Home.

I've been with my 3rd host family for less than a week and I already feel completely at home.  It is such a perfect fit.  This family has the same thing with music that my first family had with tatami-floored rooms filled with ancient gold-leaf-covered statues.  They just keep popping up when I least expect it.  Often, too.
I moved here on Saturday.  On Sunday I had a Rotary meeting in Matsumoto, and when I came home there was classical music blaring from my host dad's "Listening Room."
My host mom and host sister both are excellent at piano.
I have a host sister!  She's 14, which is fun because we're the same age difference as me and Molly, but this time I'm the big sister.  She's really nice and smart and sooooo good at piano.  I help her with her English homework.
My host dad is a doctor, and his clinic is the first story of the house.  We live on the second story.  The house is pink.  I'll put up a picture once I take one.  The house is so comfortable.  It is like somehow with this family complete comfort and Japanese culture can suddenly coexist.
One of the best things about having a host sister is the family-feeling it brings to the house.  My host mom and sister and I have tea and eat strawberries and chat every evening.  I really love it.  I discovered bancha, which is some sort of roasted Japanese tea, and delicious.
My host dad used to play the cello.  He doesn't really play anymore, but he still has a cello.  Before I knew this, we were talking about music and I mentioned that I've always wanted to play cello and accordion.  I get to use the cello!!  I practiced for about an hour yesterday, but I'm still working on making it make the right sounds.  It's my first time using a bow and not having frets.  The strings are different notes from mandolin, so I have to rethink all that too when I play songs.
I have not seen it yet, but apparently my host mom has an accordion that she's going to let me try!  So many life goals accomplished.
I really feel like I can be my true self for the first time in Japan.  The language ability helps, but I also feel like this family really cares about me, but even more they influence me to develop myself into someone I want to be.  They care about the same things as me, and they share it with me.  They also want to know about American culture in more depth than most people I've met here.  I've already had conversations about Irish influence on American folktunes and the spirit of New Hampshire and history and so many other things.  And they teach me about Japan too.
AND JAPANESE.  Oh my goodness, I think I've learned more in the past 5 days than I did in the prior 4 months. They [especially my host mom] help me SO much.  She teaches me the tough grammar and remembers which words I learned the day before and helps me remember them the next day and keeps a notebook for us-- one side for her new words and culture things, and one side for my new phrases and kanji. While my host dad is reading the newspaper, he'll often ask if I can read the kanji in the headlines.  If I can't he explains it to me, and usually explains the rest of the article too.
Food is so good here. My host mom is a really good cook, and she also gets lots of local food and healthy things and generally doesn't shop at the super market, but at little specialty stores.  She took me food shopping the other day, which was a lot of fun.  She doesn't drive, so we walked all around the town stopping at different bakeries, flower shops, and her co-op place.
My room is tatami-style!  It's my first time sleeping on futons and having such a traditional Japanese room.  So beautiful.  Pictures will come.
I'll probably continue ranting about how much I love my host family in the next posts, but for now I'm going to move on to culture stuff!

My host mom and I were talking about sandwiches [I forget why] and I was telling her about normal American types.  When I mentioned pb&j's she was completely shocked and thought it was really gross!  She'd never heard of it before.  When my sister came home from school, she told her, and my sister was disgusted too.

Haha. Japanese teenagers are so different from US ones.  Today in school, my teacher had all the girls sit at their desks in a circle, and all the boys sit in chairs across from them.  We had to talk for one or 2 minutes, and then the boy would move on to the next chair.  It was really challenging for them just to talk to someone of the opposite sex!  My teacher was doing this because he wants everyone to be able to function once they have jobs and have to work with the cootie-infested beings.  Some of the boys were completely silent, and I just had to keep asking them stupid things like their favorite food and age and stuff.  Strawberries are popular with Japanese boys, I've discovered.  Luckily I don't feel awkward easily, because the majority of the boys seemed terrified and someone had to make the conversation happen [although the person who can't speak the language all the way is not the most obvious choice... Oh well].  Anyway, it was pretty amusing to see the contrast.  When I told my friends that in the US boys and girls can talk to each other really easily and even hug each other, they were super shocked.

Today is the day that it becomes spring, according to Japanese old tradition.  Every year on this day, people throw soy beans around the house.  They throw them outside of a window or door in each room, saying "Oni wa soto!" [Demons outside!] and then into the room, saying "Fuku wa uchi!" [happiness in the house] and it is supposed to bring good luck and keep out bad things for 1 year.  Each year also has a direction, [this year is South-South-East] and most people eat a roll of sushi facing that direction.  I think this is a newer tradition.  They also put holly and seed pods on the door so that the demons can't get in.

That's all for now!  I'll put up pictures of my new house soon and hopefully make another post with all of the things I forgot in this one.

Family #3

I'm switching families again tomorrow.

This is my new address:

6-58 Akazuhigashi

Komagane, Nagano

399-4105 Japan

With my new family I'll have a little sister!!

Gotta go finish packing.

Write me letters! :P

Cultural Blabbering.

I realized I almost never tell y'all about Japanese culture.
I guess there is just so much of it that I don't know how to even begin to explain, so I just avoid the whole thing.
But it would be terrible to go this whole year without writing about the culture.
So I'll do it little by little.

At the end of every mandolin/guitar club practice, we all stand up and say "おつかれさまでした。”
This means "It was honorable tiredness."

We also stand up and bow at the beginning and end of each lesson.

I had a strange moment the other day during a lesson.  The teacher was talking and writing on the blackboard, so I was looking at him and the board.  Which I assumed was normal.  When a person talks, you look at him or her, right?  Apparently not.  He noticed and made a silly face at me and said I was strange.  I looked around and noticed everyone was staring off in a random direction, not at the board or the teacher.  Oops.

See why I feel overwhelmed when I think about explaining Japanese culture?  It is so different that I can't even configure my eyeballs correctly during a lesson.

That makes me sound so dysfunctional.  I promise I'm am actually a capable person and I've gotten quite used to Japanese culture.

Which is another reason I find it scary to explain it.

Little by little.  Sukoshi zutsu.


Random Note:
I really wish I could understand school.  My brain is starving.  I've started writing sonnets during chemistry and thinking up haikus [in Japanese] during math.  I also tried to make up my own related rates problem to solve, but that didn't go so well since I haven't taken calculus in 2 years, and I'm forgetting it really badly.
Dad, if you're reading this, you should take note and send me a math book.
Future exchangers: You may think your brain will be happy and fulfilled because it is taking in all this awesome language knowledge and culture knowledge, but I have found that there is still something missing.  The interacting type of knowledge.  There is plenty of the soaking-in type knowledge, but I suggest you bring books or some sort of thing to help you satiate the other type of knowledge.

Once again, I am realizing I should probably not write blog posts when I'm exhausted.  Sorry.  Again.

PS:  Also, I'm sorry to anyone who reads the Current that I've been neglecting you.

Normal? Also, kanji battles.

Sometimes I can't tell if people in a photographs are Asian or not.  They just look "normal" and my brain can't get beyond that.  Since I have two definitions of normal now, I end up not being able to tell.  Strange.

Studying Kanji.  I have 17 pages in my notebook like this.  I WILL BE FLUENT!! 

I won't be writing in my blog for the next few days because my dad and sister are visiting and I'll be in Tokyo!  After that, I think I'll attempt to write every day again.

More rambling about stoves. I don't really know why I write about them so much...

You know how I was worried about mixing high school students and super hot stoves?  I was somewhat justified, but not entirely.  No one has been severely wounded yet.  BUT at least 2 of my friends have gotten little burns on their fingers. This probably has a lot to do with the discovery that they can melt their fingernails on the metal chimney pipe.  Also, a few days ago my friend's hair was smoking because she was leaning down next to the stove.  I, too am guilty, of nearly setting myself on fire.  My socks started to smoke when I was trying to warm my feet.  These things are seriously hot.

Yet for some reason, all points in the classroom more than 2 feet away are still freezing.   I can see my breath.  I've taken to wearing at least 3 shirts and a sweater and wool socks or 2 pairs of socks.

The ridiculous thing is that it isn't even cold here.  It's about 30 F degrees everyday.

But sitting still all day in school is still cold.

♪ ♫

Today was just a normal day, so here is a video.

This is one of the songs my mandolin group plays.

Since I am 2nd mandolin, my part is more similar to this video's guitar part, but with some of the mandolin part mixed in.  I'm so impressed by my friend [Nanako, I've written about her before] who plays 1st mandolin.  [Unless you listen till about 2 minutes in you won't see the impressive part.]  We play it even a little faster than this video, and she never ever makes mistakes.

If I ever have a video of my group playing, I'll share it, but for now all I can offer is what I found on youtube.

Anrakuji is a magical place.

Today was really nice.  I spent the whole afternoon and evening at Anrakuji with my old host family and Annika!  I truly love spending time with my old host family.  They feel like my real family, and are so wonderful to be around.  I think it is because they are all genuinely happy people, and that happiness spreads to the people around them and creates an atmosphere of comfort and acceptance and love.
And it is nice to spend time with Annika, because no one can really understand the life of an exchange student except another exchange student, especially one in the same country.  She is also just fun to be around :]
It was the first time Annika had been to Anrakuji, so I got to show her around and explain all the murals and customs.  We played New Year's games [one where you flick little round chips across a horizontal dart board, trying to knock off the other person's pieces and get your own into the high scoring areas, and a card game] and ate yummy food [I forget the name, but it is a big pancake made of cabbage and lots of other things with Japanese sauce and mayonnaise.]

Today was simple and happy.

I love the kotatsu!

Annika in the grocery store