The First Entry...

おはよう！

My name is Davis and this is my Japanese blog for fall 2009! I've never actually made a blog but hopefully I'll get better at it as I go along. Until then though I'll do my best to try and add pics and different things.

A little about me-> I grew up in Baton Rouge, LA. I'm a French and Poli Sci double major and I'm in my third year here at ND. I have a strong interest in int'l relations and law and I'm hoping to get accepted to law school out west. Two of my roommates are from right around here in the Midwest and one is from the Tokyo suburb of Tsukuba. That brings me to why I chose Japanese...

At the beginning of summer 2008 I decided that I wanted to travel out to Japan and visit my roommate for a week. Coincidentally my cousin, a prof at Columbia, was also in Japan for the summer teaching some courses at a university in Tokyo. Thus, with the timing impeccable, my roommate and I decided it would be fun to spend a few days in downtown Tokyo staying at her apartment before going out to his house, a couple hours outside the city. As such I worked all summer to get the plane tickets and by the time late July rolled around, I was on my way to Narita int'l. After boarding the JAL flight at Los Angeles International, I could tell things were going to be very different. I thought the country was incredible. Other than a senior trip to Paris and a study abroad in Quebec (and my time here at ND), I had never really left the South before. Amazingly, despite what my roommate would try and throw at me, I found the food to be pretty good! The culture was fascinating- we did everything from testing out new technology on Odaiba Island to participating in a tea ceremony to even dining at a country noodle house near my roommate's hometown. On my last day there we decided to climb up the side of a mountain and visit a Shinto shrine near a summit. Of course we pulled fortunes while we were up there and luckily my roommate told me I had gotten a "best" category one. Before leaving, it struck me how much I had liked the trip despite how hurried it had felt.

I've always wanted to learn another language but I could never decide what path to pursue. I already know French, something that comes in handy with my European studies classes and being from Louisiana. Spanish of course has its usefulness. But then again why learn something that doesn't spark a real interest? I can always pick up another romance language but I probably won't have the time again to learn something as challenging as Japanese. So that's why I chose to study it. I like taking on new challenges- one of the reasons I decided to leave home and come up here to ND- and I'm looking forward to learning something completely different from anything else I've learned before.

Sorry for the wordiness... I'll try and keep things shorter and sweeter from now on. Good luck to everybody!

じゃあ、また！