Karoke!

This past Tuesday (September 23) I didn't have school! It's the fall equinox, which just happens to be a national holiday here. It was really nice to have an extra day off. So... I went to Karoke! My apartment complex has a karoke room that you can rent out for only 500 yen (about 5 USD) for 3 hours. That's so cheap! My host dad and little host brothers and Iliana and I all went together. Karoke is a little different here than in the states. You don't do it with a huge group of strangers. Just with a small group of your friends or family. The rooms here can fit about 8 people. And it really isn't as embarrassing as you would think.

My little host brothers got to sing all their pokemon songs and the "ponya" song. I guess Ponya is an anime movie that came out recently here and it's unbelievably popular. Everyone from my host brothers to my friends at school sing the Ponya song. Iliana and I got to choose from the foreign songs. There were a lot of them, actually. My first ever karoke song was "Umbrella" and I sang it with Iliana. haha. My host dad had never heard of it (see Daddy, your not the only one!) but now my little host brothers go around the house singing, "ella, ella, ella, ay, ay...". I also sang some oldies like Dancing Queen with my host dad. It was a lot of fun. I'm sure I'll be doing that again with other rotary kids and friends from school.

School this week went okay. I started Volleyball. Most of the other girls are a lot better than me, but that's okay. I'll get better with a little more practice. After school from 4 to 6 is practice. After volleyball, I go home. I get home at about 7:30 and then eat dinner alone. I wish I could eat dinner with my host family, but I think it is important to get involved with a club here. Then I hang out with my host family for a little bit and go to bed. I am so exhausted on nights with volleyball. I will just have to get used to it.

Volleyball is really the only new thing going on with school. I am back to my regular schedule now. Everything seems to be going pretty well. I've made a lot of friends and am starting, just a little tiny bit, to get a hold on the language. My English-speaking friends at school decided to stop speaking English to me. It's actually really good. They all slow down their Japanese and then explain the words that I don't know. Which is about half of them. And the other half is mostly made up of words like wa and desu. (Wa is a subject marker used in pretty much every sentence and desu is like the verb for "is, am, are" and is also used in almost every sentence.) But this Wednesday was the first day that I actually felt optimistic about Japanese. Maybe I really can learn it!