My Host Family

I've recently found out my host family assignment for my stay in Hakodate-- I'll be living with the Hirano family. My host mom, Mrs. Hirano, has already e-mailed me a couple times and seems terribly sweet; she even uses smiley-face emoticons in her e-mails! ^_^ I can't wait to meet her, but I'll have to.... I've also been notified that I'm spending my first week in quarantine to prove that I'm not infected with swine flu. After that, it will be just me and my host mom for a couple weeks until my host sisters, Reina (16) and Sachiko (13), come back from boarding school and dad (a professional cyclist!) comes back from a trip.

It's hard to believe I'll be in Japan in less than a week! In the meantime, I'm alternating between franticly cramming my brain with kanji/grammar and stuffing my suitcases with belongings. I spent a lot of time pondering hometown gifts for my host family... trouble is, Ohio is really quite boring. I'm told baseball paraphernalia makes a good gift, but considering the Indians are currently the worst team in the league, it didn't seem like the best idea. In the end I settled on fancy soaps, jams, Yale gear, and some chocolate buckeyes (definitely Ohio-y, though I'm still not sure why the state symbol is a poisonous nut).

Much to my delight, my denshi jisho arrived in the mail on Monday, leaving me to much frustrated fiddling until I figured out how to change the menus into English. I got a Canon G90 (I ordered the V90, but I ended up with a nicer one because mine was out of stock). It has a stylus and a very impressive kanji recognition tool, plus a lot of neat features and doodads, many of which remain a mystery. Regardless, the basic dictionary function will probably be the most useful. I'll be consulting it a lot since my host mom knows no English, and when that doesn't work, there's always charades/pictionary. At any rate, it should be exciting!