What Makes This Fun

It's weird to think that it's still June, the year feels like it's going so fast and it IS, but it also feels like I'll never be leaving. I know I will so that's that, but the feeling is there.

Though I'm never quite sure what to blog about, I do think about this blog a lot and about my friends and family back home. How can I share with you what I'm going through? The wonderful and terrifying (not in a bad way) experiences I have everyday. I'm not a very good writer in my opinion and I forget to take pictures because I don't want to be living behind the camera. Maybe I'll try lists of things, things that have made me really happy lately:

• The ways people laugh here, how my friends all start of quietly and build up, then fall back down again to silence. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's not, and I think sometimes they're surprised by my roar that comes from nowhere and ends just as abruptly. 
• Every time I ask a school friend to hang out and they say they have to study, it's annoying mostly but they're so sweet about it. They don't want to be studying.
• When people are surprised that I like Umeboshi.
• The ladies at the school store who know I'm there for the Umeboshi onigiri. 
• Wearing makeup on the weekends, feeling my glitter or red eyeshadow click everything back into place after a week of confusion.
• Singing backup at karaoke but never in the right tune or speed, sometimes just reading the lyrics deadpan or ad-libbing, and then watching the singer try not to laugh.
• The second floor of the McDonalds near the station where I go with friends when we just want to sit and talk in the middle of everyone.
• Holding hands in crowded places so nobody gets left behind.
• Watching adults play baseball so poorly that nobody is even watching them anymore, and spilling soda on myself when I cheer for them getting a home run. 
• Understanding conversational Japanese, communicating.

I'm leaving for school soon, today we don't have club and we won't until late next week. We have tests and then the class match, I'm on the girls dodge ball team. I told them about the rubber balls in the US that leave welts, how you get good at catching or you get bruises. They're terrified.


P.S. Make sure to check out my photo album (click on the photo slideshow in the right sidebar,) I update it pretty frequently and there are some photos from a Kendo tournament in there now.

Communication

I mess up in Japanese a lot, like A LOT. Sometimes it's funny, like when I accidentally said my hands were "shit" rather than "stinky" after my first day wearing the Kote in Kendo. Sometimes it's really frustrating and I want to give up, so angry that I can't make myself understood properly Usually though, at that time, we pull out a dictionary or start miming things, and it gets fun again. No matter how much I mess up, everyone here knows that it's going to happen and nobody holds it against me (not that I ever expected them to, but it is nice to know.)

Somehow all this confusion has got me studying more languages. I practice English a lot, using the little prompts given out for discussions in the International English courses (a group of students follows this course separately from the others for their entirety at school and most of them go on exchange) to write essays everyday. Sometimes they're AP Board worthy, sometimes they're just words, but it keeps my brain exercised. On top of this practice, I started to take up French again to fill the time between my breaks in Japanese and reading and trying to figure out what is going on in class, and it's been wonderful. My French is so limited now after a year without practice but I work on it little by little, and when I hang out with the other exchange students in my chapter we switch between Japanese and what we know of each other's languages, which gives me a chance to talk to Rose, from southern France.

Last week I popped out some stuff about my little sister and how good she is at French, but laughed at my own weird sounds and finished with "Je parle tres mal francais." Rose laughed and said my French was cute, and we switched back to Japanese.

Most of the time when we are together we speak in Japanese, sometimes we use english when our tongue fails us or Ko-chan (from China) wants to practice, but we speak to each other in the tongue that is new-ish to us all. It's fun, it's hard, and it's got to be weird looking in from the outside.

Now I am studying French and Spanish in my free time, not for any particular reason, but they are some of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn and that keeps them from being too distracting from Japanese (one of the hardest.) It's fun, I'm enjoying it and I want to keep going. Who cares whether it'll be useful or not, I'm just playing and words are the best toys.