With great freedom comes great responsibility.

The freedom I speak of is that that sees me taking only 6 hours of language classes a week. This is compared to the 4.5 – 6 hours a day that my Sheffield classmates are taking in other universities around Japan.

If I’m not to fall hopelessly behind I am going to have to be really disciplined, and just make myself study outside of uni hours.

Yellow bridge over the Sumidagawa

I’ve drawn up a list of daily excercises that I’ve promised myself I will carry out without fail. This includes reading time, TV (or TBS online news) time, vocab time and kanji time. I bought my first Japanese newspaper tonight.

I’ve really enjoyed spending time with my friends from Sheffield, especially those times when we all speak Japanese (like much of yesterday). It becomes so natural, and we can learn so much from one another. For example, today I taught Jon the word for ‘poo’.

A huge gang of us visited the Edo Tokyo museum near Akihabara today, great stuff. Amazing building, straight out of Star Wars. I’m not usually a big fan of museums but thoroughly enjoyed today’s trip. Following that, we walked up the Sumidagawa (past the national Sumo Stadium where the grand final of this years season was taking place – saw some real live Sumo-san’s too!), past the golden sperm (which was glistening beautifully, see Flickr in a couple of days time), and along to Kikowotsitmon with the huge lantern.

I really must cut down on my alcohol intake. Felt utterly exausted for much of the day today. I blame my living arrangements, as at the moment I have no inclination to return to the cell. As of next Wednesday though that will all change; the promise of a *Twinkle* at the other end of the train line will be more than enough to draw me home before I descend into the murky depths of tales of a time gone by.

Righty-ho then, time to copy my daily vocab onto flash cards from the denshi jisho.

jaa ne!