2011.10.25. Sustainability Course. Day 2.

Class started at 8:45 AM this morning.  I almost forgot that it wasn't at 10 AM.  At 8:35, I remembered.  I quickly got dressed and galloped down the sidewalk to the donut shop at Sapporo Station (main transportation hub for the city).  I grabbed myself a couple of donuts and continued on to class.  A funny aside.  Yesterday, Ben and I discovered the donut shop and were ripe for new cultural experiences.  So we each decided to grab one donut that we hadn't had before and one that we thought we'd enjoy for sure.  Ben first ate into his "strange" donut, but it was relatively normal cake donut of some unknown flavor.  His "safe" choice actually had some sort of meat product in it, while he had expected some sort of fruit filling.  My safe choice was simply a glazed donut which was really quite tasty.  My strange donut was acceptable, but actually fish sauce on one side of it.  Pretty funny.

So I got to class 4 minutes late, but it ends up that everybody was running behind schedule.  So it was just fine.  We had a morning lecture on sustainable agriculture that was actually pre-recorded.  It was okay, but not great.  We were scheduled to have a different speaker, but he had actually gotten sick and couldn't make it to class.  Our 2nd speaker was Dr. Fukushima whom is teaching in Taiwan.  So we had a distance lecture and his subject was "Systems thinking and Life cycle analyses".  It was actually a very good lecture that brought up a good discussion among the 10 students.  That was all we had scheduled for the day.

I recommended that all of the students grab lunch together today, since we hadn't really hung out at all as a group.  Some of the students are quite shy.  I don't know if they are self-conscious of their English or if its just their personality or culture, but I'll keep working on them...  :)  Some of them certainly seemed to open up a bit.  We just ate at a campus cafeteria.  It ends up that there were 3 different lines (each quite long) and I didn't know that ahead of time.  So I wanted a noodle dish, but was in the wrong line for it (which I discovered when I got to the front of the line).  So I just got some random Japanese dishes that looked like they might be good.  It was all fine and only cost 314 Yen ($4), but I was still hungry after eating.  Hmmm....  Not good.  I could have gotten 2nds, but  I just decided to get dessert.  So we found a convenience store, and I found some tasty frozen Japanese dessert.  It seemed to be some sort of frozen sweet dough with ice cream in the middle.  Yum.  I like.