First day at school and meeting the host family

After the one day at the hotel, the next day we got on another large bus and headed for the university.  There were a few group pictures along the way, which maybe I will get back later so that I can have some nice pictures of everyone.  I ended up meeting some new people both at the hotel and on the bus ride.  I took some nice pictures and videos too of the hotel, the area, and stuff that I saw on the bus ride.  It was all very nice as the residential areas of Japan are very clean and interestingly/beautifully decorated from time to time.

When I arrived at the school, the staff showed all the students to the Ajisai room, named after the city's flower.  This room is the room for international students.  Not just people from our program, but people who are going to the university full-time.  Since my Japanese isn't perfect, it's nice to have one or two rooms where I can go for shelter or to speak in English without disturbing anyone.  From that room, we went to a nearby room that the international student center uses, and we went over Japanese culture dos and donts for living with host families, since it was only an hour or two before we were to meet our families.

I was extremely worried about meeting my host family since from the emails we had exchanged it seemed that their english wasn't perfect - and my japanese even worse.  After introducing myself to my host family in a room filled with all the host families and students, I found out that it was even worse than I had thought.  My host family speaks so little english I wouldn't even say they know english.  Just a few words.  So, then I had the feeling that this was going to be a very difficult summer.

From the school, I had received 9000 yen to use right after I got done at the school in order to buy many train tickets for transport to and from school every day.  It used to be that a good way to estimate yen to usd was to place a decimal point 2 digits from the low end of the number.  For example 9000 yen would become 90.00 dollars.  But these days the yen is strong, and the conversion rate is near 1.27 pennies = 1 yen, so you'd say the 9000 was about 1.3 times 90 dollars.

On the way to the train station to use the money I was given to get a 6 week supply of train tickets, there wasn't much to say with my host family since I would have had to say it in Japanese.  I was top of my class at buffalo for my first year of Japanese, but 1 year of language isn't enough for casual speak.  Thankfully I got my train tickets with a bit of pointing and button pressing, and was able to learn how to use the train through even more pointing and demonstration by the family.

More on my life with the family in the next post!