Nihon e youkoso!

Finally after a cancelled flight, an unexpected 24 hour stopover in somewhere south of the Gold Coast and a 12 hour flight I have made it to Japan. Bring it on.



This is my host family, the Fujimoto family:
Father - Hiroyuki
Mother - Kumiko
14 year old daughter - Ayaka

8 year old twin boys - Taiga and Ginga

This is my room. It's nice and large by Tokyo standards, has its own air conditioning and a wardrobe bigger than my one at home. The unfortunate thing is the futon, the traditional Japanese bed. It's essentially just a thin mattress on the hard wood floor, that can fold up to make more space during the day. A novelty at first, now I'm just dreaming of my huge waste of space western bed. Supposedly hard beds are very common in Japan though so I think I'll have to keep dreaming for the next month!

This is my street, somewhere near Oimachi station. Taiga regularly asks me to walk him to school (he's the boy in front with the super dope back pack).

I was expecting a mild summer, the websites I'd looked at gave estimates of 24-28°. However, it's much hotter than that, and so incredibly humid. It's all people can talk about, "Atsui desu ne" (it literally is, it's one of the first sentences we learnt)! At least I'm better at handling it than the English boys! Every morning on the train this cartoon shows the daily weather with recommendations to drink water and use cool towels for your head. Also, Mario delivers the train rules to everyone on the train video screens! Why use a real actor when you have cool anime and video game characters to do it instead? 

The morning rush. Trains come every 2 minutes, yet people still rush and push to get on to the first train they can, but in an orderly fashion though of course! All the stairwells have up and down lanes, and the trains have waiting lanes on either side of the doors before getting in. Then the push starts. When you're a few metres from the door, it may look as though the train is too squished for you to get on, but with a rugby scrum pushing pfrom behind, both you and the 4 people behind you manage to push in to the train carriage. I have watched a train go past that was so full, that one man's body and face was literally squished up against the windows like you see in cartoons when someone runs into a door! I was so upset I wasn't fast enough to take a photo of it, so this one will have to do instead. I was barely able to lift my arm up to take the photo.

So that's the start of my adventure. Sorry for any spelling mistakes or poor formatting, I'm having to do this from my phone.