A place for my thoughts and ideas, my creative outlet, a little piece of the web for me to call my own...yeah...right...
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| a bite of chocolat... ::home:: A place for my thoughts and ideas, my creative outlet, a little piece of the web for me to call my own...yeah...right... |
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Wednesday, June 19, 2002 And then I met my host family... As it turns out, they're a really nice family. The Yamashita family: mother, father, and a daughter named Chion. The parents are artists, hand-painting kimonos and fans. The father is almost always away on business [and I don't know exactly what he does that is business-related, because he doesn't know how to describe it in English, and I'm not fluent in Japanese]. I could have ended up in any type of family anywhere between very traditional through techie, and I was somewhat selfishly hoping for a techie family, but, alas...no big deal, though, they're not extremely traditional either, they fall somewhere between the categories. My only gripe is that I wish that they had a computer...everyone here has cell phones, but computers are hard to come by. There's a computer lab at the school, but it's only open for a few hours after hours, though...[wow am I redundant]... The house is cute: small rooms, low ceilings, steep stairs, and some interesting traditional-esque aspects, too. There's a kitchen, a living room, a room used for storage, a shrine room, and a three-section bathroom downstairs, and two bedrooms upstairs with a random empty room between them, a tea room, and a half-bath. All of the rooms have reed-matted floors except for the kitchen and bathrooms. Almost all the doors and windows are intricate little wooden-sliding pannels. There are no brightly painted rooms and no carpeting, mostly white walls and woodwork, except for tiles in the bathrooms. The downstairs bathroom is separated into three parts: a shower stall with a deep adjointed bathtub, a room with a toilet-sink combination, and a room with a tiny urinal and a tiny sink. In general in Japan, people are really big on cleanliness. Shoes are removed before entering a house, and slippers must be worn in rooms not floored with reed-matting. Even some bathrooms have seperate slippers. They wash their hands a lot, often shower more than once a day, and many even wash their feet before moving about the house after wearing sandals outside. Chion's cool...but all the girls here just love American pop...most don't even like j-pop...and it's next to impossible to strike up conversation with guys. Here, there is some serious gender separation...girls and guys just don't hang out together unless they're practically married. Most of the guys wont talk to girls, and those who try, the girls will just say "kichoi" [I hate you, asswhole] and walk away...and at this school, everyone is soo goody-goody...for example, all of the guys on motorcycles are "bad"... It's, in a word, interesting... posted by Shannon | 4:48 AM |
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