Hello, This past weekend i had my 5 or 6th japanese language class, then folded some origami with the fellow japanese students. Saturday afternoon we met our host families and went for our homestays. My host family was the Goto family. the mother was named Kikuko and the father is Mikio and i think they:re in their 50:s but i:m not too sure. They're wicked nice. I they brought me to a temple and shrine saturday night in Asakusa where we made a wish and looked at all the street venders and walked down the japanese Broadway. We ate at a little restaraunt with my host family and their friend, we had Sakura nabe, which is horse meat in miso soup and sauce with vegetables and little pieces of bread that boil in a bot over heat at your table in front of you. Oishikatta desu! (it was delicious). when we got back to their house, their son came home, i didn:t know their son still lived at home but he:s pretty cool, hes 23 and a black belt in judo, who loves soccer, oh and my host-family father is a soccer coach part time. I went out for drinks with the son (named Keita) and his friends and got in at around 12:30. Then sunday morning we got up at 7am and went on a traditional japanese boat, which turned out to be for a festival, for the water god (mizu no kamisama). We followed tons of other boats, one was carrying the big shrine for the festival, another boat had a guy dressed up as the water god, another had old kabuki style looking dancers with fans, another had japanese drum players and flute players. We ate out of bento boxes on the boat and for the festival people started drinking beer at like 8:30 in the morning. After the festival got over at around 1pm, keita and his friends brought me around shibuya and harajuku which was packed with hundreds of thousands of people. we got back to his house at around 6pm and had dinner with the hostfamily and keitas girlfriend. The whole weekend was a test for my japanese, good thing everyone carries electronic dictionaries. I:m leaving for studio ghibli in under an hour, and am traveling all this week so i probably won:t be able to write or check my mail until next sunday (saturday for you guys). again at some point i:ll try and put some pictures up, i have around 300 on my camera, my roomate matt has taken like 600 so far and the girl we came with has transfered from her camera to her laptop like 3 times so she has 300 pictures, and they'll be making me cd copies when we get back so tons of pictures. plus my hostfamily is going to be e-mailing me the pictures they took. Tomorrow i leave for the Kumagaya campus of Rissho University and i:m there for 2 days. its about an hour and a half away. then the day after that we got to Minobu for a day, then Kyoto for 2 days then Himeji (which is the picture of the castle for this entry. so i:ll be back sunday night. talk to everyone later!