Hey all.  I haven’t updated for a good 3 weeks or so, maybe more, and a lot has happened in those weeks, mostly good, I’m happy to report, so here’s what’s going to happen.  Over the next few days I’m going to write a bunch of posts to fill y’all in on what’s been going on here.  I figure if I put it into a single post, it would be the length of a short story, and it wouldn’t be very cohesive, so it would be a huge pain in the ass to read, hence multiple posts seems to be the way to go.

I left you guys at “things aren’t going well with my host family.”  I can’t remember if I gave you any more info than that, so I’ll give you a good outline of what was going on and what’s happened since.  For about a month or maybe a little more I felt apprehensive around my host family for several reasons.  I didn’t know if I should be spending more time with them, if I was being polite enough, when I should take a bath, and other things like that, and they added up and felt something like a weight on my conscience.  This pressure built up and culminated in a small breakdown around finals time.

I was extremely busy during finals time, with barely a free minute, so the stress of everything else in addition to the stress at home made me breakdown a little.  I just kind of curled up and silently broke down, then decided that I didn’t deserve that, that I am a good person, and I just need to try a little harder, and if they can’t see that, then bullocks to them.  With that decided I had renewed courage and did my best to talk with my host family.

The day after the breakdown I talked with the homestay coordinator, who had visited my homestay a few days ago, and we talked about what was going on.  It turns out that various instances of miscommunication have been adding up and been making my family feel a little helpless.  The homestay coordinator made it clear that things weren’t terrible, but something should be done otherwise it would turn into a bad situation.  One of the main things was the time I was taking a bath.  This doesn’t sound like much, but there’s only one bath, and okaasan can’t clean up or do the laundry, whatever it is she needs to do, until everyone has taken a bath, and I was taking a bath later than she would have liked.  They had asked me to take a bath earlier, so I had switched it to after dinner, but that wasn’t early enough, and they thought I had just ignored their request.  Hence, miscommunication.

There were a couple other instances of a similar nature, with the bath problem being the biggest.  So I talked with okaasan and changed my bath time to before dinner, which seems to have solved the problem.  As for other instances of miscommunication, I just need to ask more questions if I’m confused, and I think just trying to talk with them more will help.  So as things stand I feel better because I’m trying, and I think they see that in the case of the bath, and I’ll just keep trying to talk and make sure to ask when I don’t understand.

I already made this clear earlier, but finals sucked.  I had a paper to write, a ten minute presentation on the paper, a test, and a movie project for Japanese to edit, so every free minute I had was spent editing the movie, since that’s the kind of thing you can do in bits and pieces, plus we had a bunch of different things we had to put in that I needed to wait on, like voiceovers, etc.  I actually enjoyed editing that movie though, because I got to make the credits and put in my own music and stuff.

That’s about all that happened before my trip, and I’m about to go eat dinner, so I’ll get to my trip in my next post.

Shimon