Moving House

I’m changing host families this month. Partly due to problems with my current family I had last month, and partly due to a thirst for change, I’m moving. My new house is about half an hour away from my current one by train. While this makes my commute to school longer, it cuts my time to Tokyo in half. And it may not make my commute to school longer depending on where my new house is in relation to the train station. We’ll see. I’m moving at the end of this month on the 23rd. It’s the Emperor’s birthday, a national holiday. I wish we had an Emperor. Monarchies are really cool. But from what I’ve read on Japanese history the Emperor hasn’t actually been in power since the 7th century. It’s always someone else ruling in his name. It’s the same family line though. One dynasty all the way through. Pretty neat. But that’s irrelevant. The point about moving is that anyone who has been writing me letters or wants to send a Christmas package shouldn’t send it to my current address. They should sent it to
C/o Family Ibaraki
6-12-14 Tsukushino
Abiko Shi
Chiba
Japan
My address doesn't seem to have a zip code, which is kind of weird but it’s what’s on the sheet CIEE gave me. I’m excited for the move. I’ve had a lot of fun with my current host family but I’m ready to change. I just feel like I’ve learned all I can here and I’m anxious to see the differences between households. I’m really interested in the underlying Japanese cultural elements vs. variations between people and places. Japan like any country contains lots of kinds of people and opinions. If I stayed with one family the whole time I would miss out on seeing all the variations.

I don’t know much about my new hosts. I haven’t had a chance to email them yet but I will today. They’re a young couple with a 1-year-old baby. That’s exciting because I like little kids. The father works as a high school teacher and the mother stays home. That’s about it. Abiko is closer to Tokyo, and in a different prefecture. That’s all I know about my new city. But I’m moving just before winter break so I have all that time to explore the new city and get acquainted with my new family. It’ll be a bit weird spending Christmas with them so soon after I move but weird doesn’t scare me. After I move I plan on starting a martial art and maybe a cooking class. I saw a Japanese cookbook in English in a bookstore this weekend and realized that I really want to learn to cook Japanese food. We cook in school occasionally but I want to more often. Maybe my new host mother will teach me. My parents here haven't been so receptive. I figure this year is for me to learn whatever I want, and I want to learn how to cook.

Besides the move, this week was fairly normal, if busy. Sunday I helped out at the Tsukuba marathon with my track team. It was fairly boring. We sat at the 35km mark waiting for the runners. Then since there was no work for me to do I just cheered on the runners. But it was a morning with my track friends so no complaints. Seeing the runners’ expression of pain and hopelessness at 35km really made me want to run a marathon. There’s on in Tsuchiura in April. We’ll see. I got home and was almost immediately called by my neighbor Oguchi san. He invited me out to dinner and an evening in Tsukuba with his family. I accepted of course, and we went out. Their family is really nice. Mr. Oguchi is a very kind man who likes to ride bikes. I have no idea what he does for a living. He and Mrs. Oguchi have two girls, Sarina who is 8 months and a 4 year old whose name I can’t recall. They are adorable children. I especially liked riding in the car listening to the older sibling sing songs about Sarina. Very cute. We went to a mall in Tsukuba and walked around a bit. Mr. Oguchi showed me a really large bookstore with a huge collection of English books. By huge I mean an entire isle. There were some English manga too. Manga are Japanese comics. He also showed me a snowboarding store and together we admired the cool boards and complained how expensive they were.

We had dinner at another mall buffet style. I like buffets because I don’t have to worry about what food I’m ordering. It makes things much easier. It was tasty food, although the sushi I ate was not tasty. I thought the filling was salmon but it turned out to be natto. Now, I’m not a picky eater and so far the food in Japan has turned out to be extremely delicious, but natto is possibly the nastiest stuff I’ve ever eaten. It has the consistency of slime and tastes like really sweaty socks. It’s fermented soybeans and my prefecture is famous for it. Absolutely awful. But I took three pieces of sushi and ate them all. I got to hold Sarina while Mr. Oguchi was dealing with the other child and Mrs. Oguchi was eating. That was joyous. She’s adorable. I’m excited for my new host family’s baby. After dinner we went to Tsukuba center to view the illumination. That’s what they called it, “Iru-mine-shon”. A bunch of trees were wrapped up in Christmas lights and the whole square was very pretty. But the main attraction was missing. Thee Oguchis thought that last weekend was when Tsukuba puts 100 Christmas trees all decked out in the plaza. But they were missing. It’s this weekend. I wasn’t disappointed because I had no idea what we were visiting anyway. It was a very pleasant evening out with my neighbors. I’ll definitely come back to hang with them again.

The rest of this week has been typical school. I wake up, go to school, have track, come home, do chores, have dinner, and go to bed. Except I studied hard this week. I made two new sets of flash cards and memorized them all. That means that I’ve got the entire JLPT 3 vocab list memorized. Almost 800 words in two months. And I’m nearly done with my grammar textbook. The test is tomorrow. I feel pretty confident but I am still cramming because it’s a once-a-year test. Between flashcards and grammar, I haven’t had time for my usual at-home activities like writing letters. But I did get extraordinary amounts of sleep this week. 8 hours of more every night. Sleep is key. It makes the whole day better. Even if I get 7 hours, I feel sluggish, fall asleep in class, and can’t learn as much. Sleep is the single best thing I can do on a daily basis to improve my mood and learning capacity, so it goes at the top of the priority list.

School gets better every week. I’m getting much more out of my classes. This week was the first week I felt like I learned something in my English class. I paid attention the whole time and the notes I took were useful. It’s good practice translating because he gives a sentence, I rapidly try to write it in Japanese and then he gives the answer. Even just a few weeks ago his answers would have gone right over my head. And with kanji I realized I don’t have to go through the painstaking process of looking them all up. I just turn around at the end of class and ask the kid behind me for the readings. Then I can look them up in a normal dictionary. Then I can put the kanji on flashcards later for memorization. This process goes for most classes. I focus on well-used kanji, write them down, ask someone for the readings, and memorize them. Well, I’ll implement this process next week. I’ve been so focused on the JLPT 3 vocab list that I’ve ignored kanji used at school. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes not.

It was this week when I was thinking about my classes that I realized how many classes I’m taking. Thirteen classes! English, Math, Chemistry, Social Studies, Home Ec, Health, Gym, Oral Communications, Calligraphy, Modern Japan, Classical Japanese, and Ethics. I actually don’t take Health or Classical Japanese because I get a free period every day. But that is still an incredible number of classes to cram into a six-period day. No wonder they excel in school. Since everyone takes the same classes, you can fit much more into a schedule. And they have school all year round. So they may learn the same amount of math in a given school year, but they can also fit more classes in. I don’t have every class every day, some only once a week, but usually two to three times in a week. The schedule constantly changes which keeps things interesting. I’ve seen a lot of benefits of the Japanese school system as well as drawbacks. But being exposed to so many subjects certainly seems like an advantage to me.

Today, a nice 20km run followed by lots of grammar and flashcards. After the test tomorrow, who knows? I’m in this weird transition phase where I can’t start anything new till I move but I have several weeks before I do. A tad annoying but oh well. I’m looking forward to next week, and to Christmas of course. Christmas is so soon. Yay!