Typhoon

Today was the day the typhoon came. I mean it wasn't close to us at all, but there was a lot of rain and stuff. It felt kind of nice in this hot summer. Because of all of the rain, Javier's host dad drove both of us to school today :)
My first class today was history, and today we all did presentations in groups that we had been working on since yesterday. We all did presentations on different aspects of the Jomon people. My group did "Art" which included music and spiritual stuff in addition to clay figures, pottery, and clothing. Our presentation was informative, but sort of boring, especially compared to the other presentations in our class. One group did hunting, and they acted everything out. The Jomon people would fish by placing wicker baskets in the river which the fish would get caught in. To demonstrate this, they had one girl wearing a sticky note that said "Fisher" hold a laptop case to catch candy or "fish" that were being thrown at her by a guy wearing a sticky note that said "river" And to demonstrate the celebration that took place in the village after a good catch, they gave the candy out to everyone in the class. It was basically amazing.
After history I had english, where we talked about the book Kokoro. Yeah, nothing interesting to talk about here unless you've read Kokoro...
After that is my free/math homework period. Basically all of the AB calculus people were trying to figure out the homework, and we ended up skipping like half of it. Math=not my strong point.
After that was lunch. We had a free lunch day again today. I left the school following some people who said they were going to a bento shop. That didn't turn out to be such a good idea, I don't think anyone ended up actually eating there. So then I went with Shiori, Candace, Marius and I think one other person? to go to this udon place that I haven't been to before. but Shiori started talking about how expensive it was, and how it basically has the same stuff as the cheap udon place across the street, so we ran back to go to the cheap place. Today is like legit the 5th time I've eaten there, and the food wasn't even very good to start with. but it IS cheap.
After lunch was calculus... yeah, not much to talk about there....
and after that was Japanese. I've worked out something with my Japanese teacher, so I just study by myself in class (starting where I left off in the genki II book last year), while everyone else does class work. I got a lot done today! Also, one of the more fun points of my day, is when I get to ask Michael for help after Japanese class. I ask him to make sentences for me, and give me context etc. Michael is Fukutomi sensei's son by the way, so he is fluent in Japanese.
After school today, Brendan told Michael and me that Mizutani sensei asked him if he wanted to go into the advanced class, so we tried to convince him to do it. He didn't have enough confidence in himself to do it, so we both told him that we would help him study. So then we went to an empty classroom upstairs, and I started teaching Brendan some stuff, but those two get distracted/distract each other waaay too much! Oh wellz, I managed to teach him the difference between i and na adjectives, and how to conjugate i adjectives into the past, negative, and past negative tenses, so I think that was 20 minutes well spent.
My host dad came to pick Javier and I up today (once again, because of the weather). Also, Fukutomi sensei had planned to come to my house today to meet with my host parents, but her gps couldn't find my city (yeah...) so she just came home with us. I expected to just sort of sit there while she talked with my host parents. So I was surprised at how much of their conversation I understood. Also, Fukutomi sensei told us that I made the highest score out of anyone (not including Michael of course, he lived in Japan for like 8 years) on the placement exam! This surprised me quite a bit, because I have not had the most experience in Japanese, there are people who have studied just as long, or longer than me. I mean I know I do study outside of class, but I didn't realize it had amounted to that much... I also just did not feel confident in my placement exam... well, this is good news nonetheless, it gives me a bit more confidence.
About half an hour after Fukutomi Sensei left, we ate dinner. Dinner tonight was Okonomiyaki! They set out a grill/skillet sort of thing on the table... I don't know what it's called in english, my host dad asked me and I didn't know how to answer. Apparently in Japanese it is called a "hotto pureeto" (hot plate). Anyway, and we just made the okonomiyaki on there and ate it, it was fun, and it was super delicious! Oh, after reading this, I realized that most people probably don't know what okonomiyaki is! It looks like a pancake, but it has like cabbage and stuff in it (and usually lots of meat), and then you put this sauce stuff on it, and then nori (dried seaweed) on top of that. It's really delicious. I didn't think I would ever be able to eat it, because there's always meat in it, but my amazing host mom made me some that is vegetarian. ^-^