8 months!

As of Monday, April 20th, I have officially been in Japan for 8 months. So that's exciting. Definitely the longest I have ever been away from home... by like 7 and a half months. Everything is still going well. I can tell that my Japanese has been improving, especially in the past couple months. My host mom gives me Japanese/Kanji lessons every night and they have done wonders. Last night, for example, she tested me on all the kanji I have studied up until then. All 300! And I only got 3 wrong. 99 percent!! whoo hoo! She has me studying like crazy. I am learning 10 new kanji every day and she tests me on them. We also write a little journal each day in Japanese and combine kanji I know to make words. It's all quite exciting. I really appreciate all the time my host mom takes to teach me each night. My goal is to know 500 kanji before I change families in a month. Which I should be doing with 10 a day anyway...

In other exciting news, I will have a host sister when I get back home! We are going to be hosting a Rotary student at our house starting in August and this week we found out who! She is a Japanese girl, from somewhere around Hiroshima, named Hikaru. I even emailed her in Japanese. All by myself!! :) So this is very exciting. I will get home August 1st and later in the month she will come! I hope I make a good host sister for her and I hope I don't speak Japanese with her. I want to help her learn English.

Speaking of host families, I have information about my third one now! Well, not really information about the family. I just know when I will be changing. May 24th. The day after my sports festival. It's going to be a crazy busy time then. May 23rd is my sports festival. That will go into the early evening. At some point that day (Saturday) my stuff will be sent to my third host family's house, but I will still be staying the night at my current house. The 24th is a family rotary dinner. I will go to that with the Umezaki's and go home with my next family. Around lunch that day my school friends want me to go to a party that they are having to celebrate the sports festival (?). Hopefully I will be able to go to that too, but we will see.

Preparation for the Taiikusai (sports festival) is really starting up now. My whole class is just so excited about it. You can feel it in the air. And we are still a month away. I have a feeling that this is a bigger deal here than anything we have in America for schools. This is bigger than Homecoming, which is the only thing that I can think of to compare it to. They are talking about strategies for the races, discussing the opening skit thing we will do, brainstorming ideas for t-shirts and costumes, and talking about the competition in every spare moment they have. Japanese girls hardly ever run, and more than one girl was telling me that they started running to train for this. We are going to have practices before and after school for the team events. I am starting to feel the pressure. I found out today that I am in the first heat, lane one of the 400m dash.

Oh, and going back to the opening skit... I saw the one from last year and it is more like a dance or show than a skit. There is no speaking in it. I guess the theme we picked for it this year is like time travel or something along those lines. Because this year is the 150th anniversary of Japan opening trade. Thanks to Commodore Matthew Perry. Guess who is going to be playing Commodore Perry in the skit? Yep, the American. They almost cried with happiness when I agreed to do it. For this whole taiikusai I have just decided that I will do anything they want me to do. I am going to have so much fun with this even if I have to dress up as a man and dance in front of a huge crowd.

I mentioned before that my Japanese has gotten better recently. Well, lately I have been understanding more of what goes on around me because of it. This has resulted in me finally being able to understand what people say about me, which is quite amusing to listen to. I always try to listen for comments when I walk to or from school now because I pass a lot of other students, most of whom are younger than me, on my walk to school. I hear lots of people I pass whisper dekai!(huge!) or sugoi!(wow) as I pass, but a few cuter ones happened today. I was leaving the school and there were three middle school girls sitting on a bench. One calls my name (maybe to see if it was my name) so I look back and smile. They all go "kawaii, ne?" Then as I was walking down the street there was a group of maybe 7 middle school girls walking a ways in front of me. One of them saw me and whispered, but I could hear, that I was behind them. Some of them turn around so I smile and wave at them. They all say, "Abbey wa kawaii, ne?" (Abbey's cute, huh.) and "amakunai?" (Isn't she sweet?) That made me laugh. Apparently middle school girls think I am cute and sweet.