Coping strategy #1

Living in a country and town whose institutions, cultural norms and topography I, at best, only partially understand presents many unexpected challenges in daily life.
One approach to dealing with situations for which I am not well-equipped is to, essentially, make a relatively large number of random shots into the area where I think the target might be most (or at least more) likely to be and hope that, with some patience, I can hit it. Even if you've only got a 1% chance, all you have to do is try 100 times, right?
For example: On Wednesday of last week I received my scholarship money. I really wanted to schedule a time to go with Miwa, my "tutor," to buy a mobile phone and electronic dictionary. Unfortunately, the only leads I had for contacting him were the mail address and number of his mobile phone (Japanese mobile phones use their own email addresses... Don't worry about it). Not having a phone, this wasn't terribly useful. So, on Thursday I decided that, since I didn't really want to eat lunch during the lunch-hour rush anyway, I'd try to find him. I had this much to go on:
1. I once saw him at lunch time shouting into a megaphone for some group or other on the corner of the little plaza/intersection where the long ginko-lined path ends in front of the cafeteria.
2. The day we met, he took me to the small food shop that's sort of between buildings 1 and 11, and commented that it was better to go there than the cafeteria or bigger co-op store, since the crowd is less oppressive.
3. On the same day, he then led me over to the benches around the fountain that's adjacent to the ginko-lined path, and we ate lunch there.

So, armed with these pieces of information about where he might be slightly more likely to be than other places else on the big campus at lunch time and also the feeling that maybe I could find him since, this campus having only somewhere around 9,000 students, compared to the 30,000+ I'm used to at UM, I tend to feel like I'm always bumping into people I know (which is a feeling I love, by the way).

And, after about ten minutes of walking between the cafeteria and fountain, I did in fact run right into Miwa, and we scheduled a time to meet on Saturday.