Host Family Update!

(Edit) I copied Nick's idea of embedding acronym tags. Now you can scroll over Japanese characters w/ your mouse to get English Romanizations and/or translations of words and phrases, yay!

We finally got our homestay information from HIF via email! I am rather saddened that my host family doesn't have small children or dogs (unless it just doesn't list pets, so I'll keep my fingers crossed). I told Ashok that if he ends up with kids, we're totally trading families. Anyway, there are three people in my host family: a 54-year old woman, a 24-year old guy, and a 28-year old girl. I can't tell if the latter two are a couple or if they're siblings...but it does say that they'll be staying in the same room, so I'm going to assume it's a married couple for the time being.

It took me a little while to figure out how to read most of the document, seeing as my カタカナ literacy is rather abysmal. For the non-Japanese literate, カタカナ is the phonetic character alphabet reserved for "loan-words" in order to prevent the tainting of Japanese with foreign terms. For instance, my host-mom has ウオーキング listed under her hobbies, which if you say really quickly is supposed to sound like (and translate to) "walking." If you think that was difficult, try converting Philadelphia to カタカナ, keeping in mind that the "f" sound is rendered by an "h" and the "l" sound by an "r" in Japanese, so you get something like "Hiraderuhuia" (I don't quite remember the spelling, although I recall I missed it on the カタカナ test we had during the fall semester and it's traumatized me since).

In other news, my host-brother has music and traveling listed under his hobbies whereas my host-sister has nothing. Oh well. Both of them have part-time jobs but unfortunately I can't read the 漢字 for what my host-mom does and I can't paste it from the Adobe Acrobat pdf---sad pandas. According to my electronic dictionary, the first two 漢字 translate to "self-employed" and the third 漢字 translates to "karma." Yeah. No idea what the heck "self-employed karma" is supposed to mean, and I can't get a reading of all three 漢字 together. I might make a jpeg of it and send it Michael Thornton's way and ask, although I feel bad pestering him about all my questions just because he's from there.

I looked up my homestay address and it seems I'm about a half hour walk from the train station which I'll have to use to get to school. Google estimated my trek as "26 minutes walking, 21 minute train ride, 9 minutes walking." I suppose that means I can start working off some of these pounds I've been putting on, *sigh*. For the record, I'm actually not serious--I'm well aware that weighing as much as I do probably means I'm underweight and malnourished, but I'm really vain. I miss playing three varsity sports and being hardcore in shape and running for miles and miles and not feeling tired. Also, running w/ Justin throughout New Haven during the school year was an unpleasant reminder of just how out of shape I've become (as well as yet another example of the brutal reality that Justin Hudak will always be better than me in everything I do, haha). I am hoping that Ashok or Elliot will run w/ me this summer, assuming we have time in between classes and everything else. I need the company to motivate me to run, plus my sense of direction is a complete fail. 失敗. I just hope I can find my way from my homestay to school w/o getting hopelessly lost.

However, the beginning of this summer's program will actually run somewhat differently from previous years. HIF included an attachment in the homestay email detailing a new "quarantine" procedure that we'll be undergoing as a result of the Swine Flu outbreak. Rather than go immediately to our homestays, we'll be residing at a hotel for a week where they'll monitor our frequency (sorry, couldn't resist the Star Trek movie joke), body temperature, health, etc. HIF covers the hotel cost and breakfast will be provided daily as well as ¥1000 for dinner each night (lunch is always at HIF). I'm actually pretty excited about the whole arrangement. It means I won't have a curfew for that week, I'll have people walking with me to/from school who will (theoretically) prevent me from getting lost, and I'll get to spend more time w/ my fellow HIFers in general. That and Ashok will be helping me w/ my 日本語の宿題 all week, although I have yet to inform him of that.

Anyway, I believe this post is sufficiently lengthy and this is probably the first time I actually have something legitimately relevant to this summer/of remote interest to post. Time for another hour of "studying" and such before bed--yay bad life habits (or at least, bad sleeping habits). Nick would shake his head and scold me. Oh well. G'night!