Catching up (Part 3)

Dated 09.01 at 630 AM (this morning to me)

-----

Well, so far everything is going more-or-less smoothly, so a few notes on how things work around here...
The biggest change for me so far is the shoes, which is two-fold. First, you leave your shoes in cubby holes to the side of the front door and walk around the entire building in socks (or barefoot). In addition, when you go to the bathroom there are little slip-on shoes to put on, though the emphasis seems to be on "little"; I don't think more than 1/2 of the guys on this floor can fit those shoes onto their feet.
The room I'm in is about 20'x12', the front being 4'x12' and being the entranceway + closets; the second part is 12'x12' and is a tatami floor with a floor-level desk and two futons to sleep on. The last 4'x12' is a normal study space: 2 desks, chairs, lighting, and storage space. There's AC in the room and building, though.
The roads around here are very small; most are one-lane roads (driving on the left) with either a bike lane(ish) or sidewalk. Despite this, I've seen large shops just out of nowhere, where it would be considered a back-alley in the US.
Someone else pointed this out to me, but I think I've seen one bench so far, including in parks.
Other things...
Just about every Japanese ready-made dish I have seen in an american supermarket I've seen here as well.
Fruit here is expensive, to put it mildly. Most of the melon I've seen around here is cut into 6ths and costs $2 a slice. Apples are a bit better at about $.80/per.
I'm having a pretty hard time with my sleep schedule so far. So far, I've pretty much hit a wall around 8:00PM, fall asleep by 9:00, and wake up at about 5:30AM. I need to shift that about 3 hours forward, but I just get exhausted way too early.
Yesterday was 35 degress celsius, and humid. I was out walking with people a good part of the day, and it really felt like umpiring behind the plate with all the gear on; I guess the nice part about that is that it really wasn't unbearable.
Internet Status: I can ping to a couple servers, but I can't get any internet around here. One thing the school is asking is to setup a "proxy connection to [web address port 8080]" and I still haven't figured out just what that means.
Pictures: I didn't install the software before I left, and I need an internet connection for the installation. So, nothing for a little while.
I found a vending machine yesterday that dispensed Mountain Dew in 20ish oz. cans, and it was easily better than US Dew. Sugar > HFCS. The problem is that around here, it seems Coke is king, so I don't know how many other vending machines I could possibly find that have it.