I have no other interesting anecdotes about my last week in the dorm. I packed everything I brought and bought into two suitcases, a backpack and my laptop case, cleaned my dorm room, gave my key back to Mr. Sasaki and headed back down the road toward Nishi-Waseda station.

The combined weight of my backpack and the shoulder strap of my full laptop case made my arm go numb unless I stopped to reposition it every once and a while. Just as moving in America makes one painfully conscious of the amount of waste on accumulates over a lifetime, this move was also a reminder how quickly your possessions can weigh you down. I can’t imagine myself buying much more over here after this moving experience, with the exception of souvenirs/Christmas presents for my family.

The trip took about an hour, and I finally arrived at Minami Senju station a few minutes before the 5:30 pm meeting time. I dragged my stuff to the Risona Bank that I was told to wait by and soon found the van of my host family.

So, that happened on Friday, and now it’s Monday.

The whole family is great, if you were wondering. The wife, Rina, is from Kansai, which means she’s more no-nonsense than the typical Tokyo housewife (according to stereotypes that have yet to be disproved in my mind). She spent some time in America studying abroad, and is pretty good at English. Good enough that between the two of us we can usually get anything communicated, even if it takes a little effort. She’s currently on maternity leave because she had a baby in July. The baby is a pretty typical baby — it is impossible to predict whether doing something will trigger pleasant laughter or hysterical tears — but she’s already crawling everywhere, which strikes me as early for a three-four month old. Maybe. I couldn’t tell you within 12 months when babies are supposed to do things.

They already have a six year old daughter, Serin, who is unbelievably cheerful. She is always challenging, but forgiving, to communicate with because although she doesn’t have a really highly developed vocabulary, she talks really fast and casually, which is hard to understand sometimes. Still, she’s easy-going and thinks just about anything I do is cool, so I don’t regret checking “I prefer a house with small children” on my homestay application.

The husband, Masaru, is not quite as developed in English, but still competent. He works during the day, comes home and often goes running in preparation for a marathon he’s doing in November. I recently found out that he’s a huge fan of Michael Jordan, although he doesn’t pay much attention to basketball currently.

I think it’s fair to say that they both expected me to be at a much lower level than I am. Like I said, I have yet to have a situation where some concept was too complicated to attempt to communicate, or I hear a sentence where I don’t know half the words. Certainly I hear words I don’t know all the time, but getting to the point where there are few enough words you don’t know that you can ask about them in normal conversation without being annoying is something I’ve been looking forward to.

The very first night, I found myself signing up for a half-marathon during the same event that Masaru is running the full marathon. The next morning, I went to the very close public library and got a card. That evening we went to a shopping mall. The next morning was an athletic festival at Serin’s elementary school. I met Masaru’s mother there, who I was also able to communicate with. Today, Monday, I went back to work in the morning, then to school, and came back to the house.

It’s not a house, it’s an apartment, but that doesn’t mean that it’s small. I was actually surprised how large it is. There are three bedrooms, all the necessary other rooms, a large dining/family room with a playroom off to the side. It all has a very classy feeling, especially in comparison to the dormitory, where dead cockroaches in the bathroom were common enough to not get worked up over.

There’s yet to be a dinner that featured something I didn’t like, and I even tried Kimchi and Natto, which were numbers one and two on the list of foods most people are expected to dislike. The dining situation is fairly casual, as any house with a six year old an a three month old will likely be, so it’s not the strict, formal feeling that you might be expecting.

Overall, there’s nothing about it that makes me regret the decision to go for homestay. I’m even happy that I wasn’t able to get in on the first semester, because I feel that if I instead was carting all my luggage from the homestay to arrive at the tiny dorm room, it would be a huge disappointment. They respect the sanctity of “I’m studying right now,” the curfew is essentially a non-factor for someone who hates nightlife like me, and it forces me to use language every day. On weekends in the dorm, I could go through the whole day without even opening my mouth if I wanted to. Here there’s much more of an opportunity to speak, and I can already tell that it’s helping out.

Classes start this Friday, which means a new batch of students will be arriving this week. For the new student orientation, the teachers requested that I attend so I could talk up the calligraphy special class, and also to give a sample level three conversation with one of the other students from my class. I met with that other student (“Jay” or “Jae” or “J” or whatever) at the school today and we wrote up the conversation and did some practicing. The actual entrance ceremony is on Wednesday, and I won’t act like I’m not a little bit nervous about it. Oh well, it’ll be fine.

I also got a chance to ask about my grades on the final exam. They were mostly good to okay. Kanji was an 88, grammar was in the high 70′s, reading comprehension in the low 80′s. The listening was actually in the high 60′s, which was a little bit alarming. I’ll be able to go onto level 4 no problem, but I don’t know about my A grade (an 80 or higher overall grade is an A). According to my calculations, I still have it, but I’ll have to wait to hear the final word.

Well, I’m going to enjoy the final three days before classes start up again that work and worrying about speaking in front of all the new students will allow. My daily expenses has gone down to just about nothing, and I get a paycheck next Monday. In other words, things are going good, thanks for asking.