Living At Home

It is the strangest thing to be reverting to teenage status and having someone fret over us. Even when I was living at home with my Mom we both kind of kept to ourselves. Now that I am older and do my own laundry and cooking I feel really out of place having someone do it for me.

We met our host family Friday night. Our host father (more like a grandfather as they are older) picked us up at the school and spoke no English and we were so overwhelmed and jet-lagged that we were not coherent in Japanese. We took a taxi through a maze of crazy little tiny backstreets until we arrived at our new home. We were shown down a long walkway between houses to a tiny little Japanese house next to a tiny apartment building with six doors. Our new "Apartment" is located on the top floor at the back. (see the next post for details)

Now on to the family. First of all, they don't speak English. None at all. I thought maybe they would know a little but they don't. They are a little old couple, the Murasaki's, absolutely adorable. Our host father is small, slow and quiet but he smiles a lot and seems to really love his wife. Okaa-san (mother) is a puffy little Japanese woman who loves to talk, smiles constantly, is in love with cute things and is passionate about cooking for people. At least that's the impression I'm getting from the last few days. The meals she has fed us so far are HUGE, no, really, they are HUGE. Like, the dishes spread across the table like thanksgiving. And she is constantly saying that Americans eat a lot and urging us to take more. I have gotten to the point where I eat only as much as I am comfortable with and leave the rest. Hopefully she will reduce the portions rather than waste the food. But for now we eat breakfast and dinner with our family and lunch is our responsibility. Although, in reality our breakfasts have been so big we have only been eating a snack for lunch.

Okaa-san bustles around us like we are her chicks always asking us if we understand and if we are ok. She specifically invited some English speakers to dinner because she was so worried that we were not understanding her. She did our laundry yesterday, but with the stipulation that in the future I need to do it myself, although I was already planning to. I wouldn't want her to do everything for us anyway.