Bye Bye Brother

Why is everyone complaining about it being cold? Silly Australians and American Southerners... Except the Swedes and Austrians were also saying that...

Saw Sean off at the airport, (Wooo! hour each way on the airport "limousine" bus!). We had some ups and downs while he was here, though I guess that`s kinda normal. I sort of miss him now as well, I keep having to remind myself that he`s not around now. On the other hand, I can now get back to the none to minor task of my own life now...

Also, news just in, but he`s stuck in Dubai due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. I seem to be missing all sorts of calamities befalling the UK this year; the snow, now this. Maybe safer not to go back...

Back on campus most days now, though I have Mondays off this term due to timetable oddness...

First Physics lecture in Japanese! Not too bad actually... I`m unsurprisingly the only non-Japanese person in the class, so there were many odd looks of "are you sure this is the right class room for you?", although due to the massive class and tiny classroom they couldn`t really avoid me hehe.

The lecture it`s self was a first year classical mechanics one, and I`m not yet sure if they just have a different system from us and do all their practice questions in their tutorials, but we basically seemed to be running through a list of coordinate systems with very little explanation of how it works and what it does... Fine by me, as I basically took the whole thing as a useful little (if rather obscure) vocabulary lesson: 微分方程式（Bi-butsu-hou-tei-shiki), which is obviously "Differential Equation", and 位置ベクトル （I-chi-bekutoru, location vector) Which everybody of course says every day... (Ironically, one of the other exchange students mentioned they learned the Kanji for "vector" today. Someone should tell the physics department about it. They just write it in English with Japanese phonetics lol)

Placement tests are, as always, ongoing. Today was essay writing. I chose my question of "a social problem in your country" and wrote a fairly horrifically fascist piece about refugees and Immigration, which rather quickly became a celebration of what I called "The UK`s brave defence of humanity". Obviously this isn`t really a social problem so I tacked on a "On the other hand, native British culture is disappearing. The future of my country is uncertain..." on the end.

The best bit about this whole thing was I basically just wrote out the trailer for "Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society", which I bought a few months back and only watched the trailer of because it was so frikkin hard to understand (it didn`t even have Japanese subtitles). Anyway, from the trailer I did manage learn "The policy of refugee naturalisation will have unexpected consequences", which I basically rephrased and wrote variations of throughout the essay...

Geek moment: Sean bought me the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie for my birthday (thank you very much also to Stevie for the Vivienne Westwood sweat-rag/hand-towel :-)). It`s cool.

Hmm, seems Minami (陽) and I have entirely given up on even pretending we still like each other...