Yes, yes, I know I forgot to write again. Well...I didn't really forget, per se, as much as I just ended up in a situation more often than not where I haven't been able to update the blog. For this I bow my head deeply, apologize profusely in Japanese, etc. Blah, blah, blah.
First, before we move on to more wonders of the Land of the Rising Sun, I want to give a few more updates on my upcoming work adventure. San Francisco lodging has been arranged for the length of the contract, and I'll be staying with several other people who are part of the program, which I think will be a ton of fun as well as a great learning experience for all of us. All of the other candidates I've spoken to directly are extremely humble and well-mannered without being over-polite, both very good things. Having a lot of these kinds of people in the program will make it less likely for the experience to transform into the software engineering equivalent of The Hunger Games. May the code be ever in my favor, indeed.
My last week at Yamasa was filled with surprises. First, we got slapped with a typhoon. Yes, a typhoon, as in the Pacific Ocean equivalent of a hurricane. Generally, Japan doesn't get hit with typhoons until the August time frame, but this one decided to break the rules and show up early to the party. I knew that the storm probably wasn't anything to worry about when I arrived at the grocery store about 3 hours before the storm was supposed to show up, and everything was business as usual. In America - you've all seen it, I'm sure - if the weather predicts something extreme (such as a big rainstorm or a huge snowfall), people race to the hardware and grocery stores and completely clean the places out. Maybe to everyone else a typhoon would have been a big deal. To the people of Okazaki, it was just a normal Tuesday with a little extra wind and rain. Tuesday with a little extra wind and rain was actually a pretty apt description of what happened, actually. If it wasn't for the noise outside, I wouldn't have even known anything was going on. That said, it was a weak typhoon, but still underwhelming...
Speaking of the typhoon, it ended up delaying my home visit to the Miwa family by one day. The visit occurred on Wednesday. The Miwas are a very nice couple who seem to be a few years older than Lisa and I. They have two adorable elementary-school-aged kids, Ryuuki and Rio. Both of the Miwa children also happened to be pretty big fans of video games, and, though I'm still not sure exactly how it happened, I ended up getting into a Pokemon Battle with Ryuuki. It was a lot of fun - if a bit embarrassing that my secret is out that as a 30-year-old male, I still occasionally enjoy a game of Pokemon. I did get a lot of time to talk to Tomoko (Ryuuki and Rio's mother) about the differences between America and Japan, and I'm friended to the family on Facebook and certainly plan to keep in touch. The similarities and differences between this family and my previous homestay family were interesting, indeed. Suffice it to say that if I ever had a chance to stay in Japan again for study, and the Miwas would take me on as a homestay student, I would do it in a heartbeat. They were very welcoming, kind, and a lot of fun to talk to. I'm also beginning to realize that I can get along with kids, which is something I wasn't really aware of.
I graduated from Yamasa on Thursday, which was sad, but needed, I think. I got what I wanted to get out of the program, and I promise myself here and now that I'm going to continue from here, and not lose what I've managed to learn.
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