Ryuugakusei: Home Stay

Yesterday (Saturday), everyone spent a day with Japanese families in Kanazawa. Some people were alone and others went in pairs. (Randomly assigned?) I was in a pair with Ricky. The couple that picked us up from the dorm was pretty much the cutest old couple that exists. They picked us up at 2pm and we went for a drive. The first place we went to was a Zen Buddhist cemetary near their house. That sounds a bit creepy, but it's a really cool place. It's spread out throughout a hilly wooded area with a temple in the back. We rang a giant bell with a big log. Yeah, pretty awesome. Out front of the cemetary was a pretty great overview of Kanazawa.

After that, we went to a fresh foods market called Omicho Market. It was amazing. It had what I can only assume is almost every kind of sea creature. There was buckets of octopus tentacles of bowls of weird black goop. They bought us some ice cream while we walked around. Tip: eating ice cream while constantly smelling fish is not a good idea.

Finally, we went to their house for a barbecue. Once we got to their house, we met their two daughters and his mother, who was 90 years old. Both of their daughters were married, the oldest to a chinese man she met while studying mandarin in China. They had a son, who was 7. We went to their backyard to chill out and talk. Another exchange student was there for the day too, but she was Chinese. She had also been studying Japanese for one year, and surprisingly she was at about our level. The problem was, of course, that she didn't speak English. The good news was, that Mr. Chinese Yoshi could speak Mandarin, Japanese, and English. He gave us his business card. He told us if we ever wanted to go to China we could e-mail him and he could set us up. >_<

We spent abour four hours there just hanging out, talking, and eating. Once it got dark they brought out some sparkler-like fireworks for us to play with. The little kid plead with his mom for a lot of the time to be able to light two of them at once. She finally gave it at the very end after jo-chan had lit two.