It's A Cultural Thing!

Yesterday afternoon we went over to the Hilton to pick up our Japanese exchange students. They will be staying with us for a week. In 2005 we hosted a student for 9 months. She got so homesick and miserable during her stay that I became involved with a local sister city exchange program in the hopes that seeing a few Japanese faces would cheer her up. For awhile I had three Japanese kids living with us! It didn't help her much( She was actually jealous of them!) but Inga really hit it off with one of the girls and they exchanged letters a few times. Every year Inga talked about applying to go to Japan but never did after applying once in 7th grade and being turned down. This year she put together a fabulous application and she was "In like Flynn"! And so here we are again , hosting. After five days of cleaning our house is fairly presentable and ready. I even took down the scary poster of John Coltrane in the guest bedroom and replaced it with framed Molas from Panama. We bought little gifts. I lucked out at the credit union and managed to trade some paper dollars for two gold Sacajawea coins. I was told these make good welcome gifts. We also gave them New York Yankees hats but they didn't seem to be fans.

12 kids are visiting our little town. The sister city comittee puts together a pretty intense itinerary for them but we get them to ourselves a bit. We have two 17 year old girls this time. They speak more English than we speak Japanese but of course we only know about 10 Japanese words. We expected them to be really tired but they weren't ready for bed until sometime after midnight. We had nice dinner, Italian wedding soup, homemade rolls and quiche. They pronounced the quiche very"delicious" which endeared them to me. I sent them off to the mall with Inga after dinner. Not much going on in our little town and that is the hang out on Friday night. While they were gone I put a pan of brownies in because one of them said she wants to eat lots of yummy American deserts while she's here. They came back cheerful and the brownies were a big hit.

Today we are off to the nature center, ice skating, and then the formal welcome dinner. Last time no one told me it was formal and I showed up with five kids all in jeans. Much frowning occurred. This time we know better! It will only be the colored hair thing now...but everyone seems to like Inga's new Bubble Gum Pink color. She was the first one they pushed out in front of the news cameras to be interviewed. We taped it and watched it this morning. She's so cool.

Well, they are up enjoying waffles. More later....