Taga, Omika, and Japanese

Whew, boy are my feet tired. This morning Peter and I decided to spend the afternoon walking around some of the towns between us to get to know them better. We met in Hitachi Taga and I showed him where the church was and we walked around some more, but honestly didn't see much. Perhaps we took a fairly uninhabited road... we'll take a different one next time. I honestly just don't know Taga well enough to know where anything is. I'm not even sure what is there to see besides the church. :) They do have an awesome recycle shop where I got my awesome blue couch (see story on September 6). But I have never walked around Hitachi Taga, just been driven through it. We decided to jump back on the train and go to the next town over, Omika, which I was very interested in looking around. Omika is home to Ibaraki Christian University, the sister school to my alma mater and home to the exchange students I taught last year at OC. Plus I know a handful of people on faculty there. As far as location, all I knew was that the school was supposedly very close to the station. At the station Peter and I examined the map trying to find it in the mess of kanji. Luckily, Peter is a genius who has already learned a ridiculous amount of Japanese, so he was able to find it quickly. We found the campus pretty easily, but IC is a junior high, high school, and university. We toured around, and the campus is really quite nice. Very green and lush. We walked through some buildings and I suggested we look for the English department, since 1) they would speak English and 2) that's where I know people. Peter was able to ask where the English department was and we actually found it! Unfortunately, there was no one there. However, the trip was overall a success because now we know how to find the English department at IC, should that need ever arise. The OC study abroad group arrives next Sunday night and is going to have a big cookout, and I hope to go to that. After IC we still had a good half hour or so before Peter had to catch the train back to Mito, so we walked down the main drag of Omika. Guess where that leads... to the ocean! :) Omika has a nice view, but we couldn't find any way to get down to the beach. We walked back to the station and parted ways. Peter is a good travel buddy. I'm sure we'll have plenty more opportunities to go places over our two years here.
We had a good talk about the Japanese language. We both agree that it seems somewhat archaic for a modern country and language to be using a system like kanji. It seems to me that it would help both the worldwide and local literacy rate if Japan became a completely phonetic language and just got rid of kanji. :) Hiragana and katakana are fine... they're just alphabet systems... but it does seem silly to me to have a whole different alphabet just for foreign words. But obviously they didn't ask me when devising the linguistic system. :) Peter has high language goals for his time in Japan. I don't remember them exactly, but they're ambitious. And I know he can do it if he puts his mind to it. My goals are simply to be able to communicate things I want (like a meat and bread only hamburger at McDonalds) and to be able to have simple conversations with my co-workers at school and people at church. But I think my goal is going to end up being keeping up with Peter. I was so jealous that he could communicate with people at IC and I couldn't. :) I suppose envy is one form of motivation! Haha... So I'm going to just relax the rest of the night, brush up on my hiragana, try to learn some more katakana, and make some kanji flashcards to learn. I don't need to waste this time in Japan.