Well, last night was my first Japanese class. I left work about 10 minutes early so I could make sure to be there on time. You never know how 66 is going to be and I really wasn't sure how long it'd take me to get the rest of the way by metro. I left myself a little over 2 hours. It took me exactly 45 minutes from the time I left work to the time I was standing in front of the building where the classes were being held. So I had a bit of time to kill.
When I tried to get into the building, the doors were locked, but there was a little phone where you could talk to someone who, supposedly, would open the door for you. I saw a few other people do it and I probably should've just gone in with them then. Instead, I tried myself. When the person answered, I said I was there for the Japanese class and they asked me for a code word. I said I didn't have one and they said I needed one, but they'd make some calls for me about it. Then they hung up. This was bizarre. Others had been let through with no problems. Luckily, some other people came up and were let in, so I followed them.
The class itself was interesting. There were 6 other people in the class, 4 girls, 2 guys. Our teacher's only been in the country for a year now. Her English isn't quite there yet, but... it's far better than my Japanese, so I'm not judging. The first class went fairly slowly, but I'm a bit glad about that since the language seems rather difficult to learn. Though she kept stressing that English was much harder for a Japanese person to learn because of all the consonant sounds and consonant pairs, that really didn't make me feel more confident. Still... back in the day when I'd really gotten into astronomy, I managed to memorize the lower case Greek alphabet. I should be able to handle hiragana. Or so I've lead me to believe.