お久しぶり！

Well, my first host family didn't have internet and I never ended up posting.

I've had the most memorable year of my life (not over just yet!!!) and will never forget the kindness and friends and family I've made.  I will try to update when I have some free time and tell the story properly from the beginning.

My School info! (Part 2: School Uniform)

This is my school uniform:

Formal Summer Regular

I think it's really cute!

My School info!

I'm going to be going to school in Shibuya at Aoyama Gakuin high school! It's a co-ed methodist senior high school attached to Aoyama Gakuin University. From what I've found online it looks like a really good school. I was looking through some Japanese websites and it's an AA rank school.  I'm gonna have to shape up! No 26 tardies this year! haha

My school was one of the first things I found out about. My Japanese rotary club was very generous and let me choose my school! They gave me descriptions of 2 schools. The other one was Keio girl's high school. Both of them sounded awesome! I ended up going with Aogaku (my school's nickname) because it's really pretty and I had a good gut feeling about it.

Here is the website: http://www.agh.aoyama.ed.jp/

It's such a gorgeous campus! If you want to know what you're clicking on just hover over the links and look at the web address, it's almost always in English. But since I figure the site would be hard for non-Japanese speakers navigate I'll post some pictures and info in my next post!

Host Family!

I'm so excited! Last night I got an email from my host family telling me all about them!

When I got my guarantee forms about a month ago and I found out the names of three people, their address, and an email address, but nothing else. I didn't even know how many people were living there so I was really excited to find out more.

I wrote to them saying in Japanese how much I was looking forward to meeting everyone. A few days later I got a nice response welcoming me to the family. It said at the bottom that I had emailed my host-dad's work email so he'd email me with info about the family when he got home. I had gotten worried that it was taking them so long to email me back but I'm just so happy now oh my gosh! I'm infamous for being terrible with emailing anyways, so I understand and it's not like I can talk.

They are a family of four living in Saitama city! I have a host dad and mom. They have an adult daughter and she has 9 year old son who is SUPER cute! Their house is really pretty. And... they have a rooftop garden! Who wouldn't like a rooftop garden?

They seem really sweet and I'm really looking forward to meet them!

Introduction!

こんにちは！Hi, I'm Zoe! I'm a 16 year old girl from New Jersey. In less than a month I'm leaving my American life behind to spend my Junior year as a rotary youth exchange student in Tokyo, Japan! I'm a little scared but I'm also SO excited! I can't believe this is finally gonna happen! Bring it on!

Thank you so much to all the amazing people of rotary NJ D7470 and Tokyo D2750!