Host Change

I changed host families yet again, making this the third and final family I will live with in Japan. As always the change was met with a bit of worry and the like. I had adjusted well to life with my second family and was anxious about the new one. I found out, that actually, they were people I had already met before. They hosted a Thai girl that came to my school briefly, and I had met them to go to a festival together and visited their house before. It gave me a bit of relief and I felt like the move would be okay.

Thankfully, it was. I've managed to adjust well to this family too, and it's taken a bit. I've had to sacrifice stuff like morning showers, but benefited by being a lot closer to school - a 10 minute commute compared to a 1 hour plus commute at the previous home.

The family is really interesting. The mother, father, 2 sisters (20 and 23) and grandmother and grandfather all live at home. There is a brother who lives in Tokyo at the moment, too. Both sisters are easy to get along with and always interesting, and the family is in general very warm and friendly. I'm glad I've got to experience 3 very different, very positive home stays while I've been here.

The picture above is of my second family, the Ota family.

PIEE Trip and Speech Contest

Since I have a day free, I figure I should go back a bit and talk about some of the larger things that have happened since my last update. On November 23-25th I went down to Tokyo yet again to take part in the PIEE trip, which meant meeting up with heaps of people I hadn't seen since our first orientation in Tokyo.

A few of the other guys living in the Kansai region and I decided to go down by night bus. This was either a good money saving idea, or a bad idea period. It was difficult to sleep, since they kept turning the lights on and speaking over the microphone every time they stopped, and besides that it was just uncomfortable. They made a pit stop at about 3am and we braved the freezing cold to get drinks from the vending machines and make use of the toilets. When I say freezing cold, I mean it. It was ridiculously cold outside, especially after having been in the warm bus for so long.

We arrived in Tokyo early in the morning, and met up with Azuma, a guy that works for PIEE and he took us around Ginza which was not all that interesting. Maybe it was just being really tired, but looking at pens wasn't what we were wanting to do. Besides this, I had been developing a very sore throat since the day before the trip and wasn't feeling tops. We had delicious ramen for lunch, but that was the only real saving point.

After meeting everyone at 1pm, we headed off to Akihabara. One of the places I could have gone without going to. Sure, it's typical geek Japan culture, with no lack of dirt cheap electronics and suspect anime (Japanese animation) stores with even more questionable customers, but I'd already been there before and I feel there's so much more to Japan that they should be promoting besides anime and stereotypical geek culture.

In Akiba we split up into groups. Our group went to karaoke. Totally un-Akiba, and it was a short 1 hour trip due to time constraints, but fun nonetheless. I sung with a strained, sore throat... probably not the best idea. After meeting up again we headed back to the Olympic Center; the same place we spent a week at for our orientation. It was as we remembered, with the horrible food and all.

The next day was our big trip to Nikko, a very famous place known for the Toshogu Shrine, as well as famous waterfalls. We spent hours and hours on a bus, which wasn't the best. The trip there sucked, to put it simply. I was even more sick, I hadn't slept the night before and the heating in my room was so weak as to not be existent at all. That said, after that it was fun. We had a nice, very traditional, Japanese lunch. Saw some amazing architecture at the Shrine, went to the waterfall which was beautiful and covered with snow and ice. Then it was back home. With a short stop for Mos Burger dinner.

I slept much better that night, despite it being a late one, and then we were up bright and early for a trip to Odaiba. Odaiba is a manmade island in Tokyo, and home to the famous Fuji Television Station. I'd been there before, so it didn't bother me that our stay was a bit short. We broke into groups again and the group I was with visited Fuji TV, taking lots of touristy photos, and then lunch in a nearby mall.

After Odaiba we all split up and had to go home. We had decided to take the Shinkansen home, which I was happy of... being very sick by this point. The cold I had caught lasted over a week and wasn't much fun at all.

Another highlight was the speech contest held by PIEE in Osaka on December 15th. All the PIEE students from Kansai were supposed to attend, but the turnout wasn't that grand. About 8 of us showed up with speeches to present in Japanese. That said, the prizes weren't too bad. There were prizes for everyone. Ranging from an iPod shuffle, an electronic dictionary, and then the dud prizes like... gloves, hot packs, a calender, photo album and maid cookies.

My speech was about my own experience here in Japan and how I feel I have changed as a person because of it. I ended up winning first prize and chose the iPod, since nothing else really spoke to me haha. I was surprised and happy to win! I think the crunch line was the fact that I had tried to set the content of my speech apart from the rest.