hot chocolate party

11/18/2010
This morning was very cold. I had to wear my gloves even at osato station to keep my hands from falling off. There are already a lot of christmas decorations up in Ichinomiya around the station.
After school today, all of the Aikido people had to wait around until Aikido. We went to a circle K and bought some food, and Suet-yee had made me a bento for an after school/before Aikido snack. And then we all decided that we wanted hot chocolate, and we still had some from yesterday.* The hot chocolate wasn't very sweet though, and we didn't want to take all of the school's sugar, so we sent Lizzie to buy some sugar from the drug store across the street. She came back with a large bag of sugar, and Suet-yee made the hot chocolate for everyone. Everyone had their cups of hot chocolate in front of them, and suddenly Candace freaked out. She finally turned to Lizzie and said "you bought salt!" And we had to pour out all of the hot chocolate, and we sent Lizzie to get some sugar and redeem herself. Once it wasn't salty, it was really nice. We gave some to mr. haldeman, mizutani sensei, and the lady that cleans the school as well.
Aikido today was a lot of fun. We got sized for our dogi's, which I think we will get next week. the guy that teaches us, Masa, is so funny. The actual teacher would come and demonstrate stuff with Masa, and basically just try to put him in pain, and we would watch and laugh, and then the sensei would just walk away, and Masa would recover, turn to us, and say "did you understand?" and we would all just laugh. It was fun.
Then I went to the train station with Suet-yee, where we waited for Alex to ride the train together. We also met Javi while we were waiting. Suet-yee and I have a habit of slipping into Japanese while we're talking, which is really convenient when we don't want other SYA students to hear our conversations, but it probably isn't so great to do in public. It's also good conversational practice! Anyway, we did that while we were waiting, and I think we may have made Alex and Javi feel a little left out.
when I got home, my host mom gave me some pizza and corn soup and salad for dinner, and told me about our trip to Hiroshima. She is taking me to Hiroshima and Miyajima on december 11th and 12th, I am so excited! She also told me that in the new year, we might take a trip to Tokyo! :D
Also, while I was eating dinner, my host mom gave me a magnet frame thing that had a picture of a little western girl in it. She told me that she doesn't know what I looked like when I was young, but she thought that this picture looked like me. So she told me to take the frame as a gift if I want it, so I can show people and tell them that it's me.
As I was eating dessert, my host mom changed the channel, and found Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix playing, so we watched that. It was awesome, because I've basically memorized the movie, so I always knew what was happening/being said. I think I could probably learn a lot of Japanese this way.

*Yesterday we threw a party at the school after school. One of my friends was sort of upset about stuff at home, so we went to the drug store, intending to buy everyone ice cream to sort of cheer everyone up. When we got there, however, we decided that we might as well go all out. We bought hot chocolate, cookies, chips, and ice cream. There were only like 7 people left at the school, so it was kind of ridiculous to have that much food, but it was still awesome. This was after we played Simon says.