Alright, my second post, but finally some interesting stuff.

This weekend is Toukasan, a big festival in Hiroshima, where girls dress up in yukata, similar to a kimono, and guys wear jimbei. Anyway, a fellow classmate and I decided to go before everyone else, since we were not going to wear jimbei of yukata, like all the other students. The first thing we did when we got there was go to the Sega arcade; not very cultural or related to Toukasan, but still very fun indeed. After that, we starting walking towards the actual festival, we reached a small part of it where a lot of food stands were. We decided to eat later and to see a shrine that we needed to see for our religion class. So we spent like an hour and a half looking for the shrine, which we didn’t find, because we kept walking past it. When we finally did find it, it was so crowded that we could only stand there for about 30 seconds. Looking for the shrine was pretty tiring, so we decided to go to some more arcades; one of them actually had Half life 2 survivor. After some walking, we went into a 7 11, we took a look around and stared looking at the magazine section. I was looking at a manga about samurai, when “friend” comes up to me with open nudie mag saying “Charles look”. So I look to see him standing there with the magazine open to some girl with her top half hanging out, and there was a guy right next to him, strange. After 7 11, just went back home on the over crowded fear train. This was by far the scariest train ride I have been on since getting here. First, when the train was loading, a lady tripped on my foot, we both said excuse me, no big deal. A few minutes later “friend” tells me that the guy across from us is probably reading a dirty manga, so I look up to see what he is talking about, and the girl next to him now thinks I was staring at her, so I quickly look down, and when I look back up, she is still staring at me. So I decide to look to the right, were there is this girl who notices me and tells her friend “hey look a foreigner”. So now there’s three people staring at me, so then I just look down. After a while I figure its safe to look back up, and when I do, the guy standing in front of me, is looking down at me, so I just looked at the ground for the rest of the train ride. The long scary train ride.

Hello, sorry, but this is the first chance getting to post. It was very troublesome getting internet on the campus. Anyway, I at Hiroshima Shudo University; and at the moment, I’m in my homestay. Well, let me start from the beginning, this post will probably be long as it will cover about four days. Well, 5:15am, La Quinta Inn, Phoenix. I decided to set the alarm on my phone, good thing I did because I did not get the wakeup call I requested at check in. I caught the first caravan to the airport at 5:30am, arrived at my terminal about 10 minutes later, and got in line. Sensei and some other students were already there before me, so I knew I was at the right place. Check in took forever because there was about 60 people in line all going to San Francisco. One family was checking about 8 bags, so that did slow things down a bit. But everyone was able to get through on time, which is all that matters. The flight to San Fran was about 2 hours, so it wasn’t too bad. San Francisco airport is huge, it was my first time there, and it is an amazing airport. Well, the lay over was about 2 hours, enough time to buy a disgusting sandwich and some barely flavored potato chips. Now for what I know you have been waiting for….JAPAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh, wait… there’s a 12+ hour flight before we get to that. The flight was ok, except that my seat had like something blocking were I would have stretched my legs, so my legs were even more crunched. On this flight I realized, that if you sleep, and the stewardess is serving food or snacks, you wont get any, and no one will wake you up. One guy missed a whole meal on a 12 hour flight because he was asleep. Anyway, we got two meals, so the guy didn’t miss the second one. One cool thing about international flights is that, each seat has a tv and about 30 channels, with movies, tv shows, just about anything. The cool thing was, whenever you go to a channel, the program starts from the beginning. So, after the flight, we’re finally in Japan, all that’s left is an hour and a half flight to Hiroshima from Narita, Tokyo. I fell asleep on that flight, so I didn’t get the green tea or the candy that was passed out. After the flight, we were finally to our destination, and glad to not have to fly anymore. At the airport, Mr. Ootsu was waiting for us, so he could drive us to the university. That was about 30 minutes until we got there to be surprised by about 20-30 students of the school. It felt good to be welcomed after so much traveling. After the introduction, we got bento lunches, they were pretty good, pork cutlets, rice, plastic lettuce, I forget what else, but it cured an empty stomach. Once we finished eating, we were able to go to our rooms and setup. I decided to take a shower that night, since orientation would be early, and I wanted to get as much sleep as possible. Orientation wasn’t earlier enough to my surprise; I was up at 5:30am. I went to the restroom, and Travis, another student on the trip, was up and ready to explore. We were talking out on the balcony when my roommate got up and joined us; after that Travis’ roommate also joined us, and decided to go for a walk. We walked down one of the school drive ways for a little bit, and stopped to see some of the rice fields near the school. It looked great, and there were a lot of mountains in the background covered in trees. The Shudo campus is very green. We stood looking at the scenery which was great, but then it started to rain, so we decided to head back….

Hey, sorry for the big skip, but really haven’t had time lately. Nothing really great happened yet, but I’ll try to have constant posts from here on out.