text book, a reading and writing test that even the Egyptians would've dropped jaws at, and to top it all off, an intimidating interview with the infamous Aizawa-sensei. This was the test that would tell us where our destiny lay. You have to understand that before I came to Japan there had been great expectations placed on me... expectations which I was unfortunate enough to disappoint. But I held my head high as I was placed in level 2 out of 4 levels. This meant I was going to still receive an intense and rigerus training in the Japanese language, but I was still going to be able to what I set out to do upon coming here. Live.

Level 3 received their textbooks and first day assignments of which included a paper to be written in several kanji I did not yet know the meaning of, a test, and several reading assignments. It was then I knew that those in that level were going to spend the majority of their weekends holed up in their rooms studying while the rest of us are going to be out exploring Japan and taking in all it has to offer. Could I have made level 3? Yes. Am I glad I didn't? Oh yea...