Speechy speechy, and the Playground Movie Star

It must seem strange that I'm posting so soon after the first one, doesn't it? Well, I have a reason for that. Today I actually don't have anything planned until six, and it's almost five. No one's home. so I'm just hanging around doing nothing. I figured it was a good enough time to make a blog post as any.

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for the birthday wishes! Special shoutout to the parents, Liz Denius, Marilyn Sands and Ella Rose for the birthday gifts. I had a blast on my birthday in Japan; I went to a sushi round table, where there's this sushi conveyor belt, and on it pieces of delicious fish scroll by, just waiting to be picked up. I had six plates, which is apparently very little; my host mom had ten or so. She's amazing. Here are some pictures and short videos of what it was like.

My meal.

Short video of the little conveyor belt above the automatic one. Here, you ordered your food from a little screen, and the little conveyor belt brings it right next to you. Really cool.

The unagi sushi I ate (and loved), and a bowl of soup next to it. Super tasty.

And here's a video of the automatic conveyor belt!

Pretty rad, right?

So you may be curious about the title of the blog post, as you probably should be. I'll start with the first one, speechy speechy, because that has become a big part of my life here in Japan. 

Apparently when you're a Japanese exchange student, your only purpose is to write many, many speeches in Japanese. To give you an example of how many I've said so far: in the last two weeks I have given three speeches. One was at a Rotary meeting, one was a presentation on America to a bunch of high school students, and the last was at an elementary school. But I'll be getting back to that later. 

See, the thing about speeches (I call them 'speechy' in my head, because the Japanese don't use plural, and they use katakana for the spelling, so it ends up sounding like speechy) is that I can't speak Japanese all that well yet. I'm not being modest. I'm getting a lot better at comprehension, but my speaking skills are still pretty poor. This of course means that when I first write my speeches, they're pretty simple. They're basic Japanese, all of which I can understand, and easy to read. 

Then of course I have to ask my sensei or my host mom for help. 

They usually take one look at my speeches and go, 'No'. Just no. Then they take my speeches from me, so lovingly crafted, and completely rewrite them until suddenly I have no idea what I'm saying. 

It's getting better. But it's still really difficult. For those of you who want to become foreign exchange student in Japan, be prepared to stutter your way through a ton of speeches every month. 

Now I'll go back to the elementary school, which is the second part of the post title. 

So Thursday and Friday I and the other exchange students went to an elementary school to give a speech to an English class. Thursday where the fifth graders, and Friday were the sixth graders. Here's what my first day looked like. 

Twelve o'clock, get driven to the school. Meet with the principal, and have about fifteen minutes of awkward, stilted conversation before getting sent up to the classrooms. Meet the small children. Have lunch with the small children. 

Now these kids, when they first saw us, didn't think we spoke Japanese at all. So they were speaking a little English to us, and running away and giggling every time we responded. The first time I said, "Sumimasen, nansai desu ka?" (excuse me, how old are you), I think my table rioted. One little boy screamed, "NIHONGO SHABBERERU!!!!" (SHE SPEAKS JAPANESE) really loudly. After that we managed to communicate a little better. 

After that, we went to the playground to play dodgeball. 

I won't bore you with the details of the dodgeball game, but something really cute happened during it. A bunch of little kids--and I'm talking TINY CHILDREN, I think they must have been first or second years--ran up to the us and said, "SAINKUDASAI!!" (Please sign!!). Then they gave us their notebooks. I think I must've signed at least thirty notebooks that first day. I didn't mind, though, because they were so adorable. My goodness. 

Then we gave our presentations. It went much the same the next day. It was really fun, and we got out of school early, so I'm counting those two days as my best memories of Japan so far. Here are some pictures!