Host-family wa ii desu!

Okay, now it’s definitely time for another post. It’s been a truly intense weekend with so much stuff to tell! Well, I can’t tell you too much about Kyoto, the pictures will have to speak for themselves. (Beautiful place though, if you ever come to Japan, that should be among your top-choice destinations).
As for me, I met up with my host-family this Saturday morning. I was just ridiculously nervous, ended up getting a headache during the meeting because I was so tense. However, it turned out to be a wasted worry as things so far are going really, really, well. I was met by the Otosan (the father) and he’s pretty much what I had hoped for as the family head. We had a meeting together with some Kansai Gaidai staff to set the ground-rules in the house to make sure we can get off to a good start. It did not take long until I realized that they are really laid back and that I’m granted a lot of freedom. So lucky me, I was kind of worried that I’d end up living in a cage :P. They’ve had like 8 homestay students before, So I count myself really lucky as they’ve gone through a lot of these things before. The Okasan (mother) of the family is extremely nice and speaks to me as slowly as humanly possible in order for me to understand. Since they had expected that I would speak absolutely no Japanese, I guess they’re surprised my ability to point and say the few hundred words that I do know :). I’ve got things like commuting pass taken care of and ended up getting a library card to borrow some children books in order to practice my readings. I find that to be ironic in of itself ^^ me? A library card? I barely read the books that are assigned to me in class! However, this is really interesting. I spent like lots of time trying to translate as much as I can :P. Now, fortunately since they’ve had so many homestay students they did not prepare a humongous and expensive welcoming meal which I am actually rather happy about, as that would just tend to make things somewhat more tense. Instead, they’re just ridiculously relaxed and behave as almost nothing happened (or so it would seem anyway, I hope I’m not totally misreading them right now). They try to talk to me as much as they can I and work so hard to understand them, and it’s going fairly well considering my language abilities. Their English is just slightly better than my Japanese, but I consider that a good thing as it helps me when I am missing a word or two, but it’s not good enough so that they only speak English with me. Quite the opposite, I can proudly declare that I’ve spent two full days speaking Japanese (or at least pointing at things and brutally mispronouncing things).
We went to a sushi place today where you have a band going past the table and you can pick out whatever looks good. Amazing idea and really cheap too! They made loud protests on my attempts to pay, so I gave up :).
Although the food is delicious, I can only fit so much. These people are not bigger than me, any of them, and they eat like 50% more than I do! They have three children and one of the daughters is home right now. She’s like my height and I swear to god, she can’t be over 45kg and she eats like a horse. I can’t see how these people can fit that much food, but I just can’t :P. I explained this to the mother that I really do like the food, but it’s just way too much! She eventually let go and today at dinner she asked if this small portion was enough, and I said that this would be excellent, upon which she added even more food! :P She’s really sweet, so I feel very at home. I hope that things will continue this and that I won’t do anything that’s just too out-of-line.
Well, after hearing all the horror stories about possibly homestay-scenarios, I count myself extremely lucky and I hope that my friends are having the same luck. They do not, however, have internet. So I will be limited to checking my mail in the school and so on. I can kind of pick up some wireless connection but it’s very shaky and only works like every 2 minutes for 5 seconds.
Tomorrow (Monday) we’re heading to get my papers done before I head to school, and then I’ve got the daily commute of 45 minutes (*snore*). It’s not bad though. It’s like 15 minutes by bicycle to the station, then like another 20 minutes on the train, and then lastly 10 minutes walk from the station to the school. It’ll be good, not complaining at the moment.
So far I’ve spent a lot of the time reading, watching game-shows (there’s sooo many of them on TV) and trying to have conversations. Tomorrow I’ll actually have my first Japanese class so everything seems really promising.