Space World

Today I went to Space World. It was actually really fun. My host brother Yuchi, who is 27, and his friend and his friend's girlfriend, who are also in their late 20's, took me. They were really nice, and even though they don't speak much English, and I don't soeak much Japanese, we had a really fun day. There was one huuuge ride that Yuichi and his friend loved, so they made us ride it SEVEN TIMES! It was great though, we rode the ride so many times that we figured out where the camera on the ride was and we posed for our pictures... I bought one of them. :) The bad part of the day was I spilled ice cream on myself, and I got 23 mosquito bites. I'm not kidding, I counted and I have 23. Haha it's horrible! One funny part of the day was the way that the three of them kept picking up phrases from me. For instance, when we were about to get on one ride, I looked up and said, "Oh man." And they just thought it was hilarious and were saying it all day. The same went for "Geez," and when I saw the ride that we went on 7 times I said, "Scary!" and they just cracked up. It was really fun. My legs itch sooo bad though. I hate mosquitos. Haha. Tomorrow I am going to Kumamoto Caste, the hot springs, and another fireworks festival, so probably a longer blog in a couple days. :)

all the titles of my blogs are lame:)

Hello again. :) Today I went to see Harry Potter, so that was fun. I also started on the 5 minute speech in Japanese. So far I have about fifteen sentences about my family in the U.S. and I called my dad and read it to him tonight. But other than that it has been a pretty uneventful day. Since I have already told you my schedule for the whole weekend, I thought I would tell you some news that I heard today.

Remember the creepy dentist? Well Mrs. Epp you were right, he is actually a really nice person. Today we were leaving school and he ran up to us, holding a bag. In the bag was a small photo album he had made for us with all the pictures he had taken. I thought it was so strange the number of photos he made us pose for, but today I realized it was so he could make this gift for us. And that isn't all! On the 23rd of July, he is taking us out to lunch again and he said he has more gifts for us. He bought all four of us yukata (this is like a kimono, but it is lighter for the summer season.) I was amazed. To get a good quality yukatta is an expensive gift for four teenagers that you've only met a couple times! He said we each have a yukata, a robe, and the traditional wooden sandles (they have a name, but I can't remember it.) He told me that mine is pink and Noemi's is violet, and I don't remember about Cameron and Daniel's. Still, it is incredibly generous. I will now come home with two yukata! Can't wait to show you all. :)





Melissa:
Maybe when I give my presentation about Japan at Smith Cotton, you can be my assistant and wear one yukata while I wear the other. Sound good? :)

konbanwa! (that means good evening)

Hello everyone. Sorry i haven't posted a new blog sooner, not much has happened the past couple of days. Last night Noemi and I went to a fireworks festival with my host parents, but it started raining and I was the only one who had an umbrella. I offered it to my otoosan and okaasan, but they refused and used newspapers instead, haha. At least I got some funny pictures out of it. Tonight I went to an ikibana, or traditional flower arrangement, class. It is a class thatmy okaasan and her friends take, and it was hosted at the same house as the tea ceremony. When you first walk in the house there is a bucket that has bundles of flowers wrapped in newspaper, one for each person. Then you are to mae a flower arrangement and get graded on it by the sensee, and then draw your work. It was interesting. I got to make one too but with less fancy stuff, and mine wasn't that good, haha.

Since I don't have much new news I thought I could tell a couple funny things that have happened while I have been here. When I first arrived in Japan, the stress and travel and climate changes made me break out. My second night here my host parents pointed at my face and said, "What's that?" and i said, "Acne." Since they weren't familiar with the word acne, they looked in up in the small computerized dictionary in the kitchen. Once they figured out what it was they were like, "Ohh acne, I see," and I figured that was the end of it. But I didn't realize that whenever they would introduce me to their friends they would say, "This is Audrey. SHe has acne." I swear they introduced me to at least 3 people that way! I kept thinking, "Is that really the only quality that I have worth mentioning the first time my family introduces me to someone??" Haha. I don't think that they realize that that is rude and embarrassing. Maybe it was just odd to see since almost every Japanese person I have met has had perfect skin (lucky!). Thankfully my face cleared up after a week and they stopped introducing me like that.

Another thing that I think is funny is dinner time. The way to say "time for dinner," in Japanese is, "gohan desu yo." But my host dad likes to say, "Audrey, come and get it!" It's hilarious. My host mom prefers to say it in Japanese, but my host dad just loves yelling "come and get it."

The way my name is pronounced here is so cute. They literally say, "O-DO-REE." When Noemi and I went to a big dance festival in Kurume, the announcers kept saying "odori," before every act. And I kept wonder why they were saying my name? I learned a week later that "odori" means "dance." Another funny thing about my name is there is currently a male commedian who is very popular among young people in Japan. So when I went to the middle school earlier this week and I was wearing a name tag, all the kids there thought it was hilarious that my name is Audrey.

Tomorrow I am going to see Harry Potter at the movie theatre (in English with Japanese subtitles... haha), Saturday my family is having a barbeque, Sunday I am going to Space Workd (an amusement park) with my host brother Yuichi and his friend, and Monday I should be going to Kumamoto Castle and a big fireworks festival. So I will have a long blog coming in a few days. :) Only 5 days left of Japanese language school, and then a five minute speech in Japanese!

Audrey

great day :)

Today we went to school, as usual. Then at 2:00 the four of us got to spend an hour at a Japanese middle school just a block away from our teacher's home. Today I joined English class with a group of 14 and 15 year olds, tomorrow I will join a Music class, and Wednesday I will be in a Math class (ew.. haha). But it was great. The second I walked in, all of the girls started screaming, "kawaii, kawaii!" which means "cute, cute," haha. Everyone was really nice and I got to introduce myself in Japanese, and then join the class.

After school today, I finally bought a kimono. I wasn't really planning on it until I read the comment on one of my previous blogs from Mrs. Engles saying that I should. And even then I was skeptical, because even the poorer qualitly kimonos here are over 100 dollars. But then today, in a store above Kurume Station, I found one for about 39 U.S. dollars! It's not really a traditonal pattern, because those are really only pretty if they are silk. The cotton traditional patterns just look a little cheesey. But it's really pretty and I am excited. :)

Last night's sushi was wonderful. There is rotating belt inbetween two long rows of tables, so the sushi literally just moves right past your table and you grab what you want. Thankfully, orange plates warned you if there was wasabi, and white plates said there was none. :)

Now I am watching sumo wrestling on tv, and I am about to go to the post office to mail a box of gifts home. Miss you all. :)



Melissa: Your comments never fail to make me smile, so please keep them coming. You are clever and wonderful and we will open a Mrs. Donuts when I get home and make lots of money. When I get home we can sit on my couch with bugles and cups of ice and Gilmore Girls and Law and Order (SVU of course).

Mama, Daddy, Ethan: You're going to love your Japanese gifts. :) Can't wait till Shun comes, and he can continue my Japanese lessons. After I'm fluent (HA), he and I can teach you guys. Love you so much. And tell Mary I love her, and she of course will be getting a gift from Japan as well.

Mrs. Epp and Mrs. Engles: Thank you for your support, your comments, and for always reading my blog. You're both wonderful.


Aud:)

japanese tea ceremony

This weekend has been great, and it's not quite over yet. On Saturday I went to a camp in Tachibana Village. There were lots of AFS and EF students there. They included:

Me :)
Noemi, from Italy, AFS
Cameron, from Illinois, AFS
Daniel, from New York, AFS
Alex, from Los Angeles, AFS
Michelle, from Switzerland, AFS
Oscar, from Australia, EF
Sarah, from Germany EF

Everyone there was great, and a few Japanese students joined us as well, but I am sorry to say I forgot their names!


The site was beautiful, and I have lots of new pictures! There was a stream that ran directly through that had a bridge and a small waterfall, and a mountain path that we walked. The cutest thing happened while we were there. There was apparently a bunch of elementary school kids that were on a baseball/softball team also using the facility. Next to the eating area was a large square shallow concrete pool. It was filled with water and the Japanese children were going crazy running around the pool and splashing and grabbing at the water. When Noemi and I got closer, we saw that the pool was filled with mackeral, small fish! And the kids were supposed to catch the fish with their hands and put them in a big trash can filled with water (we didn't know until later that after all the fish we caught, they were put on sticks for the kids to cook in the fire). But they smiled at the small group of teenage foreigners that surrounded them and invited us to join. Michelle and I were the only students out of the 8 of us who would! Haha, so we rolled up our jeans and hopped in. It was hilarious. The fish were insanely fast, and so were the little kids. Finally Michelle and I each caught a fish and help them up and took pictures. Then we all ate dinner, played cards for a couple hours, and went to bed.

The next morning (Sunday), we packed up our stuff and headed home. After taking showers, Noemi and I had the honor of attending a tea ceremony at one of my neighbor's house. I will warn you right now that there were a million tiny details to this ceremony and it was beautiful, but my description will definitely not do it justice so I apologize in advance.

We walked in and took off our shoes as usual. Then we were escorted into a traditional Japanese room, with tatami mats and sliding doors with screens. Everyone else knelt while Noemi and I were led to chairs! We were obviously were being given special treatment, so we said it was really okay for us to kneel. We had been to a couple restaraunts where you removed your shoes and knelt the whole meal, so we thought we could handle it. I can't speak for Noemi, but kneeling for that long was extremely painful! Finally they offered us small stools that you sit on and tuck your legs on each side, so it mimics kneeling without putting so much pressure on your ankles and making your toes numb. I saw later that both of my host parents have caulics (spelling?) on their feel from kneeling so much during their lives, and it was obviously painful. Anyway, once we sat down and it was apparent that the ceremony was about to start, Noemi motioned to her camera and asked if it was ok for us to take pictures. My okaasan (host mother) shook her head a little sharply, so we put them away. We didn't really know what to do or when to bow and we obviously looked as clueless as we were. But we soon found that the man running the ceremony didn't mind at all. He told us we were welcome to take pictures and helped give us some instruction. Roughly, this is the order of the ceremony:

1. After kneeling, everyone is given a small paper napkin and a plate with two types of candy on it is passed around and you are to take one of each. One was a small flower shape and one was circular and wrapped in paper.

2. Then the man who runs the ceremony does a lot of stuff. He has what looks like a thick cloth dinner napkin tucked in his waistband. There are lots of ceramic cups and bowls in from of him as well as a couple unfamiliar utensils. He takes the cloth out of his waistband and wipes off some of the utensils and containers. He folds the cloth a different way to wipe each item, opening containers and checking them and such. I'm sure I am leaving some things out and will continue to, so again I apologize.

3. After all of this is done, the cloth goes back into his waistband and the actual tea part of the ceremony begins. He removes the lid from one container that contains green tea powder, and uses one of the utensils to take 2 and 1/2 scoops from the powder and puts them in a small bowl. He closes it and puts it back, and then uses what looks kind of like a wooden ladle to take hot water from a container and pour it into the bowl with the powder. After again putting everything back where it previously was, he takes what I can best describe as a small wooden whisk with a short handle and mixed it quicky. He replaces the which and uses his right hand to place the bowl on the other side of him. Then he shuffles to face the bowl, picks it up and kneels in front of the first person (which happened to be me) and places it in front of them and bows. I was expected to bow back and I did, but later my okaasan showed me the proper way to bow during a tea ceremony. Before you drink the tea you eat the flower shaped piece of candy, which sort of melts in your mouth. Then you drink the entire bowl of hot green tea placed in front of you. I later learned that I was supposed to drink it in three gulps, but at the time I had no idea. After drinking the tea, it is polite to say "oishii katta," which means " it was good." Then you unwrap and eat the round piece of candy, and the ceremony continues on down the line. After everyone has had hot tea, the bowls are collected. Then the action is basically repeated as was my understanding, but with cold green tea. It sounds so short, but when each person's tea is prepared and presented indiviually (and there were 8 or 9 people there), and the same actions are so meticulously repeated with each person, it takes a while. It was a beautiful thing to see, even if I messed up and can't remember or understand all the actions of the man preparing the tea.

After this, the man ( whose name I have also forgotten, sorry!) gave Noemi and I both photocopies of a short book called The Book Of Tea, which was written both in Japanese and English. Once I read it, maybe I will be able to better understand everything, haha. We were also served vanilla ice cream in bowls, and when I asked if this was also a part of the tea ceremony everyone laughed. "They just thought you'd like some ice cream," my otoosan laughed.

Then the man who had performed the ceremony asked if Noemi and I would like to learn. Obviously we said yes, and we got to scoop the green tea powder, fill the bowl with hot water, mix it, and present it. I hadn't realized until then that there was a specific way to hold and use each of the utensils! My okaasan took pictures of me, and they look really funny. It was an interesting experience and I am glad I had the honor to be a part of it.

Anyway, tonight we are going out for sushi at what my okaasan described as a "rotating sushi bar," so I am excited. Sushi isn't my favorite, but it's really not bad. While in Japan I have only had three things that I truly thought were, well gross. Everything else had been delicious; my okaasan is a great cook. But the three things I didn't like were:

Nato: beans with some kind of thick, sticky paste around it. I only had two or three of the beans in my mouth, but it was a taste that I can't describe as anything but bitter.

Sea Urchin: I had this when I went to lunch with my friends and the dentist. It was orange and squishy and left a horrible aftertaste. We ate Mister Donuts afterward to get rid of the bad taste.

Wasabi: I had only had wasabi in small portions before, and it wasn't bad. But when we were eating sushi that day with the dentist, we honestly had no idea what we were eating. There was a roll of rice wrapped in sushi with something green and red in the middle. Without thinking, I out the whole thing in my mouth. It was then I realized that the thick green part in the middle was wasabi. If you've ever had wasabi, especially a chunk as big as what was in that roll, you might understand why I am no longer quite so fond of it! Haha.

The funny thing is that I can only remember the names of the foods I didn't like. My host mom is a wonderful cook, but the names of the dishes are so long that I can't remember. So I have instead begun taking pictures of my dinner every night, which I think my family finds amusing.

Thanks again to everyone who reads this. Sorry this one is so long. :)

good day:)

Today was a good day. I went to school, which was great since on wednesdays and thursdays we have Sensee Tajiri, who is my favorite. She is extremely patient but at the same time she doesn't let you slack off. I feel overwhelmed when a couple of the other teachers aren't so patient, especially since Japanese is so difficult starting from scratch, it stresses me out! But I have a notebook almost halfway full of notes already, if anyone is interested in learning Japanese when I get home, haha. :)

Today's lesson was about verbs, along with past and present tense. By the end of class I had written a paragraph about what I did yesterday in hirigana, so I was pretty excited about that, haha.

So there is a dentist's office across the street from my teacher's school, and for some reason he has taken some sort of fascination with Noemi, Cameron, Daniel and myself. He's nice enough but slightly creepy, especially since he wears his camera around his neck and takes multiple photos of us individually, haha. But today my teacher let us out of school at 12:30 because the dentist asked if he could take us out to lunch. We went to eat sushi and it was pretty good, except for a couple mysterious things that left gross aftertastes. When we asked what some of the things we were eating were, he just shrugged, so I am really not sure! But we all went to Mister Donut afterward, since this week is a big sale and every donut is just 100 yen. :)

After Mister Donut, we had a couple hours before we were expected home. So we got on bus #2 to go to YouMe Town, a huge shopping center. There I got the last of my gifts for people in Sedalia. I am excited because I was so afraid I wouldn't be able to find nice gifts for the the many people on my list! But I am very happy with the things I bought, and am so excited to give them to everyone when I get home. :)

A couple days ago my okaasan (host mother) was folding a pair of my jeans and she started laughing really hard. I turned around and saw her holding my pants up to her, and they were so long that they went from her feet all the way to her shoulders! I took a picture, it was so funny. Obviously I am much taller than many people here. In fact the first words out of my otoosan's mouth when I first met him and my okaasan were, "Wow you are tall!"

Oh another thing. Last night my okaasan wasn't going to be home until late, so my otoosan and my host brother Yuichi decided to order pizza from Pizza Pockets. I trusted them to do the ordering. We had teryaki chicken pizza, tomato bacon pizza, and potato pizza. I had never had the tomato bacon or potato, and they were amazing. Haha I realize this has nothing to do with Japanese culture, I just thought I would tell you that everyone should try potato pizza because it is great.

Anyway guess that's it for now. Thanks to everyone taking the time to read this. :)

hmm

Not much really happened today, haha. I am beginning to realize though that I was wrong about a few things about Japan.

1. That I would lose weight while staying here. My family feeds me ice cream and brings home chocolate for me all the time, and there is a Mister Donut at thebus station. Dang it. I might actually gain weight!

2. Japanese people are very friendly. Although there isn't much talking on buses and trains as I mentioned earlier, I have had at least 3 or 4 experiences where people on my bus ride to school sitting behind or in front of me try to start a conversation. I apologetically tell them that my Japanese is very bad. I hate this, because I would like to be able to converse with some Japanese people. But learning the Japanese language in 6 weeks is beginning to feel impossible.

3. I stand out. Haha. I went to a festival the other day in Kurume, and Noemi and I were literally the only people who were not Japanese, and there were hundreds of people there! We get a lot of stares, but almost all are friendly and smiling. And little kids love us, it's adorable. They scoot closer to sit by us and my neighbors have two small children, ages 5 and 9, who come over a lot to ask if Audrey can come over to play Uno? And they've taught me some other games I've never played before. It's very cute.

4. Japan has insanely huge arcades. I went to one the other day that literally had 5 floors of nothing but arcade games.

5. Have you ever been in one of those booths where you sit with a friend or whoever and pose to have a small strip of pictures for your wallet? Well in Japan that is called purikuda, if I am spelling it right. But pirikuda is like extreme. You are in a large booth and pictures are taken of you, but you get to choose colorful backgrounds or funny scenes. And after your pictures are taken, you move over to another booth where you can personalize these already colorful photos. You can add Japanese characters or your own writing, or choose from a large selection of bows, hats, ponies, fish, ice cream cones, stars, hearts, peace signs and a million others. You can also type in your email address or cell phone number and the pictures will be sent to you! Then a couple copies of the pictures taken print out. I have done this twice so far, and they really are cool. I will probably do it quite a few more times, and I will have a wallet full of purikuda. Can't wait to show you all. :)