UPDATE

hey kids,

its been a month so I figure I better give an update. the big changes recently are that so many exchange students I know and love have gone or are going home. The girl from Thailand has gone home, one of my New Zealanders, and my Australian girls have all gone home, my Fijian is off to university soon as he has high school graduation, which is coming up soon. I can't decide who I will miss most.

Like I said, the end of the school year is upon us, in case you are not aware I was only a second year student up to this point, and will now be traveling on to senior year, they did it this way so I could have the same classmates all the way through my year, I'm glad they did.

As for new exchange students, in the next two months we will be getting; (at school:) a NEW New Zealander for the rugby scholarship, a Japanese-Australian for rugby and Japanese study, and a Sri Lankan for a cultural and language exchange like mine. With my program (rotary) we have two new arrivals from Australia who are doing very well so far.

Lately I've been spending my time translating for the new australian in my house and keeping him on track, or doing research about different programs at different universities whenever I can bring myself to look at the stuff. I really have to get finished with it soon. Studying is pretty much a thing of the past, I am speaking Japanese all day everyday and although its far from perfect I can learn a lot just from listening. Of course I still study on paper once a week with my tutor, Japanese class at school however has become kind of a zoo, as we've lost half our classmates, and we often get the teacher to go off on a tangent so we can have a period of angry shouting about world issues or funny stories.

Oh, yeah, last night we went out for karaoke and stuff with all the rotex girls (Japanese past exchange students) and it was an excellent evening, but on the train home I was standing holding onto the handrail and a businessman was sitting on the seat at around my waist level, I was talking about something with The Australian and my gum dropped out of my mouth onto the business man's knee. I snatched it up within a second and I don't know if he even knew what happened but I was apologizing so furiously in Japanese that he started to laugh like it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him, quite a few people had a laugh, including me, and as we got off the train some guy was halfway through calling his friend telling him about it.


So other than that, everything is great, I'm excited to meet the new exchange students coming and excited to get to know the ones that just arrived.

I know a lot about Japan now that I didn't know before I came but I also know a LOT more about the countries these kids come from. Oh yea, and I've been saying this for a while now, but I gave a really really long speech in Japanese at the welcome party yesterday and looking back on how much I used to stress about public speaking IN ENGLISH seems like a huge waste of brain.

I am a very lucky 男の子。