Day 1: Meeting

Today I left the Seminar House for the last time. I had forgotten to take any pictures of the room and building while I was there, but one of my roommates was still sleeping, so I wasn't able to take any before I left. Oh well, maybe another opportunity will present itself later.
I met with my host family at 3:00 in the afternoon, and man was I nervous. The father, Hideo, is 38, and has two jobs as an office worker, one of which takes place late on weeknights. The mother, Kaori, is two years older and works part-time. They have two children, a boy named Tatsuki who is 8 and turns 9 in November, and Momoji (Momo for short) who is 6. Though I was told that none of them speak english, Kaori-san can speak it quite well, and is far more proficient at it than I am at Japanese.
After our meeting, where a Kansai Gaidai office worker helped translate as we worked our way through the various things to know, I left with then to pick up my stuff at the Seminar House and then went to their home. In Japan, it is not mandatory that vehicles have seat belts, and the back seat of their van, which is actually pretty big, doesn't have any at all. But it can electronically fold down to become a large bed for the children to sprawl out on. If the traffic regulations here were only a little stricter, I think I would take that kind of setup any day.
Tatsuki is interested in baseball and does judo, while Momo does synchronized dancing. I got to watch home videos of both of these. The family has two chihuahua/poodle mix brothers, though I don't think they are from the same litter. Kojiro has short curly brown hair and is pretty fair tempered, but he always wants to be held in some way that not even he is sure of. And Musashi has long white hair with brown and black splotches, and barks whenever I move. He doesn't get along well with strangers. Surprisingly, these two aren't named after the two most well-known swordsmen in Japanese history, Miamoto Musashi and Sasaki Kojiro, But after pokemon's Team Rocket duo Musashi (Jesse) and Kojiro (James).
For dinner, we went out to get sushi. This time all of the food was the same price, and the plates were colored yellow if they had wasabi and white if they did not. Needless to say, I only found this out after it was too late. When we arrived, Momo took my arm and had me sit down with her. After she noticed that I have nose hair, however (I guess the Japanese don't), she began to roll up balls of napkin, stick them up her nose and blow them out while singing some little song about gaijin :)
My room is very nice. It has a glass-plated desk with compartments on the side, a bedside drawer that all my clothes fit into, and a number of small items and manga from the last two foreign students this family has hosted. Right now the bookshelf is really empty, but I bet I can fix that.
It takes about forty-five minutes to get to campus using the bus and train, but only about twenty is I ride a bike. They don't have one that I can borrow sadly, but they said I am welcome to buy one. A used bicycle costs around fifty dollars here, while a new one only costs around one hundred. I definitely need to see about getting one.