The Big 6!

Although I am over halfway through my exchange, today was the official six month mark. And somehow it makes more of an impression on me, six months sounding much more legit than 5 and a couple weeks. I feel like I should have some wise reflections about my time so far and my current feelings, but I can't think of any... maybe I'm just tired. So I'll just talk about some more little things in my daily life.

I'm taking some really fun and interesting classes right now, doing things I never did in America. I have an art class with the middle school 3rd years (like high school freshman), and we're making wooden spoons! We're all given saws and big files and are free to hack away at our blocks of wood as we like. The sensei goes around helping, but I was surprised by the amount of freedom the students have. I feel there would be more safety regulations in the US. In music class, there are like 40 guitars so there are enough for everyone to learn how to play! Right now we're split into groups and given one of six parts for the Mickey Mouse March. With everyone practicing at once, it's noisy but really fun :) I also go to a Japanese Manners class, and we are currently learning how to sit, stand, and bow properly, and how to handle a fan. I think it's so cool how this is a part of modern Japanese culture, since there's really nothing like it in America. Finally, we cook in home economics! Today we made crêpes and rolled cakes (those are incredibly popular here). My group definitely had the most struggles though... We had the wrong amount of ingredients in things, so the first crêpes didn't cook right and turned out looking like scrambled eggs. The cake ingredients were wrong too, so we had to triple everything. And then we put too much filling on the rolled cake, or maybe the cake part was really thick since we had so much batter, so it ended up more like a taco, and less like a roll... But I'm pleased to say that all tasted good ^_^

I may have mentioned this before, but they never eat apples without peeling and cutting them. So it was a big adventure tonight when I got tired of doing that and ate one normally, and all the kids wanted to try. And I guess it takes more skill than I realized. Also, they don't use peanut butter nearly as much here, but for some reason my family had a few jars so I've been teaching them all the ways to eat it. They only seem to eat it plain on bread or toast, so no wonder they don't like it, all sticky like that. Literally no one has heard of peanut butter and jelly, and they think it's the weirdest thing. I really don't understand how it's such a universal sandwich in America but America alone. I've also taught them about peanut butter on apples, bananas, and celery, all equally alien ideas.

More on Valentine's Day. Even though I didn't go to school on the 14th itself, I still got a huge amount of sweets. It actually started two days before, and continued on Saturday, Monday, and even Tuesday. There were a variety of cookies and chocolates, some awesome chocolate pudding tarts and even mousse. The presentation is also important, so everything was in cute little bags with ribbons and doilies. Wow actually just this moment I got another one, in a cute pink bag with pastel teddy bears and bunnies. And ooh it's a macaroon! At home it was even more ridiculous. I have never seen so many boxes of chocolate outside of a chocolate store. I had to self-impose a ban on chocolate for a couple days. But it was really fun!