Well, I've now spent 7 days in my town and it's been a pretty awesome so far. It feels more like I've been here a month. I arrived here last Wednesday at night and was basically thrown into work headfirst.. well... more like being thrown into an empty pool and learning how to swim for the first time.. To be honest, I didn't have much to do for my first few days of work so I made work for myself! When they don't have anything planned for me I've mainly been studying Japanese and surfing the net all day (w00t Facebook). Since being here only a week, my Japanese skills have skyrocketed! I can listen to a conversation at normal speed, read text (well, Katakana/Hirigana) at normal speed and have basic conversations with people, even though it may sound something like this:

"In Canada weather same now?"
"In Canada weather more cool."
"Ah sou desu! How hot become?"
"Usually from 15 to 25 degrees."
"Ehhhh"

Another year here and I'll be fluent then I'll be able to understand this damn moon language. Yesterday I spent the morning at two different daycares in town... that was an experience. When I got there they were learning about the story of the Tanabata festival, which is connected to watermelon somehow...since that's what they fed me at both daycares. Then we played some games including a different version of Duck-Duck-Goose. They tried to explain the game to me but it was pretty apparent how to play just by watching it. Soon it was lunchtime so they asked me to stay for lunch. One of the girls took my hand and brought me into her homeroom so I sat down in one of their miniature tables feeling like a complete giant. My knees came up to the tabletop. While waiting for the food to arrive, the kids slowly congregated around me and were asking me questions in Japanese.. at least I think they were questions. Imagine a bunch of 5 year olds standing around you as you're sitting down, asking questions that sound like gibberish and then waiting in eerie silence for a response. All I could do was stare back and trying to furiously translate what they just said. Of course it doesn't help they're using slang half of the time. Eventually I would just say something in English or throw out a random Japanese word that I think was the answer and they seemed satisfied. A few of them were pretty cute though and would bring over parts of their lunch and say "Pan" (which means bread) or point out anime characters on their lunchbags. After lunch they went to play outside in their swimsuits with waterguns and buckets. Around that time was when I had to leave, after all, I had forgotten to bring my bathing suit.

A few days ago I was also required to attend a history lecture held at the town museum. It was part of a summer lecture series where high school teachers travelled around the area to different towns to attend lectures on different topics. It went from 9:30am until 3:00pm and was entirely in Japanese. Luckily it was a powerpoint presentation with lots of pictures so between those and being able to pick out the occasional word in Japanese, I was able to understood most of the lecture. It was also interspersed with activities such as grinding wheat into flour with two rocks, watching it bake on a rock frying pan in a fire, a tour of the museum (which was actually really interesting), trying three different kinds of rice (I'm still not really sure why we did this..), trying on traditional clothing (including ninja pants and tabi..now I understand why they wear them. Tottemo benri desu!), and doing "traditional activities" like...chopping wood! Yay! I was talking to the curator of the museum who happens to speak really good English and he explained to me that Japanese people don't do this often. Being from the land of the lumberjacks, I told him we do it quite often in Canada while camping. After that we took a tour of full-sized Jomon and Meiji period houses and then it was time to go. I actually learned quite a bit without even understanding over 80% of what was being said but I'm a hands-on learner anyways. Now if only there was a way of learning Japanese like that..