クリスマス。

Hey everyone,

So my new host family is just fine, although our house is a lot farther from school and the subway station etc, and to make matters worse I lost my bus/subway card yesterday, it had about ichi man en on it, or 100ish US dollars, this is quite a tragedy as I will now be walking 40 minutes in horrible winter conditions to and from school every day until next month when I get a new card from rotary. Oh well its good exercise, but this is one financial strain I did not need.

It’s definitely winter here now, but not as cold as I hear home is getting. Christmas is coming, Japanese Christmas deserves mentioning. Now obviously Christianity is not a major religion here, I have met zero Christians since my arrival here except for exchange students and a couple of Mormons trying to harass my Swiss friend into a German bible. Despite this, Christmas is fairly huge in Japan, or Hokkaido anyway, and it makes sense, winter is cold and depressing and we need a reason to look forward to it. Pretty much every culture that has winter has some kind of big winter celebration. Now, Japan has New Year, but maybe they just couldn’t wait, or maybe companies couldn’t pass up another chance at making a killing. KFC has a huge Christmas ad campaign about like eating KFC on Christmas and how that is what you're supposed to do, same with other fast food companies, There is a German Christmas market set up in the downtown park, and they sell hot chocolate and all kinds of foreign Christmas junk. Oh yea, in Japan Christmas presents are not the norm, cakes are, you give people cakes, and they give you cakes in return, then they go to the bar on Christmas eve. With that said, I think everything is very commercial in Japan and I should not be so surprised that Christmas is any different. I am very much looking forward to my Christmas box from my family.

Not long now until the rugby boys go to a tournament for a month and my Swiss friend goes home for Christmas, and not long after that the Australian exchange students go home for good, and I get three more, one of which will be living in the same house as me. With them gone me and the Finnish girl will be the sempai ryuugakkusei, or senior exchange students, the ones who are supposed to know what’s going on and show the new people the ropes, and speak Japanese. We’ll see how I do with that.

Anyway happy holidays everyone
Stay tuned.