This semester, the Ito family is hosting me and one other CIEE student. The Itos live in Saitama, a prefecture just north of Tokyo, in a small city called Kawaguchi. That's about a 40-45 minute commute by subway to school each day.

I don't think I could have a nicer family to live with here. The mother and father are both in their 30s (I believe…who's counting right?) and have two young kids. The mother, Tomomi, works during the day, although I don't know where, and makes awesome food for dinner each night (and a hot breakfast each morning). Hobbies: Reading, Gardening, Flower arranging, Sports. Extremely nice. Always smiling.

The father, Yoshimasa, works designing rolling shutters for buildings (Google image search: rolling shutter). As he put it in English, "Different buildings need different rolling shutters. Someone has to design for each building. I am someone." On weekdays, Yoshimasa gets home from work late in true salaryman fashion, sometimes around midnight. Hobbies: Bicycle, Karate (years retired), Tea.

The two kids are Akimasa (age 5, boy) and Momo (age 2, girl). Adorable, noisy, energetic, attention getters. Probably everything kids should be. From what I've seen, Akimasa likes watching Dragon Ball and building legos. Ever since he discovered games on my iPod, he's also taken to spreading himself out in my room after school and playing them with the volume all the way up until dinner time or the battery dies.

Momo has a pink complex. She loves pink, or more accurately feels she has some inherent ownership over anything pink. Momo means "peach" which also means "pink," so it goes without saying. Tomomi-san warns, "Feel free to use our cups, except for the pink one. Don't use the pink one. It would be scary." Momo likes milk, carrots, Mickey Mouse, and Anpanman.

Both Tomomi and Yoshimasa speak a tiny bit of English, usually enough to translate important things or simple sentences. When that fails, the Japanese-English dictionaries are brought out. When talking to me at dinner time, they will usually speak first in Japanese, see if I understand, then follow up in English as best as they can. I try to understand from the little Japanese I know, and by the time dinner is over I'm exhausted from listening so carefully and trying to match words to context. It's a terrific motivator to learn Japanese faster.

From what I understand, they're also veterans at hosting foreign students, having hosted from CIEE in the past and possibly more before that, so I seem to be in pretty good hands. Looking forward to not having to communicate through broken English.

がんばります。