Rotary things! In the past two weeks, I had my first district conference, finally getting to meet my fellow inbounds, and gave my big presentation about my life in America to my club. Neither went exactly as planned, but I took it all with a smile and it was just fine.
On the day of my district inbound orientation, my host family was all busy so I had to navigate the train system for the first time by myself. I had to change trains three times, and I just knew something was going to go wrong. It was all fine until my last changing, where I had to switch to a different train of the same line that branched off to where I was going. I barely had any time to switch, so I wasn't able to check very well which train I was getting on, so I ended up just switching from the express I had been riding to the local train, instead of the special branch line. I realized at the next stop, and didn't stress out or anything, but I lost time waiting 15 minutes for a train back the other way. I then had some trouble finding the actual building, and had to ask a few times, but eventually I got there, only about ten minutes late.
I walked in to a girl singing the Mexican national anthem, karaoke style, and then a girl singing the German anthem. I wasn't looking forward to "The Star-Spangled Banner," but apparently I had missed it, so I didn't have to. Then the chairman said, "ok, now please give your three minute speech reconfirming why you want to be here, and your plans for the year, in Japanese," and I noticed that all the other inbounds had full sheets of paper, covered in writing. That was a nasty surprise. So I whispered to the nice Rotex next to me, "uhhh no one told me about a speech..." and she and a nice man on my other side helped me quickly scribble something. I was third, so there wasn't much time, but I did my best and thankfully this not getting nervous about public speaking thing has been holding, so it was ok but way worse than everyone else's. I later found out that the chairman had emailed everyone the week before, but he had my address wrong so I didn't get anything.
The chairman then gave a lovely welcoming speech about how if we even broke one rule, we'd be sent home, and then I finally got to talk to the other students. There are six others, from Minnesota, Ohio, Mexico, Germany, Indonesia, and Australia, all with good English. The girl from Australia has already been here six months, so she can show us around. They're all girls except the boy from Minnesota, and I really like all of them and am excited to spend more time with them. It was sad because some of them met on Saturday, but I had SCHOOL and couldn't go :P Even though everyone's in France anyway and Gabbi was gone. Actually it was really random, instead of studying like usual we watched a movie, in English, about the Holocaust, then wrote an essay about it. So cheerful. While everyone else was out having fun. Anyway, the Rotary meeting ended fairly quickly, and my club counselor was very nice and gave me a ride home.
This Monday I met with my host club for the second time, to give my PowerPoint presentation about myself, and that got off to another rocky start. This time there were no problems with the train, the meeting was only two stops away from my station. However, there were great problems in the hotel, trying to find the room. First I went to the third floor, where it was last time, but no one was there. So I went down to the desk to ask, and was told to go outside to the adjoining building. I went there, and the ground floor was just a small lobby with elevators, so I took one to the eighth floor, which was the first one accessible by elevator, realizing I had no idea which floor it was on. The eighth floor was just a few blank halls with blank doors and no one around, so I decided to go back down and over to the desk to ask which floor it was. The guy called over a lady to help me, and we went back over to the adjoining building. She read the signs, put me an elevator telling me to go to the eighth floor, and left. So I went back up to the totally blank floor and decided to open a door, which happened to be the door to the Sakai Rotary Club office, but not meeting. Soo I went back to the main hotel side to the third floor again, because I had seen some people there before. I found some other important looking event, with cameras and people wearing sashes, definitely not my meeting, but I asked the hotel staff outside where the Rotary one was. So one of them went with me to the desk again, but this time asked someone who actually knew and was able to point me to the fourth floor this time, where I finally found my meeting. They could not understand how I had gotten lost in the hotel for 25 minutes, but it happened. Thankfully the meeting hadn't started yet, I was just supposed to get there early to set up my presentation. So I tried to do that, but it turned out my host family's big laptop that I had lugged around only had 8% battery left, and it died while I was setting up. Luckily the presentation was on a flash drive, so this awesome butler dude who had been helping with the projector was able to find a different laptop somewhere. The presentation itself went ok I think, but I had to give it mostly in English because I don't know enough Japanese. My counselor helped translate, but I feel like a lot was lost. Oh well. They gave me some adorable little towels as a thank you, so Japanese. I think my club and counselor are mostly amused by me and all my mishaps, so that's good. However, they were all a little concerned about me going home alone, which I did just fine, thank you.
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