憩いの広場に休憩

Puh! Exams are almost over. On Monday I wrote Current English (楽勝 - Simplicity Overkill), Tuesday there weren't any I took (-> slept in E-Room, a room we exchange students were allowed to use in our free time), and today I jumped over the big Literature-History hurdle. Screwed up my leg, but I got over. I finished off half of the Literature test (easiest thing being the Kanji questions lol), and skipped the other half because it was composed of pure impossibility, still barely making it in time. History... pure fail. Although I spent around 8 hours the day before deciphering (as in writing down vocab with eng. translation into my note) two pages of my textbook filling 7 note pages (!), having me at least understand what's going on, I didn't manage to memorize any names, and the two textbook pages were only half of the study material as well. But I did manage to fill in around 20% of the test sheet, so if everything I did write should happen to be correct, I'd have at least reached my goal. Conclusion: Schedule around 2 whole days cramming if you want to have at least a chance. What's left is tomorrow with General English (not even worth learning for) and.. Japanese. As I said before, I have 4 different teachers, so the test will include: (1) Old Japanese months and 3rd grade Kanji, (2) Terms for family members and jobs + the stuff I, Ben and Ari (her real name is Allison btw.) did on Golden Week, (3) an excerpt of a novel and (4) memorizing and composing a kid's song about Hiragana. Now if that won't come in handy someday! =D
Also, from tomorrow, clubs resume their training... meaning no free time anymore )= As for that, I am looking forward to the next exam period.
Last Sunday I went to Nagoya for the very first YFU meeting after the arrival one. Unfortunately, my hostmum was occupied with a municipal meeting, so only my hustdad went with me. Why unfortunately? Well, since they discussed possible problems and how the students are doing in general with YFU reps, I found it a bit awkward to get represented by only my dad whom I see like, 2 hours at most per day, as opposed to my mum which I spent at least twice of that with, so I think there's a lot more she knows about me. Not trying to bad-mouth my hostdad, I was just slightly disappointed. The meeting itself wasn't that interesting, a short introduction of everyone, then we, the students, were more or less baby sit by the returnees while the parents had their discussion. Of course somewhere in between the question "Did you have any hardships or troubles?" popped up, but nobody was likely to talk about that in front of everyone. Nevertheless, it was interesting to meet all the people again with who I've had departed to Aichi-ken. One thing that really surprised me was that everyone was giving their best trying to communicate in Japanese, not using English a single time (except when it was necessary). Even Caroline, the only one from Germany besides me, talked to me in Japanese from the very start. I really can't describe the feeling of being able to communicate with a lot of different people without using English, but it was awesome, just awesome. At the end we exchanged cellphone addresses and stuff.

Today was a nice day. It was almost too warm, having those 2 tests behind me felt unexpected relieving and, since the day was still young and we had nothing to do, me, Ben and Ari ended up climbing up the mountain behind our school and chill out a bit. Lately we've barely had any opportunity to talk about all the things we want to, and this was the perfect chance. Too bad I forgot to bring my camera to school, I really wanted to catch the view you get from atop. You can see my city Toyokawa, the neighboring one Toyohashi where Ben lives, and the beautiful outlet of Mikawa-Bay (which I really have to visit once). I know that YFU and generally anyone having experience with exchange years strongly discourages hanging out with other ex.students, but somehow it feels indescribable easing talking to them both (not especially because they're my comrades, but because of their personality), since we all naturally have our problems here and there, like Ari who can barely communicate with her host mum due to her lack of basic Japanese skill, or Ben who's having a hard time making up with his host sister after a lot of initial misunderstandings, and finally me. For some reason my relation to my host brother seems to get worse from day to day, for no apparent reason. But it clearly shows in the amount of conversation we have. That's one thing on which we three agree really sucks at times about Japanese people: Their partial inability to tell you if there's something on their mind, letting it grow inside of them without any visible signs at first, and then quietly breaking through the surface. I think I didn't mention that yet, but my host brother's going to the USA in a bit more than 2 months (hence his family accepted me in return), which is quite funny at times because I get to relive all those moments of becoming an exchange student, like receiving your host family's address, dealing with all the visa crap, writing your first letter and all that. But I really don't want to say god bye to him having unsolved problems in between. He really is a person that's hard to get through emotionally, and that's something I'm not extraordinary skilled at. Besides all that, there happened some certain things between me and a girl from my class; well, I won't go into detail, but let's say I almost completely lost interaction with some of the girls in my class I liked to talk to most, no, more than that, they were the only ones I could really talk to. Here come the problems I've been longing for.... not to be too depressive! It's really hard for me to notice it myself, but my Japanese is steadily improving I think. I just love how easy thoughts come flowing out of my mouth naturally, and the feeling of reading texts written for average Japanese students and actually understanding them is indescribable.
There are so many things small things that kinda make me a little bit happy every day, even if it's just the rice plants steadily growing (the whole scene actually looks really incredible to me, especially at night when the moon is being reflected on the flooded fields), the view of an overflowing Otowagawa when crossing over Minamidahashi on a rainy day or just some random girls greeting me at school.

Recently I finished watching a J-Drama from 2005 entitled 「１リットルの涙」 (1 liter of tears) about a 15-year-old girl that suddenly started suffering from an incurable disease slowly and steadily paralyzing her whole body (spinocerebellar ataxia), whereas her character "Ikeuchi Aya" and most of the story are based on a real diary which also served as the dramas name, written by Kitô Aya (木藤亜也) around 40 years ago. As such, most of the characters were also directly taken out of it, and at the end of each episode there are quotes from it and pictures of the real Aya. Although for the most part I dislike Japanese drama because of its overdose of (often) artificial emotions and empathy wringing music, I really enjoyed this one because I never really felt any of the aspects mentioned before (although the character falling in love with Aya wasn't real), and for those who don't know it yet, I sincerely recommend it. Because I've been only able to see it subbed on YouTube, I think I'll go to Tsutaya (one of the main rental shops in Japan) on a free day, lend it and copy it.