Catching Up Pt. 3 (Final)

Alright, here's the final installment of my 'catching up' series. I'm on break right now, so I have a lot of time at the moment, luckily.

At the beginning of April, I had to say goodbye to my second host family, which was actually a little traumatic. I'd really gotten attached to these people, so you know. There was much crying, hugging and all that jazz going on. I told them, though, that if they ever decided to travel to America they should stop by my place and say hi.

Anyway, my new host family is...well, they're kind of the 'quintessential Japanese' family that you think of when you imagine traditional Japanese. The house is an enormous, old building, and it's very traditional, in that it still has tatami mats on the floors, and uses sliding doors. There's a shrine in the kitchen dedicated to the grandmother's late husband, and a monk comes in every week and prays over it. I have a host mom, a host dad, and a host grandmother, and the father is a doctor at a private hospital nearby.

In other words: they have a lot of money and it is vaguely nerve-wracking.

However they're very nice people; the host mom does things like flower-arrangement and tea ceremony, and we go to a lot of cultural performances. Just the other day I went to a Japanese puppet show, though I have to warn you: Japanese puppet shows are really morbid. Someone always dies at the end for reasons I can't really parse out because it's a cultural thing.

(Also the food is also a little horrifying, because they keep feeding me whole fish. I of course eat the whole fish, because I am a Good Exchange Student and sometimes that means dying a little on the inside for cultural experiences. But still--veeeeery Japanese.)

I don't have any pictures of my house yet, but I'll post some later.

Also just...two days ago, was it? Anyway, two days ago my brass band had it's annual concert, where we played about an hour and a half of music. The pieces were pretty difficult, but we'd worked for ages on them, so we killed it. In case anyone is wondering: yes, my host family recorded the entire thing and is planning on giving me a copy. If anyone wants to see the concert, I'm planning on posting the videos...somewhere. I'll get back to you about that later. Just to warn you, there's a lot of talking in Japanese in the third section, so you might not understand that one as well.