One month in Japan in one sitting get ready.

Okay, so I know I haven't written in a long while considering what I have been up to. I went through a patch where i was so frustrated with a situation i didn't want to portray that to anyone else and make them think i wasn't having a great time because it is quite the opposed. i am loving my trip and those simple things that were frustrating me are in the past and are still in Japan. it may sound like i didn't like Japan but that is not the case at all i love Japan and i love the people there i just needed freedom that i never was able to have. but that is a long story and for now i just want to tell you all about what i have been up to.
i guess i really left you all in China. a little in Japan but not too much. so where to begin in Japan... I suppose i will start in Ibaraki... I was lucky enough to be placed with the Ebata family from Shizu. this village of 10,000 people was about an hour and a half from the school by train. as many of you know i am not a morning person so for a month i acted and survived on very little sleep. i would wake up at about 5:15 every morning leave the house by 6:10 and would get home around 7-7:30 sometimes later, seldom earlier. at times i really wanted to do things with my family but really there was no time during the day to do anything. even though it was impossible to really do anything with my host family i got to experience more of the country life and the mountains that others didn't. My host grandma lived next door and had a strawberry crop, amazingly tasty and amazing strawberry jam. my room was a traditional rice paper on the windows and doors and i was sleeping on a tatami mat really it wasn't too bad but in the end i was really missing a bed. My family also had a set of dishes for each person and you never mixed the dishes or the chopsticks, really i never understood this and it was only in my family that this happened. oh well it was a family, cultural thing that i just adjusted to and actually learned the proper place for each dish the chopsticks i had down in one night hahaha. I have also learned that i under no circumstances like soy bean anything, and i mean anything. i don't like mizo soup, i don't like nato, i don't like tofu, i don't like Japanese sweets, nothing. for quite a long time i kept quiet about this but finally my mom saw me choke down a piece of tofu and asked and i broke down and told her i didn't like anything soybean. she felt bad for making me eat it for so long i felt bad that i made a face about it. but in the end we decided that it was funny and they would still jokingly offer any kind of soybean they could just to see my reaction. I suppose i should tell you about my family at this point... i had a Mom who wanted me to call her Haha (informal way of saying mom in Japanese), i had a grandma who always ate supper with us and i had three sisters Souri 20, Tomomi 19, and Chacki 14 (pronounced Jackie). my sisters all had different personalities that you just had to love. my grandma is an amazing woman who doesn't speak a work of English and i don't speak a word of Japanese so we of course could communicate just fine much to the disgust of my middle sister Tomomi who treated to stop speaking English because grandma and i could communicate better than her and me sometimes. but all i can really say is that i had an amazing family that i will cherish forever.
School... well that was interesting. we had classes really all day which of course that is what we should have right. well it was hard to be in class that long. i really wanted to just explore and experience Japan which wasn't quite happening to my liking. unlike China where we would have class in the morning and field trip it up all afternoon with an annoying tour guide we would be stuck on campus and not be able to go anywhere. we did have some fun though we learned about culture and language and we got to try our hand at haiku which i must say i mastered i won the first prize for mine which i wrote in chapel apparently it followed the proper Japanese style of Haiku, i really found this humorous. we got to play the Japanese Harp thingys that really no one remembers what they are called trust me i just asked, haha. it was interesting but it seemed really flat to me. we learned some of the different Japanese folktales, interesting but weird, it was by far our best class though. we had this class that dealt with mixing cultures which in my opinion and the opinions of my classmates was a complete waste of time, it may have helped the Japanese students that were in the class but for us it was horrible, they were just making us sit through what we already experienced through out our whole trip and with our families. it wasn't in anyway helpful. oh well what can we do. Japanese class was very overwhelming and difficult. our first day we walked in and she just started speaking Japanese to us, and was wanting us to read this hiriagana that we didn't know at all. and still don't to tell you the truth. she kind of dropped it after she saw how far behind we were from where she wanted us to be. but there is nothing really we could do about that.
now for our day trips... Niko, this was an amazing place. there is a beautiful waterfall then we went to this shrine area. it really sucked that we were so rushed because we missed a lot really it should have been a two day excursion. on our way up to the waterfall is this winding road that there is a Japanese poem that helps students learn the katakana sounds. This is one thing that my grandma and i really connected over and had a great conversation this road and my sister got mad we so understood each other that it was funny. we had to take our shoes off to see some of the shire stuff. that was weird. Nikko is the place that has the monkeys the see no evil hear no evil and speak no evil so that was cool.
we got to go to an elementary school and play with them it was so much fun we also spent time with some grade 7 and some grade 8ers so much fun. i loved spending time in the schools.
we went to the aquarium, and i pet a shark ya you read that right i pet a shark. and i saw a dolphin show and i saw penguins. so many things... i loved it. NOT as good as the Great Barrier Reef trust me i have seen it. haha
we are also the next OC chour. where ever we go it seems like we are asked to sing and we are getting better and better haha.
there are so many things to say about japan and i really love it i just had a hard time for a while so i refused to say anything and i kept it bottled up.