Day 5

From Japan: Day 005

Meet the Okudas.
From the left: grandma (Kiyoko, 70), the younger grandson (12?), grandpa (Gunji, 71), me (:P), the son-in-law, the older grandson (14), and their daughter.

Sorry I haven't updated in a while... I have been really busy (classes starting and everything...). Anyway, this is a picture of my host family, actually I just live with the grandma and grandpa. As you know, I'm bad at remembering names (having it written down for me helps, language barrier doesn't), so sorry for not having the names for the rest of the family. Today's schedule ran like this: 10am-11:30 homestay orientation, 11:30-1:30 campus tour & lunch with Japanese volunteers, 2:00 host families will pick you up. I got some more pictures of Doshisha University when we got the quick campus tour. It was rather amusing after lunch... basically all the Stanford students were in one room waiting for our homestay families to arrive in another room... right next door. Yeah... 31 nervous students trying to practice how to greet their families properly while waiting for their names to be called to go next door >_< Anyway... I was greeted by my host mom (grandma), she's really nice (they have done homestays several times before, so she knows how it is, just not this program). We took the subway and the train back to their home (every homestay family shows the student the way back from Doshisha to their home so the student knows how to get to/from the University) and she helped me get the monthly pass for both routes at the stations. After we dropped off my things at the house, they took me to a "welcome C.J. party" dinner at a nice restaurant located in a hotel next to the Kyoto Station (didn't know this was going to happen/my suit was in the bags that I don't get until tomorrow is why I'm not dressed up). It was basically an all-you-can-eat buffet with really nice food. Communication, of course, is an issue. Unfortunately, my host parents don't really speak any English at all. Fortunately (tonight), their daughter, son-in-law, and the older of the two brothers do speak a fair amount of English... so that helped. After we got back, I continued unpacking some things and took a couple pictures of my room, which (like the rest of the house) is pretty small.
Tomorrow's post will be different. I wanted to do a daily blog... but it doesn't look like I'll have that much time during the week, so starting with tomorrow I'll be doing a weekly blog! Let's see how that goes =^.^=