Friday 5/7: Best Day in Japan Thus Far

So first off, I am now more awake than when I was doing the other journal things last night, so I remembered some stuff I forgot to put in:

1. It is possible for Japanese families to never know what the dad does for a living, without the dad working for the government or the yakuza. Its one of those topics that is like asking someone how much they earn- its ok for them to tell you, but its not something that you ask someone. Siroccos host family has no idea what the dad does for a living.

2. On Thursday the family stopped by a market area downtown to get some food for a luau. I found several over-priced foods: $30 for a melon? $26 for a mango? Its kinda ridiculous. Oh, and really expensive cherries that did not look good at all (its not even cherry season!)

OK, onto Friday...

Today my class went to an elementary school to help the kids learn english and to have a ton of fun :) I was put with a class of 2nd graders, that were all super-adorable. I introduced myself in Japanese, and they asked me questions that I had to answer in Japanese. Luckily the questions were fun and easy- instead of "how do you want to use Japanese in your future career?" it was "whats your favorite animal?" Everyone had to come up to me and say "Hello, my name is (insert mumbling here). Its nice to meet you" and then shake my hand. They were all nervous- it was pretty cute lol. Then I played a game with them where they had to learn color names in English. Everyone got a sheet of paper with a different color, and then sat in a circle, and someone in the middle would call out a color and everyone with that color would have to run to a different seat. Then we played Bingo in English, and I led a game of Simon says, which was pretty hard with the language barrier. I also got a samurai newspaper hat- You cant get much better than that!

My host family also put on a Hawaiian BBQ. My host moms massage teacher cooked up a ton of delicious food, much to Levi Paulks joy. It was very, very nice to have good American food, good BBQ is always a good thing :) The massage dude also got fed up with my posture and did like a total back-straightening thing, which was very painful but probably good for me.