Hi everyone! Sorry it’s been a while since my last blog post — I’m really enjoying everything we’re doing here. In this post, I’m going to talk about my home stay though, which was from Friday night to Monday morning.
First of all, my family consisted of a mom and dad and a daughter (19 years old) who is studying Spanish in Tokyo, and thus, was unable to come home while I was there. However, me and my parents still hit it off pretty well! We dealt with a language barrier most of the time, but with the help of google translate, we were able to make it work.
The first night (Friday), my parents were working, so a different family picked me up and took care of me until my parents could pick me up later that night.
Saturday, my mom had to take someone to the hospital in the morning, so my dad and I took a walk around town, eventually hiking up Mt. Fuji-san 2 (as he called it). He told me it’s just a fun name for a hill that isn’t even close to the size of Mt. Fuji. Regardless, the view over the city was great. After the hike, dad had to go work, so mom and I went to hang out with some of the other homestay families and play games. There was great food, everyone was super fun to hang out with, and we all got to know each other a bit. After hanging out with everyone, mom and I took a short walk through a nearby flower garden, which was nice.
Sunday, my mom and dad took me cherry picking in a town I can’t remember. There were a ton of trees with an assortment of 10 different types of cherries, all of which were delicious (we were able to pick them off the trees and eat them right there). Then we went to Mt. Haruna, and took some pictures at the lake before we went up to the top of the mountain to visit the shrine and enjoy a phenomenal view. After Mt. Haruna, we visited 2 more shrines on the way back. Both of them required climbing a lot of stairs, but they came with amazing views, a lot of nature, and really cool history lessons.
Monday was pretty uneventful — my family had work, so I was dropped off at another homestay family’s house, and we were taken to Ashikaga University before 9am.
Overall, it was pretty neat 😀