An action packed day in the life of me.

So, today was pretty dull. Classes were mostly going over the exams (the reason for my bad scores is of course that they were all written in Japanese) and I played soccer at lunch. Those kids are strong. I played keeper for a while, and got nice and cut up on the astroturf field. I thought my wrist was broken for a while, because the kid kicked the ball so hard. After school there was a kanji test, but it was a huge one, not the little kind that I was used to. All of the other kids in my class took their own test, and I took my middleschool test. It wasnt too terrible, I dont think I did especially well, but that is becuase nobody told me that I have a test. Oh well. After the test, I was told by my teacher to call WYS. Apparently, I have another family who wants to take me in, which is kinda nice, and we are deciding where I will live next. The new family, would be for four months, so I was inclined to say that one, as well as the fact that if I went with my classmate, we would be gone a quarter of the two months that I lived there on the school field trip. The new family lives on the same train line as I am right now, but much closer in. My counselor said something funny to me on the phone. It went something like this: "Your last host family didnt have very many people, so you will like this next one." What he ment by this was that this new host family, has 8 people living in it! I feel kinda weird, because I am afraid that I will be really big in a house that already has all those people. At least I wont be lonely. After school, as I was walking to the station, I watched the soccer team practice. I stood at the entrance to the field, and after a minute, a couple of the kids came running over to me and starting talking. We had a nice chat, about not anything in particular, one of the kids was having all of his friends ask him questions in Japanese and then he would translate them into English, even though I wanted to speak in Japanese, he wanted to practice his English, so I said ok. His English was pretty damn good. I was actually rather surprised in the conversation, I didnt get asked if I had a girlfriend (the answer is still no), but one of the kids said something in Japanese that I didnt catch, and they all laughed. The translator looks and me with a straight face and says in perfect English "Do you have a big dick?" The immaturity of the Japanese is rather astonishing. When I was hanging out with my friends in Ikebukoro a couple days ago, they were obsessing over stuffed Disney characters. weird stuff. Another interesting cultural thing, that I also experienced today, has to do with Koreans. There are roughly a million ethnic Koreans living in Japan. I wont go into any of the politics, as I really dont know enough about it, but the Tokyo Korean School is very close to my school. They use the same station. I was getting on the train to come home, and, as usual, the train was pretty packed. I was standing rather close to a bunch of middleschool girls from the Korean school. As I usually do on the trains, I was doing a little bit of eavesdropping, just to see (well, actually hear) if I could understand anything. They were mostly speaking in Japanese, with the occaisonal Korean, but then, again completely out of the blue, one of the girls says, and kind of loudly, "shit". I burst out laughing and probably scared them all. I told them, in Japanese, that shit wasnt a very useful word, and that they should try to avoid using it. They looked at me funny for the rest of the trip. Thats about all for now, I am looking forward to dinner.

Peter

ps. Chris, how should I go about explaining purikura to everyone?
also, Miri and Naomi, nice to hear from you, I am having some trouble with my cellphone, but will see if I can send you some mail.