Sea Paradise

Saki, Risako, Nozomi, Haruna, Abbey, Rina, and Nana


Today, I went to Sea Paradise with some of my friends from school. It is an amusement park/aquarium. It was a lot of fun. We spent the morning going on the various rides like the one big roller coaster and the big droppy tower thing. It was 107 meters high (351 ft.) and it was really fun! We also went on the spinny ride and the big boat that swung back and forth and some octopus ride that is mostly for little kids. It was still fun. One thing about the rides here is that they are made for Japanese size people. I barley fit! On the roller coaster, my knees were up against the seat in front of me and the harness thing was just a little too small. It worked just fine, but I was a little too tall for it to come down really comfortably. I couldn't sit up totally straight in it.





We went to the food court for lunch. I got Udon. It was really good. I wish food courts in America had that good of food. Then we went to the aquarium and saw all the different animals. I think my classmates set a record of how many times they can say the word "Kawaii" in one day. For those of you who don't know, kawaii means cute. Usually for the small fuzzy animal type of cute, but they call me kawaii when I try to speak Japanese and when they saw me this morning. (I was wearing something other than my school uniform for the first time in front of them. They also commented on how long my legs are. I guess they do look longer in jeans than in the skirt.) I'll take it as a compliment. The aquarium is really big and really nice. We even got to go to a show! We saw the dolphins and seals and walrus do tricks and stuff. It was really cool.

Another thing we did was pirikura. They are Japanese photobooths where you take the
pictures and then you get to decorate them on the computers. It prints out little stickers of the pictures and you can get them sent to your phone, too. It was really fun.





Today was a really fun day. I also have tomorrow off of school, so that's nice! I had school on Saturday for an open campus thing. We only had 2 hours of school, but it was so parents could come in and see how the classes are run here. It's a private school so they have to compete a little to get students. It was really short and we get the whole day off tomorrow, so I guess that's a pretty good deal. Okay, this was a lot of blogging tonight and I am all done! I'll be adding my pictures to these entries in the next couple of days.

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!

Yacht Party!

I have once again failed to update my blog in more than a week, so now I have a few different posts to put up tonight and tomorrow. I just get so busy during the week with school and now volleyball. Anyway, more about that later. This post is about my yacht party which was last Saturday. September 20th, which happened to be the my one month mark. Yay for surviving my first month of exchange!

Saturday morning, I met up with some of the kids from Rotary. There was me, Iliana (Mexico), Felipe (Equador), Shintarou (Japanese- went to Mexico last year), and Vincent (Ohio, USA), who had us all over. We went to one of his host parent's apartments first where we used the hot tub in the basement and then the pool on the roof. It was a little cold. I really didn't want to get in, but Shintarou didn't really give me any choice in the matter... thanks a lot.

Felipe, Iliana, Shintarou, Vincent, and me on the roof.



After we were done there, we went and bought our lunches at a convenience store and then brought them to the yacht at the Zushi Marina. We watched the get it all ready and then we took off! It was really fun. I even got to drive it! The boat wasn't too big, but it was really nice. The place we went sailing is on the southern side of the little peninsula I am on. The ocean that I usually see is Tokyo Bay, but this was actually the Pacific Ocean. We stopped the boat after a while and all of us jumped into the ocean off the end. It was really fun.





Driving the yacht!


Me and Iliana


Vincent, Me, Iliana, and Shintarou



We returned to the dock and then went to Vincent's host parent's other apartment. Yes, they have two apartments. And a yacht. And a house. All within a couple hours of the rest. At the apartment we showered and then we all went to Kamikura Station. We had dinner at a nice and cheap Italian restaurant. We had Italian because it won over McDonald's when we flipped a coin. Then, we went and got ice cream and went home. It was a really fun day.

Me, Shintarou, Iliana, and Felipe after getting ice cream.