I usually try to tie together my posts with some sort of central theme, but I’m going to throw that out the window because I’ve got some disconnected things to cover.

Although I worried a fair deal about the oral exam, it went better than I could have hoped. The teacher basically asked a bunch of questions that I happened to have interesting responses to (what I did during summer vacation, my job, how I studied before coming), and the time passed before I knew it.

But while I have moments like this where I can flow like a veteran, I have other moments where I can nary put together a sentence without looking like I studied from a survival phrases book. Like today in class, which is a bad thing because we’ve got another oral exam tomorrow. I don’t think this one is weighted as much as the one I already took, though.

I also said my goodbyes to a number of the Americans who took their final exam today. Most are leaving tomorrow, including my next door neighbor Stephen and Matt Wujak two doors down. I don’t see the Americans much on a weekly basis, but I’ll likely discover how much I owed my sanity to them in the coming weeks. So it goes, I guess.

I’ve got about two and a half weeks left in this dormitory room until it’s time to squeeze all my stuff back into my suitcase and head over to my homestay. For those family members on pins and needles to know more details about this, I got a bulleted list of information from Michiko-san today as well as two letters from the family.

The Tanabe is a family of 4, with two daughters, one six years old and one who was born in January of this year. The husband works for “a company” and the wife is a nurse who is currently on maternity leave. One thing that I heard from an American who had a bad experience in the homestay was that the family often forced her to spend time with the kids without any regard for her need to do homework. I doubt this would be a problem for various reasons, but if you crave something to worry about, there you go.

One thing I was thinking about is how to squeeze everything into a day. Before coming to Japan, I imagined this situation, where I have a school that demands a lot of attention, a job that would like me to work as much as possible, and a homestay that I’d imagine would like to spend some time with me as well. I also want to spend some time by myself as well. What will likely happen is that I’ll have to wake up earlier than I do currently in order to accommodate the 45 minute commute time. After school gets out at 12:15, I would have lunch and go straight to work and work for my maximum 4 hours. That would put me at about 5:00, where I could get home before 6:00. They say they eat dinner around 6-7, so that’s what I’m trying to aim for. The wild card is how many special classes I want to sign up for. I’ve had a ton of fun in both special classes (calligraphy and intermediate kanji) and there’s a part of me that wants to do a special class every day of the week next semester. The problem with that is that I would then get out of school at 1:15, which would mean I could only work for about three and a half hours before having to go home. I might decide that this is fine. I might decide to start working on Thursdays to compensate. I might not decide to do special classes every day.

It’s hard to anticipate how the homestay would actually be. What I can do is paraphrase the letters I received, which were both very nice and written on stationary (Japanese love stationary.) The letter from the wife (Rina) says that their family is looking forward to having me, they want to eat and go out together, and want me to teach them some stuff about America. She also included a letter written in (very good) English. All in all, they seem so excited to have me that I’m almost worried about disappointing them.

In addition, there was a letter from the six year old daughter, that was quite frankly very cute.

She also included a separate letter written in English. According to the “stat sheet” that I got from Michiko-san, the daughter (Serin) is interested in English. So I’m sure there will be a fair amount of pro bono English teaching, but luckily I’m not a grumpy person who doesn’t mind doing that sort of thing.

Beyond that, it’s all speculation. Like everything KCP does, it’s likely to be very good. I feel like the bad experience I heard was more of a fluke, and to be fair, I only heard one side of the story. I have a good feeling about the homestay, and am sort of looking forward to somebody caring when I get back to my room.

One trade off I’m making by doing a homestay (which my boss Peter swears that I’ll regret) is that I won’t have as much time to do whatever I want at the spur of the moment. That’s probably true, but as intrepid as I would like to be perceived, and as exciting as it would make this blog, I haven’t been taking as much advantage of that freedom as I could be.

One thing I did do was head over to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building in downtown Shinjuku, where the rumor was that there is a free observatory on the 45th floor. It was a decently clear day, as there had been a downpour the previous day, so I decided to make the trek. As it turned out, there was indeed a free observatory, and it was indeed very cool. Because my panorama from the top of Mt. Misan in Miyajima turned out nice, I decided to try something similar here. Although it wasn’t a panorama; the picture is actually square shaped. But it’s stitched from 20 separate pictures. The final image is 11963 x 10013 pixels, or almost 120 megapixels. Click on the picture below to be taken to the full size image, and sorry if it kills your computer.