earthquake and a new family.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, today there was an earthquake, a level 2 where I live, but a level 3 where my friend lives, and a level 4 in another part of Japan.

It was nothing serious, just a bit of rumbling and the house shaking, the earthquakes are pretty weak/rare here in Hokkaido, and I was told I was lucky to have experienced one, and now this has been my second. The Australian living with me experienced one yet, and came out in his pajamas looking like he'd seen a ghost.

You may have also guessed from the name of this post that I changed host families today, only a few hours ago really. I am already pretty familiar with my new host mother, but not so much with the rest of the family, they've been really nice so far. I'll miss my last host family, for a lot of reasons, but changing host families every three months keeps things interesting and is part of the adventure, right?

dinners almost ready, here are some pictures.

Oh P.S. I turned 19, even though I tried not to.

bokuno kazoku

Hello,

So I set my return date. I'll be leaving here on July 21st, which seems really soon to me, but I guess its not.

I have to give a 20 minute power point presentation in Japanese this Saturday, then translate the new Australian's 10 minute presentation from English. There will also be a question and answer period I'm told, which will be a great chance to prove how I am terrible at Japanese.

so wish me luck!

Here are some pictures from Sapporo International night, where I discussed the issue of world hunger with Japanese and people from all of the world, and met lots of new people. Also there are some pictures of yuki matsuri, the famous snow festival.

I'm too busy to write about it though.

I went skiing today with school again, did some off trail stuff with my Swiss friend and almost died twice. Awesome.

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。