Sunday, September 18, 2011 8:51 PM, JST
Posted by Shaun
Five is my lucky number. There are five letters in my first name, S-H-A-U-N, five letters in my last name, and five in my middle name. There are five people in my family, counting me. I will be the fifth student my host family has hosted, and, counting me, there will be five people in that family as well.
I found out my host family assignment on Friday, but I’ve been too busy to write about it until now. I meet them and move in tomorrow afternoon, so it might be too soon to start writing about them, since I only know the barest of details. My host father is a businessman, my host mother is self-employed, and I have two host siblings. My host brother is 22 and has a part-time job, and my host sister is 21 and a student. The family also has an inside dog. They live about an hour commute from Waseda, but there’s only one transfer, and it’s at Ikebukuro, the area where we’ve been staying throughout orientation. From Ikebukuro to Takadanobaba, the second-nearest station to Waseda, is a four-minute train ride, so my hope is that I get to grab a seat on the train every day and enjoy some nice relaxing reading for the pre-Ikebukuro leg of the journey.
I’m excited to meet my host family. On the paper that I was given with their information, their reason for hosting an American student was given as “They want their children to have a wonderful experience with you.” Since I’m not the first student they’ve hosted, I have high hopes that my host siblings will be interested in showing me around and helping me figure things out.
I’m ready to stop living out of a suitcase and start getting settled. I’m also ready to have a group of Japanese people that I can get to know face to face. The people I’ve been meeting through orientation have been really nice, but it’s hard to get to know them in a group of 23 people. I need to dive into my Japanese more. Our hostel is so international that it’s hard to know which language to speak sometimes.
