Going to Kyoto in August, and am extremely excited about it. I will stay at the very least a week, if not a month. Made a friend who was studying here in Toronto for a year, he just went back to Japan yesterday. Looking forward to seeing him again.

My Japanese lessons start on March 24th, and hopefully by august I will be at least semi-conversational, though probably horribly slow
The course is immersion, two and a half hours of no english at all, every saturday. I don't know if we will learn any Kanji in the level 1 classes, but perhaps by the end of level 2 we will have covered a few at least. I already have Hiragana and Katakana down, so I will at least be able to read my textbook

Wish me luck!