愛してもいい？

Getting ready for Japan. I'm not sure the enormity of my summer has yet hit me. I leave early Tuesday morning, to fly 8 hours back in time and magically jump forward 24 somewhere in there.

OMG I'M EXCITED!!

HILLARY IS UNCOMFORTABLE!

In preparation for the freeform city exploration I plan on doing in Japan, I had myself an adventure today in Seattle. I live in Spokane, and have been visiting my sister in Seattle before my flight leaves from here on Tuesday. As a warm-up of my city exploration skills (some skeptics would say that I actually failed at reading the bus map) I walked from Pike's Place market to the U District, with no map, no notion of the city layout, and no knowledge of any of the streets between my destination and target. What shouldn't have been that long of a trip become 90 minutes (i knew I was supposed to follow 15th avenue but was very displeased when apparently they put a lake in the middle of it) but it was awesome. I enjoyed the day, the city, the cities, the hobos (actually I didn't very much enjoy that hobo that chased me). Exploring and seeing things and watching people with nothing more than a light pack and a waterbottle is awesome. I can't wait to do this all over Japan, hopefully with a bit more courage to ask for directions.

Adventures led me many places, including the UW chapter of my fraternity Sigma Chi

In lieu of actually studying for my placement exam, I've been reading through Making Out in Japanese and other such books that deal with casual spoken forms more so than the polite textbook forms. I also learn such invaluable phrases like "By the way, how much do Japanese weddings usually cost?"　ところで，日本の結婚式がどのぐらいかかる？ This will be useful for all the Japanese marriage proposals I expect to receive.

Unrelated: most hilarious billboard ever (you may have to enlarge it). I will be sharing lots of hirarious engrish that I find in Japan.

家族やおみやげ

I just recently got my host family assignments. My feeble kanji ability paired with the sparse nature of the list leave me a little confused. In the Naitou family, there's two parents, Yoshinao, age 49, and Naoko, age 48. Yoshinao is a middle school teacher, and after a long time spent looking up unknown kanji through their radical count I finally discovered the second word in his job title was the name of the school at which he teaches. Splitting the two kanji of 奥尻, they apparently mean "inner" and "butt" respectively, but together, it's just the name of the city Okushiri. He likes オ-ケストラ活動 ("orchestra activities"- does he play? does he listen? I don't really know) and 温泉 (hot springs). Naoko is a professional housewife who's into crafts and making cakes (I'm pretty sure that as an aspiring gourmet pastry chef myself, I will become best friends with her.)

The kids are a little harder. There's two 9 year old girls with the same birthday- I'm hoping they're fraternal twins and not identical. For as much as Americans complain about asian girls who "all look same", encountering a pair who actually do みんな同じそう would be tough. They have the same interest, the three character kanji of which (吹奏楽) the kanji radical look-up dictionary paired with jisho.org have not yet been able to translate. The best idea I have is that they both are instrumentalists (奏者) of some music (音楽) that involves blowing (吹く), although I have no idea how that's said as one coherent word.

The 13 year old son, though, kinda makes me nervous. His hobbies are listed merely as "disabled". The best I could translate from his school/work information is that he's under "protective care". He lives 別屋 (separately) away from the rest of the family. So does the dad. Is it a split family with the father and son living away from the mother and the girls? Or does the dad live elsewhere for work while the son lives in some sort of assisted care facility? I want to ask these things but I'm afraid delving into personal matters like this in the kind of crude half-japanese I could muster up for an email could only come off as rude in a hyper-polite society like Japan. And what kind of gifts are appropriate for this situation? I'm stumped.

Hopefully by the time I'm actually allowed to make contact with my host family (after the week of quarantine imposed by HIF so that we don't give the swine flu to Japan) I'll be moderately competent at the language to deal with these kinds of things (fingers crossed). Another point- how silly and ineffectual the quarantine is. We'll be staying in a hotel and attending classes and going out as otherwise scheduled, just not allowed to meet our host families. I understand the program needs to show they're doing something to appease the fears of the families, but for such a feeble attempt at quarantine we could still spread the infection to Japan just as readily. I get frustrated with the fear-mongering and paranoia created by the media. Remember bird flu? Did anyone actually acknowledge, "Hey, we freaked out completely in disproportion to the actual threat?" I don't think so. But anyway, that's an entirely separate rant. Staying in a hotel with the rest of HIFers should be fun, and a good way to ease into that whole "living in a foreign country" thing.

日本へ行きましょう！

So. I'm going to Hakodate, Japan, in less than two weeks. I'm a little late on the uptake in actually getting my blog put together, but it's finally here! It hasn't yet entirely hit me how far away I'll be. Temporarily at home in Spokane, WA, I'm running into all these friends from high school only to explain I'm here in the city for only about a week more before spending my summer thousands of miles away from anything familiar.

日本の最も北の島は北海道

Quick explanation of the blog- anything earlier than this post (January through March) is from the blog I keep for Yale Undergrad Admissions. I write stuff here and upload it to the admitted student's website to share some stories of what I do to get the kiddies all pumped up about college. This post and later (May through the rest of the Summer) will be about my shenanigans in Japan, or as I've already decided they'll be called, Japananigans.

Hokkaido International Foundation was my first choice program because of the homestay aspect. Living in Tokyo through Sun Academy Nihongo would be awesome, but I wouldn't have real Japanese people making me real Japanese food every night. All the programs sent out their acceptance letters over spring break while I was in the middle of the Amazonian rainforests looking at birds, far away from email access. When I finally reached a computer when we took a break in Quito, Ecuador, I saw the acceptance decisions from all of them, with confirmation deadlines that had already passed. Thankfully, HIF was pretty chill and let me in anyway.

北海道の地図

Speaking of missed deadlines, I probably should have already sent off the medical forms... let's get on this.