Things are good but...

I'm feeling a little pessimistic right now but try not to take it as not being grateful for this really amazing experience but I do have a few complaints to vent.

The first is with my host family. They are really nice people, Okasan is willing to do anything to help me out and does all of the housework. However I can't get much of a conversation going with her. The language barrier is one thing, speaking Japanese is by far my weakest point and I'm really disappointed with myself in that regard but I think if she spoke English we wouldn't talk all that much more either. She's just one of those people that like there isn't a huge personallity click or something. Like I feel like I'm living with an astranged aunt or something. So when I hear how much people are having with their host familes, playing games, talking a lot, doing things, etc I get really jealous.

This jealousy wouldn't be so bad if I could meet some Japanese people, which leads me into my second point. The foreign exchange program is offset of the regular school schedule by 3 weeks. That means until like the 19th or something the school is pretty dead and none of the clubs have started up. I appreciate that we could have some time to get to know the campus before it became crowded but I think it was a pretty annoying move on the schools side. I do have 2 penpals that I have talked to for like 3 months and both of them are too busy to hang out. I'm getting pretty frustrated about that I mean I flew 14 hours to get here and you can't take 2 hours out of your day to show me around this foreign city?

That ends my rant but I do have more to talk about. By some bizzare stroke of luck I somehow managed to get into the highest difficulty Japanese class. Seriously I don't know how it happend. The first day everyone took the same test. The next day 7 people took test 3 while everyone else, myself, took test 2. If you took test 3 you were supposed to go to class D or E and test 2 people were A B or C. I'm really confused about it. This class is advanced Japanese, we are reading news articles, I don't know if I can do it. I never actually took an intermediate class, I only read the book for it. In the class I am for sure the bottom 3 on speaking ability, like I know I can study well enough to score high on the tests but in class it is stressful. We have two teachers, because its too many hours a week for one teacher to have or something like that, and they are both nice but one talked much simpler and slower then the other. Also there are two French guys there who are near fleunt (pera-pera) but their French accent is so strong I can not understand anything they say.

I got a cell phone and opened a bank account. Cell phones are really weird in Japan, you get a really crappy amount of out going calls but get unlimited incoming. Also everyone emails rather then SMS because SMS only go the company your on. I ended up going with AU because the only other feasable one, softbank, could only do a one year contract at a single store in sannomiya and you had to buy the phone right out. I really wanted a nice TV phone or something like that but I ultimately decided that for 9 months it wasn't worth the money to get a cool phone. Oh also two cool things Japanese phones do, the first is that they have a barcode reader. In Japan on advetisements you see square barcodes, you use the camera on your phone and the phone will display information like a web link, phone number, etc and you can store that in your address book right away. The second thing is IR sending. You can send info about your phone, such as number, name, info, picture of you, birthdate to someone by just point the phones at each other and pressing send. Its way easier then typing it all in and creates a sort of social event of collecting phone numbers.

Well I've talked too much and should get back to studying, bye everyone