Slowly Coming to an End

Maybe the title of this is misleading, because we don't leave Japan until August 4, but in a way things are already coming to an end. For one, our last day at the language school will be on Monday. It will be the last time that all 23 of us students will be together.

This week in school we mostly just worked on our individual speeches and group presentations again, which is for Monday.
If there's one thing that let me down the most during my time here, it's the school. Or at least how my class turned out. It's a good school and all and the teachers are nice and we went on some great field trips. However, not one thing that my class studied was new material for me. They divided the AFS students into three classes based on a placement test that we took on the first day. Class A is for beginners while class C is for more advanced students. I'm in class B. But really, it's more like classes A and B are for beginners, because we learned similar things and received some of the same work-sheets. The big differenece is that class A is for people who haven't learned kana yet while students in class B know at least hiragana already. I think to get into class C you would have to know enough kanji.
Sometimes it seems to me that they divided us based on how much we know the Japanese writing system. I don't know. The thing is, class B wasn't much of a class for people in the middle. I know they can't divide us into a bunch of little classes, but an actual intermediate class or something would have been nice.
I don't feel like my class covered much, but maybe that's because I had already studied the material we learned. But, for example, my class didn't learn new things this week because we spent a ton of time preparing for Monday and whatever, while class C was still learning new grammar, I believe.
I'm not saying I belong in class C though. I don't know if I do. I could have learned a lot more, but perhaps it would also have been too advanced for me. But what also annoys me is that some of the grammer that I used in the written part of the placement test was what my class was taught during the third week of school.

Anyway, although what my class was taught wasn't satisfying to me, I usually had a great time at school. It was a lot of fun to hang out with the other students. I really enjoyed it.
Still, sometimes I become sad that I'm not as close with the others as I could have been. I'm not very good at becoming friends with people, and it's apparent. It's saddening. I'm better at tagging along, I guess. I'm happy that I could spend time with the other students, even if I don't entirely belong sometimes. (sorry, I'm feeling pessimistic again)


On Wednesday, there was an earthquake. Actually, I don't even know if I should call it an earthquake, because it was so tiny. I woke up almost two hours before my alarm was to go off. I was just lying in bed when I started to hear rattling and noticed a little wiggling. It was 6:20 am. It didn't even last a few mintues, I believe. Nothing in my room fell over.
I've spent most of my life in Massachusetts or Germany, so I'm not used to these kinds of things. I wasn't scared though. I was sleepy.