Monday 18th --> Friday 22nd May
So I had this entire week off of school as they had mid-term exams and I don’t do exams. So I hung out a home for the week venturing around a little but really I now live in a clump of houses in the middle of a gazillion rice paddies. So my mornings were mostly spent studying and then after lunch I would watch a bit of TV with my host grandma or go for a wander (or both). Some observations of some of the TV shows I have watched this week. Yes they are insane; I watched a singing show which seems to be very like doing forget the lyrics, only if you do forget them you get water poured on you from the ceiling. And then if you try to keep singing they add powder or something else to this! Or in one case they activate a trap door that you are standing on and you fall off stage… very odd show! There is also a lunch time show on that teaches kanji (the most complicated of the 3 Japanese scripts) and by teaches it goes through a sentence that says say the weather is hot. The Japanese has 2 kanji for the word hot, both are pronounced the same “atsui” but one is used just for weather the other is used for hot objects. There are a lot of things like this so it gave sentences and the contestants had to pick the appropriate kanji for that context. There was then explanation as to why they were wrong/right. Proves my point that kanji is very complicated, my host grandparents were getting half of it wrong!
I went to rotary on Wednesday and got given my summer school uniform. (Pictures will come when I actually wear it) on Friday Yuka (host sister) had the day off work and we went to a cooking school where we got to make traditional foods. No photos because it was really busy and too fast to take photos. But it was very fun.
I spent Friday night showing my hosts lots of photos on my laptop, from the sunshine safari that I went on with all the other exchange students in December to photos of school and Google earth images of home and school in Australia compared to the Google earth images of school here.

Saturday 23rd May

Today we went to the Tateyama museum of Toyama. Tateyama is the huge mountain that boarders Toyama prefecture and Nagano prefecture… so right on the eastern boarder of Toyama prefecture. This was an interesting experience. A lot of what I saw and I must say barley understood other than what I got from the pictures but I have done a bit more research on the net today. There are/were a lot of beliefs that women should not go up the mountain and those who tried would be struck down, and the mountain was where the god lived? (That’s the feeling I get) anyway ill just say it was really pretty and interesting I'm not going to “explain” too much because I don’t understand. There was this one part that was “heaven and hell” again very interesting, the hell part of it was yeah as much as a set up of hell as they could do and still make it child friendly and also that people want to pay to go there. Heaven had some pretty cool stuff but not very heaven like. But really who knew that there are bears in this area of Japan? I sure didn’t.