So, the cool thing is, I found a way to easily convert my English keyboard into a Japanese one through Microsoft’s built in language tools.  It’s incredibly simple for me to type in ひらがな,  カタカナ, or  感じ.   Very nice feature.  In fact, I was really surprised that it came pretty much built in, you just have to poke around in the advanced language settings.

In other news, there really was nothing to update on yesterday.  Fun day, but overall just a regular school day for me.  Sleepiness hit me hard, so I fell asleep a couple of times, oops.  Two hours is really not cool, but the day after ended up being worse than the day I actually had the lack of sleep.  During lunch, I was just listening to my MP3 player and laid my head down, and ended up waking up 4 minutes into the next class, except that I was still in homeroom.  My half for English switches to a different room with a different teacher, so I was left with the wrong half of my class.  So, of course, I just grabbed my stuff and bolted.  Apparently sleeping during lunch is not a good idea.

Today I woke up late.  I started out on time, with my 6:00 alarm, but as usual, I fell back to sleep.  This time however, my host mother woke up late too…so she wasn’t there to call my room and wake me up like she usually does.  I’ll take complete responsibility for the lateness, because I should really just get up at six, and not have to have someone call my room.  I should sleep more and be ready to wake that early.  Anyways, at 6:45, my host mother rushed in my room almost yelling about what time it was and she was sorry and I should hurry and stuff.  I did, but still ended up missing the second train to school, and had to wait for the third one…which made me about 15 minutes late.  No real penalty…but just from the moral standpoint, I hate being late.  It’s the Johnson genes in me.   I did a lot of running this morning, and had to walk alone to school.  Not very fun.

At school today, just pretty regular.  There’s a bit of drama going on in school, but I officially know nothing.  And can’t actually put anything on the public cyberspace at the moment, it’s not a good time.  I know some students at Nagano read my blog, at least two, and today I found out how fast TXT messages can be passed around, so even in Japan, gossip travels fast.  That’s why everything on the internet should be PUBLIC, not PRIVATE.  My MySpace blog was a good example.  Oops.

The title, YATTA!, which is “YAHOO!” in Japanese, refers to the fact that my next host family is also in HABIKINO!  That’s awesome news, which means I won’t be switching towns!  If I had gone to Sayama, it’d be much harder to see my friends, and especially Yudai, who is the one I usually do stuff outside of school with.  So I’m infinitely happy about that, and I’ve still got the same train ride with my friends.  I’m definitely psyched about that.

Overall, I’m a lot more comfortable switching host families now.  I’ll definitely miss the Maki family, as they are all very kind and have been awesome, but it’ll also be a new experience in a different home.  In some ways, it’s going to provide some new things for me to do, and hopefully also be just as cool as my current host family and living situation.

And, of course, I’ll be flying out to Tokyo this weekend, which in I’m also excited about.

I’ll note here, that even though I don’t have a cell phone, TXTing has become one of my best ways to talk to my friends.  The Japanese system works on email that’s checked by phone, so Yudai and I are always emailing each other back and forth after the train.  It’s really cool to be able to have that communication.  Although, I’m definitely going to have to get a cell phone.  It’s such an integral part of teen culture here, and has so many uses for a foreign exchange students.  Right now, I always have to use someone else’s phone in order to call my host mother, which becomes an annoying dependency.  Also, my friends have no concrete way to get a hold of me, since I have to be home either on email, or they need to call my host mother.  It gets kind of annoying when I’m out for the day and if something comes up…  Not spontaneous planning.   Kind of sucks.