So I’ve completed my first week of classes and my first week of living with my Japanese host family, and so far everything is going just swimmingly. It was pretty relieving to get back into the classroom, as I spent the last several months sitting on my ass refreshing webpages.
My host family is pretty gawrsh-dern awesome, I think I really lucked out in that department. My host mother (hitherto referred to as Okasan) is really nice and talkative, and I can already tell that my language comprehension is increasing. It’s this particular family’s 15th time hosting exchange students, so they also know what they’re doing. Their house is about a 40 minute bus ride away from campus, so I get to play “towering figure on public transportation” on a daily basis. A definite plus.
I’ve also got a host brother and sister, who’re 23 and 26. It’s not uncommon for kids to live with their parents while working after leaving school in Japan, so it’s not like these are kids sitting in the basement playing Warcraft and shouting for hot pockets and bedpans. They’re also great people, and I can proudly say that after less than a week of living in their home, they’ve already made some gay jokes at my expense. It’s like I never even left America.
I’m doing all the Japanese-y things like sleeping on a futon and using chopsticks and all the crap, adjusting pretty quickly. The Japanese student population of my school doesn’t actually start classes until the 27th of September, but several kids hang around with hopes of meeting foreigners. The school also arranges all these little get-together type thingeroos to help foreigners explore and make friends and whatever. I’ve gone to one, a trip to Kyoto (in which I found out that Japanese schoolgirls think I look like the guy who plays Harry Potter – not sure if that’s a compliment or not) but other than that I’ve had a hard time signing up for outings. I tend to idle at anti-social, but I’m TRYIN goddammit, I’m TRYIN.
I think it’ll take me around a month of living here to start picking out things to concentrate posts on/bitch about. Until then, it’s excerpts from my oh-so-lucrative life. And photos, on the rare occasion that I take any worth showing to people. Until next time…
Zantetsuken! 